Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  Reconstruction transformed struggles over political power in the postwar South into religiously latent symbols. For white southern Christians, the term “Redemption” infused sacred meanings into often deadly political struggles. Redemption was simultaneously a bloody cleansing for the body’s soul and for the body politic. For black Americans, churches served as central points of social formation and political organizing. One ex-slave most succinctly expressed his view of what the violence endemic in the postwar South really meant: “That was about equalization after freedom. That was the cause of that,” he said, indicating his acute understanding of the contest over the changing terms of religion, race, and citizenship, and over the bounds of American religious habitations of citizenship.

  Black clergymen after the Civil War insisted that freedpeople were equal citizens who deserved just treatment under the law. This was subversive preaching, especially given the connection of black church leaders to the Republican Party. The political activism of many clergymen matched the religious rhetoric. Well over two hundred black clergymen held local, state, or national office during Reconstruction. The first African American to win a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hiram Revels of Mississippi, was an African Methodist cleric and had once served as pastor of a large free black congregation in Louisville, Kentucky. Ministers organized and led Union Leagues, working men’s associations, civic organizations, and temperance and masonic societies.

  The central role of black churches during Reconstruction showed how the power of African American religious practices developed under slavery and in free black communities could become visible, public, and political. Major urban congregations, such as First African Baptist in Richmond, articulated the grievances of the freedpeople to governing authorities. After the war, the church quickly became a focal point to draw up memorials of protest against continued mistreatment of people who were now free, including the arrest of several hundred blacks in Richmond in the summer of 1865 for violating curfew or not holding passes. In June, 3,000 black Richmonders met to file protests to the governor and send a delegation to confront President Andrew Johnson directly.

  When Congress held hearings in the early 1870s to document the results of Klan activity in the South, the extent of violence perpetrated against freedpeople became clearer. So did the extent to which whites concentrated attacks on black ministers and churches involved in Republican politics. One testimony among hundreds told the story of Lewis Thompson, murdered in June 1871 by Klansmen. Lewis had gone to preach in Union County, South Carolina. While there, he had been handed a paper with a coffin drawn on it and the notation “Here is the coffin that they have marked out for me if I preach in Goshen Hill township.” Thompson, a Methodist minister, defied the threat and preached that night, but then fled the area. Later, in June, he returned to preach again. Klansmen (according to the testimony of other family members) then dragged him from his house, stabbed and castrated him, and dumped his body in the river. Locals feared giving him a burial, as Klansmen threatened anyone who helped his family.

  Black and white missionaries in the post–Civil War South, including the black Methodist stalwart Henry McNeal Turner, pursued the work of “political evangelization.” They fought to secure religious and political rights for the former bondspeople. He was central to the reemergence in South Carolina of the African Methodist Episcopal Church—the same denomination associated with the Denmark Vesey Revolt in 1822 and exiled from the state as a result.

  Born free in 1834 in South Carolina, and by 1848 an avid Methodist, Henry McNeal Turner learned early on the importance of black self-reliance and respectability. In the 1850s, Turner moved to Georgia, the state where he would make his name and career. There, biracial crowds eagerly gathered to hear his powerful preaching. Turner’s message was evangelical, and his politics fairly conservative in the context of his day. He would move a long way over the next several decades.

  Following service as a Union Army chaplain, Henry McNeal Turner established himself as a prominent AME churchman, missionary, legislator, newspaper editor, and rhetorical firebrand. Remembered later for his caustic editorials advocating black American emigration to Africa and denouncing the American flag, Henry McNeal Turner’s major life work was helping to establish the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South. Turner and his fellows envisioned their religious work as essential to securing full citizenship rights for the freedpeople. Civil rights, church organization, and racial uplift would go hand in hand. By “uplift,” they meant imparting education and the norms of proper public behavior to freedpeople left illiterate and untrained by the oppression they lived through in the antebellum South.

