The condition of the Church in the South, where so vast a majority of the Negroes were destined to retain their homes, is beyond a healthy imagination now to picture. The armies of the long years of war had swept over them from Virginia to Texas. The Rev. Bowyer Stewart, in his Hale Memorial Sermon of 1913, gives a summary, the accuracy of which may be accepted. In Virginia, some 14 churches were destroyed, and 24 more or less damaged; in South Carolina, 13 churches destroyed, and 26 chapels for Negroes; in Tennessee, only 3 churches escaped injury; while in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, the conditions were somewhat worse than in North Carolina. The many churches and schools put to military use, meant the destruction of furniture and the abuse of buildings, which rendered the latter useless for the time. Episcopal residences and rectories, in some cases, suffered either total or partial destruction. The poverty was very great. A careful examination, reported to the South Carolina Convention, in 1868, showed that “along the entire seaboard, from North Carolina to Georgia, where our Church had flourished for more than a century, there are but four parishes which maintain religious services; not one, outside the city of Charleston, can be called a living, self-sustaining parish; their clergy live by fishing, farming and mechanic arts.” Other Dioceses, though in less measure, as a rule, experienced great loss and great poverty.
But there were great men at the helm—Bishops Johns, Atkinson, Davis (soon succeeded by Howe), Elliott, the two Wilmers, Quintard, Lay, and Gregg. The five years to 1871, showed recovery of white communicants in nearly every Diocese except South Carolina. All alike had lost many of their negro members, the greatest loss being in South Carolina which originally had most. South Carolina, however, is a fairly typical illustration of the comparative loss of negro members throughout the South. In 1861, the Diocesan Journal records 2979 white communicants and 2973 colored; that of 1872, 3102 white, 618 colored, most of these in Calvary Church and St. Mark’s, Charleston.
Why was this? The facts are the more astonishing when one reflects upon the universal practice of the Church, during so many generations, of close religious association; upon the success of Christian teaching so apparently universal upon the complete trust in one another exhibited during the test of war; and the resultant feeling of affectionate gratitude on the part of the white Churchmen.
Moreover, the latter were prepared to continue the Christian ministrations under the new order in the confident expectation that, however changed the economic and social relation, nothing could sever the bond of Christian fellowship in the Church. Bishop Davis, in 1866, was expressing a conviction universally shared when, looking out upon the vast confusion, he nevertheless declared, “I have not complete statistics; but am convinced, from observation and information, that, in all cases where the colored population shall be reinstated in their former localities, they will return to the communion of the Church.” Unfortunately, however, succeeding years bore testimony to progressive losses, until another Bishop voiced the thought which experience, in turn, had universally brought: “The defection from the Church is almost universal. In some parishes I have visited, which a few years ago numbered more than a hundred communicants, not one has come forward to kneel at the altar, and very few to enter the church. The voice of remonstrance from their once-honored pastors falls unheeded upon their ears; unscriptural revelation are substituted for the Word of God; the ancient forms of worship are declared to quench the ministrations of the Spirit; and the sober worship of the sanctuary is exchanged for the midnight orgies of a frantic superstition.” There are some very bright and cheering exceptions, but this quotation from Bishop Wilmer, of Louisiana, describes the rule.
Why was it? The question may not be answered in a short phrase, and probably may not be answered satisfactorily at all.
There was the fact that the Negro’s religious teachers had been his masters, beloved under the old régime, but whose guidance and control, even in church, was to be regarded with wary suspicion. He could not differentiate between the essential wrong of a system, and the blessing which the Church had brought to him in that system. For the present, the wrong was uppermost in his mind.
Then there was the reconstruction system, and the hope held, in confident expectation, of a change in condition which a changed social relation would miraculously effect. The negro masses could not foresee the slow, toilsome pathway up which every primitive race has plodded to changed conditions, and better.
Again, there was the natural conviction of the Negro that his freed allegiance was now due to his northern liberators; and this, beyond any bond of slave-time friendship with those who had held him in slavery. It was the newborn freedom, from restraint, entering like new wine into old vessels overstrained.
Finally, there was among the few negro leaders, (and, because few, therefore all the more powerful) the exultant and alluring ambition to play the man, and to attempt to demonstrate the full-grown majority of a race just dropping its swaddling clothes.
These were the conditions (inevitable to the change of social structure from slave to free) ready at hand when the reconstruction policies offered the chance to unscrupulous politicians from North and South. They offered a ready opportunity for inspiring the Negro with a subtle distrust of former masters now become neighbors. Racial hatred for the wrongs of slavery, now became magnified to the exclusion of any benefits whatever derived from the system. For the unscrupulous, the rewards increased with the widening of the chasm between race and race; they were secured at the price of the ruthless exploitation of the Negroes, and the breeding of a spirit of suspicion and distrust toward their old friends.