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By Root 1034 0

War placed him in a particular dilemma, caught between increased white vigilance and the urge to articulate the uppermost thoughts of his parishioners. His attempts to resolve that conflict severely tested his powers of obfuscation. On the day of fasting and prayer ordered by President Jefferson Davis after a series of Confederate military reverses, whites and slaves gathered at the old Guinea Church in Cumberland County, Virginia. After the whites had said their prayers, seeking to turn the tide of battle, the time came for the blacks to make known their sentiments. The first black speaker, an old deacon, avoided the issue altogether with the simple prayer that “the Lord’s will be done,” which the parishioners could obviously interpret as they wished. But Armstead Berkeley, the pastor of the black Baptist church, when called upon to lead a prayer, pleaded with the Lord to “point the bullets of the old Confederate guns right straight at the hearts of the Yankees; make our men victorious on the battlefield and send them home in health and strength to join their people in peace and prosperity.” That seemed clear enough; the black church deacons, in fact, were said to have reproached the pastor after the meeting for this apparent betrayal of the slaves’ cause. “Don’t worry, children,” the pastor explained, “the Lord knew what I was talking about.” The deacons were reportedly satisfied with the pastor’s explanation. With a far clearer sense of purpose, an old plantation preacher in South Carolina complied with a request to pray for the Confederacy: “Bress, we do pray Thee, our enemies, de wicked Sesech. Gib dem time to ’pent, we do pray Thee, and den we will excuse Thee if Thou takes dem all to glory.”52

Although forced at times to play a dual role, the black preacher usually commanded a leading place in the black community. Many former slaves recalled him as a man who had offered them hope for redemption and freedom in this world, even when the prospects seemed most dim. L. J. Coppin, who would later become a prominent cleric in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, remembered with particular admiration Christopher Jones, a Maryland black upon whom the slaves had come to rely not only for religious guidance and inspiration but for his knowledge of wartime developments. “He was not so much for resorting to the prophecies of Daniel for information,” Coppin remarked, “as he was to the newspaper that secretly came weekly to him.” Many of the whites with whom William Russell spoke, in his tour of the South in 1861, understood the power of the black preacher as well as his capacity for mischief. “They ‘do the niggers no good,’ ” he was told, “ ‘they talk about things that are going on elsewhere, and get their minds unsettled.’ ” Some whites in the Ogeechee District of Georgia were themselves so unsettled by a slave preacher who proclaimed the inevitability of a Yankee victory that they covered him with tar and set him afire.53

No matter how closely the master regulated the religious observances of his slaves, he could neither control every aspect of their lives nor filter the information and rumors that eventually reached the slave quarters. When asked if the masters knew anything of “the secret life of the colored people,” Robert Smalls, a former South Carolina slave, would later testify: “No, sir; one life they show their masters and another life they don’t show.” On the larger farms and plantations, where more than half the slaves lived, the social life of the quarters brought together house servants and field hands, artisans and carriage drivers, stableboys and cooks. The news gathered in the Big House that day or in the nearby town or from slaves on a neighboring plantation would be divulged and discussed, often with asides and stories at the expense of the master and mistress. Dilly Yellady’s parents, who had been slaves in North Carolina, told her how “de niggers would git in de slave quarters at night an’ pray fer freedom an’ laf ’bout what de Yankees wus doin’, ’bout Lincoln an’ Grant foolin’ deir marsters so.”54

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