  Rev. H. M. Turner, chaplain of the First United States Colored Regiment, 1863

  Source: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

  Turner also served as a delegate to the postwar constitutional convention in Georgia. In his brief term in the reconstructed state legislature, Turner preached a conciliatory gospel, tried to work together with white preachers and leaders, and urged everyone to consider their common interests together. That message extended into the Civil War and after. “The interests of white and black are one and the same,” Turner proclaimed, for all were citizens in common who should cooperate to reach the same goal of advancing America socially, economically, and morally. Turner pointed out the importance of combining religious and political work. “I have put more men in the field, made more speeches, organized more Union Leagues, political associations, clubs, and have written more campaign documents that received large recirculation than any other man in the State,” he said. Meanwhile, white Democratic opponents targeted him, and white Republicans grew jealous of his prominence. He soon lost his political position, a result of an effective coup staged by white Democrats in the Georgia legislature.

  After being tossed out of the legislature in 1868, he pointed out his constant efforts at conciliation, including supporting a pardon for Jefferson Davis and approving of literacy restrictions on suffrage and protection for white property owners unable to pay new taxes imposed by the state legislature. Despite all those efforts, he and his black colleagues found themselves removed. Turner thundered, “Because God saw fit to make some red, and some white, and some black, and some brown, are we to sit here in judgment upon what God has seen fit to do. As well might one play with the thunderbolts of heaven as with that creature that bears God’s image.” Whites attacked defenseless blacks, even though “you know we have no money, no railroads, no telegraphs, no advantages of any sort, and yet all manner of injustice is placed upon us.” The “manner of injustice” Turner himself experienced included receiving threatening notes from the Klan. Whites in Macon, Georgia, attacked him after his patronage appointment to be postmaster of the city.

  Following Reconstruction, Turner threw himself into church and missions work for the rest of his life. He traveled constantly, edited the official denominational hymnal, and eventually rose to the position of bishop of the AME Church. As early as the 1870s, he began to preach that black Americans should prepare themselves to “assume control of our vast ancestral domain,” meaning Africa. Critics blasted him for cooperating with the remnants of the American Colonization Society, a remarkable transformation given that he long been a protégé of the late Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. The overturning of Sumner’s Civil Rights Act of 1875 by an 1883 Supreme Court decision seemed to ratify Turner’s growing disillusionment. The decision, he said, had made the American flag into “a rag of contempt instead of a symbol of liberty.” The court, he said, “wickedly, cruelly and infernally turned us over to the merciless vengeance of the white rabble of the country.” He began to articulate the ideas that would later become crucial to the rise of what would come to be called black theology. Turner expressed this sentiment when defending the continued use of the word “African” in the AME denominational title. “The curse of the colored race in this country, where white is God and black is the devil,�
�� he insisted, was in “the disposition to run away” from blackness. Turner advocated a different course. “Nothing will remedy the evils of the Negro but a great Christian nation upon the continent of Africa,” he said, for in America “White is God . . . and black is the devil. White is perfection, greatness, wisdom, industry, and all that is high and holy. Black is ignorance, degradation, indolence, and all that is low and vile.”

  When southern-style racism swept the country in the 1890s, Turner blasted American hypocrisy. As editor of the Voice of Missions in the last two decades of his life, Turner articulated what later would be called black theology. In the 1890s, as he began missionary work in parts of Africa and read challenges to biblical literalism from the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Turner left behind his formerly more straightforwardly evangelical readings of the Bible. Just as Stanton critiqued the Bible’s use in gendered hierarchies, Turner saw that “the white man’s digest of Christianity or Bible doctrines are not suited to the wants, manhood growth, and progress of the Negro. Indeed, he has colored the Bible in his translation to suit the white man.” Speaking to the newly organized National Baptist Convention in 1895, Turner first announced that “God Is a Negro,” compelling white Baptist home missions organizer Henry Lyman Morehouse to rebuke him: “Talk of this sort is the race spirit gone mad.”

