Columbia, South Carolina

Topic: Early Versions
The Bethel Jubilee Quartet was part of an AME church in Columbia, South Carolina.  The state capitol was located at the head of navigation for the Santee River in Richland County.  While the lowlands depended of rice as their commercial crop, Wade Hampton introduced short-staple cotton to the Piedmont county in 1799. [1]  The antebellum economy combined the agriculture of the nearby plantations with the port activities of an entrepôt where goods were transferred from upriver to downriver craft. [2]  Most of the slaves who lived in the city probably lived in the households of merchants, lawyers and other professionals who served the county and state governments, or politicians and merchants who came on business.  Many of the men may have worked as draymen, hostlers, or stevedores.

Columbia differed from Charleston and Beaufort where the Gullah language survived into the twentieth century.  Hampton brought his first slaves from the coast, [3] but after the close of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, most came from natural increase, local purchases, or Virginia. [4] David Stowell noted that in Columbia in 1860, more than 98% of the freed individuals were born in the state. [5]

The African-American population in both Columbia and the surrounding county increased in the 1860s, though not as much as Charleston.  This probably came in two phases.  During the Civil War, Columbia was seen as the safest place in the state. [6]  At first planters came with their household slaves; [7] as the war reached its climax, the “city’s population more than doubled with war refugees and their families and slaves.” [8]

After the war, freedmen moved to Charleston [9] or Savannah, where Union troops were stationed. [10]  Columbia was destroyed during Sherman’s march, [11]  and, while there were opportunities for carpenters and others, there was little food or safety.  Many who had come to the area during the war probably left after Sherman, living a city with no nascent middle class among those who were free before the war. [12]

As the chart below shows, Columbia’s Black population slowly grew through the 1920s, while that of Charleston remained stagnant.  The counties that had had the great rice plantations, Beaufort and Charleston, waned, while Anderson, northwest of Columbia waxed with the introduction of textile mills.

Immediately after the Civil War, missionaries arrived to initiate freedmen into Protestant churches.  The American Baptist Home Mission Society founded Benedict College in Columbia in 1870. [13]  Daniel Payne, head of the AME church, arrived with some assistants in Charleston in May of 1865. [14]  Their recruits were mainly former members of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, [15] which had separate buildings for slaves before the war, [16] and sloughed its Black members into a separate denomination afterward. [17]

Columbia’s Bethel Church was organized in the remains of a sword factory in 1866. [18]  One would guess many members were former house slaves who would have been forming a post-war middle class.  In the early 1920s, when Wiseman was pastor, it built a large brick edifice. [19]

So far I’ve found nothing about its leader, Thomas H. Wiseman.  The photograph that appears on the Photos C tab suggests he probably was in his fifties, which means he was born during Reconstruction.  In those turbulent years, that could have been anywhere.

The first record of his existence is a sermon he gave in 1920, when he already was in Columbia.  While the thrust was finding ways to oppose lynching and the Klan, he began by defining the soul.

“We conceive the Soul to be that essential, indestructible part of man.  That which we cannot conceive of as subject to death; that which we are sure cannot pass out of existence; the first cause of individual being, because it stands as the immediate cause of that which we know as individuality.  It is that which we conceive to be the core, the unseen life, causing all physical phenomens that we are capable of comprehending as taking place.  In fact, we can go farther and say that the soul is that somewhat of life that stands between material man and his Creator, related to both, necessary to both.” [20]

This view is orthodox enough to be published by a Black leader in Columbus.  But, within that language, there lurks the relationships with the spirit world that connect African Americans back to Africa.  As mentioned in the post for 13 March 2019, a number of African groups, which were sources of Southern slaves, believed a human was composed of the material, which died, and the spiritual, which returned to the land of the ancestors. [21]

Most believed the spirits maintained contact with their kin for some time after their deaths.  In Africa, that connection was available to any individual, although many ethnic groups recognized some had special powers of divination like the Igbo or communication like the Akan.  Wiseman suggested ministers have “the secret of mental telepathy” that allows them to communicate with God.  He added:

