Been in the Storm So Long (100 page)

Neither the Methodists nor the Baptists were strangers to emotional fervor in worship; indeed, that had been a source of their appeal to the
slaves. What many of the missionaries now appeared to suggest, however, was that emancipation demanded a new dignity and decorum in religious worship, and that these objectives could best be attained through instruction by an educated clergy. The
Christian Recorder
, as the official spokesman for the AME Church, deemed this point particularly critical as it described the activities of the church’s missionaries in the South.

Such primitive conceptions of worship, the newspaper suggested, would now have to be discarded, along with the other relics of bondage. By exposing the freedmen to higher standards of worship, a white cleric hopefully declared, they would learn the meaning of order and restraint—prerequisites of freedom whose importance went beyond the realm of religion. “Order in one kind of gathering will tend to the same in other things. They are ignorant & unaccustomed to plan & manage for themselves and I cannot help feeling strongly that their greatest need is
orderly Churches
, under the care of educated men. For the effects of such religious order is not easily overestimated, as it regards both spiritual things and temporal.”
¹⁸

Until such order prevailed in the freedmen’s worship, both black and white northern missionaries would share some common concerns. Upon visiting their first black prayer meeting in the South, white ministers conceded a certain admiration for the “simple and childlike” faith of the freedmen, their evident “sincerity and earnestness,” their “implicit belief in Providence,” their demonstrated love of prayer, and the powerful emotional impact of their music and hymns. “It took me nearer to heaven than I had been for years,” one missionary said of the singing he had heard. Still another spectator at a black religious service came away impressed not only by the “purity and simplicity” of the slaves’ faith but also by its practicality. “They believe simply in the love of Christ, and they speak of Him and talk to Him with a familiarity that is absolutely startling. They pray as though they thought Christ himself was standing in the very room.” Even though he considered the preachers “very rude and uncultivated,” exhibiting little understanding of the Bible, he would conclude from his observations that the freedmen were “the only people I ever met whose religion reacted on their daily life.”
¹⁹

What appalled the white missionaries and visitors about black religious worship made by far the deeper impression—the emotional wildness and extravagance, the unlettered preaching, the “incoherent speeches and
prayers,” the “narrowness” of the religious knowledge, and the evidently strong survivals of supersitition and paganism. “My spirit,” said one missionary, “sinks within me in sorrow to think of their noisy extravagance around the altar of my blessed Lord, who is the God of
order
not confusion.” While some observers claimed to be deeply moved by the
“soul thrilling”
hymns and the “melodious responses” to the sermons, others found them “ludicrous.” While some thought the shuffling, clapping, cries, shouts, and groans blended into “a kind of natural opera of feeling,” others considered them a vulgar display of paganism without any redeeming religious virtue. Rather than try to understand the role of tone, gesture, and response in the blacks’ worship, it would be far easier to ridicule it or to dismiss it altogether. “I never saw anything so savage,” the usually tolerant Laura Towne wrote of the first “shout” she witnessed after coming to the Sea Islands. No less dismayed, Lucy Chase came away from her first prayer meeting convinced that the religious feeling of the freedmen was “purely emotional, void of principle, and of no practical utility”; at the same time, her supervisor seized every opportunity to impress upon black worshippers “that boisterous Amens, wild, dancing-dervish flourishes … and pandemoniamics generally, do not constitute religion.”
²⁰

What the well-intentioned northern emissaries failed to appreciate was precisely the degree to which the freedmen considered the emotional fervor inseparable from worship because it brought them that much closer to God. It was almost as though white people wished to maintain a distance.

The testimony of this former South Carolina slave suggests what so many of the missionaries appeared to have missed—that the slaves over more than a century had fashioned a Christianity adapted to their circumstances. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a missionary of a very different sort as commander of a black regiment, may have been unique in this respect. Unlike Lucy Chase, he had no difficulty in finding a “practical utility” in black religious worship; in fact, he would be forced to conclude, in retrospect, that “we abolitionists had underrated the suffering produced by slavery among the negroes, but had overrated the demoralization. Or rather, we did not know how the religious temperament of the negroes had checked the demoralization.”
²¹

