USA > Alabama > History of the Protestant Episcopal church in Alabama, 1763-1891 > Part 11
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Many were brought to such decision by the publica- tion about this time of some correspondence between John Henry Hopkins, Presiding Bishop and Bishop of Vermont, and Bishop Wilmer. Bishop Hopkins had issued a circular letter to the Southern Bishops, plead- ing with them not to prolong their separate legislative organization, which, being wilful and needless, was schismatical; he had pointed out that in any case it was but "a matter of time" when such separation
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must disappear, and urged that what must be done, at any rate, sooner or later, were better done at once.
Bishop Wilmer's response was couched in terms of stern manliness. He asserted that in some cases the time of action is everything. "There is nothing ille- gal," he said, " in a second marriage, and it is gener- ally a 'mere question of time' with men when they shall marry again; but
' The funeral baked-meats
Do coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.'"
It was unnatural to suppose that Southern grief could entirely and immediately turn from the past and sing Te Deums with the victorious peoples. It must have time. Moreover there was this insuperable objection: Every single man that represented the Southern dioceses in the General Convention, having obtained such judicial or military rank or such an amount of property as excluded him from the general amnesty, was still, according to the President's proc- lamation, "an unpardoned rebel and traitor; " and it was almost certain that the men who called these pros- pective deputies rebels and traitors would have the courage of their convictions, and, on the floor of the House of Deputies, question the propriety of allowing rebels and traitors to participate in the deliberations of a loyal Church.
Influenced by these and similar considerations, the Southern Bishops and dioceses held aloof from the General Convention. Bishops Atkinson and Lay alone resumed their former places in the House of Bishops; but they did not take their seats uncondi-
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tionally. They made the recognition of Bishop Wil- mer as Diocesan of Alabama a condition precedent. This the entire College of Confederate Bishops had determined upon as their own course, however favor- able the General Convention should be in other respects. They came to this determination despite Bishop Wilmer's express statement that rather than allow his case to constitute a barrier to general pacifica- tion he would resign.
After hearing the representations of the two South- ern Bishops the House of Bishops assented to the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Alabama upon two con- ditions: Ist, That he should furnish evidence of his consecration; and, 2nd, That he should make declara- tion of conformity to the Constitution and Canons of the Church in the United States. These conditions were reasonable, and as they were precisely the terms on which any foreign Bishop would be admitted to legislative authority in the Church in the United States, the most ardent Diocesan-Rights man could not take exception to them.
It was more than two months before this action was officially communicated to the Bishop of Alabama. Meanwhile the General Council of the Southern dio- ceses had met in Augusta, Georgia, in November. The spirit of charity which had prevailed in the Gell- eral Convention the preceding month commended itself to the heart of all present. Again did the genial warmth of the sun do what the cold Northern blasts could never have done, and the dissolution of the General Council was soon accomplished. Abso-
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lute freedom of action and liberty to withdraw from the Conciliar compact was accorded every diocese. Only one obstacle prevented the prompt return of Alabama to legislative union with the general Church, and that was the military duress described in the last chapter. But this having ended, the Bishop convoked a special diocesan Council in Montgomery, on Jan- ' uary 17, 1866, laid before it the whole matter, received its unstinted " approbation, admiration, and thanks for the firm, dignified, and Christian manner in which he had maintained the independence and dignity of the Church in this diocese;" and then, by formal resolu- tion, the Church in Alabama resumed its former rela- tion to the national Church.
Immediately after the adjournment of this special Council Bishop Wilmer set out for New York, and on January 31, 1866, in Trinity Chapel, of that city, made the prescribed Declaration of Conformity, and united with the Presiding Bishop and the other Bishops and clergy present in the celebration of the Holy Communion.
"Thus happily, as I think," said the Bishop to the diocesan Convention of 1866, "the Church in Ala- bama has been able, through God's grace and kind providence, to do her full duty, and to maintain her dignity and propriety; and looking alone to the weal of the whole body of Christ, to pursue a steady and consistent course. Henceforward, guided by the same Spirit which has thus far led us and governed all our deliberations, let us more than ever strive for
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those things which concern the glory of God and the good of His Church.
