Gone to Texas

Topic: Early Versions
One popular narrative from the Reconstruction years in Alabama is that whites were so disgruntled with Republican rule that they abandoned the state.  A 1905 state history said:

“There were two movements of emigration from the state — culminating in 1869 and in 1873-1874.  Those were the gloomiest periods of Reconstruction, especially for the white man in the Black Belt.  Most of the emigrants went to Texas, others to Mexico, to Brazil, to the North, and to Tennessee and Georgia, where the whites were in power.  It was estimated that in this emigration the state lost more of its population than by war.” [1]

Sumter County’s white population fell about 12% in the 1860s. [2]  Part of that came from the deaths of soldiers, and part from the low birth rate during the war when young men were away.  Among the wealthiest planters, 43% held onto their positions, compared with 52% in the previous decade. [3]

The image of Texas as a refuge developed during the Texas Republic, which lasted from 1836 to 1845. [4]  During the hard times that followed the economic crash of 1837, this was a place men could migrate beyond the reach of United States law.  Joseph Baldwin compared local men hurt by the panic with a version of this stereotype known in Gainesville, Alabama, in the early 1850s:

“If he made a bad bargain, how could he expect to get rid of it?  He knew nothing of the elaborate machinery of ingenious chicane,—such as feigning bankruptcy—fraudulent conveyances—making over to his wife—running property—and had never heard of such tricks of trade as sending out coffins to the graveyard, with negroes inside, carried off by sudden spells of imaginary disease, to be ‘resurrected,’ in due time, grinning, on the banks of the Brazos.” [5]

Baldwin was describing James Hamilton, a Charleston, South Carolina, planter who fancied himself a financier: he owned sixteen plantations in four states in 1836 and all were mortgaged. [6]  After the panic, he stopped paying debts. [7]  He had illegally used money from his wife’s trust, and, in 1843, he had her sue him to protect the assets from his creditors. [8]

The same year he moved to a cotton plantation in Russell County, Alabama, near the Georgia line.  The 6,000 acres were actually a business partnership that owned the 300 slaves.  During the drought of 1845, he took some slaves to his Texas plantation near Stephen Austin’s colony at the mouth of Brazos, which was another partnership.  His first attempts at processing sugar failed.  He sold more land, and moved 130 more slaves to Brazoria County.  Six banks had mortgages on them. [9]

Once Texas was admitted into the union, and a reliable state government established, people from Sumter County began migrating there.  The first went to Panola County, the northern blue circle on the map.  In the 1850s, represented by the red circles, they moved farther inland.  For the most part, these were families that had fewer resources than Hamilton, and each son moved to new land.  When Elisha Lacy died in 1862, he left four children in Sumter County; two in Rankin County, Mississippi; two in Caddo County, Louisiana, just east of Panola County, Texas; and one in Grimes County, Texas, the central green dot. [10]

 

We know people went to Texas after the Civil War to avoid dealing with large numbers of Freedmen.  John Lomax’s father said he left Mississippi for Bosque County, Texas, “to get away from the wreck of the war, and take my young family out of a state of society that can only be expressed by the word ‘chaos.’  The ruling classes possessing all the culture and intelligence were financially ruined, and the State was in the hands of unscrupulous ‘carpet baggers’ and ignorant negroes.  I did not wish my family raised in contact with the negroes, either as slaves or as ‘freed-men’.” [11]

In Sumter County, Nelle Jenkins said planters around Sumterville “sold out and moved west after the slaves were freed.”  However, the reason wasn’t simply bigotry: “the top soil was washed off the hills so the bare lime rock was in evidence everywhere.” [12]  Crops in the state failed in 1865, 1866, and 1867. [13]

This was the period when Texas went from stereotype to metaphor.  The Sumter County sheriff told Congressional investigators in 1871 that he thought W. J. Prater, who was charged with murdering a Freedman and was liberated from jail by a mob, “is in Texas or somewhere else, God Almighty knows where.” [14]  Later, he said a newspaper reported man “taken from the jail in Sumter County, went to Texas and died there, but I don’t believe he was any more dead than I am, and I am a right sharp living man.” [15]

The Texas constitution of 1845 guaranteed the existence of slavery.  Everyone who could took those he owned with him.  There were some slaves brought from New Orleans, and the Caribbean, but most slave communities didn’t change much in Texas. [16]

The largest slave owners monopolized the rich bottom lands near the coast. [17]  The lands settled by migrants from Sumter County tended to be like those they knew in Alabama, rolling plains with post oak vegetation. [18]  Most lived in counties where whites were 50 to 70% of the population in 1860. [19]

More than 50% of the early settlers in Texas were from Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi.  Barnes Lathrop said each group favored a different part of the state, with those from Alabama moving to the upper eastern and central counties. [20]  Part of this, at least for individuals from Sumter County, was the result of people moving to places they had heard about from kinfolk who stayed in Alabama.

For instance, Lacy’s brother, Martin, [21] was a pioneer settler in Smith County, [22] just west of Panola County were Elisha’s son William was living in 1842. [23]  William apparently moved back to Louisiana, [24] while his brother Thomas went down to Grimes County. [25]  Meantime, Jenkins said some “Yarbroughs all went to Smith County, Texas and lived as neighbors to George, Wiley, Burk and other Littleton Yarbrough (of St. Clair County, Alabama) children who called each other ‘cousin’.” [26]

Sumter County’s slaves came from Virginia or the Carolinas.  Many of the slaves in Tennessee and Mississippi came from Kentucky.  This created an opportunity for more cultural exchange after Emancipation than occurred in Sumter County, but most probably lived in homogenous communities before.

Abner Strobel has researched the first Texas settlements along the lower Brazos River, and noted the persistence of early differences in slave communities.  He said of Hamilton’s plantation: “You could tell his slaves by their politeness and courtly manners.” [27]  At least some of these must have come from his wife’s rice plantations where Gullah was spoken.

Graphics
Locations of Migrants from Sumter County, Alabama, to Texas.
Blue: 1840s
Red: 1850s
Green: 1860s

Base map:  David Benbennick.  “Map of Texas.”  Wikimedia Commons.  12 February 2006.

End Notes
1.  Walter L. Fleming.  Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905.  769.

2.  My calculation.

3.  Jonathan M. Wiener.  “Planter Persistence and Social Change: Alabama, 1850-1870.”  The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7:235–260:1976.  247.  He defined persistence as the appearance of the same family name in two consecutive census reports.  He admitted this understated persistence because lands that passed through daughters were difficult to detect.  Inheritance by daughters would have been greater after sons were killed in the war.  By comparison, the persistence rate was lower than in other parts of the country.

4.  Wikipedia.  “History of Texas.”

5.  Joseph G. Baldwin.  “How the Times Served the Virginians.”  72–105 in The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi.  New York: D. Appleton, 1853; 1858 edition.  93.

6.  William A Behan.  Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina.  New York: iUniverse, 2004.  42.

7.  Behan.  43.

8.  Robert Tinkler.  James Hamilton of South Carolina.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004.  213.

9.  Tinkler.  On move to Alabama, 213; on Alabama plantation, 213, 214-215; on drought and first sugar crop, 217; on move of slaves to avoid creditors, 231; on ownership of moved slaves, 232.

10.  Nelle Morris Jenkins.  Pioneer Families of Sumter County, Alabama.  Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Willo Publishing Company, 1961.  Reprinted by Bloutsville, Alabama: The Yarbrough National Genealogical and Historical Association, 14 June 2015.  142–143.  Other information on the migration of individuals from Sumter County to Texas was found by searching Jenkins’ document for the word “Texas.”  There were many references, but not many with both a date and location.

11.  John Avery Lomax.  “Recollections of J. A. Lomax, as Dictated to W. F. Graves.”  142–146 in Joseph Lomax.  Genealogical and Historical Sketches of the Lomax Family.  Grand Rapids, Michigan: The Rookus Printing House, 1894.  144.

12.  Jenkins.  18.

13.  Michael W. Fitzgerald.  “Congressional Reconstruction in Alabama.”  Encyclopedia of Alabama website.  11 August 2008; last updated 24 October 2017.

14.  Allen E. Moore.  Testimony, Livingston, Alabama.  20 October 1871.  United States Congress.  Joint Select Committee.  The Condition of Affairs in Late Insurrectionary States.  Alabama.  Volume III.  Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872.  1576.

15.  Moore.  1577.  Thomas Cobbs was hired to defend Prater.  He described him as “a drunken maniac.  He came from Mississippi here.” [28]  Most likely he was William Jabel Praytor, who Robert Spratt said was a member of “a purely social organization of unmarried men known” that included Spratt’s father and Cobbs.  It formed “just after the Civil War.” [29]  Jabe’s father and older brother died in the war.  His younger brother rose in the planter aristocracy when he married a granddaughter of John Evander Brown. [30]  His own position fell: he worked as a mail clerk. [31]  As mentioned in the post for 20 September 2020, African-American railroad employees were being driven from their jobs at this time.  Jabe may have been living in Mississippi then, since Meridian was the rail center.  His descendants believe he died in Birmingham in 1878 at age 28. [32]

16.  Randolph B. Campbell.  “Slavery.”  Handbook of Texas Online website.  “The great majority of slaves in Texas came with their owners from the older slave states.  Sizable numbers, however, came through the domestic slave trade.  New Orleans was the center of this trade in the Deep South, but there were slave dealers in Galveston and Houston, too.  A relatively few slaves, perhaps as many as 2,000 between 1835 and 1865, came through the illegal African trade.”

17.  Campbell.  “Slavery spread over the eastern two-fifths of Texas by 1860 but flourished most vigorously along the rivers that provided rich soil and relatively inexpensive transportation.”

18.  Entries for counties on map posted by Handbook of Texas website.

19.  Campbell.  The exception was Grimes County where the one Lacy child lived.  It had been settled during the Mexican period by Jared Ellison Groce who moved from Virginia to South Carolina, Georgia, and Mobile, Alabama area, [33] before going to Texas in 1823.  He was the wealthiest man in Austin’s colony. [34]

20.  Barnes F. Lathrop.  “Migration into East Texas, 1835-1860 (Continued).”  The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 52:184–208:1948.  184.

