CHAPTER IX.

Church and School

Reconstruction in the State was closely related to reconstruction in the churches and the schools. Here also were to be found the same hostile elements: negro and white, Unionist and Confederate, victor and vanquished. The church was at that time an important institution in the South, more so than in the North, and in both sections more important than it is today. It was inevitable, therefore, that ecclesiastical reconstruction should give rise to bitter feelings.

Something should be said of conditions in the churches when the Federal armies occupied the land. The Southern organizations had lost many ministers and many of their members, and frequently their buildings were used as hospitals or had been destroyed. Their administration was disorganized and their treasuries were empty. The Unionists, scattered here and there but numerous

in the mountain districts, no longer wished to attend the Southern churches.

The military censorship in church matters, which continued for a year in some districts, was irritating, especially in the Border States and in the Union districts where Northern preachers installed by the army were endeavoring to remain against the will of the people. Mobs sometimes drove them out; others were left to preach to empty houses or to a few Unionists and officers, while the congregation withdrew to build a new church. The problems of negro membership in the white churches and of the future relations of the Northern and Southern denominations were pressing for settlement.

All Northern organizations acted in 1865 upon the assumption that a reunion of the churches must take place and that the divisions existing before the war should not be continued, since slavery, the cause of the division, had been destroyed. But they insisted that the reunion must take place upon terms named by the "loyal" churches, that the negroes must also come under "loyal" religious direction, and that tests must be applied to the Confederate sinners asking for admission, in order that the enormity of their

crimes should be made plain to them. But this policy did not succeed. The Confederates objected to being treated as "rebels and traitors" and to "sitting upon stools of repentance" before they should be received again into the fold.

Only two denominations were reunited—the Methodist Protestant, the northern section of which came over to the southern, and the Protestant Episcopal, in which moderate counsels prevailed and into which Southerners were welcomed back. The Southern Baptists maintained their separate existence and reorganized the Southern Baptist Convention, to which came many of the Baptist associations in the Border States; the Catholics did not divide before 1861 and therefore had no reconstruction problems to solve; and the smaller denominations maintained the organizations which they had before 1861. A Unionist preacher testified before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that even the Southern Quakers "are about as decided in regard to the respectability of secession as any other class of people."

Two other great Southern churches, the Presbyterian and the Methodist Episcopal, grew stronger after the Civil War. The tendency toward reunion of the Presbyterians was checked

when one Northern branch declared as "a condition precedent to the admission of southern applicants that these confess as sinful all opinions before held in regard to slavery, nullification, rebellion and slavery, and stigmatize secession as a crime and the withdrawal of the southern churches as a schism." Another Northern group declared that Southern ministers must be placed on probation and must either prove their loyalty or profess repentance for disloyalty and repudiate their former opinions. As a result several Presbyterian bodies in the South joined in a strong union, to which also adhered the synods of several Border States.

The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was confronted with conditions similar to those which prevented the reunion of the Presbyterians. The Northern church, according to the declaration of its authorities, also came down to divide the spoils and to "disintegrate and absorb" the "schismatic" Southern churches. Already many Southern pulpits were filled with Northern Methodist ministers placed there under military protection; and when they finally realized that reunion was not possible, these Methodist worthies resolved to occupy the late Confederacy as a mission field and to organize congregations of blacks and

whites who were "not tainted with treason." Bishops and clergymen charged with this work carried it on vigorously for a few years in close connection with political reconstruction.

The activities of the Northern Methodists stimulated the Southern Methodists to a quick reorganization. The surviving bishops met in August, 1865, and bound together their shaken church. In reply to suggestions of reunion they asserted that the Northern Methodists had become "incurably radical," were too much involved in politics, and, further, that they had, without right, seized and were still holding Southern church buildings. They objected also to the way the Northern church referred to the Southerners as "schismatics" and to the Southern church as one built on slavery and therefore, now that slavery was gone, to be reconstructed. The bishops warned their people against the missionary efforts of the Northern brethren and against the attempts to "disintegrate and absorb" Methodism in the South. Within five years after the war the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was greatly increased in numbers by the accession of conferences in Maryland, Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, and even from above the Ohio, while the Northern

Methodist Church was able to organize only a few white congregations outside of the stronger Unionist districts, but continued to labor in the South as a missionary field. ¹

¹ The church situation after the war was well described in 1866 by an editorial writer in the Nation who pointed out that the Northern churches thought the South determined to make the religious division permanent, though "slavery no longer furnishes a pretext for separation." "Too much pains were taken to bring about an ecclesiastical reunion, and irritating offers of reconciliation are made by the Northern churches, all based on the assumption that the South has not only sinned, but sinned knowingly, in slavery and in war. We expect them to be penitent and to gladly accept our offers of forgiveness. But the Southern people look upon a 'loyal' missionary as a political emissary, and 'loyal' men do not at present possess the necessary qualifications for evangelizing the Southerners or softening their hearts, and are sure not to succeed in doing so. We look upon their defeat as retribution and expect them to do the same. It will do no good if we tell the Southerner that 'we will forgive them if they will confess that they are criminals, offer to pray with them, preach with them, and labor with them over their hideous sins.'"