" We are able to show to the world that we are not a sect, much less a sectional sect; that the catholic spirit of the Southern dioceses has met with a like response in the catholic spirit of the Northern dio- ceses-" deep calling unto deep "-giving us con- fidence that henceforth, as ever before, no political differences shall prevail to break the bonds of catholic unity and of Heaven-born charity."
CHAPTER VI.
DECAY OF THE NEGRO WORK.
T
HROUGHOUT the civil war the relationship of master and slave had remained unchanged. The master realized that the obligations of ownership were not rendered less sacred by the inoperative proclama- tion of a foreign power. The slave was content to serve him to whom he had always confidently looked for food and raiment, for tobacco and snuff, and for that personal consideration which was lacking in few slave-holders and which seldom found an unresponsive object.
When the impatience of men brought about by revolution that abolition which God was bringing about by the slower but surer process of evolution, and when they whose natures were fit only for serfdom were by one violent effort hurled into an environment for which man had made no due preparation, this state of mutual confidence was changed, as by hideous enchantment, into a state of reciprocal distrust. With the ballot, the white badge of freedom, in their hand, the newly enfranchised felt that they were as gods. They easily fell a political prey to those swarming demagogues and carpet-baggers who unscrupulously exalted the Negro that they themselves might use him as a stepping-stone. With centuries of ignorance, and bondage, and slow development" behind them, and without any exercise in intelligent choice and self-
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determination, they were unable to discriminate be- tween freedom and anarchy. With minds excessively emotional, and without discipline by the in-forming Spirit of God as to the proper objects and limitations of emotion, they confounded the restraints of God with the restraints of inan. "Six days shalt thou labor " was an obsolete command, now that no visible law enforced it; and since they were free to idle when they wished, the ex-slaves wandered from place to place as fancy dictated, filled with restless anxiety to demon- strate their freedom by exercising it to the utmost limit. They looked upon their former owners with a suspicion that fast grew into settled antagonisni. Labor became thoroughly demoralized, and it seemed that the devastation of civil war would shortly be sur- passed by the tidal-wave of race conflict. The wealth of the South was in land, and the value of the land depended on its yearly harvests. With fewer laborers came reduced acreage, poorer cultivation, smaller crops; and with this the further impoverishment of land- owners. This was succeeded in constantly increasing ratio by the removal of the white people to the towns and the surrender of the country to the blacks.
This segregation of the races, attended with the numerical predominance of the blacks over those whites that remained on the old homesteads, caused among the whites increased, and often baseless, fear of Negro uprisings, and led to the formation, for com- mon protection, of the Ku Klux Klan, whose purpose was to create and perpetuate such terrorism among the Negroes as to nip in the bud any incipient lawlessness,
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and to kill out the insolent spirit and habits that were springing up so luxuriantly under the fructifying presence of Northern troops.
The political alliance of the Negroes with the aliens, and the apparently necessitated retaliation of the whites, tended to a further disseverance of interests that should have been common. In nine years the Legislature of Alabama, elected by Negroes and com- posed in large part of Negroes and carpet-baggers, had increased the State debt from less than six millions of dollars to more than thirty-eight millions. Evidently the whites must rule or be ruined. To rule they must as a phalanx set themselves in opposition, determined, aggressive, merciless, to the forces of disintegration. And this relationship must be maintained in every county, township, neighborhood, house, and heart, till the common salvation of whites and blacks alike was secured.
Such were the conditions that confronted the Church in Alabama after the war. Under the old regime it had been possible to give the slaves frequent religious ministrations, and many a slave-holder had gladly made provision for their spiritual and moral instruc- tion. But now the ex-slaves would take neither their politics nor their religion from their former owners. Northern politicians and renegade Alabamians ini- tiated them into the mysteries of political economy. Preachers of their own color made broad for them the strait and narrow way. Every attempt made by the clergy that had formerly visited them, preached to them, and administered to them the Sacraments, was
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now met with that disingenuousness which has ever characterized the response of the freedman to the ap- proaches of the white.
