Chapter 4
Black Atlanta’s Efforts to Institutionalize a Temperance-Based Moral Community
We need more education and less whiskey, more morals and less politics, (we do not say no politics but less politics), more pure Christianity and less bigotry in religion, more of mental culture and less pampering our bodies and appetites.
One fateful day a teenager “full of liquor” meandered down the street near the Storrs School just as a temperance meeting was about to begin. Rose Kinney, a teacher, invited him inside, and by the end of the meeting the young man had signed the teetotal pledge. His name was George V. Clark, and he was one of the many former slaves who poured into Atlanta following the war. At the time he met up with the missionary work of the AMA he was a porter at a saloon. Miss Kinney and the Reverend Cyrus Francis saw potential in the young man, enrolled him at Storrs, and began to deal with him about his soul. Before long George Clark underwent a conversion experience and joined First Congregational. He eventually graduated from Atlanta University, and in 1881 from Howard University’s School of Divinity. Following his graduation, Clark responded to an invitation to plant a new Congregational church in Athens, Georgia. His church was duly organized, and he was ordained, in April 1882. His new church plant, with only 17 members at first, was initially supported with AMA funds, and when Clarke County held a local option vote in early 1885, he was proud to report that his whole congregation voted “dry,” helping to make the county dry. In the nineties, Clark moved on to pastor self-supporting black Congregational churches in Memphis, Tennessee, and Charleston, South Carolina. Clark was clearly an AMA “success story.”
George V. Clark was not the only “success story” from Atlanta’s missionary schools, and they did not all leave Atlanta. Many remained, becoming local pastors, teachers, and journalists, forming the nucleus of Black Atlanta’s “better classes.” With few exceptions, through the eighties, all of Black Atlanta’s “leaders” had some connection with Northern evangelicals and were overwhelmingly supportive of temperance.
Up to this point this study has focused on the theology, motivations, and activities of Northern evangelicals who insisted on introducing black Atlantans to temperance, regardless of their need. From this point forward it concentrates on the freed people themselves, first examining how the clergy functioned as a critical community by defining Black Atlanta’s intemperance problem and then taking leadership in collective action to address it, first through moral suasion efforts and then through Fulton County’s local option elections. These chapters also argue that black temperance leaders were strongly connected with the religio-cultural traditions of both black and white antebellum evangelical reformers.
Northern free blacks were immersed in the antebellum evangelical reform nexus, which partly accounts for the AME Church’s embrace of temperance. But at the same time, the severe socioeconomic, political, and religious ostracism endured by Northern African Americans encouraged them to perpetuate elements of a distinctly African worldview or cosmology, and this worldview also encouraged temperance values. In the South the continued experience of slavery, combined with the ongoing illegal importation of slaves after 1808 and the general absence of Northern revival theology, created even more intense spaces for blacks to perpetuate elements of traditional African spirituality, although not to the extent of slaves in the Caribbean and Brazil. The Christianity taught by Northern missionaries to the freed people sounded different from what they learned under slavery for more than one reason, but what concerns us here is that Northerners taught a benevolent God, downplayed or rejected the doctrine of original sin, and understood God to be the moral Governor of the universe. None of these ideas would have been the common fare of white clergy employed to preach to slaves, but such ideas connected in meaningful ways with latent and explicit African elements of African Americans’ worldview.
This chapter will briefly review the common elements of traditional African spirituality widely believed by nineteenth-century African Americans and will identify where they intersect with evangelical reform nexus theology. I will then identify ways that the temperance discourse and activism of both Northern antebellum blacks and postbellum black Atlantans reflected these traditions. Subsequent chapters will suggest the ways that these traditions informed black Atlantans’ response to the city’s experiment with prohibition.
