African Methodist Episcopal Church

[This entry contains two subentries dealing with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, from its founding in the mid-eighteenth century through 1895. The first article provides a discussion of its relationship with its parent church and reasons for its breakaway, while the second article also includes discussion of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the role of both these institutions in African American society.]

The Origins of the African Methodist Episcopal Church through 1830

Methodism arose in England as part of a movement within the established Anglican Church. It was carried to North America by the great English evangelists John Wesley in 1735 and George Whitefield in 1738. Systematic Methodist preaching began in the mid-Atlantic colonies in the 1760s; following the development of the system of circuits and itinerant preaching, membership spread rapidly. Among the most fervent converts were African Americans, who were drawn to the weak and struggling movement by the evangelical message of the priesthood of all believers and the dynamic of conversion.

Although Methodists were not immune to racial prejudice, the biracial character of early revivals, the public opposition of many of the English itinerant preachers to slavery, and the controversial ministry of some of the American-born preachers to the enslaved added to the denomination's appeal to African Americans. There was no official church policy, but Methodists' identification with the antislavery movement as well as their pacifism during the Revolutionary era led to wartime persecution and a powerful backlash against the denomination. The war and slavery forced most of the English itinerant preachers to flee the country, and sharpened the sense of distance between American and English Methodism. At the Christmas conference of 1784 American Wesleyans organized as the Methodist Episcopal Church.

By that time a core of able and articulate black church leaders had emerged. Respectful of their deep spirituality and the power and authority they commanded among their own people, Methodist leaders readily sent black men on itinerant missions but were reluctant to admit them to the church establishment. A shortage of white preachers and persistent pressure from black men eventually forced church leaders to yield. In 1799 Richard Allen, a former slave, was ordained a deacon by Francis Asbury, and in 1800 the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church agreed to ordain local deacons. Black women, who made up a substantial part of all Methodist congregations—and formed a clear majority in many—also claimed the right to exercise religious authority by virtue of the priesthood of all believers. Though denied admission to the religious establishment on biblical and doctrinal grounds, black women such as Zilpha Elaw and Jarena Lee claimed spiritual ordination and functioned as “self-ordained” preachers. But it was primarily as visionaries and as exhorters, offering prayer and testimony to prepare the congregation for the conversion experience, that most women exercised religious influence. The visionary mode was believed to be a form of enthusiasm especially well suited to the female temperament.

The proselytizing efforts of black men and women resulted in the rapid rise of societies with predominantly or exclusively black membership, although black Methodists were members of many biracial churches. White Methodism gave black religious life its basic shape and substance, but traditional African beliefs and practices more definitively influenced black religious life; thus African American Methodists developed a spiritual identity that was both similar to and different from their African spiritual roots as well as white religious culture.

Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia, drawn in 1829 by William L. Breton. The church was founded by Richard Allen in 1794 and rebuilt in 1805.

Library Company of Philadelphia.

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In general, black churches adhered to the same organizational forms, doctrine, and polity and used the same liturgical forms, prayers, and music as white churches. Yet black churches also developed their own distinctive ethos and character. Black Methodists interpreted the rhetoric of conversion, with its powerful themes of deliverance and divine justice, literally—stirring up vigorous activism among black converts. The hymns of Isaac Watts were standard in all Methodist worship, but music took on a primary role in black churches: songs were the source of sermon material and religious instruction alike for the largely illiterate enslaved population. The blending of prose sermon and music and the affective nature of black worship sharply distinguished it from that of whites—especially after 1815, when white Methodist worship became far more circumspect.

In the quarter century after the American Revolution, Methodism grew at a phenomenal rate, reaching a quarter million congregants by 1820 and a half million by 1830. Between 1800 and 1815 the number of black Methodists doubled from twenty thousand to over forty thousand, representing nearly one-third of the American Methodist population at the time. The growth and geographical expansion of black Methodism coincided with a rise in demand by blacks for full integration into the Christian community and the right to exercise authority within their own congregations. Until the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822 put a stop to it, there was a distinct movement among large black urban churches toward the creation of separate churches. The first such secession was precipitated by racial discrimination: Jacob Fortie led the black members of the Lovely Lane and Strawberry Hill meetinghouses of Baltimore to withdraw after the white membership forbade black members to take communion with whites. Although Asbury denied their request to form a distinctly “African yet Methodist church” that “in temporals, shall be altogether under their own direction,” the black secessionists were eventually able to establish two black churches in Baltimore: Sharp Street and Bethel.