The few faithful Negroes that clung to the teach- ings and the communion of the Church in preference to hearing the ranting ululation of sensual enthusiasts were ostracized by their race, and suffered all the social trials that went with mediaval excommunica- tion. They were regarded as heathen and traitors. In health they had no communication with their own people. In sickness they received no succor from their own kinsfolk. In death hirelings of their own race performed the offices that affection refused. Some endured to the end a martyrdom as real as that of the early Christians. But most wearied after a time, and went with their people.
The Church in Alabama yielded only to necessity in abandoning for a time her efforts to evangelize the Negro. There were lips to speak so long as there were ears to hear, and long after there were hearts to feel. It must be confessed that the laity did not evince any wild enthusiasm. To any reasonable dis- tance they would follow the rector's lead, but they themselves would not lead. When, in 1866, it was proposed that the Convention should, in its corporate capacity, adopt some authoritative plan for the further- ance of Christian work among the Negroes, the laity flatly, though in parliamentary language, refused to have part or parcel in the matter as a diocesan move- ment. They said that they would "confide all details " to their spiritual pastors and governors, the
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Bishop and the clergy, believing that under their wise counsel the guiding principles of the Bible and the ordinary forms and appointments of the Church sufficed to meet all the exigencies of the case.
The Bishop and the clergy did what they could do to stem the tide, but that was little. The General Convention attempted to assist the Southern Bishops, before they asked for assistance, by establishing the "Freedmen's Commission," but the Commission rendered assistance impossible by suggesting, at the outset, that the Church's work among the Negroes pass from the Bishops' jurisdiction and be entrusted to other agencies. This schism-breeding proposition was promptly and forcibly rejected by Bishop Wil- mer, who, magnifying his office and purposing that it should not be belittled by others, took the ground that the Bishop of a diocese is charged with the selection of instrumentalities, and that these, if they are to work properly, must work under his super- vision; that class legislation is repugnant to the mind of Christ, in whom is neither bond nor free; and that the Churchmen of Alabama were debtors to the free as to the bond-not less; but also not more. Finally, the Bishop said, he was willing to accept subordinate help, but not co-ordinate .* Assistance on such terms was not forthcoming, and the diocese was left to its own devices.
As early as 1867 the many congregations of Negroes had dwindled to two-the Church of the Good Shep- herd, Mobile, and Faunsdale Chapel, on the planta-
* Journal of 51st Annual Convention, page 36.
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tion of the Rev. William A. Stickney, in Marengo county. Occasionally a solitary Negro communicant was found in white congregations, but the only aggres- sive work attempted, except in the two congregations mentioned above, was among the children. Even this did not long survive. In St. John's parish, Montgomery, Dr. H. M. Smead conducted a Sunday school of six white teachers and one hundred and twenty Negro pupils; but, in face of the parental and social influences that were moulding the pupils' character all through the week, the difficulties and discouragements were too many, and the fruits of an hour's influence and teaching once a week were too few and insignificant, to warrant a continuance of the attempt. When, in addition to these discourage- ments, intermeddling Negro politicians went about proclaiming that the school was simply a hot bed of horrible Democratic sedition, the project was doomed. After two years of faithful labor the entire corps of workers retired from the field.
In the "Canebrake " of Hale, Perry, Dallas, and Marengo counties, the Rev. William A. Stickney fought a losing fight, single-handed, for nearly twenty years. Mr. Stickney was a large land-owner; it was his property that gave the name to the present town of Faunsdale. On his plantation he had built, at a cost of twenty-five hundred dollars, a neat chapel for the use of those who, at first his slaves, were now his tenants. His return to the practice of the early Church in imposing penance on evil-doers appealed to the Negroes' sense of fitness, and did not diminish his
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popularity among the congregations that he served, and they requested him to preach to them regularly on several plantations. For a short while their attend- ance was good, especially on week-days when field- labor was suspended and the wages of attendants at chapel ran on. Upon his own plantation, when the congregations began to decrease Mr. Stickney refused to renew the lease of his tenants except with the stipu- lation that they should regularly attend public services in the chapel. With the Negroes it was one thing to make this contract, and another to keep it. With those who kept the contract it was one thing to come and another to worship. Very soon the ministerial proprietor of the chapel ceased the attempt to make the Negroes worship the Almighty by contract.