21.  Elisha and Martin were born in the Pendleton District of South Carolina.  While Elisha moved to Alabama, [35] Martin moved to Kentucky, then down to Texas when it was part of México where he became an Indian trader. [36]

22.  Vista K. McCroskey.  “Smith County.”  Handbook of Texas Online website.
23.  Jenkins.  235.
24.  Jenkins.  143.
25.  Jenkins.  142–143.
26.  Jenkins.  233.

27.  Abner J. Strobel.  “The Old Plantations and Their Owners of Brazoria County, Texas.”  Originally published in 1926.  15–62 in A History of Brazoria County.  Edited by T. L. Smith, Junior.  1958.  No other publication information about either.  46.

28.  Thomas Cobbs.  Testimony, Livingston, Alabama.  31 October 1871.  Alabama.  Volume III.  1621.

29.  Robert D. Spratt.  A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama.  Edited by Nathaniel Reed.  Livingston: University of West Alabama, 1997.  12.

30.  H. Martin Prather.  “James Thomas Praytor, Prather.”  Prather Genealogy website.  Last updated 28 July 2015.  James was Jabe’s father.

Jenkins.  176.

31.  H. Martin Prather.  “William Jabel Praytor.”  Prather Genealogy website.  Last updated 28 July 2015.

32.  Prather, “William Jabel.”

33.  Brian Weir.  “Wharton, Sarah Ann Groce (1810–1878).”  Handbook of Texas Online website.

34.  Charles Christopher Jackson.  “Groce, Jared Ellison (1782–1839).”  Handbook of Texas Online website.

35.  Butterfly Rose.  “Capt Elisha Lacy.”  Find a Grave website.  3 March 2009.

36.  David Mark Cordell.  “Martin Lacy (1789 - 1842).”  Wiki Tree website.  23 August 2011; last updated 5 September 2017.

Mourning Benches in Sumter County, Alabama

Topic: Early Versions
Emancipation instantly terminated plantation communities, and left Freedmen to create their replacement.  While African-American Baptist churches were evolving as an alternative, individuals were stranded between two worlds.

Hester Frye was living with the son of her mother’s owner when Ruby Pickens Tartt met her in the 1930s near Tishabee, across the Tombigbee river in Marengo County, Alabama. [1]  She said her “mammy come out here with Marsa Bob from Charleston, South Carolina, and I was born here, right here in this here yard” [2] around 1870. [3]

Frye lived among whites who “thought religion was a lot of trash” and Robert Hawkins “didn’t allow none of his colored folks to go to church.” [4]  She confessed:

“I used to try to pray sometime when I’d get right lonesome.  I used to shut the door and put my head down in the washpot so it could catch the sound, then pray easy so Mr. Charlie wouldn’t hear me.  I reckon if I had a prayed out loud I might of got religion, but it’s too late now.  Look like I just don’t believe somehow.” [5]

She added she wasn’t going to the barbeque that evening at the local Baptist church [6] because “I ain’t never had no belief and no experience, and you can’t join without you got religion.” [7]

Tom Moore was born the year before Fyre “somewhere in Alabama.”  [8]  While his wife was a member of New Prospect Baptist Church, he told Tartt “I call myself tryin to pray.  I thought once I had religion but I doubted myself; I believe, though, but just ain’t joined.  I just ain’t ’solidated in my mind.” [9]

He shared Frye’s belief that one couldn’t enter a church if one hadn’t had a religious experience.  It was no different than what William Francis Allen heard on Saint Helena Island during the Civil War when a woman told him she wasn’t going to a ring shout because they “wouldn’t let me in—hain’t foun’ dat ting yet—hain’t been on my knees in de swamp.” [10]

As mentioned in the post for 20 March 2019, ring shouts on the South Carolina island were local adaptions of Mende culture to plantation life.  The ritual [11] didn’t transfer with people like Frye’s mother, but the underlying set of values did.

Church revivals developed as the alternative to Mende initiation rites.  Instead of a group of adolescents withdrawing into the wilderness to be prepared for adulthood, individuals withdrew from their routine activities.

Moore’s great-granddaughter, Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine, was born in Bellamy in 1956. [12]  She recalled “In the area of Sumter County where I lived, Revival season usually ran from the first week of August through the last week of September.  During this time, there was no playing, no watching television, no listening to the radio and certainly no dancing.” [13]

The timing coincided with Igbo funereal rituals, which occurred when there was no agricultural activity.  As mentioned in the post for 29 November 2020, a church in nearby Whitfield began its two-week revival at the end of July with a service “for all members who had died during the previous twelve months.” [14]

DeLaine recalled the first week was devoted to “prayer service,” and the second to “preaching.”  She added, “you had to go to your praying ground during the day until it was time to go to church for Revival Services.” [15]

Rosa Little, who was born in 1919, had similar memories of the “old timey revival” near Sumterville.  She said “a mourner or a sinner would have to seek JESUS.  The way you did this was to go to your praying ground or get on the mourners bench at the church.” [16]

Both Allen and Margaret Washington noted “seeking” was the term used in South Carolina to describe the period when individuals were preparing for a religious experience. [17]  Washington said the term was introduced by Methodist preachers. [18]

Calvinism emphasizes single individuals who are preselected by God for salvation, rather than groups.  As such it was at odds with Mende ideas, but was synchronous with Igbo culture that posited spirits bargained with personal gods (chi) to define the conditions under which they would be reborn. [19]  Thus, while Langston Hughes’ church in Joplin, Missouri, mentioned in the post for 3 January 2021, wished to welcome a group, conversion was an individual decision in Sumter County.

In 1967, DeLaine remembered:

“It was during the first week that I had been on the mourner’s bench praying and seeking JESUS.  Finally on that Friday, I made up my mind and went into an earnest and sincere prayer for salvation.  At the end of the prayer, I asked GOD to let me feel his Holy Spirit if he was truly going to save my soul.  As soon as I finished praying, the LORD granted my request.  The Holy Spirit showered down upon me and I started running to find my mother to share the good news with her. [20]

Charles Finney used what he called the “anxious seat” to attack individuals until they fell into despair and begged for forgiveness. [21]  Marian Wright Edelman, mentioned in the post for 3 January 2021, attributed conversions to sermons that “scared us to death about the wages of sin” [22] in a church in the cotton-growing region of South Carolina.

Eldridge Taylor said he “got religion at Mary’s Chapel under Reverend Johnson from Union Town, Alabama.  And buddy when that old preacher started preaching, the Holy Spirit got on me and I felt like I got as wide as my front door, I tell you I couldn’t stay on that bench, I had to get up from there.” [23]

Taylor was raised as a Baptist in Coatopa, [24] but Mary’s Chapel is affiliated with the AME Zion church. [25]  The ones who attended the Christian Valley Baptist Church did not mention the mourner’s bench as a place of mortification, but as a means for contacting the world of the spirits.

Alma Edwards Towns, who was born in “1919 on the Patton Place in Coatopa,” [26] recalled she was the one who was making the effort at her praying ground:

“Well, I just kept on praying and praying cause I wanted to be sure.  So I asked GOD to let me see a spot of cloud melt and it did and then seem like something got on me and I had to run and tell it.  Well I ran upon my Grandma Rachel and I started telling her about how I met JESUS and she said this here is a GOD sent child.” [27]

Everyone’s first response was to tell someone: DeLaine went to her mother, Towns to her grandmother.  Washington found that in Africa during their time in isolation, “boys and girls conversed with the spirits and related these conversations to the altar parent, who interpreted them.” [29]

In 1846, a Methodist minister complained a Black “seeker” ignored his preacher and selected a mentor who would “teach him how to conduct himself, and particularly how to pray.  He is also ‘an interpreter of visions’ to whom the seeker relates all his ‘travel’.” [30]

Calvinists have always demanded individuals describe their experiences before their neighbors.  Finney converted this into a form of peer pressure.  African Americans in Sumter County transformed it back into a way of joining the community of saved.

Towns recalled “I just kept on running and telling my religion and all the while the sun was in front of me and it just seemed to shout up and down right in front of me.” [31]  Taylor remembered “the next day I got up and I went every where and all over Dug Hill telling my religion.” [32]

DeLaine wrote “during my childhood days, it was customary that you go from house to house sharing your testimony of salvation.” [33]  She most wanted to tell her great-grandmother, who owned a mule name Mary that jealously guarded her pastures from intruders.  She remembered all the times she had chased her when she went to visit Mama Alice.

“I was determined to share my testimony.  It was at this juncture that I decided no more running!  As Mary charged toward me, I held my right handout in front of me and exclaimed in a loud and commanding voice, “Stop in the name of JESUS!”  And just like that, Old Mary came to an abrupt and complete stop.” [34]

This was so typical of something a teenage girl would have done who had seen The Supremes use the same hand gesture when they sang “Stop!  In the Name of Love.” [35]  What was special was her explanation that “I have always believed that Mary stopped running after me because she recognized the Holy Spirit that was upon me.” [36]

In the 1920s, a man in Columbus, Mississippi, to the northwest of Sumter County, told Newbell Niles Puckett “when a mule balks a ghost is stopping him.” [37]

End Notes
1.  Tishabee and other places mentioned in this post appear on the map posted on 20 September 2020.

2.  Hester Frye.  Quoted by Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Earthy-Ann.”  Southwest Review 397–405:Spring 1944.  87–93 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  90.

3.  Brown and Owens.  160.  They noted Tartt didn’t use Frye’s name when she published her portrait.  They added she was not the Earthy Ann Coleman mentioned in the post for 6 December 2020.