“When the Occasion Comes, the Proverb Comes”: The Pragmatic Syncretism of African and African American Spirituality
Just as the Puritans brought their version of Christianity to Massachusetts and the Quakers brought theirs to Pennsylvania, the African immigrants who had come to America involuntarily brought their own religious thought. Over time, the creolization process turned African cultural practices and belief systems into African American ones, as slaves blended elements of their various African cultures with elements of the dominant white culture.1 While scholars debate much about this historical process, it is generally agreed that developing an African American cosmology required slaves to draw on their commonly held beliefs about the nature of, and relationship between, the spirit world and the material world. Some ideas were jettisoned because they were so ethnically unique, while others died out because they did not seem to work in America as they had in Africa. Despite the fact that slaves hailed from many disparate societies, as religion scholar Dianne Stewart notes, there was still a “great deal of cross-cultural consistency . . . especially with regard to metaphysical orientation and religious logic, expression, and function.” These principles coalesced and perpetuated themselves in the black-only spaces created by slavery and the racial segregation following emancipation, and provided the lens through which African Americans interpreted their experiences in America.2
Although U.S. laws generally permitted owners to make almost limitless demands on the time of their slaves, discipline them at will, and sell family members as needed or desired, the one thing a master could not do was control the perceptions and thoughts of his slaves or their conversations when they were out of sight and earshot. While scholarship is divided on the relative cultural importance of these independent spaces, they did exist, and within them, as much as they could, slaves developed their own worldview by telling stories, teaching, preaching, praying, and talking of—and sometimes planning for—individual and corporate freedom. The African American cosmology that coalesced in these spaces was blended, or syncretic. Further syncretism occurred as African Americans adopted and adapted elements of European Christianity to their experience of oppression. The creolization process was multi-generational, and traditional beliefs died hard. Discussed below are the beliefs likely to have had the most influence on how nineteenth-century African Americans interpreted the temperance message and responded to its politicization in local option elections.3
The first, most basic assumption of African cosmology is that the universe is hierarchical and functions on an “ethic of reciprocity.” While names varied, African peoples widely believed (and believe) in a Supreme Being whose duty is to always seek the order and preservation of the human community. Beneath the Supreme Being are various types of lesser spirit beings, mankind, the various plants and animals, and phenomena and objects. The “ethic of reciprocity” meant that “those of higher rank are obligated to protect their subordinates and the duty of the latter is to acknowledge their dependency by always seeking the good will and blessing of the former.” This applies within and between the natural and spiritual worlds. In many African people groups, powerful men were such because they protected and provided for so many people in their clan or lineage, and because large numbers reciprocated by publicly recognizing these individuals’ status and power. Likewise, lesser spirit beings were expected to protect and favor their human devotees in return for lavish worship rituals. Prominent Africanist Karin Barber has argued that in Yoruba culture, spirits (òrì�sà) who fail to answer their devotees’ supplications are ignored and can fade into insignificance because people are free to switch their allegiance to a spirit who will answer their prayers. The relationship between humans and spirit beings is so intimate in African thought that distinctions between the sacred and secular are often blurred in practice, if not in theory.
The second major African concept relevant to this study concerns beliefs about the relationship between the community and the individual, and the nature of evil. In African thinking, an individual’s behavior is judged according to its impact on the community. Behaviors that benefit the community are deemed virtuous, while evil behavior is the opposite. Anything that violates the social order or insults or offends the spirits is evil. An individual’s behavior is never only about himself. Charges of witchcraft are sometimes accompanied by evidence that the individual’s wealth compared to that of others in the community has improved too rapidly. Such exceptional success is enough to raise suspicions of foul play. Evil, then, inheres in the deed, not the person, as Christianity has historically taught. The results of an evil act are presumed to affect the whole community, so often the whole community is expected to respond. Illustrative of this principle is the African tale about a tortoise, an iguana, and a snail hiding under a tree. Birds and monkeys arrived to eat the fruit on the branches, and in the process became very noisy. The tortoise became concerned that the noise would attract a hunter, so he whispered to the iguana to relay a message to the birds and monkeys to quiet down, but a hunter came along before the iguana could hear clearly what the tortoise wanted him to do. The tortoise had warned the iguana that “death begins by one person,” by which he meant that all the animals might die even if only a few of them were acting inappropriately. Such folktales encouraged Africans to be their brother’s keeper “or else suffer for sins that he has not committed.”4
It is from this individual-community relationship that African thought, per se, arises. African thought—ethics, philosophy, and theology—largely arises from efforts to address disorder within the human community. As a result, traditional African ethics is situational and theology is contextual, as reflected by the Ashanti proverb, “When the occasion comes, the proverb comes.” People judge actions according to their effectiveness. One’s position or status could be contingent on their efficaciousness. For example, if a shaman’s prophecies or cures repeatedly fail, it is not unheard of for them to be rejected, dismissed, or even punished by the village. Facilitating this utilitarian or pragmatic orientation was the absence of the concept of orthodoxy from African religions. Africanist John Thornton argues that the belief in continuous revelation and a historically weak priesthood prevented the rise of orthodoxy. While there have always been Christian traditions that accept limited forms of continuous revelation, the faith asserts a closed canon of writings, which has no parallel in African religion. Furthermore, historical Christianity developed a relatively strong priesthood that reserved to itself the privilege of interpreting the closed canon in order to form doctrine. In stark contrast, African cultures do not entertain the concept of an “official” version of a folktale or proverb, for they all exist in several forms, undoubtedly designed out of the exigencies of varying contexts. The absence of a closed canon and a strong priesthood combines with a belief in spirit beings’ ongoing revelations through dreams, visions, spirit mediums, and divination to create a constantly evolving and inclusive religious and ethical orientation. Pragmatic syncretism, then, heavily colored African Americans’ worldview, and they could not help but interpret personal calls for abstinence and the politics of prohibition within its parameters.
