Church bodies have been formed for any number of reasons--some noble and some not so noble. Few denominations have had their origins explicitly in witness against social evil, but there have been some. One such group was the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America, the oldest branch of the present Wesleyan Church formed by merger in 1968. The Wesleyan Methodists emerged as a protest against Methodist compromise on the issue of slavery.
Early Methodism had been characterized by vigorous opposition to slavery. As early as 1743 Wesley had written into his “General Rules” a prohibition against “the buying and selling the bodies and souls of men, women, and children, with an intention to enslave them.” His 1774 Thoughts Upon Slavery condemned “every gentleman that has an estate in our American plantations; yea, ALL SLAVEHOLDERS OF WHATEVER RANK AND DEGREE; seeing men-buyers are exactly on a level with man-stealers. You therefore are guilty, yea PRINCIPALLY GUILTY, of all these frauds, robberies, and murders. You are the spring that puts all the rest into motion.” And Wesley’s last letter, written just a few days before his death, encouraged William Wilberforce in his fight against “that execrable villainy” in these words: “Go on, in the name of God, and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.”
American Methodism attempted for awhile to maintain these standards. The 1784 founding conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church had called for the immediate expulsion of any member engaging in the slave trade. But with the development of Methodism into the largest American denomination, this stance was gradually abandoned. When faced with the alternative of growing either into a national church or maintaining discipline on the slavery issue, Methodism chose growth and prosperity. By the 1820s and 1830s the Methodists had largely accommodated themselves to the institution of slavery, maintaining at most, in some quarters, a vague disapproval.
But the growth of abolitionism in the 1830s again sensitized the consciences of some Methodists. Foremost among these was Orange Scott. Born into a penniless Vermont home in 1800, Scott had received only a few scattered months of education and was not converted until the age of 21. But Scott gave himself immediately to the Methodist ministry, and despite handicaps in background and education, developed into a powerful leader and preacher. By 1830 he was elected a “Presiding Elder” and some were beginning to predict that he would be a bishop.
But this promising church career was interrupted by a “crisis of conscience.” At the age of 33, Orange Scott became an abolitionist. Though “ashamed to confess it” later, Scott lamented that until that time he had been “ignorant of some important principles or features of civil rights.” As he expressed himself years afterwards on his deathbed, “being wholly devoted to the one idea of saving souls, I omitted to examine, faithfully and critically as I should, the condition of the country in respect to great moral evils. My eyes, however, were opened.”
Scott studied The Liberator of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionist writings for a year and then declared himself an abolitionist. Soon thereafter he spent $100 of his own money (no small amount in that time for a Methodist preacher!) to subscribe to The Liberator for three months in the name of 100 ministers of the New England Conference. Before the subscriptions expired, a majority of the conference was converted to abolitionism. As a result the New England delegation to the General Conference of 1836 was abolitionist.
Here the real confrontation began and here Scott was propelled into national leadership. Scott became the key abolitionist in extended debates on slavery. Though one observer characterized his debating as “a noble and lofty effort; calm, dignified, generous, Christian,” his opponents insisted that Scott was either “a reckless incendiary or non compos mentis.” One opponent was heard to mutter somewhat euphemistically on the conference floor, “I wish to God he were in heaven.” But in spite of Scott’s work the conference delegates resolved (by a vote of 120 to 14) to express themselves as “decidedly opposed to modern abolitionism, and wholly disclaim any right, wish or intention to interfere in the civil and political relationship between master and slave, as it exists in the slave-holding States of the Union.” The intent of this motion was made clear when the Conference refused an amendment proposed by Scott and others that would add words taken directly from the Methodist Discipline to the effect that “we are as much as ever convinced of the great evil of slavery.”
This resolution became the excuse for the suppression of anti-slavery discussion within the Methodist Episcopal Church. That year Scott’s bishop said that he would reappoint Scott to the “Presiding Eldership” only if he would promise to cease lecturing and writing on the subject of slavery. Scott refused and was demoted. Elsewhere bishops and church leaders refused to allow anti-slavery resolutions to come before annual conferences, assigned abolitionist ministers to either “hard scrabble” circuits or to churches where the anti-abolitionist feeling was so strong that they would be crushed, brought ministers to trial for attending abolitionist meetings or even reading abolitionist literature.