4.  Frye.  Quoted by Tartt, Earthy-Ann.  92.

5.  Frye.  Quoted by Tartt, Earthy-Ann.  92.  Robert’s son was Charles Darwin Hawkins.  Fyre lamented.  “I feels the need to be baptized.  It’ll soon be time for me to ride on the Jordan tide, and I ain’t ready, and what is I goin to do.” [38]

6.  Tartt, Eathy-Ann.  91.
7.  Frye.  Quoted by Tartt, Earthy-Ann.  92.

8.  Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine.  The Moore Place Community.  Gordo, Alabama: Southeast Media, 2015.  8.  She published a photograph of Moore and his family, including Safronia Beville and Jerry, the son mentioned in the post for 6 December 2020.  She also reproduced a photograph of herself.

9.  Tom Moore.  “Tom Moore and His Death Money.”  Transcribed by Tart.  77–79 in Brown and Owens.  77.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [39]

10.  Bristol.  Quoted by William Francis Allen.  “Introduction.”  The Slave Songs of the United States.  Edited by Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison.  New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867.  xii.

11.  I’m not sure we know exactly what people were doing with their “iron pots,” so I don’t know what older rituals were being reenacted.  There’s general agreement though that ring shouts like those among Gullah-speakers on the South Carolina coast were limited to that area.

12.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  i.
13.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  28.

14.  Ida Gayle.  “Black Bluff Missionary Baptist Church.”  1982.  Jud K. Arrington collection, Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  44 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.

15.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  28.  Emphasis added.

16.  Rosa Little.  Interviewed by Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine in Hamner, Alabama, on 29 October 2011.  13–15 in  Back Then.  Edited by Tammy Jackson Montgomery and DeLaine.  University of Western Alabama website. 14.  Emphasis added.  It includes her photograph.

17.  See the post for 20 March 2019 for more details.

18.  Margaret Washington Creel.  “A Peculiar People.”  New York: New York University Press, 1988.  285.

19.  Richard N. Henderson.  The King in Every Man.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972
2003 edition.  110.

20.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  28–29.  Emphasis added.  Kurt Carr used the expression “shower down on me” in his version of “Kumbaya” discussed in the post for 26 August 2017.

21.  Finney was discussed in the post for 12 August 2017.

22.  Marian Wright Edelman.  “Give Children the Richness of Their Heritage.”  U. S. Catholic.  February 1997.  The post for 3 January 2020 has a more complete excerpt.

23.  Eldridge Taylor.  Interviewed by Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine in Lilita, Alabama, on  6 June 62011. 19–22 in Back Then.  20.  Emphasis added.  It includes his photograph.

24.  Taylor.  20.

25.  James Pate identified the church in his “Survey of Black Churches in Sumter County Alabama 1980-1981.”  University of Western Alabama website.

26.  Alma Edwards Towns.  Interviewed by Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine in Demopolis, Alabama, on 22 July 2011.  23–25 in Back Then.  23.  It includes her photograph.

27.  Towns.  24.  Emphasis added.

29.  Washington Creel.  288–289.  The post for 20 March 2019 has a more complete quotation.

30.  Southern Christian Advocate.  30 October 1846 and 30 October 1847.  Quoted by Washington.  286.  Emphasis in original.  The post for 20 March 2019 has a more complete quotation.

31.  Towns.  24.
32.  Taylor.  20.
33.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  29.
34.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  29.

35.  The Supremes.  “Stop!  In The Name Of Love.”  Motown MT 1074.  8 February 1965.  45 rpm. [Discogs entry]  “They performed the song on an episode of the ABC variety program Shindig!” in 1965. [40]

36.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  30.

37.  Ben Rice.  Quoted by Newbell Niles Puckett.  Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926.  114.

38.  Frye.  Quoted by Tartt, Earthy-Ann.  92.
39.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.
40.  Wikipedia.  “Stop! In the Name of Love.”

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.

Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Beliefs

Topic: Early Versions
Child rearing practices in cotton-growing Alabama exposed slaves to a variety of beliefs.  Infants spent their early days with their mothers.  Then women were sent back to the fields, and nursed four times a day.  Ank Bishop recalled:

“All the women on Lady Liza’s place had to go the field every day, and them what had sucklin’ babies would come in about nine o’clock in the mornin and when the bell ring at twelve and sucklin them.  One women tended to all of them in one house.” [1]

Eugene Genovese found that, contrary to popular notions, those women actually supervised older pre-adolescent children, who in turn took care of younger children. [2]  One of his examples was a planter living in Marengo County, across the river from Sumter County. [3]

By the age of eight, children could do chores and help pick cotton.  Around age twelve, they were sent to the fields.  Boys, especially, then spent time with predominantly male work groups. [4]  Instead of an age-group initiation that existed in Africa, they were assimilated slowly into their gender groups.

The division of control meant specific beliefs were melded into general ones shared by everyone raised on a plantation.  Details, especially those related to complex cosmologies, were lost, and core values were distilled.  Often those most compatible with Baptist theology survived longest.

The Kongo had been exposed to Roman Catholicism before they were captured.  Michael Gomez said they thought “the recently dead were divided into the evil bankugu and the good banzambi bamungu.  The former dwelled in the forest or were forced to wander about homeless.  The banzambi bampungu, however, lived in the land of the good spirits, mpemba.” [5]

These beliefs were adapted to Protestantism by two individuals who talked with interviewers for the Federal Writers Project in the late 1930s.  Lucindia Washington said “We’s got one good spirit an’ one bad un.  One goes to heaben an’ de udder stays on earth.” [6]  Bishop believed:

“This is the evil spirit what the Bible tells about when it says a person has got two spirits, a good one and a evil one.  They good spirit goes to a place of happiness and rest, and you don’t see it no more, but the evil spirit ain’t got no place to go.  Its dwelling place done tore down when the body died, and it’s just wanderin and waitin for Gabriel to blow his trumpet.” [7]

As mentioned in the post for 13 March 2019, the Mende believed the dead required help crossing into the land of the ancestors, where they became guardians for their descendants.  In Sumter County, they only appeared as harbingers of death, and then materialized as dreams or visions.  Despite their rarity, they were heeded.

Tom Moore’s son was struck by an automobile.  He said “I ought to have been expectin it ’cause I dreamed about white horses, but I just said to myself, Shucks, ain’t nothin to that.  But it bothered me mightily and I told Jerry that same Saturday, ‘Be careful with them mules’.” [8]

Similarly, Amy Chapman’s daughter-in-law remembered two weeks before Chapman died, she “made the long trip to town to see them.  ‘She said the spirits told her to come and see us, and I was afraid then that somthin was gonna happen’.” [9]

There was general agreement among the Civil War generation in Sumter County that spirits were most active between a death and a burial, and that burials must be done quickly.  Josh Horn, who became a pastor at Mount Nebo Primitive Baptist church, [10] told Ruby Pickens Tartt “I don’t exactly believe in ghosties.” [11]  Then, he told her:

“I head Mr. Marshall Lee say he was ridin on home one night and a woman stepped out in the road and say, ‘Marshall, let me ride.’  He say, ‘My horse won’t tote double.’  She say, ‘Yes it will,’ and she jump up behind him.  And that horse bucked and jumped nigh about from under him, but when he got home, she warn’t there.  He say his sister had just died and it might have been her.” [12]

When his own wife died on a Saturday, Horn turned the mirror against the wall  and stopped the clock. [13]  He knew her “spirit had done gone ’cause she had a home in the gloryland waitin for here.  Them is evil spirits what hangs around, or comes back, ’cause they ain’t got to resting place to go to.”  Even so, he believed that if her body “stay in the house over Sunday it sure bring death in the family ’fore the year is out.” [14]

One reason Horn was sure her spirit was safe was she hadn’t suffered a bad death, like the ones of the Igbo mentioned in the post for 29 November 2020.  He called a doctor, because he knew her illness “warn’t no conjure, cause Alice never had no fallin out with nobody in her life, and you got to have enemies to get conjured.” [15]

Conjuring, hoodoo, and voodoo often are treated as the same thing by whites.  Melville Herskovits said the first tended to be practiced by women who used herbs, while the second was associated with men who used magic and animals. [16]  The last was a sect found in New Orleans and Haiti. [17]

Carrie Dykes admitted she saw a “conjure woman” in Sumter County when “I had somethin’ in my ankle and I don’t care where I walked when I come back home I’d be lame for two day.” [18] The woman told her:

“‘somebody throwed at you.  Grudge what you got.’  But she say she could uphand anything brought before her, so I asked here to work on me.  She took to the house and got three things, I don’t what they was, but they was three things she put on my ankle and rubbed it.  And that was just as well as the other one, and it ain’t bothered me a bit since!” [19]

Dykes worked as a midwife, and suspected the conjure woman indulged in tricks as much as she did legitimate cures.  Another midwife, who was the aunt of Carrie Pollard, was summoned to Sumterville by a white woman.  While there she had a dream “somthin done happened to her children and that they was in trouble.” [20]  The white woman told her to see the local fortune teller, who

“cut the cards, and then she looked up and told Aunt Cynthy, ‘All you children and your husband done gone and I can’t tell you where they’s at’.” [21]

Cynthy was a free woman, as were her children.  The white woman sent a messenger who discovered Cynthy’s husband’s master was taking the children to Mississippi to sell into slavery.  A posse was dispatched, and the children saved [22] because Cynthy and the white woman shared a belief in spirits.

