Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Experiences

Topic: Early Versions
Ruby Pickens Tartt had a strong preference for older religious songs.  When she stopped by the African-American’s Dug Hill Church in Sumter County, Alabama, she was upset when they sang “a hymn learned from a hymnbook.”  She told the preacher she would “get them a new stove if they would promise to sing only the old songs, not the printed ones from books.” [1]

In 2011, Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine talked to a man who would have been a child when Tartt visited the Primitive Baptist church.  Eldridge Taylor remembered it had a mourner’s bench. [2]  This was not part of the ritual when the songs valued by Tartt were being created, but an innovation that came with gospel song collections after the Civil War.

As mentioned in the post for 12 August 2017, mourner’s benches were introduced by Presbyterian Charles Finney as a technique to coerce potential converts into acknowledging their depravity in front of their neighbors.  It spread through camp meetings where Francis Lieber observed a Methodist one in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1834.

“We entered one of the tents where a ‘class’ was assembled.  These tents, destined for class meetings, are divided lengthwise by a bench about a foot high, and called the mourners’ bench.  On one side are the men, on the other the women; they lie or sit in disorder on the straw, which is strewn on the ground.  Along both sides of the mourners’ bench kneel ‘the sinners in a repenting state’ who wish to join the faithful; or, overpowered by their feelings or by exhaustion, they lie on the ground, or in the arms of others, quiet, half faint, exclaiming, groaning or weeping, while, from time to time, the minister or any other ‘brother’ speaks into their ears of impending everlasting damnation, or the bright hope of salvation.” [3]

When mourner’s benches were used in churches, they were placed at the front between the pulpit and pews.  The use of the word “come” in altar calls was not a call for the Holy Spirit to appear, but a call to would be converts to come forward.

Mourner’s benches in African-American churches probably were adopted as the various local Baptists conventions, mentioned in the post for 22 November 2020, organized at higher levels.  One group, with representatives from eleven states, met in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1880.  Six hundred formed a second group in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1886, and a third organized in 1893.  They merged in 1895 in Atlanta into the National Baptist Convention. [4]

Ideas no doubt spread through the African-American seminaries, like the one in Selma, Alabama, mentioned in the post for 22 November 2020, and through education efforts by the national groups.  More important, methods spread when clergymen met at local meetings or spoke in one another’s churches during revivals.

By the time Langston Hughes was an adolescent in 1915, the pattern was set.  He recalled a revival in Joplin, Missouri, where “every night for weeks there had been much preaching, singing, praying, and shouting, and some very hardened sinners had been brought to Christ, and the membership of the church had grown by leaps and bounds.” [5]

The last night was devoted to people his age who needed to be initiated into church membership.  He said they all were led to the front and “placed on the mourners’ bench.” [6]  Then

“the preacher preached a wonderful rhythmical sermon, all moans and shouts and lonely cries and dire pictures of hell, and then he sang a song about the ninety and nine safe in the fold, but one little lamb was left out in the cold.  Then he said: ‘Won’t you come?  Won’t you come to Jesus?  Young lambs, won’t you come?’  And he held out his arms to all us young sinners there on the mourners’ bench.  And the little girls cried.  And some of them jumped up and went to Jesus right away.  But most of us just sat there.” [7]

Older members of the church gathered around the teens and prayed over them.  “The church sang a song about the lower lights are burning, some poor sinners to be saved.  And the whole building rocked with prayer and song” [8] until all left the bench and went to the altar except Hughes.

Marian Wright Edelman was born a generation later in 1939.  She recalled the same ritual in her father’s Baptist church in Bennettsville, South Carolina:

“After the hour or so of singing warmed our spirits and after the visiting preachers’ sermons scared us to death about the wages of sin, unsaved young people (and a few desperate older sinners) went to the mourners’ bench, dropped to their knees panting and praying, and fervently begged God for salvation, while congregation members clapped and sang over them, urging Jesus to come and save their souls.” [9]

The problem with the mourner’s bench is that Finney assumed salvation resulted from a preacher creating an environment where people were so demoralized by hearing about their damnation that they accepted Christ as a release.

