RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Negro Evangelization
America. In 1783-84, soon after the separation of the colonies from the mother country, the society's operations ceased, leaving in all the colonies fortythree missionaries, two of whom were in the Southern states, one in North Carolina and one in South Carolina. The Moravians or United Brethren were the first who formally attempted the establishment of missions exclusively to the Negroes, cooperating with the trustees under the will of Dr. Bray, who left funds for converting the slaves of Carolina. Finally Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians began efforts among the slaves more or less spasmodically.
Thus the efforts to convert Negroes in America fall in three main periods : The first period was early in the eighteenth century after it was decided that baptism did not free slaves. Results were meager, and the effort spasmodic. A second period came between the Revolutionary war and 1820, when the " Cotton Kingdom " came into being. More was accomplished in this period, though " on the whole but a minority of the Negroes, and that a small one, attended regularly the house of God; and, taking them as a class, their religious instruction was extensively and most seriously neglected." The third period followed after the depression of the thirties. This depression was severe, and lasted nearly twenty years. For instance, the Presbyterian Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, in 1833, said of the slaves: "There are over two millions of human beings in the condition of heathen and some of them in a worse condition. They may justly be considered the heathen of this country, and will bear a comparison with heathen in any country in the world."
As the result of such appeals a reaction set in about 1835, and the Methodists and Baptists especially were active among the slaves. By 1840 enough had been done to furnish Negroes with their own ministers and missionaries and to es- ' tablish numbers of Negro churches. A minister in Mississippi testified that he had charge of the Negroes of five plantations and 300 slaves; another in Georgia visited eighteen plantations every two weeks. " The owners have built three good churches at their own expense, all framed; 290 members have been added, and about 400 children are instructed." Another traveling minister declares, in 1841, that in many places like Baltimore, Alexandria, and Charleston, the Negroes had large, spacious churches. This religious activity among Negroes brought to the front a number of distinguished Negro preachers: Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, who led insurrections; Richard Allen, who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (see Methodists, IV., 6); Abraham Jones, the first Negro Protestant Episcopal rector; Harry Hosier, the companion of Bishop Asbury; George Lisle, the West Indian missionary, and Lott Carey, the African missionary. To these may be added the names of Lemuel Haynes, who pastored white New England churches; John Chavis, who taught a fashionable white school in North Carolina; Henry Evans, a black missionary to whites and Negroes; James Varick, who founded the Zion Methodist Church; Jack of Virginia, Ralph Free-
man, and Lunsford Lane, — thirteen remarkable characters.
The gradual increase of these Negro Christians, however, brought peculiar problems. Clergymen, despite the law, were reproached for taking Negroes into the church and still allowing them to be held as slaves. On the other hand, it was not easy to know how to deal with the black church-member after he was admitted. He must either be a subordinate member of a white church or a member of a Negro church under the general supervision of whites. As the efforts of missionaries slowly increased the number of converts, both these systems were adopted. But the black congregations here and there soon aroused suspicion and fear of the masters, and as early as 1715 North Carolina passed an act which declared: " That if any master or owner of Negroes or slaves, or any other person or persons whatsoever on the government, shall permit or suffer any Negro or Negroes to build on their, or either of their, lands, or any part thereof, any house under pretense of a meeting-house upon account of worship, or upon any pretense whatsoever, and shall not suppress and hinder them, he, she, or they so offending, shall, for every default, forfeit and pay fifty pounds, one-half toward defraying the contingent charges of government, the other to him or them that shall sue for the same." This made Negro members of a white church a necessity in this colony, and there was the same tendency in other colonies. It gradually became true, as Brackett says, that " any privileges of church going which slaves might enjoy depended much, as with children, on the disposition of the masters." After the Civil War the Negroes were segregated in their own churches in the South and to some extent in the North.
2. Statistics. [The distribution of the Negroes in the churches as given in the appended tables may receive some illumination and interest from the following facts. The first church in the United States to receive Negroes was the Anglican, the baptism of a Negro child taking place in Virginia in 1624. There has always been a considerable proportion of the Negro population in fellowship with this church and its successor, the Protestant Episcopal. The ceremonial of the service is grateful to the Negro mind, and the rolls of the Protestant Episcopal ministry include over 150 Negro preachers since the first, Alexander Crummell, was ordained in 1839. The connection with the Methodist communion was inevitable. The strongly emotional element in the Negro mind receives the appeal of vigorous Methodist evangelism with special favor. This relationship with the Methodist bodies began as early as the activity of Bishop Thomas Coke (q.v.), whose servant, Harry Hosier (d. 1810), was a noted colored minister. Almost as inevitable was the trend of the Negro toward the Baptist denomination. Here the attractive element was the symbolism of immersion. The explanation given above for the attraction to the Protestant Episcopal Church applies with equal force to the Roman Catholic communion. The next denominations in point of strength, Presbyterians and Congregationalists, do not enlist so strongly the mental leanings of the race.]
Negro Evangelization