But this failure did not quench his ardor. With the help of the women of his family he began a day- school for the children that were too young to work in the fields. Only a two-hours' session was held, and the instruction was entirely oral and sugar-coated. The idea on which the school was founded was that the work of forming Christian character must begin very near the cradle and persist through life. If it seemed hopeless to change those whose characters had crystallized, it was possible to develop unformed, plastic characters along right lines. At least, this was the Stickneys' hope. The two great obstacles to its realization, heredity and environment, were not sufficiently considered. Heredity gave an inborn pre- disposition to sensuality, a phronema sarkos, above that of mankind at large; for the sense of morality is -14
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a growth that their ancestry had not cultivated, the ape and the tiger had not been worked out, and their inborn inclination found favorable atmosphere and soil in the home life. The vices of the Negroes were grosser than those of the whites; their will-power was weaker; their consciousness of sin could not, appa- rently, be germinated. Having little training of the spirit and less of the mind they were debarred from intellectual enjoyments and spiritual restraints. De- velopment of mind and soul did not keep pace with development of body; hence they easily and almost inevitably fell victims to first temptations. At the present day many have reached a high plane of ethics, and in every class an imperfect and arbitrary morality is evident, but in those days the vast majority had no morality at all. They who from afar spun their theo- ries and idealized their brother-in-black believed that Southern men and women were grossly calumniating their old slaves. But they who came down and worked in the midst of them, and went in and out among them, found that enchantment was inseparable from distance.
Mr. Stickney served the Negro, in face of all these obstacles, long, faithfully, and intelligently; but his zeal could neither blind him to facts nor prevent him from telling what he saw. In 1869 he wrote: " Viewed from the Christian standpoint, I can say nothing of this race, within my sphere of observation, to en- courage you as to their future. They have not abandoned the spasmodic, emotional religion taught them by sectarian religionists. 'Professing' is yet
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their favorite and perhaps only religion, with an utter disregard for the morality enjoined in the Decalogue. It is dismal to think of their licentious depravity who occupy the head and front ranks in this illusory sys- tem." A year later he said : "Results in this field have not cheered my heart with the hope of elevating the people in pure or Christian morality." A few years later he said: "Perseverance is the rule adhered to amid prospects anything but hopeful. Indications pointing to the growth of morality-especially of truth, integrity, and chastity-do not cheer my toils for and with this people." From year to year a few were confirmed, and the nominal communicants at Faunsdale chapel long numbered about twenty-five; but the most of these were not actual communicants, and not a few that purposed to communicate were repelled from the Holy Table.
In 1883 the final full report of this work showed its virtual disintegration: " I am at a loss to know what to do in this field of labor. For the past twenty years I have been practically familiar with various of the ex- periments recommended on paper in different quarters of the Church. My strength and deepest concern have been expended on them. With the beautiful ecclesiological structure on the plantation in days of slavery, I have had, and used, the opportunity of dealing with it as a regular parish-baptizing and instructing the children, celebrating the Holy Com- munion, visiting the sick as physician to both soul and body, solemnizing marriage, and burying the dead. In settling their quarrels, counselling them
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through difficulties, and in all my dealings, the staple of my conversation has been their responsibility and allegiance to their Creator as taught by our Redeemer. I have found it easy to bring forward classes to Con- firmation. The picture is attractive to them. Out- wardness ever has a charm for them, and the more of it, the greater their avidity to participate in it. But emptiness, sham, hypocrisy, are about all I have seen come of it. I am paralyzed in any and every attempt to induce this race of people to realize that God requires the keeping of His commandments as a condition of pleasing Him. They will flock to the Holy Com- munion besotted in bestial depravity, unless I can find it out and repel them. It distresses me to invite them to a pure participation of that Holy Sacrifice. I have hence reported but one celebration the whole past year, and I cannot actually frame a list of communi- cants. This is not the report of a missionary toiling among the heathen on Afric's shores. But it is the exhibit of Americanized Africans, that have been instructed from childhood in the Catechism on this plantation. I have in my view successive crops of the young-children's children-who have thus been tried, and I fail to see one step gained for or by them in purity of life and common morality."*
Similar discouragement and disintegration attended the efforts of the Rev. Dr. Massey in Mobile. The congregation of the chapel of the Good Shepherd gradually melted away and sought the companionship
* Journals of Conventions, Rev. Wm. A. Stickney's reports, passim.
