“(Signed) E. M. Stanton, Sec’y of War.
Thus armed, Bishop Ames started on his Episcopal raid upon the Southern Methodist Churches, taking with him and picking up along the route down the Mississippi a goodly number of “loyal ministers.” The details of his exploits in the South, seizing and appropriating to the uses of a “loyal religion” the churches of others would not be appropriate to this work, but will be left to the history of these strange times in their appropriate localities.
In Memphis, Tenn., Vicksburg and Jackson, Miss., Baton Rouge and New Orleans, La., the Episcopal General found and possessed himself of fine and costly churches. In the latter city he called the Official Board of Carondelet street Church together—the largest, finest and wealthiest Southern Methodist church in the city—and formally demanded the surrender of that and the other Southern Methodist churches in the city to him.
They objected, and in their objection set forth that “Bishop Ames, as an officer of another Church, had no ecclesiastical jurisdiction over them.” He replied that he “claimed no ecclesiastical jurisdiction over them any more than over the Catholic or Episcopal Churches, but that he came with an order from the United States Secretary of War, and an order from General Banks, Department Commander at New Orleans, and by that authority he demanded the surrender of the churches.”
They replied that, as they “held the property in trust for the use and benefit of the M. E. Church, South, they could not voluntarily give up that trust. If they did so it must be under the stress of a compulsion they had no power, civil or military, to resist—the Bishop would have to compel them.”
Whereupon the Bishop obtained a military force, and the churches were taken, just as Memphis, Vicksburg, New Orleans and Richmond were taken.
An extract from the Special Order of Major-General Banks, then commanding the “Department of the Gulf,” will show the light in which this church-seizing business was viewed by the military authorities as a moral “war measure.”
“Headquarters Dep’t of the Gulf, }
New Orleans, Jan. 18, 1864. }
“Special Order, No. 15.]