“Daniel had it. Three times a day Daniel opened his window and himself becoming the sending station, with the throne of the Most High God as the receiving station he communed with God always.  Paul and Silas had it.  Away in the still watch of the night they called up heaven, told God all about their troubles, and to show that the message was received, God sent an angel to deliver them from the stocks.” [22]

Graphics
1.  Data drawn from:
United States Census.  1930.  Composition and Characteristics.  South Carolina.  
Table 11.—Population by Age, Color, Nativity, and Sex, for Counties: 1930.  784–787.
Table 12.—Population by Age, Color, Nativity, and Sex for Cities of 10,000 or More: 1930.  788.

United States Census.  1920.  South Carolina.
South Carolina
Table 9.—Composition and Characteristics of the Population, for Counties: 1920.  930–933.
Table 10.—Composition and Characteristics of the Population, for Cities of 10,000 or More: 1920.  934.

United States Census.  1910. Statistics for South Carolina.
Table I.—Composition and Characteristics of the Population for the State and for Counties.  590–597.  Includes 1890 and 1900.
Table II.—Composition and Characteristics of the Population for Cities of 25,000 or More.  598.  Includes 1890 and 1900.

United States Census.  1880.
Table V.—Population, by Race and by Counties: 1880,1870, 1860.  407– 33
Table VI.—Population, by Race, of Cities and Towns of 4,000 Inhabitants and Upward: 1880 and 1870.  424.

United States Census.  1860.  State of South Carolina (1860)
Table No. 3.—Population of Cities, Towns, &c.  452, for Charleston.

Stowell.  Figures for Columbia in 1860.

2.  Wiseman’s picture appears on the Photos C tab.

End Notes
1.  Walter Edgar.  South Carolina.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.  271.

2.  David O. Stowell.  “The Free Black Population of Columbia, South Carolina in 1860: A Snapshot of Occupation and Personal Wealth.”  The South Carolina Historical Magazine 104:6–24:2003.  9.

3.  Ulrich Bonnell Phillips.  American Negro Slavery.  New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1929 edition.  160.

4.  Edgar.  323.
5.   Stowell.  10.

6.  Alexia Jones Helsley.  Columbia, South Carolina: A History.  Charleston, South Carolina: History Press, 2015.  52.

7.  Helsey.  55.
8.  Helsey.  56.
9.  Edgar.  379.
10.  Edgar.  378.
11.  Helsey.  60–66.

12.  Stowell.  16.  “The occupations found within the 1860 census indicate there was no professional class or group within Columbia's free black population — there were no physicians, ministers or teachers, for example, although there were undoubtedly free blacks (as well as slaves) who performed at least some of these functions.”

13.  Helsey.  67.

14.  Dennis C. Dickerson.  The African Methodist Episcopal Church: A History.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.  125.  Payne is discussed in the posts for 9 August 2017 and 6 November 2017.

15.  Dickerson.  125.
16.  Edgar.  289.

17.  The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church is discussed in the post for 15 November 2020.

18.  “Historic Bethel A.M.E. Church.”  United States Department of the Interior.  National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form.

19.  “New Bethel Church.”  The Southern Indicator, Columbia, South Carolina, 3 September 1921.  1.  “Within a very few days Dr. T. H. Wiseman and the members of Bethel A. M. E. Church will be able to worship in the basement of their new church. [. . .] At present services are being held in the chapel of Allen University.”

20.  T. H. Wiseman.  “The Fruit of a Thought.”  Delivered 14 October 1920 at Sidney Park C. M. E. Church, Columbia, South Carolina.  12–22 in Richard Carroll and T. H. Wiseman.  Thoughts.  Columbia, South Carolina: Lewie Printing Company.  12.

21.  Among those mentioned in the post for 13 March 2019 are the Akan, Bambara, Ewe, Igbo, and Mende.

22.  Wiseman.  20.  As I noted in the post for 13 March 2019, Michael Gomez believed it was these commonalities in world views that allowed slaves to form communities, first on plantations, then again under the aegis of Christianity.