The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism

2. Slavery and Free Blacks

Chapter 2 Slavery and Free Blacks There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. . . . Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. —galatians 3:28, 5:1 Central to the problem of understanding the relationship between slavery andMethodisminHolstonisthedearthofdocumentaryevidence,especially at the local or grassroots level. Only a relatively small number of quarterly conference minutes remain extant for Holston out of these all-important records kept so meticulously by diligent church members in the nineteenth century. Even rarer are class meeting records, or class books, as they were then commonly called. Indeed, modern Methodists scarcely understand what exactly these class books are, with their strange rolls and seemingly indecipherable letters, “P,” “A,” or “D,” indicating whether the class member was present, absent, or distant, unable to attend that particular week. Complicating the issue even further was the reality that by the 1850s class meetings were no longer a vital part of Holston Methodism in larger towns and cities, although they continued to be the mainstay of church members in rural districts. Nevertheless, there is clear evidence that in many parts of Holston, class meetings were as vital and energizing as they had been early in the first decades of the century.1 Fortuitous indeed, therefore, was the discovery in 1981 of a class book for Spring Creek Church, dated between 1845 and 1860. Spring Creek was the site of a popular campground in McMinn County, Tennessee, five miles north of the town of Calhoun. The roll for 1860 listed eight “colored” members : Joshua Colville, Harriet Colville, Elizabeth Turk, Ant[h]ony Colville, Slavery and Free Blacks 32 Amanda Sharp, Darthula Sharp, Eliza Colville, and Margaret Bradford. Even more interesting, however, is the notation by the compiler that pages 138-47 had later been “sewed in upside down.” Whether by accident or design , this concealment of the African American members is symptomatic of a much larger problem in trying to recover the past from documentary evidence that, regarding free blacks or slaves, has often been deliberately hidden or destroyed in Holston records.2 Startling examples abound of this moral amnesia. David Sullins, a staunch Confederate who was a prominent itinerant and influential leader in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, wrote in his autobiography that his father, Nathan Sullins, although he would never own a slave, did not have any clear conviction that slavery was wrong. In 1841, however, Nathan Sullins explicitly told Ezekiel Birdseye, a Connecticut abolitionist living in East Tennessee, that he was “conscientiously opposed to owning slaves.” In 1842, another prominent Methodist local preacher, Spencer Henry, confided to Birdseye his wish to preach openly against slavery in his pulpit but complained that he was prevented from so doing by Tennessee state laws, his limited means, and a large family of small children. Henry readily assisted Birdseye in his efforts to secure the freedom of one slave but in the final analysis kept his antislavery sentiments private.3 Likewise, Holston’s most famous itinerant, William G. “Parson” Brownlow, after becoming editor of the Knoxville Whig, emerged in the 1850s as one of the most forceful proslavery spokesmen in the entire region. He denounced abolitionists in his newspaper with such vituperative rhetoric so repeatedly that none of his contemporaries doubted his total hostility to antislavery agitation in any form. By the time Brownlow publicly debated abolitionist Abram Pryne, a Congregational clergyman, between September 7 and 12, 1858, in Philadelphia, he had emerged as one of the most visible defenders of slavery nationally. Yet in 1834, Brownlow as an itinerating Methodist minister in Holston had actually signed a fervent antislavery petition to the Tennessee state legislature begging that body to abolish slavery in the new state constitution. Abram Pryne could not have expressed a more specific and incisive condemnation of slavery than is to be found in this document , which, ironically, Brownlow himself may have written. This single piece of documentary evidence, hidden in obscurity until I discovered it in 1995, illustrates that the most important public representative of Holston Methodism had in the 1830s been very sympathetic toward the antislavery cause; however, later years changed his belief and attitudes toward the peculiar institution.4 Slavery and Free Blacks 33 A careful reading of the manuscript annual minutes of...