African American Spirituality and Reform Nexus Theology
Some African elements of African American thought intersected with key doctrines of the evangelical reform nexus. Increasing numbers of antebellum Americans came to believe that traditional “Five Point” Calvinism—with its emphasis on God’s predestination of only some to heaven, leaving the rest for eternal damnation regardless of their efforts—characterized God as capricious and unreasonable. Partly in response to people’s revulsion to such a characterization of God, the new pro-revival theologians downplayed, and sometimes outright denied, the doctrine of original sin, instead stressing each individual’s ability to work out their own salvation. In a complementary manner, moral government teaching portrayed God as a rational, consistent, and just “Governor” who designed laws to maximize mankind’s happiness. This emphasis on the human ability to do good and God’s benevolence toward mankind is functionally identical to key elements of traditional African spirituality. Finally, the doctrine of disinterested benevolence, the teaching that new converts are obligated to demonstrate their salvation through their benevolent deeds to relieve others’ suffering, bears much resemblance to the African belief defining virtuous behavior as that which benefits the whole community.
The pro-revival theological innovations of the reform nexus, however, did not go unchallenged. Theologians like Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and James Henley Thornwell, among others, mounted vigorous attacks on these “New England” revivalist doctrines, and their attacks found their greatest acceptance in the antebellum South. In fact, the leading historian of antebellum theology, E. Brooks Holifield, argues that the pro-revival doctrines discussed here had “only a token presence” in Southern life. To this reality must be added the fact that slaveholders who arranged for preachers to address their slaves intended such instruction to serve primarily as a motivation “for slave obedience and deference.” The goal of slave submission yielded routine sermons from a relatively small number of Bible passages. Slaves largely dismissed such preaching, seeing it for what it was, and preachers fretted over what seemed to be a low number of conversions. Although many slaves accepted Christianity and practiced much of it out of sight of their masters, they had no sense of the intersections between their worldview and Northerners’ innovations in Christian theology. Since Southern white preachers could only teach abstinence as a form of obedience to the master, if at all, it could be nothing more than an expression of the master’s concern for labor efficiency, which obviously was of little to no concern to the slaves.5
All of this changed when AMA and ABHMS missionaries arrived in Black Atlanta after the Civil War. Whether or not Northern evangelicals delved into the finer points of their doctrines, they taught, preached, and prayed in the presence of the freed people in their schools and churches on the assumption that their nexus doctrines were true, and this could have only made their version of Christianity sound qualitatively different—and more appealing—than that of their former masters. Southern freed people, like Northern blacks before them, probably discerned the overlay between elements of their African American worldview and those of the evangelical missionaries. These similarities likely facilitated the diffusion of temperance values and discourse within Black Atlanta. Similar to Northerners before them, black Atlantans drew on both evangelical and African themes in their temperance efforts. A brief overview of the key elements of Northern antebellum black temperance will provide the basis for discerning these continuities.
“A Subject of Peculiar Importance to Colored People Generally”: Northern Antebellum Black Temperance
Antebellum black temperance discourse and activism evolved within the confines of a painfully racist society.6 Nineteenth-century American white supremacy placed so many economic, political, social, cultural, and religious restrictions on free blacks that they lived as second-class citizens, enjoying a “quasi-freedom.” Their inability to find employment, to advance in employment, to be paid the same as whites for the same work, to vote, to receive an education, to be treated courteously by whites in personal encounters, and sometimes even to assemble peaceably, among other things, made a mockery of blacks’ freedom or, worse, threatened their continued existence as independent individuals and a community of free persons. Their limited economic and political opportunities created a contingent, dependent state of being for Northern African Americans. They lived a precarious, unstable existence with little or no opportunity to improve themselves, as white institutions and structures were mostly closed to them. Complete dependence is the essence of enslavement, so free blacks’ inability to live independently—their continuing state of “dependence,” even though they were ostensibly free—created an existential crisis for Northern blacks. Despair led some to emigrate to places like Haiti, Liberia, or Upper Canada, and even more to talk about doing so. The vast majority, however, remained and fought for the human and civil rights that were rightfully theirs. Successes were so minimal that multiple approaches were tried, and those leading the fight could not easily agree on the best way to make their case for full equality before white society.7
One helpful idea black leaders facing this crisis rallied around was the concept of virtue. The concept of virtue was located at the intersection of African spirituality and reform nexus ideology. As discussed in chapter one, beginning with the era of the American Revolution virtue had repeatedly appeared in American public discourse as the central element of the malleable and ubiquitous ideology of republicanism. Classical republicanism equated economic independence with public virtue, while the Christian version of republicanism equated virtue with personal morality. Using either or both definitions, revolutionary-era patriots had often claimed that because of their virtue they would not, indeed could not, accept being “enslaved” to Britain, and to remain rhetorically consistent they turned and argued that the actual (African) slaves in their midst lacked virtue, thereby justifying their enslavement. Whites even denied that free African Americans were virtuous, which helped them rationalize the less than full citizenship rights extended to free blacks well into the nineteenth century. While the revolutionary generation argued that virtuous people by definition could not be enslaved and were thus compelled to fight for their freedom and independence, in the era of the early republic whites carried their argument to its logical conclusion by arguing that one could not retain one’s freedom and independence without remaining virtuous. Thus, virtuous people would naturally become an independent people, and conversely, all independent people must logically be virtuous and remain virtuous people. This circular reasoning remained a truism of American civic thought for decades.8
Whites’ denial of African Americans’ virtue meant they felt no obligation to respect their freedom and independence, personally or collectively. The racism of the young nation gave free blacks anything but a sense of human dignity or the confidence that they, like whites, could improve themselves by dint of their own hard work, skill, and intellect. Black leaders argued this was unacceptable in a nation whose founding philosophy asserted that “all men are created equal,” and they sought to nurture and demonstrate the existence of virtue (independence) among their own people. In each Northern city, African Americans organized mutual aid societies, fraternal lodges, literary societies, and most importantly, churches. In these spaces they learned to look to each other for strength independently of whites. The independence might be economic, in that mutual aid societies assisted the sick and needy, or it might be political, as each organization elected its own officers, giving those with leadership abilities a place to exercise them, since they often could not vote and definitely could not win public office. These demonstrations of independence were ultimately about creating a virtuous community.
