• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1321 0

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.

White folks tells stories ’bout ’ligion. Dey tells stories ’bout it kaise dey’s ’fraid of it. I stays independent of what white folks tells me when I shouts. De Spirit moves me every day, dat’s how I stays in. White folks don’t feel sech as I does; so dey stays out.… Never does it make no difference how I’s tossed about. Jesus, He comes and saves me everytime. I’s had a hard time, but I’s blessed now—no mo’ mountains.

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