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of their own people. From fifty communicants the number dwindled to nine. The separate organization was dissolved, the building was sold for a few hundred dollars, and the handful of communicants became members of Trinity parish.
So among the children of Montgomery, the farm- hands of the Canebrake, and the literate of Mobile, the Church's attempts failed utterly and completely, and in 1882 not one of the old organized Negro con- gregations was to be found in the Diocese of Alabama.
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CHAPTER VII. ETHIOPIA'S UPLIFTED HANDS.
N utter ignorance of the unparalleled conditions that confronted the Church and the Churchmen of the unreconstructed South, many Northern journals gave liberal and aggressive advice to the Southern bishops and clergy. When their nostrums and pan- aceas were gently put aside, they quickly abandoned counsel and began to hurl epithets. Inertness and indifference to Negro evangelization were openly charged against the bishops. The Negro was sup- posed to be looking up hungrily to the shepherds, and the shepherds were withholding food; to be swarm- ing about the Church doors eager to enter, and the bishops were waving off the multitudes.
The true condition was just the reverse. The Negro was waving off the bishop. Every proffer of spiritual food was daintily examined and rejected. Every attempt to benefit individuals contributed to a spirit of self-assertion that misconstrued every effort. And when the political influences playing upon them are remembered it is not surprising that they looked upon these approaches of their old masters as so many attempts to conciliate their most worthy reserve.
But, however natural the Negro's behavior, it necessitated cessation of effort on the part of his would-be benefactor. The fever must have time to
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cool off, the reason to return. Experience must teach what affirmation could not teach.
Years passed. Social equality came not to the Black. Neither did he long retain his political superiority. The rightful owners of the State drove out of power the dishonest carpet-bagger and his un- scrupulous black tools, and put a stop to the fearful knavery that was bankrupting the commonwealth. After a while the Negro learned that legislation could no longer give him his daily bread, and that hence- forth he must earn in the sweat of his face what bread he did not steal. Then he turned to his old master. The former confidence between them was gone, but there was between them a bond that gave hope of better things in days to come. If the ex-slave would not follow from love, he would follow because of the loaves and fishes. He had learned where his best interests lay. From necessity he had learned humil- ity. It was now possible to edify him without puffing him up.
The attempt at edification was not made imme- diately. The distrust of those who remembered the past was not removable at beck and nod. Time must be given for the forgetting of fierce conflicts, and for the trying of new things, whether they were of tem- porary or of permanent duration. If the Negro had so changed that the Gospel of Jesus Christ would not incite him to leap the barrier of race and social con- dition that God himself had erected, then Churchmen were willing for the clergy to carry the Gospel to the Negro once more.
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Finally, at what was deemed an opportune time, a new beginning was made in Mobile. It was in 1882 -the year that saw the death of the last Black Belt congregation. The remnant of the old congregation of the Good Shepherd formed the nucleus. The clergy and the Bishop bore the entire burden of the attempt. They did not receive the co-operation of the laity; they neither asked nor expected it; for the laymen of Mobile, those of them that were interested in ecclesi- astical and benevolent work, were already doing what they could for the numerous hospitals and widows' and orphans' homes in the city.
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