Feelings were intense during this period. Those opposing the abolitionists viewed them with real fear. One attack was entitled Abolition: a Sedition. The author objected to the argument that “slavery is wrong by a higher and more imperative law than that of the country” insisting that such a position led to an unconstitutional intrusion of religion into the civil realm. Abolitionism, moreover, for this author, distorted the true nature of Christianity, for “it is to the conservative power of Christianity, that we owe our greatest blessings.” He feared, too, that abolitionism tended to anarchy by leveling “all distinctions in society, of rank, color, caste, and sex” (his italics in both cases).
The tensions mounted. The abolitionists insisted that slavery was “sin” and that the churches were the “bulwark of slavery.” Their opponents feared anarchy and saw the abolitionists as “subversive” of “law and order.” The pressures became unbearable, and Scott himself left the ministry for two years to serve as one of the “Seventy” agents sent out by the American Anti-Slavery Society to spread the gospel of abolitionism as Jesus had sent out his seventy disciples. But Scott insisted that though “I closed up and left the ‘regular work’ of a stationed preacher ... I still profess to be engaged in the ‘regular and appropriate work’ of a gospel minister.”
Scott returned to his church in 1839, but by this time sentiment was growing for the establishment of a new Methodist body that was truly “Wesleyan” and unflinchingly devoted to reform principles. At first these ministers tried to avoid the charge of schism, arguing that it was more to the point to insist that “anti-abolition measures tend to schism.” But after a long struggle, Scott finally decided that there was no alternative but “stand forth for a new anti-slavery, anti-intemperance, anti-everything-wrong, church organization,” and the Wesleyan Methodist Church was formed in the early 1840s.
It is difficult now to recreate the ethos of this new denomination. Though focused on the issue of slavery, they tended to become “universal reformers.” Something of their spirit may be seen in the title of an early hymnal, Miriam’s Timbrel: Sacred Songs Suited to Revival Occasions; and also for Anti-Slavery, Peace, Temperance and Reform Meetings. This hymnal consists of songs appropriate for each type of rally--as well as a general section of “Songs for the Reformer.” Among the latter the following is typical:
We will speak out. We will be heard,
Though all earth’s systems crack.
We will not bate a single word Nor take a letter back.
We speak the Truth, and what care we
For hissing and for scorn
While some faint gleamings we can see
Let liars fear; let cowards shrink; Let Traitors turn away.
Whatever we have dared to think that dare we also say.
Wesleyans tested the spirituality of a church by its commitment to reform, but refused to substitute reform for piety. Orange Scott warned the young church in 1845 that “Deep Experience in the things of God is essential to the peace and usefulness of all Christians; but especially is it essential to any class of Christian Reformers.” Wesleyans spoke often of the conjunction of “piety and radicalism.”
Another characteristic of the Wesleyans was specificity in their attack on social evil. Scott insisted that “in opposing sin, the power of the Gospel must be brought to bear upon particular evils. Generalizing will not answer. We must particularize.” And in this Scott believed in starting at home by at tacking “especially popular sins and sins of the Church.”
The Wesleyans did not center their attack on the South and the churches of the South. Scott insisted that “all northern Christians, who neglect to lift up the warning voice and refuse to take sides with God’s suffering poor, are scarcely less guilty.” This involved a sense of “corporate guilt” that is made explicit in a statement of George Pegle stating why he left the Methodist Protestants to join the Wesleyans Though lengthy, its contemporary relevance justifies extensive quotation:
We believe that the churches of the North are responsible for the continuance of slavery….
First, the churches at the North, as well as at the, South, hold the slave-holder in Christian fellowship, thus endorsing his Christian character and esteeming him as a brother beloved, and thus justifying his daily acts of man stealing.
Second, by members of the northern churches voting at elections for the man-thief, and his apologist, thus giving evidence that they approve of the wicked laws they enact, whereby they oppress the poor. This is done every year. And the church approves of these acts, and is thus striking hands with the oppressor instead of being a reprover of those who commit the deeds of darkness.
Third, the members of the northern churches sustain those parties that make those civil laws which crush the poor colored man in their midst; and among those who are victims of this cruel class legislation are many who are members of their own church.
Fourth, in most of the churches at the North the “negro pew” is erected, thus showing that they despise the poor, and have “become respecters of persons.”
