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By Root 1440 0

MILLION souls at stake, the struggle for supremacy among the several Protestant denominations often took on the spirit and the language associated with the prosecution of a war. Into the breach left by departing and deposed “rebel” ministers poured native black preachers and both white and black northern missionaries, and each congregation captured would be hailed as though an enemy had been routed. “Our cause has been gaining daily,” the Reverend Cain reported from South Carolina. “In Columbia, the capital of the State, we have captured all the Methodists, and are laying the foundation for an immense congregation.” Less than forty-eight hours after General Sherman entered Savannah, the Reverend James Lynch was in the city to claim Andrew’s Chapel, previously affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church; the white minister had fled, and under the Reverend Lynch’s exhortations the black congregation voted overwhelmingly to align itself with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Consolidating the gains made by previous missionaries, the Reverend Henry M. Turner reported in early 1866 that Georgia had been secured for the AME Church. “I have visited every place it was safe to go, and sent preachers where it was thought I had better not venture. Last night was the first quiet night I have had for five weeks in succession.”30

Few triumphs, however, were more gratifying to the African Methodist Episcopal Church than the day in September 1865 when the cornerstone was laid for a new church building in Charleston. Not only did this mark the return of the AME Church to a city from which it had been banished some forty years earlier for complicity in the Denmark Vesey insurrection plot but the new building would be erected exclusively by black labor and the architect was none other than Robert Vesey, the son of the executed insurrectionist. Some three thousand black Charlestonians listened that day to speeches from a group of black clergymen who would for the next decade play a dominant role in both the religious and the political history of the state. By September 1866, a black Charlestonian could proudly describe eleven colored churches in his city—five Methodist (two of them affiliated with the AME Church), two Presbyterian, two Episcopalian, one Congregational, and one Baptist. “The flower of the city,” he also noted, worshipped at the Episcopalian Church (St. Mark’s), some of “the wealthiest colored families” attended the Methodist Episcopal Church (which had been reorganized by northern white missionaries), and the Reverend Cain’s AME Church was made up largely of newly freed slaves. In Charleston, as in other urban centers where a free Negro community had thrived before the war, church affiliation often reflected divisions of class, status, and color within the black community. And if the experience of Ed Barber some years after the war was in any way typical, those who crossed those lines in choosing a church might come away disappointed.

When I was trampin’ ’round Charleston, dere was a church dere called St. Mark, dat all de society folks of my color went to. No black nigger welcome dere, they told me. Thinkin’ as how I was bright ’nough to git in, I up and goes dere one Sunday. Ah, how they did carry on, bow and scrape and ape de white folks.… I was uncomfortable all de time though, ’cause they was too “hifalootin” in de ways, in de singin’, and all sorts of carryin’ ons.31

Almost conceding defeat at the outset, the Methodist Episcopal Church (South) did little to check the mass withdrawal of blacks from its ranks. Within a year after the end of the war, in fact, it had already lost more than half of its black membership; those who remained would soon be reorganized into a separate Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.32 To win over the departing black Methodists, an often furious battle ensued between the Methodist Episcopal Church (North) and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Despite the impressive number and quality of the missionaries dispatched South by the northern Methodists and their clear superiority