  But Turner was not finished. In 1898, he published one of his most famous pieces about God and race. In it, he insisted that since everyone else projected a “race” onto God, black Americans had every right to do the same. “For the bulk of you, and all the fool Negroes of this country, believe that God is a white-skinned, blue-eyed, straight-haired, projecting nosed, compressed-lipped and finely robed white gentleman, sitting upon a throne somewhere in the heavens.” Turner said that he would rather be an atheist or a pantheist than “to believe in the personality of a God and not to believe that He is a Negro.” It was “contemptuous and degrading” for blacks to accept the white God handed to them by the theology of American society. Turner died in 1906, memorably eulogized by the great black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois as “a man of tremendous force and indomitable courage. . . . In a sense Turner was the last of his clan: mighty men, physically and mentally, men who started at the bottom and hammered their way to the top by sheer brute strength.”

  Throughout the South, black ministers and missionaries forged equally significant lives in political evangelization. Serving the Baptist church and black residents of Georgia at the same time as Turner included William Jefferson White. The son of a white planter and a mother who was probably of mixed Native American and African American ancestry, the ambitious young Georgian could pass as white but self-identified as black. In the 1850s, he worked as a carpenter and cabinet maker. Like Turner, his artisanal skills complemented his preaching abilities, giving him a secure economic base that underwrote his independence into the era of black freedom. As a stalwart of Augusta’s free black community, an educational leader, newspaper editor, and political spokesman, White labored for freed African Americans. At the first meeting of the Georgia Equal Rights and Education Association (held at Augusta’s historic black Springfield Baptist Church in early 1866), William Jefferson White’s eloquent address drew the attention of General Oliver O. Howard, director of the federal Freedmen’s Bureau. White also helped to found schools for freedpeople in the growing southeastern Georgia town, including Augusta Baptist Institute, the school that eventually, after its move to Atlanta, became Morehouse College, a critical center for the education of black men (including Martin Luther King, Jr.,) since the late nineteenth century.

  In 1880, White began publishing the Georgia Baptist. With its masthead reading “Great Elevator, Educator, and Defender of the People,” the Georgia Baptist was one of the most widely distributed black newspapers in the late nineteenth-century South. The Republican Party activist and pastor of Harmony Baptist Church in Augusta aggressively defended black rights amidst the growing racial turmoil. “The dark clouds of internal discord have gathered in some localities,” he wrote after witnessing the racial pogrom in Wilmington (North Carolina) in 1898. He warned that the “irresponsible and irrepressible mobs” were not be satisfied but with the taking of innocent black lives. His hopes later in the nineteenth century that the tides of racial hatred were turning were not realized. After publicly denouncing a local lynching and defending its victim, White’s life was threatened. Privately, he was profoundly disturbed by the turn of events. “We seem to be standing on a volcano,” he wrote to his son.

  White lent vocal support to streetcar boycotts that sprang up in a number of southern cities in the early twentieth century in response to the newly enacted segregation laws on public transportation systems. “The colored people of Augusta are keeping off the street cars because of the revival of Jim Crowism on them, and some of the white papers of the city are howling about it,” he exclaimed. “They howl if colored people ride on the cars and howl if they stay off of them. What in the name of high heaven do the white people want the colored people to do?” In 1906, White joined W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope, and other race leaders to establish the Georgia Equal Rights League. The brutal Atlanta riot of that year again mocked their hopes for a racial truce. Leaders such as White should be exiled from the South, a local white newspaper opined. “The place for them is, either where there are no Jim Crow laws or where it is too hot for street cars. Augusta has no room for such incendiary negroes, and we should waste no time letting them know it.” By the time of his death in 1913, White’s Reconstruction-era hopes of equal rights for all were a distant memory. Unlike Turner, he never abandoned hope in the United States as a potential land of equality and opportunity for African Americans. Yet the fellow Georgia Reconstruction-era comrades ended their lives at a relative low point for black hopes. They had lived through what historians later called the “nadir” of black life in post–Civil War America.

