Sherman's March and the Emergence of the Independent Black Church Movement: From Atlanta to the Sea to Emancipation

From Atlanta to the Sea to Emancipation

L. Whelchel

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349487653, 9781137405173
• eBook ISBN: 9781137405180
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

A discourse on the historical emergence of African American Churches as dynamic cultural presences which occurred in the aftermath of the Civil War, and specifically in the wake of General Sherman's march from Atlanta to Savannah.

1

Preparing the Stage for Liberation

Abstract: This section presents the historical setting in which General Sherman’s campaign and the effective end of slaveholding would take place. It provides some details to help explain why the march to the sea would prove to be a decisive event in forcing the Southerners to finally end their war effort.

Whelchel, L. H. Sherman’s March and the Emergence of the Independent Black Church Movement: From Atlanta to the Sea to Emancipation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137405180.0003.

On the eve of the Civil War, Georgia was the second-largest state in the South, exceeded in population only by Virginia. The Peach State was also one of the most economically advanced, with a well-developed infrastructure, including extensive railway, warehousing and distribution systems. Sitting in the heart of the deep South, Georgia would be the geographic and economic centerpiece of a new Confederate States of America. Many were convinced that without Georgia, the confederacy would not be economically viable. As in other southern states, some members of the Georgia legislature had been agitating for secession for years. Most of the wealthy Southerners were determined to protect their privileges and prerogatives even if it meant war. However, there were also some Georgians who doubted the capacity of the Southerners to hold their own in open warfare against the North. In December 1860, political haggling led to certain moves by the state legislature intended to satisfy the rabid secessionists and to placate those who harbored serious misgivings about leaving the Union. The legislature voted by a 5-to-1 margin to secede from the Union, a vote which they immediately rescinded by a much closer margin, and instead approved a statewide plebiscite on calling a state convention for secession. By majority vote of the White male population of Georgia the secession convention was approved in January 1861.¹ Opposition from legislators who feared the devastating consequences of warfare turned into solid support of the secessionist effort after the convention.

Marietta, Georgia, a handsome town just north of the metropolis of Atlanta, was home to the Georgia Military Institute. Young White men who had come to Marietta to attend the institute, like their counterparts throughout the South, were excited about prospects of going to war in defense of their homeland, and many rushed to sign up for the war effort. They had imbibed Southern propaganda depicting the South as victim of Yankee aggression, and they responded to the call to preserve their privileged Southern way of life. At the beginning of the war the South was energized and determined to rebuff Northern encroachments against their slaveholding prerogatives. Meanwhile the Northerners found themselves thrust into a war that they did not want, but which they found necessary to preserve the Union. Few in the South expected this war to be long. The enthusiastic young enlistees believed that they would be home again with their families in just a few months.²

As the war went on, becoming ever longer and bloodier, it became apparent that the South would pay a heavy price. After three years of fighting, Southerners realized that the war had turned progressively worse for the Confederates, both on the battlefield and on the home front. They were at a decided resource disadvantage compared to the North. Able-bodied White men who had been managing work on the farms and in factories were now serving in the Confederate army. This left the women, children and seniors to fend for themselves in efforts to obtain basic resources needed for local economies and to support the troops. Prices skyrocketed as manufactured goods became scarce. The South began to suffer from food shortages, and there was a widespread lack of clothing and military equipment for the troops. The Southerners stubbornly fought on, hoping somehow to turn the tide. Union leaders, perceiving their advantage, determined to apply more pressure on the Confederates. Thus, the stage was set for the massive Union invasion of north Georgia in the Spring of 1864.

Notes

  1   Donald L. Grant, The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press) 1993, 80–82.

  2   Patrice Shelton-Lassiter, Generation of Black Life in Kennesaw and Marietta, Georgia (Charleston, S.C.: Anaconda Publishing) 1999, 7.

2

The Historical Context of Conversion

Abstract: This chapter provides an outline of the factors that led to the conversion of enslaved Africans to Christianity. It opens by portraying the introduction of enslaved Africans to the colony of Georgia. The chapter continues an account of how rationales to simultaneously support both conversion and slavery as a benevolent institution were developed which formally initiated doctrines of racism and white supremacy which would become basic components of established institutions.

Whelchel, L. H. Sherman’s March and the Emergence of the Independent Black Church Movement: From Atlanta to the Sea to Emancipation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137405180.0004.