Rich Amerson and his sister, Earthy Ann Coleman, both claimed to practice hoodoo.  She said “I could conjure with little animals and pick up folks’ tracks so good, and keep them wondering where to find them.” [23]  Amerson intimated he did both legitimate work utilizing animals like lizards, and practiced tricks on people. [24]

Jake Green recalled the owner of the plantation next to his was so mean, his slaves continually ran away.  “One nigger, Rich Parker, runned off one time an’ whilst he gone he seed a hoodoo man, so when he got back Mr. Brasefiel’ tuck sick two or three weeks.” [25]

Hilliard Johnson remembered right after “Surrender,” the sheriff still was using dogs to track Freedmen and “det sot de dogs on dat nigger and ’fo’ yer knowed hit dat nigger done lef’ dere and had dem dogs treein a nekked tree.  ’Twa’n’t nobody dere.  Dey calls hit hoodooin’ de dogs.  And I’se seen hit more times than one.” [26]

[they set the dogs on the man and before you knowed it that man done left there and had them dogs treeing a naked tree.  There was nobody there.  They calls it hoodooing the dogs.  And I’ve seen it more times than once.] [27]

Once individuals accepted the idea both good and bad spirits existed, they learned to differentiate between the two.  Oliver Bell knew he confronted a bad one while he was passing a graveyard “one night, ridin on about midnight, and something come draggin a chain by me like a dog, and I got down off my hose and couldn’t see nothin with no chain, so I got back on the horse and there right in front of me was a jack-er-lantern, with the brightest light you ever seed, tryin to lead me off, and every time I’d get back in the road it would head me off again.  You sure will get lost if you follow a jack-er-lantern.” [28]

Hattie Harris told Newbell Niles Puckett that “Jack sold himself to the devil,” but when his time was due he tricked him.  When Jack died, he was condemned to wander the Earth because neither God nor Satan would let him in. [29]  He became homeless like those mentioned in the post for 29 November 2020 who died Bad Deaths.

George Young justified the existence of good spirits by telling Tartt that “Christ appeared to the apostles, didn’t He, after He been dead?” [30]  Then he told her:

“I’s seed folks done been dead just as natural in the day as you is now. [. . .]  But I ain’t scared of ’em.  I gets out the path plenty times to let ’em by, and if you can see ’em, walk around ’em.  If you can’t see ’em, then they’ll walk around you.  If they gets too plentiful, I just hangs a horseshoe upside down over the door, and don’t have no more trouble.” [31]

Bishop also connected ghosts with Protestantism.  He said “spirits ain’t nothing but a lot of folks out of Christ.  Haints ain’t nothin but somebody died out of Christ and his spirit ain’t at rest, just in a wanderin condition in the world.” [32]  He added:

“I ain’t scared of them, though.  I passes them and goes right on plowin, but if you wants them to get out of your way, all you gotta do is just turn your head least bit and look back.  They gone just like that!” [33]

End Notes
1.  Ank Bishop.  “Gabriel Blow Soft!  Gabriel Blow Loud!”  Transcribed by Ruby Pickens Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [34]  126–128 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  126–127.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [35]

2.  Eugene Genovese.  Roll, Jordan Roll.  New York: Pantheon Press, 1974.  This section is based on his discussion of “Children,” 502–518.

3.  Marengo Planter.  “This Season’s Work.”  American Cotton Planter 2:280:September 1854.  Cited by Genovese.  509.

4.  I started thinking about gender differences after reading Brown and Owens’ comment that Benjamin Botkin [36] thought belief in Hoodoo was stronger among men than women because they worked in the fields and thus had less contact with European beliefs. [37]

5.  Michael A. Gomez.  Exchanging Our Country Marks.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.  147.

6.  Lucindia Washington.  Transcribed by Alice S. Barton for the WPA’s Slave Narratives from Alabama.  Reprinted by Alan Brown and David Taylor as “A Slave Story.”  99–102 in Gabr’l Blow Sof’.  Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1997.  101–102.

7.  Bishop.  127.

8. Tom Moore.  “Tom Moore and His Death Money.”  Transcribed by Tart.  77–79 in Brown and Owens.  78.

9.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Amy Chapman’s Funeral.”  79–83 in Brown and Owens.  82.
10.  Brown and Taylor.  70.

11.  Josh Horn.  “Blow Your Horn, Josh.”  Transcribed by Tartt.  105–107 in Brown and Owens.  106.

12.  Horn.  106.

13.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Alice.”  Southwest Review 34:192–195:Spring 1949.  100–105 in Brown and Owens.  Mirror, 101; clock, 102.  These beliefs were shared with whites, who may have been the source for the practice.  Puckett notes house slaves often were the ones asked to handle mirrors and clocks when someone died. [38]  The association between mirrors and spirits is much older, and may go back to the ancient pan-Mediterranean culture mentioned in the post for 19 May 2019.

14.  Tartt, Alice.  102.  Her source was Josh Horn.  A similar belief was discussed in the post for 29 November 2020.

15.  Tartt, Alice.  101.  Tartt said Chapman “had no use for her black neighbors and would not allow any of them to come near her house.  Privately, I often thought she was afraid of being conjured. [39]

16.  Melville J. Herskovits.  The Myth of the Negro Past.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1958 edition.  It first was published in 1941.  239–240.

17.  Wikipedia.  “Louisiana Voodoo” and “Haitian Vodou.”

18.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Carrie Dykes: Midwife.”  21–29 in From Hell to Breakfast.  Edited by  Mody C. Boatright and Donald Day.  Austin: Texas Folk-Lore Society, 1944.  66–71 in Brown and Owens.  70.

19.  Tartt, Dykes.  70.

20.  Carrie Pollard.  “A Husband Couldn’t Be Bought.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  132–133 in Brown and Owens.  133.

21.  Pollard.  133.
22.  Pollard.  133.
23.  Brown and Owens.  157.

24.  Rich Amerson.  “Hoodoo Doctor.”  Transcribed by Tartt.  115–117 in Brown and Owens.

25.  Jake Green.  “A Conju’ Didn’ Wuk.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  47–49 in Brown and Taylor.  48.

26.  Hilliard Johnson.  “Hoodooin’ de Dogs.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  83–86 in Brown and Taylor.  86.   This is the same use of herbs to obscure a trail that was mentioned by Coleman.

27.  Brown and Taylor did not modernize Tartt’s transcriptions.

28.  Oliver Bell.  “That Tree Was My Nurse.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  134–137 in Brown and Owens.  136.  Uncle Remus told a boy “While I was crossing the branch just now, I come up with a Jacky-my-lantern, and she was burning worse than a bunch of lightning-bugs.  I knew she was fixing to lead me into the quagmire down in the swamp, and I steered clear.” [40]

29.   Newbell Niles Puckett.  Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926.  135–136.  Hattie Harris was from Columbus, Mississippi.  Most of Joel Chandler Harris’ tale was about a blacksmith who tricked the “Bad Man.”  He noted: “This story is popular on the coast and among the rice-plantations, and, since the publication of some of the animal-myths in the newspapers, I have received a version of it from a planter in southwest Georgia; but it seems to me to be an intruder among the genuine myth-stories of the negroes.  It is a trifle too elaborate.  Nevertheless, it is told upon the plantations with great gusto, and there are several versions in circulation.” [42]  Cydney Grannan said the tale of Stingy Jack had Irish origins. [43]  Bell did not mention it to Tartt.

30.  George Young.  “Peter Had No Keys ’ceptin His.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  120–122 in Brown and Owens.  122.

31.  Young.  122.
32.  Bishop.  127.
33.  Bishop.  127.

34.  For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

35.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.
36.  B. A. Botkin.  A Treasure of Southern Folklore.  New York: Crown, 1949.  631–633.
37.  Brown and Owens.  153.
38.  Puckett.  80.
39.  Tartt, funeral.  80.

40.  Joel Chandler Harris.  “Jacky-My-Lantern.”  160–166 in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings.  New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1921 revised edition.  160.  Dialect removed.  Puckett brought this to my attention. [41]

41.  Puckett.  134.  He was using the 1917 version.
42.  Joel Chandler Harris.  160.
43.  Cydney Grannan.  “Why Do We Carve Pumpkins at Halloween?”  Britannica website.

Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Rituals

Topic: Early Versions
Rituals for baptisms and death are the African-American religious rites of passage best known to outsiders.  After the Civil War, Walter Fleming wrote in Alabama:

“Baptizings were as popular as the opera among the whites to-day.  That ceremony took place at the river or creek side.  Thousands were sometimes assembled, and the air was electric with emotion.  The negro was then as near Paradise as he ever came in his life.  The Baptist ceremony of immersion was preferred, because, as one of them remarked, ‘It looks more the business.’  Shouting they went into the water and shouting they came out.” [1]

In Sumter County, Oliver Bell remembered “us got baptized in the river back of Horn’s Bridge, but that wasn’t till after the Surrender.” [2]

Margaret Washington connected baptisms among Gullah-speakers in South Carolina with Mende initiation rituals. [3]  The Julia Tutwiler Library has photographs of one on the banks of the Tombigbee that match those described by Washington.  In one picture, five men, dressed in white, are standing in the water with a pastor clothed in black.  In another, a large group is assembled on the bank.  Most are wearing white.  The skirt styles and hem lengths suggest the photo was taken just before or after World War I. [4]

Most descriptions of Sumter County baptisms, however, are as simple as Bell’s.  Amy Chapman told Ruby Pickens Tartt: “I was baptized in Jones Creek, and Dr. Edmonds, a white preacher, joined me to the Jones Creek Baptist church long before the war.” [5]

Similarly, Lewis Brown told Charles Octavius Boothe, he “was baptized by a Mr. Edmonds into the fellowship of the Jones’ Creek Church.” [6]

Alma Edwards Towns was born in 1919.  She told an interviewer in 2011: “I was baptized by Reverend L. S. Partridge from Demopolis, Alabama in the Jim Matthews pond in Coatopa, Alabama.” [7]

These people remember two things: the body of water, and the name of the person who did the initiation.  These perfunctory comments might suggest the long-lasting fear of white vigilantes who disrupt public ceremonies, [8] but I suspect they indicate a different cultural heritage than that of the Mende.

