Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890

Preface

Preface ON 3 September 1846 the Union Missionary Society, the Committee for West Indian Missions, and the Western Evangelical Missionary Society united to form the American Missionary Association as a protest against the silence of other missionary agencies regarding slavery.1 The association leadership was staunchly antislavery. Prominent leaders and supporters Lewis Tappan, Simeon S. Jocelyn, Gerrit Smith, Joshua Leavitt, George Whipple, and William Jackson were all evangelical abolitionists who believed that the gospel was a powerful weapon against slavery. As a part of the Tappan wing of the antislavery movement, the AMA advocated political activity, insisted upon the essentially antislavery nature of the Constitution, and was dedicated to purging the churches of the stain of slavery.2 In its early work the association strengthened the existing missions of its parent societies in Africa and Jamaica and created or accepted the care of others in Hawaii, Egypt, the Sandwich Islands, and Siam. In 1847 it began to provide clothing for slave refugees who had fled to Canada, and later it sent teachers and preachers among the refugees to establish schools and churches and to administer relief. It maintained its Canadian missions until after the Emancipation Proclamation . The AMA's largest activity, however, was in the United States, preaching the gospel "free from all complicity with slavery and caste." By the mid-1850s it had financed more than one hundred missionaries in the Northwest and the slave states ofMissouri, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Antislavery churches were founded in the Northwest, and in the South the AMA began education and religious instruction "on an avowedly antislavery basis." In Missouri, Stephen Blanchard, an AMA worker, was indicted for circulating "incendiary" books, and the Reverend Daniel Worth was imprisoned in North Carolina for the vii viii Preface same offense. A Kansas missionary barely escaped proslavery violence in 1856. A Kentucky mob viciously whipped an association agent and drove another missionary, John G. Fee, out of the state. After being disinherited by his slaveholding father for his antislavery views, Fee in the mid-1850s moved to a small plot ofland given him by the notorious antislavery figure Cassius M. Clay. He called his new home Berea. Fee built a rude log cabin and organized a church and school that recognized no distinction of race, caste, or color. The school later became Berea College. At different times Fee was dragged from the pulpit to be ducked in the river, hunted through the mountains to be whipped, and shot at in his home, but he, like other AMA agents, persisted in his antislavery teaching.3 When the Civil War erupted, the AMA was probably more an antislavery than a missionary society, yet its experience, organization, and fund-gathering capability enabled it to lead the way in providing systematic relief and education for slaves escaping from Confederate lines. It sent agents to Fortress Monroe, Virginia, in September 1861. The number of teachers and missionaries sent to assist freedmen increased to 250 in 1864 and to 320 in 1865. By 1868 the AMA had 532 agents in the southern and border states. The association provided relief, attempted to help blacks acquire land, demanded civil and political rights for former slaves, established schools and churches, and fought for a system of public education in the South. The first AMA schools were elementary, but from the beginning the association planned to establish normal schools and colleges. It early decided that blacks should eventually furnish their own teachers. No race, AMA officials thought, should be permanently dependent upon another race for its development. Though whites should assist, and initially would provide leadership and teachers, blacks must eventually playa major role in working out their future with their own educators and leaders. As soon as the southern states began to establish public schools, the AMA deemphasized common schools and concentrated on graded schools, normal schools, and colleges. Although its elementary training and relief were significant, the AMA's most lasting contribution was the establishment of normal schools and colleges. Association officers were motivated by religion and patriotism, and an educated, moral, industrious black citizenry was their goal. Equality before the law was "the gospel rule," the AMA concluded, and the Preface ix country's "political salvation" depended upon its implementation. Unfortunately the association sometimes failed to live up to its own lofty ideals. It failed to recognize the richness and vitality of black culture and institutions and only belatedly to comprehend...