The colony of Georgia was established in 1733, but unlike settlers in the other English colonies Georgia’s settlers were originally prohibited from owning slaves. This prohibition was not due to any consideration for the Africans. The English colonial authorities wanted to use Georgia as a buffer zone to obstruct enslaved runaways from other colonies and prevent them from using the escape route south to the Spanish colony of Florida. In their efforts to undermine the English, the Spanish who controlled Florida had adopted a policy of encouraging runaways. The colonial authorities also wanted to set up garrisons in the region to fend off advances by their Spanish and French rivals. Also, in the beginning, Georgia was largely populated by small farmers and ex-convicts who were mostly too poor to own slaves. But, the prospects of slave labor proved irresistible to the European settlers. Planters widely ignored the restriction and by 1751 the ban was rescinded. The colonial authorities determined that Georgia colonists could legally own slaves provided that, “no work was required of Negroes on Sunday.”¹

It is deeply ironic that the conversion of enslaved Africans provided the Christian nations of Europe with a defense and rationalization for the European Atlantic Slave Trade. Those nations that perpetrated the slave trade—Portugal, Spain, France, The Netherlands and Great Britain—defended slavery on the grounds that they were engaged in missionary work, and that they had been called by God to convert Africans from paganism and barbarism to the blessings of Christianity and European civilization. This movement was initiated by Pope Nicholas V who issued the papal bull authorizing the hereditary enslavement of all pagan infidels in 1452. Under the guise of the universal need for salvation, the institutions of slavery were made to seem palatable. Part of this sanitizing effort included giving slave ships “holy” names such as Brotherhood, Charity, Gift of God, Morning Star and Jesus.²

However, the conversion of enslaved Africans to Christianity in North America would expose basic contradictions in this rationale for enslavement. If heathens are to be enslaved so that they might be Christianized, then should not their baptism result in their release? There was an established English custom which held that baptized persons should, in accord with civil law and church canon, be freed from bondage; Christians were not to hold other Christians in servitude. But this custom presented a serious problem to the colonial establishment, because freedom for enslaved Africans upon conversion would antagonize slaveholders who stood to lose their free labor force. Yet, to deny conversion to the Africans would undercut the basic rationale for slave trading in the first place.

In an attempt to resolve this contradiction, church authorities and European scholars began to fashion constructs of White supremacy which made Blacks an anomaly of humankind. Bishop William Fleetwood and Bishop Edmund Gibson, both of the Anglican Church, contended that the salvation of African souls had no bearing on the utility of African bodies. Fleetwood maintained, “... slaves are no more at Liberty after they are Baptized, than they were before. ... The Liberty of Christianity is entirely spiritual.”³ Slaveholders could enslave the body of a Christianized African while the soul would belong to God. Later apologists of slavery propagated the so-called curse of Ham rationale based upon the Biblical story in which the children of Canaan were cursed to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water” in service to others due to Canaan’s misdeed of mocking his drunken and naked father Noah.⁴ And Blacks were supposedly the very sons and daughters of Ham who must now serve in bondage to Caucasians. European and American philosophers, scientists and medical doctors in their turn found Africans to be subhuman and inferior. Africans were a people outside of history according to the German philosopher George Friedrich Hegel, and the Black race held the inauspicious distinction of being the only race of people completely incapable of developing civilized societies, according to the Scottish scholar John Hume, as they lacked the proper “moral cause.” The best that the Africans could hope for was to be instructed and guided by the more advanced races of humankind. In short, Europeans found that baptism of Africans would not be sufficient reason for their emancipation, it could not remove their enslaved status; African ancestry and black skin color became an eternal curse.

Many of the European settlers who colonized America and enslaved Africans had no strong interest in religion either for themselves or for those whom they enslaved. But, the church used the conversion motif to garner support for evangelical activities among the enslaved. Colonial slaveholders were often reluctant to give their slaves time off from work for religious training and worship services. They were suspicious of the training which allowed some of the enslaved to learn to read and write, also called “religion with letters.” In the early period, prior to 1750, Anglican Church officials argued that conversions would benefit the institution of slavery by following God’s command to convert the unsaved. They further assured the slaveholders that religious training would make for better and more compliant slaves. The esteemed historian Carter G. Woodson called the engagement of “religion with letters” for enslaved Africans the “Dawn of a New Day” as they would now begin the formal process of mastering cultural tools which would allow them to make progress in American society.⁵

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) was organized in 1701 as the missionary arm of the Anglican Church. Their mission included evangelizing Native Americans and the enslaved. They were the first to engage in organized efforts to bring literacy and religious training to the enslaved on southern plantations. The catechetical training of the enslaved included teaching them the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and how to read the Bible. The Bible in effect became the first textbook for African Americans.

White missionaries were sometimes amazed at the desire and capacity for the Africans to learn. Africans were already seen to be gifted with their hands but they would also prove to be just as proficient with their cognitive abilities. With great rapidity Africans adapted to an unfamiliar culture, and many learned to speak, read and write in a new language, and all of this while under the viciousness of American chattel slavery. In the early period despite the lack of formal training some of the enslaved became quite effective teachers and preachers. They taught and ministered to their own people and in some cases they even taught White children. A few of the more talented Black preachers would occasionally serve as pastors of White congregations.⁶

At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century there was an unprecedented growth in the conversion of Africans in America to Christianity. African Americans begin to perceive conversion...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Preparing the Stage for Liberation
• 2  The Historical Context of Conversion
• 3  The South Defends Its Peculiar Institution
• 4  The March toward Liberation
• 5  Impositions and Fatuities by Classes and Colors
• 6  The Liberation of Savannah
• 7  The Groundwork of Freedom
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index