As mentioned in the posts for 8 September 2019, many of the slaves in Sumter County came from Igbo areas of modern-day Nigeria through Virginia and North Carolina.  Their most important initiation ceremony occurs soon after birth when the parents seek the identity of the ancestor who has been reincarnated in their child. [9]

Chapman may have been alluding to this ritual when she told Ruby Pickens Tartt “I would admire to stay on a little longer.  There is a baby comin on the Johnson place soon, and don’t nobody know about the signs like I do.” [10]  Her mother came from Petersburg, Virginia, and her father from Richmond, Virginia. [11]

Igbo traditions also may have influenced funereal traditions.  Richard Henderson says Igbo mortuary ceremonies involve two stages: “burial and lamentation.” [12]  In 1866, a Clarke County, Alabama, newspaper reported “black preachers travel about and preach funerals of persons who died many years ago.” [13]  In the 1930s, Tartt noted:

“Among the Negro people of Sumter County the actual internment is referred to as the ‘burying.’  The funeral is preached later on a Sunday chosen by the family, sometimes after a year has elapsed.” [14]

This was an easy tradition for Igbo to perpetuate on Southern plantations where sacred time was limited during certain seasons of the agricultural cycle.  Angie Garrett remembered “If any us died in them days, buried us quick as they could and got out there and got to work.” [15]

More important, Henderson said the the postponed part of the Igbo ritual occurs during the dry season after the harvest is complete. [16]  Ida Gayle said at the Black Bluff Missionary Baptist Church near Whitfield “the fourth Sunday of each July was the beginning of two-week revival services.  On this day funerals would be preached for all members who had died during the previous twelve months.  When a member died, they were buried the same day.” [17]

Tom Moore’s son was killed by a careless driver in the late 1930s.  He told Tartt “it all happened on Saturday and us had to hurry and get the grave dug and bury Jerry before dust on Sunday ’cause we knowed it naturally won’t do to carry him over in the house on Sunday or some of the rest would be gone before this year is up.” [18]

Moore indicates burials were done quickly to lay spirits to rest.  Among the Igbo, Henderson said “when a person dies, the elemental ghostly components of the personal god ordinarily return to the land of the dead, whence they may be born again through a compact with another personal god.” [19]  They are key to maintaining the cycle of reincarnation that is part of the post-natal rituals.

Henderson noted things are more serious when a “bad death” occurs, that is one that doesn’t have a natural cause.  Then, “the ghostly components become attached to the shrine of that spirit and are not reincarnated but remain dangerous to the living.” [20]

When Stephen Renfroe killed Frank Sledge and Caesar Davis in 1869, [21] Oliver Bell remembered the freedmen “went down there that night and got them, and they buried” them. [22]

Tartt attended AmyChapman’s burial in 1938. [23]  She said that after the grave was filled and a mound had been shaped over it, saplings were “placed in the soft earth at its head and foot to mark it.”  Then, “each worker rested his spade against the mound’s side, iron point in the earth and handle pointing toward the sky.” [24]

Next, the preacher asked for flowers.  Following the protocols of white supremacy still governing social relations, Tartt went first “with my bowl of zinnias.”  When the others followed, they “made small hollows in the earth in which they placed their bouquets so that they stood upright.” [25]

When she later asked Chapman’s family about the shovels, they brushed Tartt off with “it is custom.” [26]  The saplings that Tartt took for granted may have come from the Kongo who planted trees on graves as “a sign of spirit, on its way to the other world.” [27]

Chapman was “buried on the plantation where she was born.”  The grave was “beside her Aunt Mary’s and near her sister’s.  A few steps down the hillside were other, unmarked graves, members of her family who had gone before.” [28]

Separate African-American cemeteries with headstones don’t appear in Sumter County until the 1890s [29] when a cash economy had been introduced around Cuba, and individuals and groups could accumulate money to buy land for churches. [30]

That did not mean individuals didn’t know where their parents and grandparents were buried.  It may be the reason people returned to their old masters after the war. [31]  The fact whites believed some freedmen were being loyal or rewarding good people may have been a convenient fiction to which Blacks acquiesced to protect what was sacred to them.

In the late 1930s, Oliver Bell remembered they buried Sledge and Frank “up there in the old Travis graveyard right there on that place.  My mammy and daddy buried there too.” [27]

People carried a map of the unseen in their heads.

End Notes
1.  Walter L. Fleming.  Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905.  273.  His sources were Huntsville newspapers, denomination histories, and “conversations with various negroes and whites.”

2.  Oliver Bell.  “That Tree Was My Nurse.”  Transcribed by Ruby Higgins Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [33]  134–137 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  134.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [34]

3.  Margaret Washington Creel.  “A Peculiar People.”  New York: New York University Press, 1988.  293–295.

4.  M. J. Turpentine.  “Negro Baptising ‘Big B’ river, Gainesville, Ala.” and another unlabeled photograph.  Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  Reprinted by Alan Brown.  Sumter County.  Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2015.  29.

5.  Amy Chapman.  “The Masters Good but Overseers Mean.”  Transcribed by Tartt.  128–129 in Brown and Owens.  129.  I’ve found nothing about Edmonds.

6.  Charles Octavius Boothe.  The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama.  Birmingham: Alabama Publishing Company, 1895.  117.

7.  Alma Edwards Towns.  Interviewed by Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine in Demopolis, Alabama, on 22 July 2011.  23–25 in Back Then.  Edited by Tammy Jackson Montgomery and DeLaine.  University of Western Alabama website.  24.  Jno. Matthews owned 152 slaves in Sumter County in 1860. [35]

8.  The post for 6 September 2020 has a description of an African-American frolic being disrupted by a man “with a white sheet round him.”

9.   Igbo initiation into adulthood is an individual affair that is a prerequisite for marriage. [36]

10.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Amy Chapman’s Funeral.”  79–83 in Brown and Owens.  79–80.  Tartt simply noted: “the superstitions connected with a baby’s birth were important to Amy.” [37]

11.  Chapman.  128.

12.  Richard N. Henderson.  The King in Every Man.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.  400.  The Igbo source also is mentioned by Newbell Niles Puckett. [38]

13.  Clarke County Journal.  18 October 1866.  Cited by Peter Kolchin.  First Freedom. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972.  118.

14.  Tartt, Funeral.  81.

15.  Angie Garrett.  “Turned Lose without Nothin.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  140–142 in Brown and Owens.  141.

16.  Henderson.  385.

17.  Ida Gayle.  “Black Bluff Missionary Baptist Church.”  1982.  Jud K. Arrington collection, Tutwiler Library.  44 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.

18.  Tom Moore.  “Tom Moore and His Death Money.”  Transcribed by Tart.  77–79 in Brown and Owens.  78.

19.  Henderson.  122.
20.  Henderson.  122.
21.  The deaths of Sledge and Davis are described in the post for 13 September 2020.
22.  Bell.  135.

23.  Brown and Owens.  “Appendix: Biographies of Sumter County Singers and Storytellers.”  156.

24.  Tartt, Funeral.  82.
25.  Tartt, Funeral.  82–83.

26.  Tartt, Funeral.  82.  In Columbus, Mississippi, to the northwest of Sumter County, Puckett was told “the tools used in digging a grave are left on the site for a day or so after burial. [39]  In Calhoun, Alabama, they were “laid across the grave.” [40]

27.  Fu-Kiau Bunseki.  Interview, 9 October 1977.  Quoted by Robert Faris Thompson.  Flash of the Spirit.  New York: Vintage Books, 1984.  139.  Bunseki was the Belgian Congo-born scholar who articulated the Kongo cosmology. [41]

28.  Tartt, Funeral.  81.

29.  The earliest date for an African-American cemetery in a list published by The University of Alabama, is 1890 in the Jones Creek Baptist Church. [42]  Jenkins seemed to think few white graves had headstones because of the difficulty of transporting them by steamer and dirt road. [43]  This overlooks the fact part of the county was limestone bluffs.  The raw material was present, but apparently no settler had the skills to make headstones or to train slaves to do the work.  This probably was a consequence of the county’s hostility to skilled tradesmen, especially those from Europe.

30.  The economic renaissance in southwestern Sumter County is discussed in the post for 20 September 2020.

31.  Gwendolyn Midlo Hall believed Igbo women where especially attached “to the land where their first child was born.” [44]

32.  Bell.  135.  The Travis cemetery was a white family graveyard begun for Enoch Travis, who died in 1841.  Travis’ daughter married Ed Bell. [45]  It’s also known as the Bells Cemetery. [46]

33.  For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

34.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.

35.  Tom Blake.  “Sumter County, Alabama: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census.”  Ancestry website.

36.  Vincent De Paul U. Mbah.  “Igbo Child Initiation and Christian Baptism: A Case Study in Inculturation.”  PhD dissertation.  Universidad De Navarra, 1993.

37.  Tartt, Funeral.  80.

38.  Newbell Niles Puckett.  Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926.  91.  His source was Arthur Glyn Leonard.  The Lower Niger and Its Tribes.  London: Macmillan and Company, 1906.  154.

39.  Puckett.  94–95.  His source was Rena Franks.
40.  Puckett.  95.  His source was Qeither Y. Stanfield.

41.  Wyatt MacGaffey.  “Constructing a Kongo Identity: Scholarship and Mythopoesis.”  Comparative Studies in Society and History 58:159–180:2016.  165.

42.  List of Sumter County Cemeteries.  The University of Alabama, Department of Geography Alabama Maps website.

43.  Jenkins.  164–165.

44.  Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.  Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.  142.

45.  Jenkins.  165.
46.  University of Alabama.

Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Forms

Topic: Early Versions
The lexical history of Sumter County, Alabama, slave communities differed from that in the Georgia and South Carolina sea islands.  In places like Saint Helena, plantations had imported manpower from Africa before the close of the Atlantic slave trade, and kept groups isolated from one another.  During the Civil War, William Francis Allen noted:

“the different plantations have their own peculiarities, and adepts profess to be able to determine by speech of a negro what part of the island he belongs to, or even, in some cases, his plantation.  I can myself vouch for the marked peculiarities of one plantation from which I had scholars, and which are hardly more than a mile distant from another which lacked these peculiarities.” [1]

All but seven slaves in Sumter County in 1850 were born in this country. [2]  As indicated in the post for 8 September 2019, ancestors of the ones interviewed by Ruby Pickens Tartt in the 1930s, had come from Virginia and North Carolina.  Over generations, a regional vocabulary developed that attached African concepts to English words.