Richard Allen, the first black Methodist to be ordained a deacon, and Absalom Jones, a religious leader of Philadelphia's free black community seemed to be moving in the same direction. In September 1790 they established the Free African Society, perhaps the first black mutual aid society in the United States. Frustrated with the arrogance and discrimination they experienced in Saint George's Methodist Church of Philadelphia, the two left to establish two African churches: Saint Thomas's African Episcopal Church and Bethel Methodist Church. The precipitating incident for their departure from Saint George's occurred one Sunday during prayers, when the Reverend Jones was rudely pulled from his knees by white elders and told to retire to segregated seating in the gallery. When the prayer was over “we all went out of the church in a body, and they were no longer plagued by us in the church,” as Richard Allen remembered it. By the turn of the century an estimated 40 percent of Philadelphia's fifteen hundred black Methodists had joined one of the two African churches.

Until 1816, however, Bethel remained part of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Through skillful negotiation, Allen was able to assume a degree of autonomy for Bethel by limiting membership to “descendants of the African race.” The struggle for independence intensified over control of property and the right to name preachers to lead Bethel's thirteen-hundred-member congregation. At one point the congregation blocked the aisles to prevent white preachers from mounting the pulpit. The controversy was ultimately resolved by a court decision ruling in favor of Allen's church. In 1816 Bethel joined with black congregations from Baltimore, Maryland; Salem, New Jersey; and Attleborough, Pennsylvania to form the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with Allen serving as its first bishop.

The development of a separate institutional life coincided with gradual emancipation in the northern states and the 1800 Gabriel conspiracy in Virginia to produce a powerful backlash that took different regional forms. In the slaveholding states efforts were renewed to reinforce the structure of slavery through comprehensive laws aimed at controlling the enslaved population and regulating relationships between the races. In the northern states the black-removal movement was formulated. A crucial step in effecting removal was the development of pictorial and literary representations that caricatured black Americans as evil or stupid and ridiculed their manners, dress, and dialect, creating a differentiated social identity that became the justification for literal removal. Throughout New England persons of color were “warned out” of towns and cities, were excluded from public schools and jury and militia service, had their mere presence taxed, and were denied or given restricted rights of suffrage. The culmination of these developments was the organization in 1817 of the American Colonization Society, the ultimate goal of which was the transportation of free persons of color to Liberia.

While the American Colonization Society represented the first institutional effort at removal, the colonization movement began in the 1780s when Thomas Jefferson, among others, argued for the “resettlement” of free people of color in Africa. Alarmed or inspired by the growing assertiveness of persons of color, slaveholders, northern reformers, Federalists, and evangelical Protestant clergy threw their support behind the colonization movement. A complex of motivations stirred evangelicals, some of whom viewed colonization as a strategy to end slavery and others as a means for black Americans to escape oppression. Some saw persons of color as agents of moral disorder or, alternatively, as mediators of African conversion or even as instruments for the transmission of “republican” values and practices to Africa.

Although some black nationalists later supported emigration, black Americans were almost universally opposed to colonization, which David Walker characterized as

"a plan got up, by a gang of slaveholders to select the free people of colour from among the slaves, that our most miserable brethren may be the better secured in ignorance and wretchedness, to work their farms and dig their mines, and thus go on enriching the Christians with their blood and groans."

(Hinks, p. 58) A combination of factors, including the vigorous opposition of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, the wide circulation of William Lloyd Garrison's influential Thoughts on African Colonization after 1832, and the impracticability of the project, contributed to an abatement of support for the strategy of colonization.

