[1840] Whitaker, “The Church in Alabama,” pp. 193, 205, 206-212. The work of the Episcopal Church among the negroes is more promising in later years. See “Race Problems,” pp. 126-131. It is not a sectional church, with a northern section hindering the work of a southern section among the negroes, as is the Methodist Episcopal Church.
[1841] Carroll, “Religious Forces,” p. 263.
[1842] Montgomery Advertiser, Nov. 24, 1865.
[1843] Montgomery Advertiser, Nov. 11, 1865.
[1844] Report for 1866, Sen. Ex. Doc., No. 6, 39th Cong., 2d Sess.
[1845] Lakin fomented disturbances between the races. His daughter wrote slanderous letters to northern papers, which were reprinted by the Alabama papers. Lakin told the negroes that the whites, if in power, would reëstablish slavery, and advised them, as a measure of safety, physical as well as religious, to unite with the northern church. The scalawags did not like Lakin, and one of them (Nicholas Davis) gave his opinion of him and his talks to the Ku Klux Committee as follows: “The character of his [Lakin’s] speech was this: to teach the negroes that every man that was born and raised in the southern country was their enemy, that there was no use trusting them, no matter what they said,—if they said they were for the Union or anything else. ‘No use talking, they are your enemies.’ And he made a pretty good speech, too; awful; a hell of a one; ... inflammatory and game, too, ... it was enough to provoke the devil. Did all the mischief he could.... I tell you, that old fellow is a hell of an old rascal.” Ala. Test., pp. 784, 791. One of Lakin’s negro congregations complained that they paid for their church and the lot on which it stood, and that Lakin had the deed made out in his name.
[1846] In the Black Belt and in the cities the slaveholders often erected churches or chapels for the use of the negroes, and paid the salary of the white preacher who was detailed by conference, convention, association, or presbytery to look after the religious instruction of the blacks. Nearly always the negro slaves contributed in work or money towards building these houses of worship, and the Reconstruction convention in 1867 passed an ordinance which transferred such property to the negroes whenever they made any claim to it. See Ordinance No. 25, Dec. 2, 1867. See also Acts of 1868, pp. 176-177; Governor Lindsay in Ku Klux Rept., Ala. Test., p. 180; Montgomery Advertiser, Nov. 24, 1865.
[1847] Huntsville Advocate, May 5, 1865; Carroll, “Religious Forces,” p. 263.
[1848] Reports of the Freedmen’s Aid Society, 1866-1874.
[1849] The first recognition of such work, I find, is in the Report of the Freedmen’s Aid Society in 1878.