Homogenization accelerated when people moved about after Emancipation.  By the time people were talking to Tartt, they had common terms for describing their secret meetings with iron pots described in the post for 22 September 2019.  They either shouted or prayed easy, depending on the situation.

There was no agreement on the location of these meetings.  Margaret Washington said in South Carolina in the 1840s, Baptist slave owners began setting aside buildings for religious use to “deprive the inhabitants of various plantations of an opportunity to mingle.” [3]

Whites knew these as Praise Houses, but Samuel Lawton found local Gullah speakers really were saying “Prays.” [4]  Washington observed Gullahs were adept at double meanings, [5] which allowed simultaneous communication with whites and among themselves.

No term existed in Sumter County.  Josh Horn said his master, Isaac Horn, provided “an old house with a dirt floor in the quarters.” [6]  George Young implied slaves on Reuben Chapman’s plantations appropriated an “old house with a dirt floor.” [7]  Oliver Bell simply said they “shut the door” on Tresvan De Graffenreid’s place. [8]

Freedmen agreed they were Baptists after the war, but, beyond full-immersion baptism by adults, that term had little meaning.  As mentioned in the posts for 19 January 2020 and 26 January 2020, Baptists in Pamlico County, North Carolina, continually were confronted by proselytizing groups bent of changing their ways.  This continued in Sumter County, where Bethany Baptist church split in 1838 between Missionary and Old Side groups. [9]

When one looks beyond dogma, which was of little interest to most slaves and whites, the primary difference between factions was their view on what constituted qualification for membership and ordination.  Anabaptists, General Baptists, Free Will Baptists, and Primitive Baptists all believed a religious experiences was sufficient.  Particular Baptists and Missionary Baptists were more influenced by Calvin, and believed an individual needed to recognize his or her own depravity and that ministers should have some training.

Individuals who talked to Tartt had had owners from a variety of family traditions.  De Graffenreid’s great-grandfather founded the Anabaptist colony in New Berne, North Carolina. [10]  Jim Godfrey, the owner of Lucindia Williams, [11] was a Methodist from South Carolina. [12]  His aunts were married to John Evander Brown and George A. Brown, [13] whose early ancestors moved from Rhode Island to a Baptist colony in New Jersey. [14]

Ancestors of the owners of Berry Smith and Josh Horn had contacts with Quakers.  James Harper’s great-grandfather [15] lived in Friend’s communities in the Carolinas and Georgia, [16]  while one  of Isaac Horn’s father’s [17] brothers joined the Quakers in Edgecombe, North Carolina. [18]

Many who moved to Edgecombe County were fleeing religious persecution in Virginia. [19]  Another of Horn’s father’s relatives was a founding member of the Kehukee Baptist Association [20] formed by General Baptists.  Isaac’s father’s brother, his uncle Josiah, [21] helped organize the Methodist Protestant Church in Panola with Quakers and Primitive Baptists from that same part of Edgecombe County. [22]

Descendants’ religious affiliations may have changed and their public theology probably evolved to fit that of their neighbors in Sumter County.  What may not have changed were attitudes and values passed on through early child rearing practices.  Godfrey’s father’s will stipulated:

“it is my will that in the event any of the negroes be dissatisfied or unwilling to go to or live or serve any of my heirs to which they may fall in the division, it is my will my executioners shall swap exchange or sell to some other person or persons to whom the dissatisfied slave may be willing to live with.” [23]

No one has left a record of Freedmen’s actions in the first year of Emancipation in Sumter County.  In the pine woods of Clarke County south of Marengo County, a local newspaper complained that preachers were “springing up among them . . . without ordination, and claiming to receive their ministerial commissions and Biblical information directly from the mouth of God.” [24]

The following year brush arbors were reported.  There was no shared agreement on this term in Sumter County.  While most used “bush arbor,” some contributors to The Heritage of Sumter County in 2005 used the term “brush harbor.”  Mary Jo Square wrote “bush hobbler (meaning tent).” [25]

It probably began as a white term coming from Phoebe Palmer’s Holiness Movement that spread after 1867, [26] and was used by Freedmen to camouflage an African-American event with a label soothing to outsiders.  One suspects the retreat into the country provided a means of perpetuating what remnants of older African initiation rituals had survived.

Not all Freedmen wished to continue antebellum practices.  Many wanted “to do what was ‘right’ and behave as they thought free men did.” [27]  In Sumter County they were affected most by Jeremiah Brown and Abner Scarborough.  Brown’s father had been an English Baptist pastor in Darlington, South Carolina. [28]  Scarborough’s father was converted in 1811 [29] in Edgecombe County. [30]

Both were in the Missionary Baptist tradition, which emphasized centralized organizations that defined theology.  Brown donated to the Baptist seminary in Marion, Alabama. [30]  Scarborough was active in the Bigbee Baptist Association [32] in Sumter and Greene counties that was founded in 1853. [33]

One Freedman they influenced was Lewis Brown.  He was from Saint Louis, and had been purchased by Jeremiah in 1845.  Lewis was baptized in Jones Creek Church in 1863 where, Charles Octavius Boothe said, “the chief persons in the presbtery were Revs. Abner Scarber (white) and Mr. Wright.” [34]

Nathan Ashby organized the Colored Missionary Convention of the State of Alabama as a parallel organization [35] to the white Alabama Baptist Association in 1868.  That same year the regional Bethlehem Association was formed “in association with Jones Creek” to mirror the Bigbee conference. [36]

Like Daniel Payne, who tried to suppress ring shouts in the AME church, [37] Ashby sought to spread “correct gospel knowledge and influence” and elevate the “standard of ministerial education, piety and usefulness.” [38]  Boothe, head of a church in Montgomery, [39] condemned local Baptist ministers for acting on “dreams and suggestions which, they say, are made to them by ‘the spirit’.” [40]

Lewis was newly ordained [41] when Jones Creek hosted the founding meeting of the Bethlehem association.  By 1895, it had 6,000 members in 37 congregations, and sent more students to the church’s seminary in Selma “than any other association in the state.” [42]

Scarborough’s last pastorate was New Prospect Missionary Baptist, where he moved after he bought a plantation in the area in 1866. [43]  The year before he died, [44] white membership had dwindled, and ownership was turned over to African-American members. [45]

Tartt talked with three individuals about this church.  Tom Moore said his wife belonged to “the Prospect Baptist Missionary, and she just sets and prays and sings.” [46]  Laura Clark lived “across the road from that church over yonder and can’t go ’cause I’s crippled and blind.  But I hears them singin.” [47]  Emma Crocket told Tartt “I goes now to de New Prophet Church, and my favorite song” has the line “move Daniel, rock me home Daniel, rock by faith Daniel.” [48]

The white form was Missionary Baptist, but the African-American substance was much older.

End Notes
1.  William Francis Allen.  “Introduction.”  The Slave Songs of the United States.  Edited by Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison.  New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867.  xxiv.

2.  Nelle Morris Jenkins.  Pioneer Families of Sumter County, Alabama.  Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Willo Publishing Company, 1961.  Reprinted by Bloutsville, Alabama: The Yarbrough National Genealogical and Historical Association, 14 June 2015.  128.  Most were on one plantation owned by “Poole who bought them from a man by the name of Jones in North Carolina.”

3.  Margaret Washington Creel.  “A Peculiar People.”  New York: New York University Press, 1988.  233 and 277.  Quotation, 277.

4.  Samuel Lawton.  “The Religious Life of Coastal and Sea Island Negroes.”  PhD dissertation.  George Peabody College for Teachers, 1939.  54–56.  Cited by Washington.  391, note 44.

5.  Washington.  391, note 44.  “The Gullahs’ mastering of double meaning however may also inform the discussion.  They often asked white Northerners to ‘jine praise wid we.’ [. . .]  Thus the Gullahs went to the meetinghouse to praise and pray.”

6.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Alice.”  Southwest Review 34:192–195:1949.  Reprinted by Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  103.  Her source was Josh Horn.  A fuller quotation appears in the post for 22 September 2020.

7.  George Young.  “Peter Had No Keys ’ceptin His.”  Transcribed by Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [49]  120–122 in Brown and Owens.  121.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [50]  A fuller quotation appears in the post for 22 September 2019.

8.  Oliver Bell.  “That Tree Was My Nurse.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  134–137 in Brown and Owens.  134.

9.  Jenkins.  38.

10.  Bell.  134.  For more on the founding of New Bern, see the post for 19 January 2020.

11.  Lucindia Washington.  Collected by Alice S. Barton for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama.  Reprinted by Alan Brown and David Taylor as “A Slave Story.”  99–102 in  Gabr’l Blow Sof’.  Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1997.  101–102.

12.  James Godfrey was buried in the Sumterville Methodist Church’s cemetery. [51]

13.  Robert D. Spratt.  A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama.  Edited by Nathaniel Reed.  Livingston: University of West Alabama, 1997.  24.

14.  The line was Nicolas > Abraham > Abraham > John > Samuel > John Evander.  Jenkins identified John Evander’s grandfather. [52]  The Cummings Family provided the rest of the genealogy. [53]

15.  James M. Allen, Jr., identified Harper’s parents as Robert Harper and Mary Dunlap in “James Allen of Scotland and Virginia: A Partial List of His Descendants.”  11 January 2007.  North Carolina Digital Collections website.

16.  House of Harper Genealogy.  “Robert Harper Sr. of Georgia.”  Genealogy and History Blog.  5 May 2017.  “By 1774 Robert Harper, Sr., was in Georgia, in the neighborhood of the Quaker settlement at Wrightsborough, St. Paul’s Parish (now McDuffie County) [. . .] Records show that Robert Harper, Sr. had previously lived near Quaker settlements in North Carolina and South Carolina.”

17.  Isaac’s line was William > Jacob > Thomas > Isaac.  Thomas’ siblings included John, Jeremiah, and Edith, mentioned in the post for 13 September 2020.   Relationships pieced from a number of sources.