In addition to the independence demonstrated by these community groups, their constitutions stipulated that members lead personally virtuous lives or risk being expelled. Several years before Richard Allen led the walkout from St. George’s Church, he and Absalom Jones had organized the Free African Society of Philadelphia, one of the nation’s first black mutual aid societies. The society’s constitution prohibited any “drunkard or disorderly person” from being admitted to membership. The 1796 constitution of Boston’s African Society stipulated that “any member, bringing on himself any sickness, or disorder, by intemperance, shall not be considered, as entitled to any benefits, or assistance from the society.” And so it went, as society after society required members to lead virtuous, moral lives, and intemperance was banned. This language reflected much more than a unilateral effort to coerce individuals to lead moral lives. Drawing on broad African principles about the relationship between an individual and community, these societies presumed that it was natural that “personal morality should motivate one to participate actively in the welfare of the group.” Insofar as these societies facilitated individual virtue, they facilitated corporate virtue, resulting in genuine independence and existential wholeness. Ethicist Samuel K. Roberts argues that by using virtue in this manner antebellum blacks were able to resist the contingency and precariousness imposed by their racist society and instead establish a viability that “may be understood as the quality of existence without which a person or group is devoid of an interior generative force capable of achieving and sustaining life.” For Northern free blacks, the concept of virtue “impelled” them to “struggle against injustice and oppression and to forge communities and structures that could ensure the development of the furthest moral and material possibilities.” Just as white Americans asserted their virtue and defied British tyranny in the 1760s and 1770s, likewise, in the first half of the 1800s free African Americans asserted their virtue and defied the oppression of white Americans. All African American community groups did not define temperance as teetotalism, but the character trait of temperance, broadly conceived, was a virtue expected of members of Northern black societies.9
Other ideas besides virtue had currency with both reform nexus doctrines and African spirituality, and the overlap makes it difficult to determine the true source of antebellum black temperance discourse. For example, in an 1834 temperance speech the Pennsylvania businessman William Whipper argued: “To assert that we are morally bound to support the cause, is only to say that our obligations to our Maker and society impose upon us the duty of promoting the welfare of our species.” Was Whipper assuming a well-churched audience familiar with Charles Finney’s theology of benevolence, or was he appealing to an African ethic of reciprocity—or both? Similarly, the Sixth National Convention of Colored People (1847) issued a temperance resolution praising the movement for its positive effect on the “social happiness” of humanity. Since both nexus theology and the African American worldview defined virtuous behavior as an obligation to God and as that which benefited the community, it is not easy to discern whether the speaker had simply assimilated white evangelical theology or had found language that was familiar to whites yet actually was understood slightly differently by a black audience. It is likely that, even though white and black temperance audiences heard the same language, it resonated differently with blacks because they arrived at it from a slightly different direction. Since both groups arrived at the same language by different routes it is not unreasonable to assume that, even if that language persuaded different peoples to embrace abstinence, it did so for slightly different reasons.10
At other times it was clear that the discourse was borrowed directly from white reformers. An example of this was when four men who issued a call for the creation of a New England Temperance Society for people of color said, “We long to stand among the men of our country, as fellow-citizens, worthy of our country and the human race. Our first step is to put far away vice and every immorality.” In 1839 the Reverend Amos G. Beman, a Connecticut minister active in temperance societies, published a series of five temperance articles in The Colored American. Beman devoted the entire fifth article to the premise that “intoxicating liquors are the enemies of the religious interest of man.” He asked, “how can it be expected that men should understand and regard the best interest of their souls, when they habitually allow themselves to be under the pernicious influence of intoxicating liquors?” Beman’s concern here is best understood as nothing more than an expression of the moral government of God theology, which highly valued the unfettered reasoning capacity of sinners.11