But if the large Southern churches held their white membership and even gained in numbers and territory, they fought a losing fight to retain their black members. It was assumed by Northern ecclesiastics that whether a reunion of whites took place or not, the negroes would receive spiritual guidance from the North. This was necessary, they said, because the Southern whites were ignorant and impoverished and because "the state of mind among even the best classes of Southern

whites rendered them incapable … of doing justice to the people whom they had so long persistently wronged." Further, it was also necessary for political reasons to remove the negroes from Southern religious control.

For obvious reasons, however, the Southern churches wanted to hold their negro members. They declared themselves in favor of negro education and of better organized religious work among the blacks, and made every sort of accommodation to hold them. The Baptists organized separate congregations, with white or black pastors as desired, and associations of black churches. In 1866 the Methodist General Conference authorized separate congregations, quarterly conferences, annual conferences, even a separate jurisdiction, with negro preachers, presiding elders, and bishops—but all to no avail. Every Northern political, religious, or military agency in the South worked for separation, and negro preachers were not long in seeing the greater advantages which they would have in independent churches.

Much of the separate organization was accomplished in mutual good will, particularly in the Baptist ranks. The Reverend I. T. Tichenor, a prominent Baptist minister, has described the

process as it took place in the First Baptist Church in Montgomery. The church had nine hundred members, of whom six hundred were black. The negroes received a regular organization of their own under the supervision of the white pastors. When a separation of the two bodies was later deemed desirable, it was inaugurated by a conference of the negroes which passed a resolution couched in the kindliest terms, suggesting the wisdom of the division, and asking the concurrence of the white church in such action. The white church cordially approved the movement, and the two bodies united in erecting a suitable house of worship for the negroes. Until the new church was completed, both congregations continued to occupy jointly the old house of worship. The new house was paid for in large measure by the white members of the church and by individuals in the community. As soon as it was completed the colored church moved into it with its pastor, board of deacons, committees of all sorts, and the whole machinery of church life went into action without a jar. Similar accommodations occurred in all the States of the South.

The Methodists lost the greater part of their negro membership to two organizations which

came down from the North in 1865—the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Zion. Large numbers also went over to the Northern Methodist Church. After losing nearly three hundred thousand members, the Southern Methodists came to the conclusion that the remaining seventy-eight thousand negroes would be more comfortable in a separate organization and therefore began in 1866 the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, with bishops, conferences, and all the accompaniments of the parent Methodist Church, which continued to give friendly aid but exercised no control. For many years the Colored Methodist Church was under fire from the other negro denominations, who called it the "rebel," the "Democratic," the "old slavery" church.

The negro members of the Cumberland Presbyterians were similarly set off into a small African organization. The Southern Presbyterians and the Episcopalians established separate congregations and missions under white supervision but sanctioned no independent negro organization. Consequently the negroes soon deserted these churches and went with their own kind.

Resentment at the methods employed by the

Northern religious carpetbaggers was strong among the Southern whites. "Emissaries of Christ and the radical party" they were called by one Alabama leader. Governor Lindsay of the same State asserted that the Northern missionaries caused race hatred by teaching the negroes to regard the whites as their natural enemies, who, if possible, would put them back in slavery. Others were charged with teaching that to be on the safe side, the blacks should get into a Northern church, and that "Christ died for negroes and Yankees, not for rebels."

The scalawags, also, developed a dislike of the Northern church work among the negroes and it was impossible to organize mixed congregations. Of the Reverend A. S. Lakin, a well-known agent of the Northern Methodist Church in Alabama, Nicholas Davis, a North Alabama Unionist and scalawag, said to the Ku Klux Committee: "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."

For a time the white churches were annoyed by intrusions of strange blacks set on by those who were bent on separating the races. Frequently there were feuds in white or black congregations over the question of joining some Northern body. Disputes over church property also arose and continued for years. Lakin, referred to above, was charged with "stealing" negro congregations and uniting them with the Cincinnati Conference without their knowledge. The negroes were urged to demand title to all buildings formerly used for negro worship, and the Constitutional Convention of Alabama in 1867 directed that such property must be turned over to them when claimed.