18.  Robert Gordon Horn.  “Henry (the Quaker) Horn.”  Horns of Tennessee/Kentucky website Henry was the son of William and brother of Jacob.  The immigrant ancestor, William, had land south of a Quaker meeting house.  Henry set two of his seven slaves free in his will.

19.  George Stevenson.  “Surginer, William.”  NC Pedia website.  1994.

20.  Old Reporter.  “Col. William Horn.”  Rocky Mount [North Carolina] Telegram.  17 March 1961.  4.  Posted by Jeanealogy058 on 21 April 2018.  William was the son of Henry.

21.  Jenkins identified Josiah Horn as another brother of Thomas. [54]

22.  R. M. Arrington.  “Shady Grove Methodist Church, Panola, Alabama.”  60–61 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.

23.  William Godfrey.  Will recorded 13 March 1854 by B. J. H. Gaines.  151–153 in Gwendolyn Lynette Hester.  Sumter County Alabama Wills.  Dallas: Southern Roots, 1998.  152.

24.  Clarke County Journal.  18 October 1866.  Quoted Peter Kolchin.  First Freedom.  Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972.  118.

25.  Mary Jo Square.  “The History of Shady Grove Baptist Church.”  60 in Heritage.

26.  For more on Phoebe Palmer’s camp meetings, see the post for 9 February 2020.  I’ve found neither an etymology for the term “brush arbor” nor a reference that was published before 1865.  I suspect once camp meetings (an activity) and brush arbors (a structure) became associated, they became synonymous, and once synonymous, the term brush arbor was extended back in time so that now it refers to any outdoor meeting that occurred after the Cane Ridge revival of 1801. [55]  If anyone has a published reference from before the Civil War, I’d love to see it.

27.  Kolchin.  61.

28.  T. A. Deland and A. Davis Smith.  “Jeremiah H. Brown.”  Northern Alabama, Historical and Biographical.  Birmingham, Alabama: Smith and De Land.  1888.  219.

29.  Jewell Davis Scarborough.  “Southern Kith and Kin.”  1957 edition.  59.  Roots Web website.

30.  Karen Hoy.  “John Rasberry Scarborough (1787 - 1846).”  Wiki Tree website.  10 May 2014; last updated 12 October 2019.

31.  DeLand.  The school was Howard College, now Samford University. [56]
32.  fdmal.  “Rev Abner Rasberry Scarborough.”  Find a Grave website.  12 August 2009.
33.  “Bigbee Baptist Association.”  Samford University website.

34.  Charles Octavius Boothe.  The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama.  Birmingham: Alabama Publishing Company, 1895.  117.

35.  Edward R. Crowther.  “Interracial Cooperative Missions among Blacks by Alabama’s Baptists, 1868-1882.”  The Journal of Negro History 80:131–139:1995.  132.

36.  Boothe.  58.
37.  Payne is discussed in the post for 9 August 2017.
38.  Crowther.  132.
39.  Crowther.  133.  Boothe’s church was the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

40.  Boothe.  Quoted by Crowther.  134–135.  His sources were the Alabama Baptist for 20 April 1877, 2; Alabama Baptist for 17 May 1877, 1; and Minutes of the Alabama Baptist Convention, 1877, 24–25.

41.  Boothe.  117.
42.  Boothe.  58.

43.  In 1866, Scarborough purchased the plantation of John H. Gary, who was moving to Meridian, Mississippi. [57]

44.  fdmal.

45.  Jud K. Arrington.  “Bluffport.”  Arrington collection, Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  25 in Heritage.

46.  Tom Moore.  “Tom Moore and His Death Money.”  Transcribed by Tart.  77–79 in Brown and Owens.  77.

47.  Laura Clark.  “Children in Every Graveyard.  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  123–126 in Brown and Owens.  123.

48.  Emma Crockett.  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  Reprinted as “Ex-Slave Emma Crockett.”  29–31 in Brown and Taylor.  30.  On their “map of Sumter County showing where Ruby Pickens Tartt found singers and storytellers,” Brown and Owens showed Crockett with New Prospect. [58]  I found no mention of a Prophet church.

49.  For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

50.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.

51.  A.  “Dr James Myers Godfrey.”  Find a Grave website.  20 October 2008; updated by Doug Fitchett.

52.  Jenkins.  175.

53.  The Cummings Family of Sumter, South Carolina.  “Descendants of Nicholas Brown.”  Roots Web website.  Last updated 20 January 2019.

54.  Jenkins.  166.
55.  For more on Cane Ridge, see the post for 26 January 2020.
56.  Wikipedia.  “Samford University.”

57.  Mary H. Abbe.  “Scarborough Family.”  254 in Heritage.

Mary Anne Habbe.  “Gary/Scarborough Deed.”  November 1866.  AlGen website.

58.  Brown and Owens.  vi.

Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Institutions

Topic: Early Versions
Before the Civil War, some whites in Sumter County, Alabama, exposed their slaves to Christianity.  Two Methodists churches had balconies for slaves, [1] as did two Presbyterian buildings. [2]

Many of these churches were physically small, and the space for slaves must have been limited.  One suspects their intent was not evangelization, but providing a place were the servants, who accompanied owners’ families, were placed in an isolated area. [3]  Only the ones who tended horses would have been free to mingle with men from other plantations, and they too probably were observed.

Berry Smith recalled “de white preachers used to preach to de niggers sometimes in de white folks’ church, but I didn’ go much.”  He told interviewers he “was a house boy an’ didn’ go to de fiel’ much.”  His was born near Gainesville. [4]

However, one Presbyterian church in Sumterville did begin admitting slaves as members in 1840. [5]  In 1865, it had 188 white members and 64 Blacks. [6]  The church in Livingston had four black members in 1860. [7]  Some of these may have been among the 25 freed people who lived in the county at the time. [8]

Baptists had more churches in the Sumter County, 16 as compared to 9 Methodists, 7 Presbyterians, and 2 Episcopalian congregations. [9]  None had a balcony, although one in Sumterville allowed slaves to sit in back. [10]  Instead of taking slaves to churches, some owners, like Jeremiah Brown, sponsored services on their plantations. [11]

Amy Chapman, a slave on Reuben Chapman’s plantation was baptized at Jones Creek [12] where Abner Scarborough was minister. [13]  This liberty wasn’t permitted every slave.  As mentioned in the post for 15 September 2019, she became the mistress of the overseer, Hewey Leman. [14]  George Young, who also was owned by Chapman, said “they didn’t allow us to go to church.” [15]

A few plantation owners, like Isaac Horn, [16] let slaves hold religious meetings where “us got happy and shouted”. [17]  On other plantations, like Chapman’s, Young said “sometimes us slip off and have a little prayer meetin by usselves.” [18]

Alabama churches expected nothing would change with Emancipation. [19]   And, indeed, Scarborough continued to hold separate services for whites and Freedmen on his plantation until he died [20] in 1888. [21]

In other parts of the South, missionaries arrived from Northern churches to teach and convert newly freed children.  However, most devoted their resources to states nearer the north, “such as Virginia and North Carolina, or to states where large areas were liberated early in the war, such as Louisiana and South Carolina.” [22]  The only group the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Alabama could recruit was the American Missionary Society, and it focused on large cities and the school it founded in Talladega. [23]

Instead of continuity with white religious traditions, the clandestine became public.  Walter Fleming said “all through the summer of 1865 the revival meetings went on” in Alabama “conducted by new self-‘called’ colored preachers.” [24]  One new preacher, Frank Sledge, was mentioned in the post for 13 September 2020. [25]

Another was Richard Burke.  Reuben Meredith recalled:

“He was a very peaceable negro, so far as I know.  He was an old preacher.  He had been preaching there a long time.  When he was a slave of Judge Reavis’s he used to preach in the Baptist church, I have heard him preach there many a time.” [26]

Burke was born in Virginia. [27]  He moved to Gainesville after the war, and was appointed to fill a vacancy in the state legislature in 1869.  The Freedman was murdered by an unidentified masked mob the same year. [28]

During 1866, African-America groups began meeting in brush arbors including Black Bluff [29] and Friendship near Bellamy. [30]  The construction of African-American church buildings was inhibited by the mob activities mentioned in the post for 13 September 2020, and the lack of currency.  Share cropping was essentially a barter economy.

The first buildings were on land provided by former owners who also provided a measure of protection.  James George Whitefield gave land to the Black Bluff church in 1869. [34]  Most new groups still used brush arbors.

In the period when Republicans began registering Freemen to vote in the 1867, white denominations began disassociating themselves from their former Black protégées.  Peter Kolchin said Baptists, who had no hierarchical structure, feared a majority of freed members might take control of their buildings. [35]

Southern Methodists had successfully kept the independent AME and AME Zion churches out of the state before the war. [36]  The latter organized a few churches in Montgomery and Mobile after the war, [37] and a congregation appeared in Livingston in 1867. [38]

The denomination countered by sponsoring the formation of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in 1870. [39]  Grants Chapel near York began as brush arbor. [40]  Others eventually were organized in areas where there had been Methodist churches before the war.

The Presbyterians apparently did nothing, although they were affiliated with the Congregational churches [41] who sponsored the American Missionary Society.  So, despite the openness of some churches to slaves before 1860, there’s no evidence any African-American Presbyterian group ever existed in the county.