Then there was temperance discourse that drew most definitely from African traditions. “As a people, our interests, our prosperity, and our happiness call upon us to forsake this course,” announced one colored temperance convention, clearly judging intemperance on the basis of its effect on the whole community. One argument that was popular for a time was that if blacks became temperate it might convince whites they actually were virtuous, giving the lie to whites’ charges and removing a pillar of racism. One call for a state temperance convention expressed how this behavior harmed the whole community: “Prejudice is, alas! too strong without any cause. None of us, therefore, by intemperance or any vicious indulgence, should contribute in the least to foster it.” This is widely known as the “moral reform and racial uplift” response to racism, of which many scholars have been critical, seeing in it little more than a failed assimilation effort. It is more culturally authentic, however, to interpret this language in the context of an African-inspired ethical system that evaluates an individual’s behavior based on its effect on the whole community. This approach to ethical behavior has roots deep in the collective African heritage.12
Perhaps the favorite approach of black temperance speakers was to equate intemperance with slavery, arguing that both harmed the African American community, and that an attack on one was an attack on both. This connection could easily be drawn from a consistent reading of moral government of God theology, which many white temperance reformers were loath to do. A key theme here was that slaves to human masters and to the bottle both, by definition, lived dependent, that is, non-virtuous, lives. “The same principles that sustain the system of slavery will apply, equally well, to the justification of rumselling,” declared one writer. Another speaker insisted that “Our freedom must show itself in the fact that we are not slaves to intemperance,” while the Fifth National Colored Convention resolved that, “as intemperance and slavery are closely allied, this convention recommends to our people the formation of temperance societies which we believe will facilitate the cause of immediate and universal emancipation.” Their precarious freedom made rhetorical connections between virtue, freedom, and independence especially poignant for African Americans. Besides African Americans, the other group for whom such connections were particularly salient was slave owners. Temperance literature designed for plantation owners argued that “Drinking could lead to loss of control, where the distinction between freeman and dependent was blurred or destroyed.” After all, no one understood better the inherently demeaning nature of the dependency of slavery than the slave master who enforced it with violence.13
Even African American fiction writers depicted the interdependence of virtue, temperance, and freedom in their narratives. Perhaps the best example of this is Martin R. Delany’s novel Blake: Or, The Huts of America, serialized in the Anglo-African Magazine from 1859 to 1862. This novel repeatedly associates intemperance with slave ownership. The protagonist, Henry Blake, is a fugitive slave who travels through the South to stir up rebellion. On one occasion, a white man who figures out that Henry is a fugitive unsuccessfully offers him whiskey in a false attempt to befriend him. In another scene a slave posse drinks and eats in Henry’s presence, totally deceived into thinking he is a local slave. On yet another occasion a slaveholder uses brandy as a sedative for a visitor who is horrified at his treatment of a slave. Finally, a slave insurrection is exposed through some inopportune comments from a drunken slave. Delany viewed intemperance as supportive of black oppression, while temperance was a tool of resistance, even revolution.14
The Northern antebellum African American temperance movement was integral to blacks’ quest for meaningful independence, full citizenship rights, and full recognition of their humanity—or “manhood,” as many termed it. It was logically an outgrowth of both their evangelical Christianity and their African heritage. The temperance work of blacks in postbellum Atlanta shows that they inherited this dual Northern antebellum tradition.
“It is Ruining our People”: Temperance and the Church in Black Atlanta
Through the 1880s Black Atlanta’s clergy led the way in temperance reform in their community and also left the most extensive record of their rationale for supporting the reform. Their most dedicated allies were non-clerical alumni of the various missionary schools. Through their leadership of churches and various societies, these men sought to institutionalize a temperance-based moral community in Black Atlanta and eventually turned to politics and cooperated with white secular and religious leaders to make the whole city dry.
The Dual Heritage of the Critical Community of Black Clergy
The local and state associations, conventions, and conferences to which Atlanta’s AME and black Baptist churches belonged had standing temperance committees as early as the late 1860s, and they remained in place well into the twentieth century. The reports of these committees collectively expressed the temperance views of Atlanta’s clergy. This is how the committees functioned: After members were appointed, the committee drafted the report and presented it to the whole body for their comment and all-but-guaranteed approval. Usually one Atlanta area clergy served on each committee. These reports included some combination of a rationale for abstinence; an assessment of the extent of intemperance in their churches, community, or nation; recommendations for clergy action; and commentary on the local or national temperance movement. In spite of their often cursory nature, these reports collectively provide the best window into the thinking of Atlanta’s black clergy.
