“Thirty-six hundred dollars, appropriated upon our application to the United States Government for damages done to our church at Knoxville during the war, were, by some sleight-of-hand movement, passed into the hands of a minister of the M. E. Church. This money is still, held from us.
“In other cases, school and church property of our’s on which debts were resting has been forced upon the market by agents in your interests, and thereby wrested from our poverty and added to your abundance.
“Members of the M. E. Church constitute, in part, the mobs that insult and maltreat our preachers, while ministers of the same Church, by words and acts, either countenance or encourage our persecutors. In no instance, so far as we are advised, has any one for such conduct been arraigned, or censured even, by those administering the discipline of your Church.
“We could specify the name of each of these churches, and the locality, were it necessary, in which our ministers and people are either permitted sometimes to worship, or from which they are excluded and driven by locks, threats, mobs and bloody persecutions. Their names are in our possession, and at your disposal. About one hundred church edifices are held in one or another of these ways, with a value of not less than seventy-five thousand dollars.
“Of this property, it should be added, some was deeded to the M. E. Church before 1844, and the rest, since that time, to the M. E. Church, South. That it is all claimed by the M. E. Church in East Tennessee we suppose to be true, or it would not be reported and received in their Annual Conference statistics. That it belongs to the M. E. Church, South, we suppose also to be true, inasmuch as all deeds since 1844 have been made to us, and all the remainder were granted to us by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Church suit; unless the ground be assumed by your reverend body that when Lee surrendered to Grant the M. E. Church, South, surrendered also to the M. E. Church all her property rights. Surely if the United States Government does not confiscate the property of those who are called rebels, the M. E. Church, in her highest legislative assembly, will hardly set a precedent by claiming the property of their Southern brethren.
“But it may, perhaps, be said that we have been sinners, rebels, traitors, touching our civil and political relations to the Government. If this be so, we are unable to comprehend by what authority we are to be punished by the M. E. Church, since for our moral obliquities we are responsible alone to God, and for our political crimes only to the United States Government.
“It may also be asked, what jurisdiction has your General Conference over these deeds of injustice? No civil jurisdiction, we are aware; but your reverend body does possess a moral power of such weight that, if brought to bear in East Tennessee, there would be an end to these acts of oppression and cruelty. A word of disapproval, even, from your Board of Bishops, or the publication in your Church papers of some of the above cited facts, with editorial condemnation, would have done much to mitigate, if not entirely to remove, the cause of our complaints; but we have neither heard the one nor seen the other. Why this has not been done is believed by us to be a want of knowledge of these facts, of which we now put you in possession. Familiar as we are with the condition of things in East Tennessee, and with the workings of the two Methodisms there, we are satisfied that your body could, by judicious action, remove most, if not all, of the causes which now occasion strife, degrade Methodism, and scandalize our holy religion. We, therefore, ask—
“1st. That you will ascertain the grounds upon which the M. E. Church claims and holds the property in church buildings and parsonages within her bonds in East Tennessee, as reported in her Holston Mission Conference statistics.
“2d. If in the investigation any property so reported shall be adjudged by you to belong of right to the M. E. Church, South, that you will designate what that property is, and where; and also instruct your ministers and people to relinquish their claims upon the same, repossess us, and leave us in the undisturbed occupancy thereof.
“3d. Inasmuch as your words of wisdom and of justice will be words of power, that you earnestly advise all your ministers laboring in this field to abstain from every word and act the tendency of which would be the subversion of good order and peace in the communities in which they move.