The leader-driven ritual didn’t recognize the older view that individuals had to work by themselves on being converted, often through days or weeks of misery.  Peter Cartwright said he

“retired to a cave on my father’s farm to pray in secret.  My soul was in an agony; I wept, I prayed, and said, ‘Now, Lord, if there is any mercy for me, let me find it,’ and it really seemed to me that I could almost lay hold of the Savior, and realize a reconciled God.  All of a sudden, such a fear of the devil fell upon me that it really appeared to me that he was surely personally
there, to seize and drag me down to hell, soul and body, and such a horror fell on me that I sprang to my feet and ran to my mother at the house.  My mother told me this was a device of Satan to prevent me from finding the blessing then.  Three months rolled away, and still I did not find the blessing of the pardon of my sins.” [10]

It was in this state that he attended a meeting held by James McGready.  “On the Saturday evening of said meeting I went, with weeping multitudes, and bowed before the stand, and earnestly prayed for mercy.  In the midst of a solemn struggle of soul, an impression was
made on my mind, as though a voice said to me, ‘Thy sins are all forgiven thee.’  Divine light
flashed all round me, unspeakable joy sprung up in my soul.  I rose to my feet, opened my eyes, and it really seemed as if I was in heaven; the trees, the leaves on them, and every thing seemed, and I really thought were, praising God.” [11]

Hughes had been promised such an experience.  His aunt had said when “you were saved you saw a light, and something happened to you inside!  And Jesus came into your life!  And God was with you from then on!  She said you could see and hear and feel Jesus in your soul.” [12]

Only, nothing happened that night in church.  He was the last on the bench and “began to be ashamed of myself, holding everything up so long.”  Finally, he “decided that maybe to save further trouble, I’d better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved.” [13]

That night he cried in bed “because I couldn’t bear to tell” my aunt “that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn’t seen Jesus, and that now I didn’t believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn’t come to help me.” [14]

End Notes
1.  Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  10.

2.  Eldridge Taylor.  Interviewed by Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine in Lilita, Alabama, on  6 June 62011. 19–22 in Back Then.  Edited by Tammy Jackson Montgomery and DeLaine.  University of Western Alabama website.  20.  He was born in 1922.

3.  Francis Lieber.  Letters to a Gentleman in Germany, Written after a Trip from Philadelphia to Niagara.  Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1834.  311–312.  Emphasis added.  This is the first known published use of the term.  Classes were introduced by Wesley as a way to instruct converts before accepting them as members.  It became a term for local meetings where members confessed their weaknesses to each other and fortified their resolves as Christians.  The post for 11 November 2020 has more on this camp meeting.

4.  “History of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.”  Its website.

5.  Langston Hughes.  “Salvation.”  The Big Sea.  New York: Hill and Wang, 1940.  Chapter 3.  Calculated date.

6.  Hughes.

7.  Hughes.  “Ninety and Nine” was used by Dwight L. Moody in his crusades.  Lyrics by Elizabeth Cecilia Clephane in 1868.  Music by Ira D. Sankey in 1874.  First published in Gospel Songs.  Edited by P. P. Bliss.  Cincinnati, Ohio: John Church & Co., Cincinnati, 1874. [15]  This was the type of song disliked by Tartt.

8.  Hughes.  This is similar to the recollections of the Bolton Brothers in Mississippi mentioned in the post for 12 August 2017.  “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning” was written by P. P. Bliss and published by him in The Charm.  Chicago: Root and Cady, 1871. [16]  It was another of the type of gospel songs deplored by Tartt.

9.  Marian Wright Edelman.  “Give Children the Richness of Their Heritage.”  U. S. Catholic.  February 1997.  

10.  Autobiography of Peter Cartwright.  Edited by W. P. Strickland.  Cincinnati, Ohio: L. Swormstedt and A. Poe, 1859.  36.

11.  Cartwright.  37.  McGready was mentioned in the posts for 8 November 2020 and 11 November 2020.

12.  Hughes.

13.  Hughes.  Earlier in the memoir, Hughes remembered the last boy on the bench said “to me in a whisper: ‘God damn!  I’m tired o’ sitting here.  Let’s get up and be saved.’  So he got up and was saved.”  It was after Hughes noticed that “God had not struck Westley dead for taking his name in vain or for lying in the temple” that he made his decision.

14.  Hughes.
15.  “There were ninety and nine that safely lay.”  Hymnary website.
16.  “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning.”  Hymnary website.