Since clergy penned these reports, it is not surprising that one of their most prominent aspects is the bemoaning—not unlike that of their Northern antebellum white counterparts—of alcohol abuse in their churches. These admissions became more frequent and assumed a more urgent tone in the mid-1870s. In 1875 the North Georgia Conference of the AME Church recognized intemperance as a “growing evil,” and the Ebenezer Baptist Association declared, “Great reproach is brought upon the cause of Christ by the practice of some professed Christians in visiting drinking saloons, and drinking whiskey and other liquors as a beverage.” The following year the Baptist state convention announced that intemperance had to be defeated in the Church first, before it could be defeated in the world, a sentiment shared essentially verbatim with many antebellum temperance clergy. The problem did not go away, for in the 1880s committees were still bemoaning that intemperance had “entered the Sanctuary of the Lord” and brought “many of our useful members” to “disgrace and poverty.” Some reports even went further, exposing a drinking problem within the ranks of the clergy. The New Hope Baptist Association lamented “that by alcohol the judgment of ministers is prevented, the purity of deacons is blasphemed and the church is sacrilege.” To help address the problem of drinking in the church, the editor of the Christian Recorder, the AME’s national newspaper, suggested that churches make the annual temperance report the topic of a class meeting and offer the pledge to class members. Such a practice would ostensibly “add immensely to the value of the often hastily drafted and more hastily adopted” report. Although lacking details, clergy reports with this tone were noticeably absent in the late sixties and early seventies but began appearing in 1875 and continued throughout the eighties, suggesting that by the mid-seventies abuse of alcohol had increased in black churches.15
But just as much as black clergy complained of intemperance within their churches, there were also echoes of the Christian republicanism that had animated Northern white antebellum reformers. Yet this language was much more common from AME committees than from Baptist ones. One AME committee warned that because the nation was spending an inordinate amount on liquor the “vigor” of the nation was being destroyed and the “alms-houses and prisons are being filled.” In 1889 the same committee said of intemperance, “Let it alone and it will destroy the place and prospect of our church, and corrupt our government, and will ultimately destroy our nation.” This was wording with which almost any antebellum Northern white clergyman could agree. Undoubtedly the national, centralized structure of the AME Church gave its local conference reports a slightly more Northern (or national?) flavor than Baptist reports, thus reflecting the Northern theology.16
Equally understandable was the clergy’s concern about the effects of intemperance and the liquor traffic on the “cause of Christ.” Reports mentioned that when Christians drank they brought “reproach” to the cause of Christ or “retarded” the church’s progress. Lamenting a nationwide increase in intemperance, the New Hope Baptist Association declared, “Even in proud America ‘King Alcohol’ sways the largest kingdom ever established on earth; even outnumbering the church of Christ and rivaling the kingdom of heaven.” One committee claimed intemperance stopped the “progress of the kingdom of God,” while another said it “dethroned reason.” Such language clearly had its roots in antebellum revival theology.17
Over half of the temperance reports cited Scriptural authority by direct quote, summary, or reference, to assert the personal sinfulness of intemperance.18 The most widely used verse was Solomon’s warning in Proverbs 20:1 that “Wine is a mocker and strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise,” but committees found other verses appropriate when stressing things like temperance education (“In all thy getting get wisdom”) and the importance of lifelong temperance habits to one’s spiritual well-being (“Let us lay aside every weight and the sin which doth so easily beset us”). Some reports included a simple reminder that the Bible condemns drunkenness and warned that drinking “enslaved” and damned the soul. By the 1870s evangelicals had well-mined Scripture for antidrinking verses, and black clergy frequently cited examples from the standard list.19
Temperance reports also reflected the traditional African emphasis on the relationship between an individual’s actions and communal well-being. The second most frequently used defense of abstinence highlighted the social disorder occasioned by intemperate drinking: financial, medical, and criminal problems, family conflict, and destitution. One committee warned that intemperance “promises to destroy friends and rob us of our senses. It promises to make friends and neighbors become enemies of each other.” Liquor-related crime destroyed peaceful relations within the race as well as between races.20 The committee of the Eleventh North Georgia Conference of the AME Church lamented that intemperance was destroying the youth of the community. Their depiction has so much pathos that one wonders if the committee members did not have one or more specific individuals in mind when drafting the report:
It is the means of interfering with, and often stopping the progress of a promising young man; one who has received the best training in the best institutions of our country; one who has been the idol of a loving mother and a doting father, just when his prospects were the brightest and the expectations of this friend the greatest. But all of their hopes are blighted by the “worm of the still.”21
Obviously some young men’s lives went the opposite direction of George Clark’s. Nearly as impassioned, but with more sweeping language was the attitude of the Ebenezer Baptist Association:
It dethrones reason, dwarfs understanding, reddens the eyes, impairs health, impoverishes the rich, widows our fair daughters, ravishes the heart of woman, the main spring as well as the ornament of society, orphans our children, supplies our jails, chain-gangs, penitentiaries and gallows. . . . This flagitious, diabolical, and inexorable demon fathers most of all of the crimes that are committed, and points to hell as the best proof of its appalling work.22
Clergy loathed intemperance not just because they considered it an individual sin but because people lived in families and communities, and it violated and ruptured the vital social bonds of a healthy community. As the Missionary Baptist Convention said in 1875: “Families beggared, business destroyed, children hungry, naked; character lost, souls lost, are only a few of the dreadful consequences of intemperance.” Intemperance undermined the social order and, as such, was evil. While such arguments had historically been made by whites, they sometimes incorporated concern for the financial costs to the community, but in the context of African American life, with so few economic assets, these concerns are best understood against the backdrop of an African worldview that required a community response to individual violations of the social order.23