Bibliography

Frederickson, George. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Frey, Sylvia R. ‘The Year of Jubilee Is Come’: Black Christianity in the Plantation South in Post-Revolutionary America. In Religion in a Revolutionary Age, edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.
Frey, Sylvia R., and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Friedman, Lawrence J. Inventors of the Promised Land. New York: Knopf, 1975.
George, Carol V. R. Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches, 1760–1840. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Hinks, Peter P., ed. David Walker's “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.” University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.
Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Sylvia Frey

The Ame Church and Ame Zion Church through 1895

The origin of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church is tied to the beginnings of the American Methodist movement in 1760; blacks had been present in the denomination since those beginnings. In the Revolutionary period this black presence was the result of Wesleyan Methodism's vigorous antislavery sentiments, drawing many slaves and free blacks alike. Such sentiments declined after 1784, however, giving way to increased segregation in Methodist congregations; such segregation spawned the AME Church. In 1787 a Sunday liturgy at Saint George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia was interrupted when an overly zealous white parishioner attempted to remove several black parishioners, including Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, to the area of the church designated for blacks. Thereupon many black members of the congregation followed Allen and Jones as they walked out of the church. The group of walkouts would split: some black dissenters followed Jones into the Episcopal Church, while others followed Allen and remained committed to Methodism.

Bishops of the A.M.E. Church, lithograph by J. H. Daniels of Boston, c. 1876. The portraits are of Richard Allen (center) and (clockwise from twelve o'clock) Morris Brown, William Paul Quinn, Daniel A. Payne, Jabez P. Campbell, Thomas Ward, John M. Brown, Jason A. Shorter, Alexander W. Wayman, Willis Nazrey, and Edward Waters. Surrounding them are scenes that include Wilberforce University, Payne Institute, missionaries in Hawaii, and the church's book depository in Philadelphia.

Library of Congress.

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Richard Allen was a slave who purchased his freedom and converted to Methodism in 1777. In 1783 and 1784 he served as an itinerant Methodist preacher in Delaware and New Jersey before settling in Philadelphia. By 1788 some of the dissenters who had originally followed Absalom Jones returned to Allen's group; Allen then used his own money to construct a church called Bethel, a name that would become synonymous with the AME Church. By 1794 the growing segregationist practices of the American Methodist churches from Baltimore to New Jersey had driven out many black members. Allen traveled extensively among these black Methodists, preaching and reaffirming the Methodist faith. On 9 April 1816 representatives from these dissident black Methodist congregations, including Richard Allen, met in Philadelphia. This group, representing over one thousand black Methodists, resolved to establish the African Methodist Episcopal Church and to elect Allen as its first bishop. In the following years the AME Church grew quickly; by 1822 its membership had risen to over nine thousand members, and its congregations ranged across the North, from Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The AME Church and its members were dedicated to education. This commitment first came to institutional fruition in 1842, when various congregations took action to provide educational programs for their children. This emphasis on education was the keystone of the work of the AME Church's sixth bishop, Daniel Payne. Payne was born a free black in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1829 he opened a school for both free and enslaved black children, but in 1835 a South Carolina law made the teaching of those demographic groups illegal, forcing Payne to flee to New York. In the North he was associated with the Lutheran and Presbyterian churches before Morris Brown, Bishop Allen's successor, invited him to join the AME Church. Payne became an early advocate for an educated clergy. At the general conference of the AME Church in 1841 he wrote resolutions establishing a course of studies for the education of the clergy.

The segregationist practices of the Methodist Church in the late eighteenth century eventually spawned a second black church as well; the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was an evolutionary process that occurred between 1780 and the 1820s. The process began with the recognition by the New York Conference of the Methodist Church of blacks' right to have their own church meetings. In 1796 the blacks of the Jones Street Church in New York established their own “African Chapel,” which led to construction of the AME Zion Church in 1800.

The separation went into its final stage in 1820, when white dissent arose in the New York conference regarding the authority of the clergy and the lack of lay representation in church government. The Reverend William Stilwell, the white elder in charge of the black AME Zion Church, broke with the conference over the issue of control over church property. The lay members of the conference had prevailed in their attempt to divest the ministers of property control and transfer that control to the laity. Lacking a minister, the members of the AME Zion Church looked to the New York and Philadelphia conferences to ordain black ministers and establish a black conference. When the local conferences refused to ordain blacks and the General Conference of the American Methodist Church in 1824 refused to authorize a black conference, four black congregations—Zion, Long Island, Wesleyan, and Easton—moved to establish the AME Zion Church. This second black Methodist church did not grow as quickly as the AME Church; by 1831 the AME Zion Church had only 1,689 members.