Freedom of worship remained conditional for both Blacks and poor whites.  The Southern Methodist church had proscribed the Holiness movement in 1894. [42]  It entered the county surreptitiously through a revival held by Arthur Kiergan that provoked the formation of the Church of God Holiness Church in Cuba in 1886. [43]

The more radical Pentecostal movement was squelched.  Robert Spratt recalled a skating rink

“became a ‘Holy Roller’ tabernacle for a while.  The sect never obtained a real foothold here, and most of those who took part in the services were from other places.  Some of the believers would roll on the floor and speak in unknown tongues.  The people here attended the services and took much interest in these proceedings.” [44]

Blacks were equally monitored.  As mentioned in the post for 23 January 2019, Ruby Pickens Tartt’s father would drive out on Sunday mornings to listen to services from outside.  Even though Charles Harrison Mason organized the Church of God in Christ in Mississippi, there’s never been a COGIC church in the county that left a record.  Instead, a few Church of Gods were organized. [45]  This was one of the alternatives to Mason’s church [46] organized by men who did not accept speaking in tongues. [47]

Instead, local Baptist conventions expanded.  In 1934, the Hope Hill Association in Demopolis held a singing convention that brought together participants from Sumter, Greene, Hale, and Marengo counties. [48]  This most likely was the way “Come by Here” breached the walls of the county to enter the repertoire of someone Tartt knew later in the decade.

Graphic
African-American Churches in Sumter County by Period
Blue - Churches in existence by 1895 when Charles Octavius Boothe published his list of Baptist groups. [49]  The map also included other churches mentioned in sources like Heritage, Jenkins, and Spratt.

Red - Churches that came into existence between 1895 and 1980 when James Pate did his survey. [50]  The map included ones mentioned by Tartt. [51]

Green - Churches mentioned since Pate, taken from Home Locator and other contemporary websites.

Base map from G. A. Swenson, et alia.  Soil Survey of Sumter County, Alabama.  Washington: United States Department of Agriculture, May 1941.  3, “Sketch map showing topographic divisions of Sumter County.”  Locations approximate.

End Notes
1.  These were Livingston Methodist Episcopal [52] and the more radical Pleasant Grove Methodist Protestant in Panola. [53]

2.  These were Gainesville [54] and Elizabeth in Gaston. [55]

3.  I’m sure someone has done research on slave balconies, but I haven’t found it.  If anyone knows of a paper or dissertation, please let me know.  Most items are architectural comments that make rosy assumptions about the motives of the churches that not may not be based on contemporary observations.

4.  Nelle Morris Jenkins.  Pioneer Families of Sumter County, Alabama.  Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Willo Publishing Company, 1961.  Reprinted by Bloutsville, Alabama: The Yarbrough National Genealogical and Historical Association, 14 June 2015.  20.

5.  Berry Smith.  “Ex-slave, Scott County.”  WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from  Mississippi. [56]  Collected by W. B. Allison, rewritten by Pauline Loveless, reprinted by Alan Brown and David Taylor.  94–98 in Gabr’l Blow Sof’.  Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1997.  94.

6.  Jenkins.  43.

7.  “Livingston Presbyterian Church.”  50–51 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.  51.  Based on Ralph M. Lyon.  “A History of the Livingston Presbyterian Church, 1833 – 1958.”  1977.  Alabama Church and Synagogue Records Collection, Alabama Department of Archives and History.

8.  Classified Population of the States and Territories by Counties on the First Day of June, 1860.  Section on Alabama posted on United States Census website.  Table 1.  “Population by Age and Sex.”  5.

9.  These numbers primarily are based on reports in Heritage, Jenkins, and Robert D. Spratt.  A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama.  Edited by Nathaniel Reed.  Livingston: University of West Alabama, 1997.

10.  Jud K. Arrington.  “Sumterville Baptist Church.”  Arrington collection.  52 in Heritage.

11.  T. A. Deland and A. Davis Smith.  “Jeremiah H. Brown.”  From Northern Alabama, Historical and Biographical.  Birmingham, Alabama: Smith and Deland, 1888.  219.  “He gave them every Saturday the entire day for their own, and furnished them with good churches and white preachers on Sunday, and saw that they had a reasonable amount of instruction and religious training.”  Brown is mentioned in the posts for 22 September 2019 and 22 November 2020.

12.  Amy Chapman.  “The Masters Good but Overseers Mean.”  Transcribed by Ruby Pickens Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [57]  128–129 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. 129.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [58]

13.  Scarborough is discussed in the post for 22 November 2020.

14.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Amy Chapman’s Funeral.”  79– 83 in Brown and Owens.  80.

15.  George Young.  “Peter Had No Keys ’ceptin His.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  120–122 in Brown and Owens.  121.  A fuller quotation appears in the post for 22 September 2019.

16.  Horn is discussed in the posts for 22 September 2020 and 22 November 2020.  

17.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Alice.”  Southwest Review 34:192–195:1949.  Reprinted by Brown and Owens.  103.  Her source from Josh Horn.  A fuller quotation appears in the post for 22 September 2020.

18.  Young.  121.
19.  Peter Kolchin.  First Freedom.  Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972.  109.

20.  Bettie Tolbert.  “Lost to the Refugee Wagons.”  Transcribed by Tartt.  127–139 in Brown and Owens.  137.  “Marse Abner died right after he done finish a sermon to us (’cause he preach first to the white folks, then to the niggers).”

21.  fdmal.  “Rev Abner Rasberry Scarborough.”  Find a Grave website.  12 August 2009.
22.  Kolchin.  80.

23.  Walter L. Fleming.  Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905.  459.  The Bureau head was Wager Swayne.

24.  Fleming.  272.

25.  Sledge’s religious role was remembered by Blacks, but was not mentioned at the time by whites.  They only recalled the name of his former owner.

26.  Reuben A. Meridith.  Testimony, Livingston, Alabama.  2 November 1871.  United States Congress.  Joint Select Committee.  The Condition of Affairs in Late Insurrectionary States.  Alabama.  Volume III.  Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872.  1771.  As mentioned in the post for 22 September 2019, this was at a time when state law required “five respectable slave-holders” be present whenever a Black preached.

27.  Cherise Williams Newsome.  “Her Quest to Fill Genealogical Gaps.”  The [Norfolk] Virginian-Pilot.  29 January 2014.  18–19 in the advertising supplement.”  Her subject was Thelma Young Carroll, whose father was a relative of Burke.

28.  George W. Houston.  Testimony, Montgomery, Alabama.  17 October 1671.  Alabama.  Volume II.  998.  Houston is discussed in the post for 13 September 2020.

29.  Ida Gayle.  “Black Bluff Missionary Baptist Church.”  Collected by Jud Arrinton.  Tutwiler Library.  44 in Heritage.

30.  “A Brief History of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, Bellamy, AL.”  47 in Heritage.

34.  Gayle.  Whitfield was too well connected to be harassed by the Klan.  His father, [59] James Bryan Whitfield, [60] was the brother of Nathan Bryan Whitfield, a powerful man living in nearby Demopolis.  Andrew Johnson personally pardoned Nathan’s son for his activities during the war. [61]

35.  Kolchin.  111–112.
36.  Kolchin.  108.
37.  Kolchin.  110.
38.  “Brief History of A.M.E. Zion Church — Livingston, Alabama.”  64–65 in Heritage.

39.  “Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.”  Encyclopædia Britannica website.  20 July 1998; last updated by Satyavrat Nirala on 11 August 2014.  Discussions for the new denomination began in 1866.  The name was changed from “Colored” to “Christian” in 1956.

40.  Anne Gyps.  “History of Zion Hill Baptist Church.”  65 in Heritage.

41.  In 1801, Presbyterians and Congregationalists agreed to combine flocks on the Ohio frontier and use whichever clergymen were present.  The Plan of Union was brokered by Jonathan Edwards. [62]

42.  The reaction of Methodist hierarchies to Phoebe Palmer’s theory of Holiness is discussed in the post for 9 February 2020.

43.  Elizabeth Geeslin.  “The History of the Cuba Church of God (Holiness).” 44 in Heritage.  Kiergan left the Southwestern Holiness Association to form the Church of God in 1883. [63]  I suspect the revival was held in Mississippi where the new denomination had churches. [64]  The Cuba church was organized before the  economic independence discussed in the post for 20 September 2020.

44.  Spratt.  108.

45.  James Pate.  “Survey of Black Churches in Sumter County Alabama 1980-1981.”  University of Western Alabama website.

46.  The Church of God in Christ is discussed in the post for 23 December 2017.
47.  Wikipedia.  “Original Church of God or Sanctified Church.”

48.  Item.  The Demopolis [Alabama] Times.  11 October 1934.  1.  Posted by stamfordwalker.  4 July 2019.  Tammy Jackson Montgomery and Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine reprinted a program from the 52nd meeting of the Mount Hermon District Singing Convention held in 1970.  They indicated that group used shaped notes. [65]

49.  Charles Octavius Boothe.  The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama.  Birmingham: Alabama Publishing Company, 1895.  59.

50.  Pate.

51.  Brown and Owens provided a “map of Sumter County showing where Ruby Pickens Tartt found singers and storytellers” on page vi.

52.  Spratt.  20.  “There was a gallery for slaves—unless the preaching was for slaves especially and then the white people occupied the gallery.”

53.  Jud K. Arrington.  “Pleasant Grove (Shady Grove) Methodist Church.”  Arrington collection, Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  57 in Heritage.

54.  Caption for photograph of Gainesville Presbyterian Church.  19 in Heritage.

55.  Jud K. Arrington.  “Elizabeth Presbyterian Church (1838 — 1946).”  Arrington collection.  47 in Heritage.  The balcony continued to be used “(at least with former slaves) through the 1870s.”

56.  For more information on the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

57.  For more information on Tartt’s involvement with the WPA, see the post for 23 January 2019.

58.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.
59.  “James George Whitfield.”  Ancestry website.
60.  “Gen. James Bryan Whitfield.”  Geni website.  23 April 2019.
61.  Wikipedia.  “Whitfield Family of the United States.”

62.  Sydney E. Ahlstrom.  A Religious History of the American People.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.  456.

63.  Wikipedia.  “Church of God (Holiness).”

64.  Charles Edwin Jones.  “Churches of God.”  67–68 in The A to Z of the Holiness Movement.  Edited by William Kostlevy.  Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2010.

65.  Tammy Jackson Montgomery and Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine.  Back Then.  University of Western Alabama website.  54.  Leola S. Moore provided the copy.