The third most frequently mentioned rationale suggested that intemperance had reached such alarming proportions it posed an existential threat to Black Atlanta—it called into question the continued existence of the community as it was then known. Using traditional African worldview language, these reports lamented the impact of intemperance on “our people.” Often it is unclear whether “our people” meant only church members or blacks generally, but in either case, it meant African Americans, and the reports expressed real concerns about the effects of drinking on the corporate well-being of blacks. Ever hopeful that their children’s lives would be better than their own, the clergy fretted that alcohol abuse was destroying any possibility of that. In 1876 the New Hope association lamented intemperance’s destruction of potential future community leaders: “This evil is destroying many of our young men and women that might be filling important stations in life.” Over the years the Ebenezer association, which had more Atlanta congregations than any other Baptist association during these years, made several particularly strong pleas for abstinence in the interest of the race. The Reverend W. H. Tillman, the self-educated pastor of Third Baptist, moderated the annual meetings throughout most of the eighties. In 1882 the association lamented intemperance’s effects on the current generation: “we find the evil of intemperance among our people to be deplored; year by year it is slaying its hundreds, it has entered the homes of many, it has robbed many a wife of a good husband or a comfortable home.” In 1885 the Ebenezer temperance committee, which included W. L. Jones, pastor of Atlanta’s Mount Zion Baptist Church, drafted a most desperate plea on behalf of the race:
We do say that whiskey is the leading sin, and we do say that it is the life destroyer . . . for we see and know that it is ruining our people; lay it down; Oh! may God help us to lay it down. It is driving away the Holy Spirit. It is driving our children down to degradation. This great demon fills our country with disgrace, and also our chain gang, and fills the place of a murder. It fosters quarrels; it degrades the person; it causes sickness, and we urge the Baptists of the State of Georgia to go to work to condemn it in the pulpit and then we can convince our congregation.24
In 1889 the committee requested the clergy to “use every effort to drive it from our midst and save our people.” The temperance committees of the Sunday School Convention of the New Hope association echoed the concerns of the Ebenezer committee. The concern for the long-term health of the African American community could hardly be clearer.25
When the committee reports turned to suggestions to combat the “growing evil” of intemperance, the recommendations of Baptists and the AME Church were quite similar. Both repeatedly reminded their clergy that the example of their own abstinence was one of their most powerful weapons. Several committees endorsed non-ecclesiastical temperance organizations like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the United Order of True Reformers and encouraged their clergy to work cooperatively with other individuals and groups to combat intemperance. The AME Church and the Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia encouraged the creation of temperance societies in churches and Sunday schools. One of the most common suggestions, however, was also the most vague, to simply “use all your efforts” or “influence” to fight the “great enemy.”26
These temperance committee reports make it clear that a variety of factors informed the temperance thought and discourse of Atlanta’s black clergy. The language of the committee reports strongly suggests that many preachers were influenced by the antebellum nexus ideas promulgated by Northern missionaries, the Weekly Witness, and National Temperance Society literature. But the clergy’s temperance discourse also reflected African elements of the African American worldview. The pragmatic syncretism of the African American worldview made it relatively easy for the clergy to merge the temperance values and language of Northern evangelicals with their own concerns and defend abstinence from several angles. Historian David Wills has argued that nineteenth-century AME Church leaders sought to create a “working synthesis”—a “black Christian culture”—between the realities affecting historic Christianity and those affecting the contemporary situation of black Americans. The preaching of abstinence was clearly one element of this synthesis, and a similar claim could probably be made for Southern black Baptists.27
“Fearful Hypocrisies”: Temperance and Church Polity
The Baptist and AME communities also made use of their different polities to fight intemperance in the pulpit. The extreme congregationalism—or localism—of the Baptists meant that each congregation was autonomous. Baptist beliefs, like local church autonomy, the authority of the Bible, and the priesthood of all believers comprise what is called the “Baptist democracy.” All Baptist church associations were voluntary, whether at the local (associations), state (convention), or national (convention) level. Associations and conventions could also include individuals or organizations, like Sunday schools, as members. Associations and conventions legally existed only while they were meeting, so no permanent hierarchy or bureaucracy existed. Decisions made by delegates were little more than recommendations for their members. Drafters of association and convention pronouncements relied on their moral authority and hoped they would be received in the spirit with which they were written. Being so beholden to the laity, the Baptist polity effectively prevented their pronouncements from being too far removed from the laity’s actual experiences or sentiments. Considering the nature of the Baptist polity, since their association committee reports admitted that a drinking problem existed, it is reasonable to presume not only that it existed but also that the laity supported both admitting it and condemning it.28