Fifth, but few of the churches at the North will allow their doors to be open to plead the cause of the poor and oppressed. They are willing to hear harangues in praise of Henry Clay, or Martin Van Buren, or any slave-holder or his apologist, but the man who will dare to open his mouth for the dumb or attempt to exhibit the wickedness and wrongs of slavery will have the door shut in his face; or if he be allowed to speak, his views will be distorted and himself held up to ridicule; or maybe he will be represented as a Traitor to his country, an enemy to republicanism, and often be in personal danger from the fury of a pro-slavery mob, headed by officers and prominent members of a Christian church.
But this emphasis on the role of the northern churches must not be taken to mean that the Wesleyans ignored the South or were afraid to tackle slavery directly. In 1847 Adam Crooks answered a call to go to North Carolina. He wrote in his diary, “I turned my face to go to the far south, to pronounce that Gospel which proclaims liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prisons to them that are bound.” Such “missionaries” were mobbed, dragged into court, imprisoned, etc. At least one Wesleyan minister was lynched. But they set about founding churches with such names as “Freedom Hill” and “Lovejoy Memorial Chapel.” (Lovejoy was an abolitionist editor martyred by a mob wishing to destroy his paper.) Crooks himself wrote back from the South, “opposition to my course is great. My image was tarred and feathered in this town . . . some of my friends are beginning to tremble for my personal safety; but my Trust is in the Friend of the poor, the Deliverer of the oppressed.” Crooks eventually had to leave the state to escape imprisonment on the charge of “with force and arms, knowingly, wickedly, and unlawfully, with intention to excite insurrection, conspiracy, and resistance in the slaves and free negroes and persons of color within the state, bringing into the state with the intent to circulate, a printed pamphlet named and styled the ‘Ten Commandments.’”
A racist and slave-holding society viewed the abolitionists as insurrectionists. Perhaps that was not inappropriate. Donald G. Mathews, a recent student of Scott, suggests that “to call him a reformer would be to misunderstand his importance; rather, he was a revolutionary ... He opposed a whole system. He demanded not the reform of slavery, but its abolition, and in doing so, implied the destruction of Southern and even American society as he and his contemporaries knew it. The implication of the abolitionist preaching was a new kind of society much different from the old--an implication only gradually being realized in the 20th century.”
Orange Scott and the Wesleyan Methodists have indeed been vindicated in recent years. What appeared as revolution and insurrection to their contemporaries now appears to us to have been responsible social witness. With clear foresight Luther Lee predicted this in his sermon preached on the death of Orange Scott in 1847: “If it be insisted that he was ultra and rash, it was because he lived in advance of his age. He advocated no sentiments, and resorted to no measures, which are not destined, very soon, to become the moderate sober views of the world.”
When this article appeared, Don Dayton was contributing editor to the Post American, director of the library at North Park Theological Seminary, and a graduate student in theology at the University of Chicago. He grew up in the Wesleyan Methodist Church.
For further reading:
Donald G. Mathews, “Orange Scott: the Methodist Evangelist as Revolutionary” in Martin Duberman, The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), also available in paperback.
Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: a Chapter in American Morality, 1780-1845 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).
L.C. Matlack, The Life of Rev. Orange Scott (New York: C. Prindle and L.C. Matlack, 1847--reprinted by Books for Libraries, 1971).
Orange Scott, The Grounds of Secession from the M.E. Church (New York: C. Prindle, 1848--reprinted by Arno Press, 1969).
For the rest of the series, see below:
Recovering a Heritage, Part I:
Recovering a Heritage, Part II: Evangelical Feminism, by Donald W. Dayton and Lucille Sider
Recovering a Heritage, Part III: The Lane Rebellion and the Founding of
Recovering a Heritage, Part IV: The "Christian Radicalism" of
Recovering a Heritage, Part V: The Rescue Case, by Donald W. Dayton. December 1974.
Recovering a Heritage, Part VI:
Recovering a Heritage, Part VII: The Sermons of Luther Lee, by Donald Dayton. February 1975.
Recovering a Heritage, Part VIII: Theodore Weld, evangelical reformer, by Donald W. Dayton. March 1975.
Recovering a Heritage, Part IX: The Tappan Brothers: businessmen and reform, by Donald Dayton. April 1975.
Recovering a Heritage, Part X, by Donald Dayton. May 1975.
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