Black Charlestonians by Bernard E. Powers

Author:Bernard E. Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610750707
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

CHAPTER SEVEN

“BEHOLD A NEW ZION”

The Black Church

No set of antebellum social arrangements was more profoundly affected by emancipation and Reconstruction than that set associated with religion and the church in Charleston’s black community. Antebellum blacks sometimes attended churches established specifically for them, and within those confines, acted as leaders among their peers. These activities existed at the sufferance of whites, who regulated them and hoped to add sacred legitimacy to their secular position as masters. But with the end of the Civil War, black Charlestonians rejected many of the old churches, created a well-ordered religious life that served their own interests, and provided a firm basis for the expansion of black religious leadership.

For most black Charlestonians, the decision to desert their former houses of worship was dictated by the imperatives of a well-developed slave religion. One of the most widely adhered-to features of the slaves’ eschatology was the powerful Biblical story of the Israelites’ deliverance from their Egyptian bondage. Slaves related this Exodus story to their own experience in word and song, which strengthened their resolve to endure the day-to-day hardships of their plight while maintaining a hopeful vision for the future. Their expectation was for a divine redemption no less concrete than that provided to the children of Israel and other Old Testament characters and for delivery to a new promised land.1 The destruction of the slaveholders’ regime in the Civil War fulfilled their most secret yet apocalyptic visions; it now only remained for them to bring order out of the chaos, to give structure and new meaning to their spiritual lives.

A mass exodus of black congregants occurred in the final days of the war and proceeded most rapidly and extensively among the Baptists and Methodists, which evoked a good deal of comment from contemporary observers. In mid-1865, one writer, noting the transformation of religious life in Charleston, remarked that “in fact the colours are Seperated [sic] now as to churches. The Blacks, now have Calhoun St. Zion, Old Bethel in Calhoun St. also I believe another Methodist church—Morris St. Baptist and perhaps some other old churches to themselves.” A year later the First Baptist Church of Charleston reported that “great changes have taken place, both in the number and constituency of membership; most of the colored members [have] withdrawn for the purpose of forming Churches under the pastoral charge of persons of their own race.” In 1859 there were 4,246 blacks in the four Methodist Episcopal South churches in Charleston; yet, by 1866 these same churches failed to report a single black member. The visual impact of the desertions was considerable, and one observer at Trinity M.E. Church South recalled, “some 2,000 colored people used to hold their membership there, and the galleries were always crowded,” but now “everything changed [and] the galleries were empty.”2

For most, severing old church affiliations was an absolute necessity because the southern churches and clerics were tainted as bulwarks of the slave system and as ideologues of secession. One reporter noted that freedmen

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