The Methodists began work with characteristic fervor about 1770, and some twenty years later counted more than 12,000 negro members, all connected with the white congregations. In 1860 this number was increased to 207,776 or, including adherents, about a half million souls. The anti-slavery movements, which more and more estranged the Methodists, North and South, during the years 1820 to 1844, retarded for a time their work among the Negroes, but with the division, in 1844, into Northern and Southern denominations, renewed activity was attended with great success.
Dr. Phillips in his American Slavery says: “The Churches which had the greatest influence upon the Negroes were those which relied least upon ritual and most upon exhilaration.” It is true that the straightness and suppression of form rigidly applied to a people whose chief mode of expressing both social and religious emotions had for centuries, been through dancing and folk songs, was a transition too radical and rapid to be widely accepted and absorbed; but certainly the forms of worship had their lessons. A wise use of both liturgical and extemporaneous services would probably have produced better results. The Methodists would probably have made better Christians, and the Episcopalians more, had each combined the methods of both.
When education in the South was prescribed, the free, unliturgical services undoubtedly influenced a far greater number than could be reached by any other means.
The moral training of the people was a matter of the most vital importance. Infractions there were unquestionably, many of them, and worse than no help from some of the Whites; but the Church’s steady voice and practice were powerful aids to the Negroes, and no less powerful restraints to the Whites. Admixtures were common enough, and would doubtless have increased had the old régime held; but the vaster commingling which took place during the four years of war in the slave territory, was one of the tragedies of the war.
On plantations belonging to earnest Christians, the sanctity of the marriage and of family relations was emphasized. It was not the exception but the rule, in such families, that all marriages were properly solemnized; and, in the case of domestic servants, the mistress or her daughters arrayed the bride, and the pastor or plantation preacher officiated at the wedding in the church or in the “Big House” parlor.
Every law of Church and State was conformed to, and repeated efforts were made by the Church to have everybody thus conform.[3]
Pastoral relations were attended with their difficulties in the city missions. The Rev. Paul Trapier writes in 1850: “The minister has still to lament that he can come so little in contact, pastorally, with his people, owing to the peculiar nature of their employment in the week and on Sunday. He fain would urge upon owners the obligation of so arranging their domestic affairs as to afford to their servants more opportunity for attendance in the Lord’s House and on the Lord’s Day. He can seldom see them during the week unless they are sick, nor then except in cases where he feels at liberty to go into the yards of their owners for that purpose. It gives him pleasure, however, to say that, wherever he has so presumed, his reception has been respectful and kind, encouraging him to ask the same liberty more generally.”
When one considers the conditions under which the missions among the Negroes had to grow, the results were far more due to the grace and mercy of God than to the wisdom of men. This is said, not in detraction of the devotion of the men and women of all denominations who, conforming to the conditions which perforce robbed them of their full half-share, wrought their best under them as co-partners with God.
There was the ever-recurring repression by suspicious politicians, who feared that religious freedom might break down the barriers which secured the abnormal social conditions of slavery, often resulting in suppression of the gathering of Negroes for any purpose. There was the bar of illiteracy, where knowledge without book-learning, in an era of books, was sought. There was the exaction of moral standards, with home conditions conducive to none but low ideals. There was the spiritual culture of the racial tree, with no expectation, for that era certainly, of its full fruit-bearing in racial pastors and leaders. There was the agnostic scientists and their satellites with the infallible dictum, “the Negro has no soul,” to be grasped at by the selfish materialist as excuse both for declining religious culture and for abusive treatment of defenseless slaves. These, and more besides, made the conditions under which evangelization in the South was prosecuted. And in the North, for reasons both like and unlike these, there were the same repressions and far more of prejudice, driving the Negroes into independent organizations so soon as law and popular approval would permit.
Under these conditions, it would have been surprising indeed if a host of notable examples of godly leaders had arisen. Nevertheless, God did raise up examples, in every degree of advancement possible to them, as illustrations of what the Negro would be capable of under less fettered conditions.[4]