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By Root 1173 0

in financial resources, the black Methodist organizations also did quite well, demonstrating to their satisfaction that “blood is always more potent than money.” In some communities, the rivals worked out a “compromise” by which preachers of both denominations used the same building and took turns at the pulpit. But at least one black minister who experimented with that arrangement found it unworkable. “The Apostle said, ‘Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.’ But in an accommodating sense, I say be not unequally yoked together with a white man.” Even less charitable, the Reverend Richard H. Cain viewed his Methodist rival in Charleston as “this Judas, who comes here to rule over our people with his Yankee rod of iron,” acting “more like Barnwell Rhett with his slaves, than a minister of Christ.”33

What exacerbated the denominational rivalries was the unresolved question of who had the legal and moral right to the property of those churches which had formerly serviced the slaves. Although blacks had often built them, title to the land and the building had invariably been held in trusteeship for the black congregations by the whites. This issue assumed particular importance now that black congregations were searching for places in which to meet. Wherever possible, they would seek to establish new church structures to make absolutely clear their break with the past and their new independence in religious affairs. But even where the will and the labor existed to build their own churches, the resources were not always available. Until land could be acquired by purchase or rental and a building erected, blacks would be forced to hold their services in improvised “brush arbors,” abandoned warehouses, and in their own cabins. On a plantation in Louisiana, a double cabin which had previously housed two slave families was subdivided so that black worshippers could meet in one of the rooms. “As you entered,” a visitor noted, “you had your choice—you could visit the family or go to church.” In many communities, moreover, the black preacher might be kept in quarters and food by his parishioners but he would have to appeal elsewhere for anything approaching a salary. “We are not doing so Well here,” one such preacher wrote to the nearest Freedmen’s Bureau officer, “the People of Smithville are very Poor so much so that they cannot suport me as their Preacher. For the last three month I have not had but $8.78. cents from my congregation. I do not know how I shall get along at this rate.”34

The spectacle of overwhelming numbers of blacks withdrawing from the established churches in order to worship by themselves provoked a mixed response in the white South. Faced with the choice of permitting the black congregations to depart or granting them equal privileges and seating within the old churches, most whites preferred separation. But the social convenience this afforded them would have to be weighed against the risks incurred, and these covered an assortment of fears. If black laborers without white supervision reverted to indolence and vagrancy, as many whites expected, black worshippers freed from white surveillance might presumably fall into the vices of heathenism. Recalling the exodus of blacks from the white churches, Myrta Lockett Avary thought that was precisely what happened.

With freedom, the negro, en masse, relapsed promptly into the voodooism of Africa, Emotional extravaganzas, which for the sake of his health and sanity, if for nothing else, had been held in check by his owners, were indulged without restraint. It was as if a force long repressed burst forth. “Moans,” “shouts” and “trance meetings” could be heard for miles. It was weird.

Voicing an even more common concern, she noted how the blacks who had participated in these orgies would return to their homes late at night or at dawn, “exhausted, and unfit for duty.”35

The political implications of separation revived even graver concerns among some native whites. Before the war, recognition of the dangers posed by independent black religious expression