  Both Turner and Jefferson witnessed the rise of the phenomenon of lynching and, more generally, legal and extra-legal violence committed against black southerners in the late nineteenth century. It crested in the tumultuous years of the 1890s. A vividly public and ritualized version of lynching emerged. Participants documented the events. They posed for photographs, sent postcards relating details, and purchased body parts as souvenirs. Upward of 4,000 acts of lynching occurred in the United States from the 1880s to World War II. By the late nineteenth century, roads, railroads, the press, cameras, and other modern forms of transportation and communication aided the communal nature of the spectacles. Crowds gathered for acts of purification. Clergymen pronounced benedictions as men crucified and set afire black bodies. Present at the horrific and well-documented lynching of Jesse Washington in 1916, Baptist pastor Joseph Martin Dawson felt “entirely helpless because five thousand monsters participated and who was I, a lone individual, to do anything about it.” The lynching victim in this case was innocent of the crime; the guilty party was soon thereafter found. When Dawson introduced a resolution at a pastor’s association denouncing the act of lynching Washington, he later recalled, “to my utter surprise, when they discovered they had burned an innocent man, they found the guilty, the only comment I heard around town . . . was ‘Well, it’s fine. At last, they got the right Nigger.’”

  By the 1890s, many black churchpeople responded to the rise of legalized racial proscription by arguing for a slow rise of African Americans at first through their own institutions. Segregation as social policy could not be defeated, they said, so blacks should promote their own churches, businesses, clubs, masonic and fraternal orders, and social institutions. For religious idealists who had lived through the revolutionary promise of the Civil War and Reconstruction, however, the disillusionment was intense. Henry McNeal Turner articulated the level of despair he heard in rural black communities, where he had spent so much time as a church organizer after the war. In 1890, he explained that black elites in southern cities failed to grasp the degree of oppression in the rural South. While
the black establishment would deny the impulse to emigrate, Turner knew the sentiments of the people, including their desire to leave the South, or even the United States, in search of “freedom, manhood, liberty, protection or the right to protect themselves.” A few decades later, rural southern followers of Marcus Garvey articulated much the same sentiment. Meanwhile, as will be traced in the next chapter, a black version of the social gospel movement was taking root. It would soon find its institutional expressions in the social outlets created by large urban churches. It also shaped the founding of such political protest organizations such as the NAACP and influenced black churchwomen such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Nannie Burroughs, and Lugenia Burns Hope. They pinned their hopes on progressive reform as a way to improve the living conditions of black neighborhoods, reform the behavior of black individuals in and out of church, and protest the new and constricted bounds of habitation set for black Americans in the era of Jim Crow.

  RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

  As the struggle to redefine religion, race, and citizenship became a dominant theme of national politics during Reconstruction, similar issues affected other ethnoracial communities. In each case, as well, the de facto nationally recognized religion of white Protestantism defined what was and was not acceptable religious behavior. If the “bounds of their habitation” were no longer those of slavery, the boundaries would include those recognized by white Christians as Christian.

  The post–Civil War years saw one of the most significant cases in American history for the history of church-state relations—the Reynolds case of 1878. The issue arose over whether the Utah territory had the right to ban polygamy, which was still then part of the official theology and practice of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). The plaintiff in the case argued that the First Amendment protection of religious freedom extended to a social practice such as plural marriage that was enjoined on members of the Mormon Church. The government of Utah territory arrested and convicted George Reynolds of taking a second wife. He pled not guilty and was tried. Appealing his case, the Supreme Court issued what became a landmark decision in church-state relations. Perhaps most significantly, the Court revisited the debates over religious freedom at the time of the Constitution, attempting to ascertain the original intent of Madison and Jefferson in crafting the classic documents of religious freedom (such as the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom). The court concluded that “Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.”