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By Root 1163 0

and organization had resulted in placing them under rigid surveillance and regulation. With emancipation, however, those restraints could no longer be enforced, and black-controlled churches and preachers not responsible to the master would become principal influences in the lives of the freedmen. Much as the whites had feared, rumors and reports of what transpired in the black churches suggested not only emotional extravagance but political subversion. In Mobile, Alabama, for example, several black preachers were accused of inculcating the freedmen with doctrines of murder, arson, violence, and hatred of white people. Not only were whites described in their sermons as “white devils,” “demons,” or “pro-slavery devils” but the preachers talked of an impending race war in which the whites would be exterminated. “He [the black preacher] frequently cried out ‘In this hour of blood who will stand by me?’ and his question ever met with most enthusiastic replies of ‘I will, bless God!’ from the assembled auditory.”36

Whatever the proven capacity of black preachers for insurrectionary activity, whites had always been aware of that potential but had also learned over the years to encourage the religious enthusiasm of their slaves as a way of curbing any revolutionary impulses. Even with separation, the ability of the church to impose restraint and to divert people from their own grievances and oppression might still prove to be serviceable to whites. After describing the organization of several new black churches in Columbia, South Carolina, a northern correspondent reported how the whites had encouraged these efforts in the hope that “they will keep the attention of restless spirits from speculative politics, which promise so much harm to the poor negro.” When the Reverend Henry M. Turner organized Georgia blacks into the AME Church and sought to train local preachers to preside over the new congregations, he found his efforts applauded by the southern white churches. “They were pleased to see that we were endeavoring to elevate the colored preachers of the South, instead of flooding the country with Northern ministers, many of whom might be ‘too radical’ for the times.”37

Not only did the Union Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau recognize the authority exercised by the black preacher but they sought to exploit his influence to restrain recalcitrant blacks and to disabuse the minds of the freedmen of any extravagant notions about freedom. The black preacher might be asked, for example, to explain the new labor contracts to the field hands and to urge their compliance, while at the same time he would correct any mistaken expectations they still held about the disposition of the lands of their former masters. In the presence of a Union officer, who no doubt nodded his head in approval, a black minister in Louisiana told a large gathering of freedmen not to delude themselves into thinking they no longer had a master—they had only changed their master. “Everything must have a head,” he explained. “The plantation, the house, the steamboat, the army, and to obey that head was to obey the law; to disobey lawful commands was to disobey the law.” In praising God for their freedom, the minister concluded, “they must not forget to honor Him by doing their duty.”38

But the number of preachers beaten and the many churches burned to the ground by irate whites testified to the fact that the black minister did not always play the role expected and demanded of him. If he viewed himself as the moral and religious caretaker of his people, he would be drawn inexorably into the political arena. For black churchmen to have drawn a line between political and religious concerns in the years immediately following emancipation would have been ideologically and tactically impossible. After all, one black journal asked, how could the church stand apart from politics when the issues in question were civil rights, the suffrage, education, and equal protection under the law?39 Not surprisingly, then, in state after state, the political and religious leaders were