The agents of the Northern churches were not greatly different from other carpetbaggers and adventurers taking advantage of the general confusion to seize a little power. Many were unscrupulous; others, sincere and honest but narrow, bigoted, and intolerant, filled with distrust of the Southern whites and with corresponding confidence in the blacks and in themselves. The

missionary and church publications were quite as severe on the Southern people as any radical Congressman. The publications of the Freedmen's Aid Society furnish illustrations of the feelings and views of those engaged in the Southern work. They in turn were made to feel the effects of a merciless social proscription. For this some of them cared not at all, while others or their families felt it keenly. One woman missionary wrote that she was delighted when a Southern white would speak to her. A preacher in Virginia declared that "the females, those especially whose pride has been humbled, are more intense in their bitterness and endeavor to keep up a social ostracism against Union and Northern people." The Ku Klux raids were directed against preachers and congregations whose conduct was disagreeable to the whites. Lakin asserted that while he was conducting a great revival meeting among the hills of northern Alabama, Governor Smith and other prominent and sinful scalawag politicians were there "under conviction" and about to become converted. But in came the Klan and the congregation scattered.

Smith and the others were so angry and frightened that their good feelings were dissipated, and the devil reëntered them, so that Lakin said he was

never able to "get a hold on them" again. For the souls lost that night he held the Klan responsible. Lakin told several marvelous stories of his hairbreadth escapes from death by assassination which, if true, would be enough to ruin the reputation of northern Alabama men for marksmanship.

The reconstruction ended with conditions in the churches similar to those in politics: the races were separated and unfriendly; Northern and Southern church organizations were divided; and between them, especially in the border and mountain districts, there existed factional quarrels of a political origin, for every Northern Methodist was a Republican and every Southern Methodist was a Democrat.

The schools of the South, like the churches and political institutions, were thrown into the melting pot of reconstruction. The spirit in which the work was begun may be judged from the tone of the addresses made at a meeting of the National Teachers Association in 1865. The president, S. S. Greene, declared that "the old slave States are to be the new missionary ground for the national school teacher." Francis Wayland, the former president of Brown University, remarked

that "it has been a war of education and patriotism against ignorance and barbarism." President Hill of Harvard spoke of the "new work of spreading knowledge and intellectual culture over the regions that sat in darkness." Other speakers asserted that the leading Southern whites were as much opposed to free schools as to free governments and "we must treat them as western farmers do the stumps in their clearings, work around them and let them rot out"; that the majority of the whites were more ignorant than the slaves; and that the negro must be educated and strengthened against "the wiles, the guile, and hate of his baffled masters and their minions." The New England Freedmen's Aid Society considered it necessary to educate the negro "as a counteracting influence against the evil councils and designs of the white freemen."

The tasks that confronted the Southern States in 1865-67 were two: first, to restore the shattered school systems of the whites; and second, to arrange for the education of the negroes. Education of the negro slave had been looked upon as dangerous and had been generally forbidden. A small number of negroes could read and write, but there were at the close of the war no schools

for the children. Before 1861 each State had developed at least the outlines of a school system. Though hindered in development by the sparseness of the population and by the prevalence in some districts of the Virginia doctrine that free schools were only for the poor, public schools were nevertheless in existence in 1861. Academies and colleges, however, were thronged with students. When the war ended, the public schools were disorganized, and the private academies and the colleges were closed. Teachers and students had been dispersed; buildings had been burned or used for hospitals and laboratories; and public libraries had virtually disappeared.

The colleges made efforts to open in the fall of 1865. Only one student presented himself at the University of Alabama for matriculation; but before June, 1866, the stronger colleges were again in operation. The public or semi-public schools for the whites also opened in the fall. In the cities where Federal military authorities had brought about the employment of Northern teachers, there was some friction. In New Orleans, for example, the teachers required the children to sing Northern songs and patriotic airs. When the Confederates were restored to power these teachers were dismissed.

The movement toward negro education was general throughout the South. Among the blacks themselves there was an intense desire to learn. They wished to read the Bible, to be preachers, to be as the old master and not have to work. Day and night and Sunday they crowded the schools. According to an observer, ¹ "not only are individuals seen at study, and under the most untoward circumstances, but in very many places I have found what I will call 'native schools,' often rude and very imperfect, but there they are, a group, perhaps, of all ages, trying to learn. Some young man, some woman, or old preacher, in cellar, or shed, or corner of a negro meeting-house, with the alphabet in hand, or a town spelling-book, is their teacher. All are full of enthusiasm with the new knowledge the book is imparting to them."