Despite its smaller membership, the AME Zion Church was extremely active in antislavery activities, and many of its members were personally involved. Its mission churches in upstate New York, from Rochester to Buffalo, were important links on the Underground Railroad. The AME Zion Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts, was critical in assisting Frederick Douglass after his escape from slavery in 1838. Douglass and other prominent black abolitionists, such as Sojourner Truth (originally Isabella Baumfree) and Harriet Tubman, were members of the AME Zion Church. These individuals and their actions led many during the antebellum period to refer to the AME Zion Church as the “freedom church.”

The AME Church also vigorously opposed slavery. Richard Allen's own home was a haven for fugitive slaves. Bishop Morris Brown served as an adviser to Denmark Vesey; when Vesey's 1822 attempt at a slave revolt in South Carolina failed, Brown barely escaped to the North. In the 1830s the church opposed the American Colonization Society's efforts to resettle free blacks in Africa, arguing that blacks were Americans and that the United States was their country as much as it was white Americans' country. In 1850, 1854, and 1856, the AME Church's general conference passed a series of formal resolutions calling for the end of slavery.

Prior to the Civil War, the missionary efforts of the AME and AME Zion churches were limited to the North, as such efforts in the South were seen as inflammatory and a threat to the slave system. The end of the Civil War opened up the entire South to the two black churches, and by 1880 their organizations had spread throughout the Old South. The two often found themselves in direct competition, resulting in bitter confrontations and occasionally in legal action over the ownership of church property. Bishop Daniel Payne, who had been forced to abandon his earlier efforts to educate blacks in South Carolina, returned in 1865 to assist in the establishment of the South Carolina conference, which included the Carolinas and Georgia. The AME Zion Church's representatives were close behind, establishing that church's North Carolina conference for the same region.

The bishop Henry M. Turner's efforts were the epitome of the efforts of the AME Church as a whole in the post–Civil War South. Turner began as a Methodist Episcopal preacher in 1860; soon after accepting a pastorate in Baltimore, he began recruiting blacks for the U.S. Army. He served as a chaplain for black troops and after the war accepted an appointment as a Freedmen's Bureau agent. He divided his time between religion and politics: he became the AME Church's major organizer in Georgia and was also elected a delegate to the Georgia Constitutional Convention in 1868 and 1870 and later to the Georgia State senate. In 1880 he was elected bishop at the AME Church's general conference. In the 1890s he left the United States and led the establishment of the AME Church in West Africa and South Africa.

During the post–Civil War period, the AME Church intensified its focus on education. In 1865 the church purchased Wilberforce University from the Methodist Church. Bishop Payne presided over the school for more than a decade, establishing it as a preeminent black university. Thereafter the church moved quickly to establish institutions of higher learning for blacks throughout the South. These would include Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina (1870); Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia (1881); Daniel Payne College in Birmingham, Alabama (1880); Shorter College in North Little Rock, Arkansas (1886); and several others.

Juliann Jane Tillman, lithograph printed by Peter S. Duval from a portrait by A. Hoffy. It has the caption “Preacher of the A.M.E. Church” and is dated Philadelphia 1844. Women were not allowed to become leaders of the A.M.E. church in its early years, but they were permitted to teach and preach.

Library of Congress.

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As the nineteenth century came to an end, the AME Church had grown from an obscure black denomination with a thousand members into the leading black church in the world, with over 400,000 members and with congregations in the North and South of the United States as well as in Africa and the Caribbean.

Bibliography

George, Carol V. R. Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches, 1760–1840. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. An excellent study of the role of Richard Allen and the development of the AME and AME Zion churches.
Payne, Daniel A. History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. New York: Arno Press, 1969. The original authorized history of the church as prepared by the official historian.
Richardson, Harry V. Dark Salvation: The Story of Methodism as It Developed among the Blacks in America. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976. A comparative study that interrelates the development of American Methodism, AME, AME Zion, and other black Methodist churches.

Thomas E. Carney

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