But such insight was all too rare. When a teacher in Beaufort, South Carolina, suggested that “our work is just as much missionary work as if we were in India or China,” she actually underestimated the task many missionaries thought they faced in the post-emancipation South. If it were
only a matter of introducing Christianity to heathens, that was a work with which they were familiar and, as one missionary conceded, “we should know how to proceed.” How to bring order, decorum, and intelligence into Christian worship, how to show the freedmen the difference between “sense and sound,” and how to eradicate the “mass of religious
rubbish”
which had collected over two centuries of slavery posed some very different problems from those encountered in missionary endeavors overseas. After all, these people had already been won over to Christ, they had for many years attended some kind of church or service, and they had experienced either a white minister or a slave preacher—and often both. Even if usually “unlettered,” the slave preacher or plantation exhorter had shared with them some trying times, he may have introduced them to the Gospel, and, most importantly, he knew how to communicate with them—and with God. With that in mind, a missionary in Norfolk, Virginia, warned that a strange minister who presumed to question how the former slaves chose to manifest their belief in God might not be welcomed into their community.

While agreeing that educated ministers were preferable, she advised her supervisors in the North that the freedmen would have to be educated themselves before they could appreciate that virtue in their ministers. That being the case, she requested that no more clergymen be dispatched to her region, “unless they are specially asked for—by the church over which they are to preside as pastors.”
²²

Whatever church they chose to affiliate with, and whether a northern minister or a native preacher presided, the freedmen would not give up easily the religious practices and fervor that had sustained them through so many trials. It was not that they were unwilling to learn new ways but only that they often found these new ways too far removed from God’s presence. Not long after the close of the Civil War, a black woman rose during a religious meeting and felt called upon, perhaps because of the presence of some northern white visitors, to defend the worship to which she still felt committed.

No sooner had she taken her seat than the congregation added their confirmation in song.

After the service, which ended in a wild emotional outburst, complete with shrieks, shouts, and the stamping of feet, the white visitors stood outside the church shocked and shaken by what they had seen and heard. “A few moments more, and I think we should have shrieked in unison with the crowd.… More than one of the party leaned against the wall, and burst into hysterical tears; even strong men were shaken, and stood trembling and exhausted.” Several years later, however, this spectator lamented that the missionaries and benevolent societies had not done enough to correct such perversions of Christianity. “By our presence and silence,” she wrote in 1870, “we sanctioned their extravagances; and they stand now self-confident, proof against remonstrance and instruction.”
²³

E
VEN BEFORE
they embarked for the South, most of the missionaries and teachers—whites and blacks alike—assumed that nothing short of a massive moral and religious transformation could liberate southern blacks from the remaining vestiges of slavery. But the question of how to structure that transformation and whether whites or blacks should assume primary responsibility and leadership precipitated tensions within this biracial movement that would persist into the Reconstruction Era, with implications for the political as well as the moral reformation of the postwar South. Since early in the war, the appeal had gone out in the northern black communities for qualified men and women to form their own Gideon’s Band. “I argue the peculiar fitness of the colored man for that position,” the Reverend Henry M. Turner wrote, “because about him the most incredulous would have no doubt. Neither could he be bribed by the deceptive flippancy of the oily-tongued slaveocrats, who too often becloud the understanding of the whites.”
²⁴

Although nearly every postwar black convention and newspaper praised the white benevolent societies for their efforts, these same spokesmen insisted that “the great work of elevating our race” properly belonged to black people. If the freedmen were to be taught self-respect, if they were to be inculcated with pride in their race and begin to view themselves as the equals of whites, what better examples for them to follow than those who had already demonstrated in their own lives the capacity for improvement and leadership. If the freedmen were to be introduced to new forms of church government and worship, would not black ministers be the ideal guides, since they would at once remove “the greatest stigma” that could be attached to such reforms—“that of being a ‘white man’s religion.’ ” And if the freedmen were to be encouraged to drop “the old broken brogue language” of slavery, they should listen to “enlightened” and educated ministers of their own color who spoke “in plain English.”
²⁵

With blacks undertaking responsibility for their own people, the potential for a conflict of interest would also be minimized. Although the emissaries of both races in the South stressed the importance of former slaves returning to work and proving their capacity for free labor, the suspicion grew that some white missionaries stood to profit materially from such counsel. Economic and moral objectives were not always easy to separate, as in the Sea Islands, for example, and if the same people who supervised black laborers in the field sometimes taught in the classroom or preached in the church, the distinctions blurred even more. “The danger now seems to be—not that we shall be called enthusiasts, abolitionists, philanthropists,” Laura Towne noted with concern, “but cotton agents, negro-drivers, oppressors.” Not far from where Miss Towne taught school in the Sea Islands, the Reverend A. Waddell preached in the First African Baptist Church, and he obviously thought her concern more than justified.