Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [341]
During the past six years in the North, he went on to explain, he had been engaged largely in “theoretical pursuits”; although this had made him confident of his intellectual abilities, he thought the transition to “practical life” had simply been too abrupt. But he remained determined to succeed, if only because he recognized the unique opportunity he had been afforded. “Here I am at last in a Slave State. How strange are the workings of Providence! Who would have thought three years ago that such mighty and important changes would so soon take place?”9
No matter how they defined success, and this tended to vary, the missionaries and teachers who descended upon the post-emancipation South would express considerable gratification over the progress of their efforts, even as the records they left behind also revealed moments of frustration, doubt, and discouragement. For the freedmen, of course, the opportunity to worship in their own churches and to be taught in their own schoolhouses had to be one of the supreme manifestations of their new status. Not surprisingly, though, any attempt to impose “civilizing” influences on a “backward” people is bound to produce its share of misunderstandings and tensions between the evangels and their wards, in part because that was invariably how the evangels viewed the relationship. Whether to appease the hostility of native whites or to placate the cultural biases and psychic needs of their northern friends, the freedmen would be forced to pay some price in violated sensitivities and prolonged dependencies. Regardless of whether they were treated with disdain, a benign tolerance, or exaggerated praise and condescension, there would be the many occasions on which a freedman or freedwoman might have easily identified with the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who observed, “When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”10
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SINCE EARLY IN THE WAR, the black South had loomed as a fertile field for missionary labor. None recognized this potential more readily than did the black churchmen of the North. “The Rubicon is passable,” exulted the Reverend James Lynch in September 1861, after noting how his African Methodist Episcopal Church had been compelled for years to operate on the northern side of the Potomac River. “With God for our guide, and his promises for our specie currency, we will cross, and carry there the legacy of the sainted Allen, our church government, and the word of God.” Although the black church acted initially with caution, pending a clarification of the war’s objectives, the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of blacks in the Union Army removed any lingering doubts. Within several months of these developments, James Lynch was on his way to South Carolina. “My own heart has been fired by our brethren here,” he soon reported. “Ignorant though they be, on account of long years of oppression, they exhibit a desire to hear and to learn, that I never imagined. Every word you say while preaching, they drink down and respond to, with an earnestness that sets your heart all on fire, and you feel that it is indeed God’s work to minister to them.”11
Although other denominations were no less zealous in bringing the freed slaves into their respective folds, the Methodists and the Baptists enjoyed a clear advantage from the outset. If the Baptists offered greater organizational flexibility and more easily accommodated native black preachers, the Methodists provided, as the founder of the AME Church once explained, “the plain simple gospel” which “the unlearned can understand, and the learned are sure to understand.” Both of these pietistic sects also found it necessary to spend less time in conversion than in simply providing the organizational structure that would accommodate