Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers

Allen Challenged: Shadow Politics and Community Conflict in the 1820s

Allen Challenged Shadow Politics and Community Conflict in the 1820s In the basement of Mother Bethel Church, the Richard Allen Museum displays a small but important piece of black political history: a voting machine. The polished, medium-sized wooden box once featured images of Bethel trustees—woodcuts, most likely—placed above a series of holes slightly bigger than a marble. These slots allowed all Bethel voters (unlettered as well as literate congregants) a chance to be heard during church elections. Although the machine probably dates from after Allen’s time, it is a reminder that free black Northerners created a vibrant world of politics where they could, in autonomous churches, benevolent societies, and reform organizations. Scholars will never know if Richard Allen (or most black founders) voted in local, state, or federal elections. Although he claimed to be an equal citizen of both the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the American republic, Allen never mentioned suffrage in any letter, pamphlet, or autobiographical recollection. Evidence suggests that Pennsylvania blacks voted only sporadically before the Civil War, largely in locales with fewer concentrations of African Americans. In Allen’s Philadelphia, free blacks faced customary prejudice at the polls, meaning that few urban dwellers (even black elites like Allen and James Forten) voted during the early republic. In 1838, Pennsylvanians crafted a new state constitution that explicitly forbade black voting rights. Not until the postbellum era would black Northerners enjoy wider access to the polls.1 Nevertheless, as Bethel’s voting machine illustrates, free blacks vigorously practiced “shadow politics”: the mimicry of formal political activity in black-controlled institutions. By staging annual elections for trustees or holding referenda on church policy, Bethel inculcated knowledge of, and respect for, the principles of democratic citizenship. For people who did not have much power in the civic realm, shadow politics gave 8 209 black voters sovereignty over community policies. As early as 1807, Richard Allen used shadow politics to secure passage of the African Supplement, which eliminated white clerics’ constitutional power over Bethel Church. As Allen recalled, the African Supplement was passed “by and with consent of two thirds of the male members of [Bethel] church.”2 Although the style of shadow politics—voting, campaigning, electioneering —illustrated free blacks’ deeper understanding of their “deliberative rights” as American citizens, the location (within black cultural groups and communities) suggests a more complex sense of allegiances and identity.3 Indeed, the intensification of political activity within antebellum free black society generally, and at Bethel Church in particular, exemplified the evolution of a more militant black consciousness . Internalizing and maximizing black political power may have become more important to many African Americans than attempting to integrate civic institutions. And this may have been one of the wellsprings of modern black-power movements. Of course, democracy challenges its practitioners to balance majority and minority interests—and it is notoriously antideferential. Allen discovered this during the 1820s, when antideference movements threatened the black founder’s long-held leadership position. The story of Allen’s biggest internal challenge began on June 6, 1820, when a small group of disaffected parishioners “detached themselves from Bethel Church and organized themselves into a distinct society.” The breakaway group soon elected a dozen trustees, rented a schoolhouse for Sunday services, and took the name “Wesley Church.” According to Wesley records, “these members left for reasonable causes,” though dissidents never fully explained them. Allen believed that the breakaway attempt flowed from base men and base motives. Yet whatever Allen may have thought, he could not ignore the reality of this secession movement, for the upstart Wesleyites quickly settled on a piece of property just ninety feet behind Bethel Church!4 Wesley no longer stands in Bethel’s shadow, having long since moved to a new location. But the genesis of Wesley Church formed an important part of Allen’s biography during the tumultuous 1820s. The key members of the Wesley breakaway were not only disaffected Bethelites; they also charged the respected Allen with financial impropriety and moral high-handedness. The Wesley breakaway thus marked the black underclass’s most sustained response to Allen’s brand of leadership and 210 | Allen Challenged leadership class. It was part of a democratic revolution within the black community. For the first time in his life, in other words, Allen confronted members of his own church who wanted complete freedom from the black founder. Allen’s confrontation with black...