“Things are moving slowly, as far as our church is concerned. Upon an order from Bishop Simpson, we vacated McKendree last week, and are now holding services in Masonic Hall. Our congregations are small, but we hope for better times. * * * * Our dear Southern brethren of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, persuasion are flocking back to their old haunts, and hold up their heads as if they were not guilty of the blood and suffering of the past four years.”
“Upon an order from Bishop Simpson” they vacated McKendree, after they had been put into it and occupied it so long upon an order from Bishop or General somebody else. But who “ordered” Bishop Simpson? Why did he require his brethren to “vacate McKendree?” For the same reason that Dr. Newman vacated Carondelet street Church, New Orleans, and the churches in Memphis, Vicksburg and other places were vacated.
Others may detail the “pious fraud” upon the churches at Knoxville, and Athens, and other places in Tennessee, while the general subject only requires here a notice of the Memorial of the Holston Conference, M. E. Church, South, to the General Conference of the M. E. Church at Chicago, in the spring of 1868, and the notice taken of it by that General Conference. The following is the
MEMORIAL OF THE HOLSTON CONFERENCE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, SOUTH.
“To the Bishops and Members of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, at Chicago, Ills., May, 1868:
“The undersigned were appointed a committee at the session of the Holston Conference of the M. E. Church, South, held at Cleveland, East Tennessee, in October last, to memorialize your reverend body, and to set forth distinctly the wrongs which we are suffering at the hands of agents of the M. E. Church within our bounds; and also to entreat you to devise some means by which an end may be made to these outrages, for the honor of Methodism and for the sake of our common Christianity.
“Our churches have been seized by ministers and members of the M. E. Church, and are still held and used by them as houses of worship.
“To give the semblance of legality to these acts and of right to this property, trustees have been appointed by the authorities of the M. E. Church; and these churches are annually reported by your ministers in their Conference statistics.
“From these churches our ministers are either excluded and driven, or allowed only a joint occupancy with your ministers. From some of them our ministers in their regular rounds of district and circuit work are excluded by locks and bars, or by armed men meeting them at the doors; from others they are driven by mobs, and threatened with death should they attempt a return; at one a presiding elder and a preacher in charge of the circuit, at a quarterly meeting appointment, were arrested and marched fifteen miles amidst indignities and insults; at another, an aged and godly minister was ridden upon a rail; at another, the same man found at the door bundles of rods and nails, and also a written notice prohibiting him from preaching at the risk of torture; at another, a notice was handed to our preacher, signed by a class leader in the M. E. Church, in which was the following language: ‘If you come back here again we will handle you;’ and, true to the threat, on a subsequent round, not two miles from the place, this worthy minister, as he was passing to his appointment on the second Sabbath in February last, was taken from his horse, struck a severe blow upon the head, blindfolded, tied to a tree, scourged to laceration, and then ordered to lie with his face to the ground until his scourgers should withdraw, with the threat of death for disobedience. All this he was told, too, was for traveling that circuit and preaching the gospel as a Southern Methodist preacher; from another, the children and teachers of our Sabbath School were ejected while in session by a company of men, who were led by a minister of the M. E. Church.
“Our parsonages, also, have been seized and occupied by ministers of the M. E. Church, no rent having been paid to us for their use.