The AME Church, on the other hand, had centralized governance under a board of bishops, an Episcopal polity. Every year the bishop in charge of each annual conference appointed the minister for each church in the conference. Many pastors changed congregations annually or biannually. In addition, as discussed in chapter two, from its beginning the AME church adopted John Wesley’s “General Rules of the United Societies of 1739,” which prohibited Methodist class members from drinking ardent spirits, “unless in cases of necessity,” but in the 1830s AME ministers began teaching total abstinence from all intoxicating beverages. In the postbellum years, the quadrennial conferences of the AME Church maintained temperance committees, which repeatedly reiterated the church’s position. The AME’s organizational structure, Discipline, and church traditions conspired to create a unity of theology and praxis that Baptists never experienced—or desired to experience.29
The process of licensing and ordaining ministers differed significantly between the two denominations. The seminary-educated Bishop Daniel Payne, among others, had struggled since the 1840s to create a high standard for the education of AME clergy. Consistent application of this standard proved challenging and was uneven, but ordination generally required passage through three stages, creating an apparently rigorous process. After being recommended by the quarterly meeting of their conference, clergy had to be approved by a majority vote of the annual conference for a probationary period and then approved again two years later by the annual conference to become a traveling elder or preacher.30 Among other requirements, candidates had to answer “yes” to these two questions: “Are you temperate in all things?” and “Do you choose and use water for your common drink, and only take wine medicinally or sacramentally?” In the 1872 quadrennial conference the church revised its statutory laws so that clergy or laity who “give, distil, drink, buy or sell spirituous liquors” would be considered to be in “gross immorality” and subject to censure or suspension.31
Baptists, on the other hand, ordained men through ad hoc ministerial councils convened for that purpose. According to historian Paul Harvey, the Baptist process encouraged “freelance exhorters to shop around for credentialing.” Such a decentralized process was relatively friendly to intellectually and morally underprepared individuals seeking ordination. The high value that African Americans place on clergy oratorical skills and political savvy enabled some men who might be otherwise undesirable to become ordained, only exacerbating the shortcomings of the Baptist ordination process. If an intemperate person slipped through the system, the best a Baptist congregation could do was refuse to vote him in as pastor (as Augusta’s Springfield Baptist Church once did to a candidate) and warn other churches through their association to avoid the “jackleg” preacher. Although lacking coercive authority, the American National Baptist Convention “recommended” that member congregations “not call or retain a pastor who is not strictly temperate.” Baptist congregations could call a pastor, dismiss him for immorality, but not defrock him, as the AME hierarchy could. Occasionally Baptist associations would publish the names of specific preachers for congregations to avoid.32
On the face of it, the AME ordination process appeared to be designed to produce “higher quality” preachers. The AME church discipline included detailed procedures for defrocking ministers accused of drunkenness or other moral turpitudes, and they were used from time to time. During the late 1800s several candidates for ordination in various conferences, including Georgia, were denied advancement for failing to show adequate educational progress. NTS missionary C. H. Mead thought that the AME’s ordination process ensured “much stronger” temperance sentiment among its clergy than the Baptist process, but ironically, ten months later the AME’s Christian Recorder called for “absolute abstinence” among ministerial applicants because of “fearful hypocrisies regarding this temperance subject.” Obviously no process could be “foolproof.”33
The AME Church’s Discipline gave its leaders leverage in the temperance cause that Baptists did not have. The Discipline served two different functions. In 1871 the temperance committee of the Georgia Annual Conference could support its call for AME members to “discard the use” of “all intoxicating liquors” on the basis of the testimony of the Bible and “our Book of Discipline.” Second, there must have been some cases of AME members using intoxicating beverages, because the committee reminded clergy in 1874 to “enforce the law of the General Conference” relating to intemperance and in 1885 to “strictly enforce” the laws in the discipline. In one sense the AME Discipline seemed to make temperance committee reports redundant, but at another level it invested them with an extra layer of moral authority that comparable Baptist reports could never claim. While Baptists occasionally criticized Methodists for having “another book” besides the Bible to abide by,34 Baptists had to come to terms with the irregularities resulting from the fact that “Baptists neither in conventions nor associations nor churches can enact laws of morality or utter directions to their brethren.”35
Both Baptist and AME temperance committees repeatedly urged clergy to preach and teach on the subject, but the different polities of the denominations affected this simple request. On two occasions the AME annual conference ordered quarterly sermons, and Baptist committees asked pastors to show clearly from Scripture why drinking was wrong. Baptist ministers like W. H. Tillman and Charles O. Jones and AME minister F. J. Peck, who received the National Temperance Advocate or the New York Weekly Witness, were particularly well equipped to expound on the biblical argument for total abstinence. Because of the different polities of the two groups, their committees used different language. One Baptist committee exhorted pastors to preach on temperance “whenever convenient,” and on more than one occasion committees asked pastors to “tenderly urge” the topic on their people. In 1869 the national Consolidated American Baptist Convention “recommended” that all people over whom they had “influence” completely abstain from intoxicating drinks, and in their 1879 convention they “requested” that all members of the convention abstain. In contrast, the Fifteenth Quadrennial Conference of the AME Church approved a committee report that read, “each pastor shall preach or lecture upon the subject of temperance” four times a year. If certain members, or enough members, of a Baptist congregation did not like constantly being exhorted about their habits they might try to stir up the congregation to vote the pastor out during the church’s next annual business meeting or use lesser ways make his tenure difficult. This was a threat AME pastors did not have to worry about since they served at the pleasure of their bishop, not their congregation. Both Baptist and Methodist traditions had elements of their polity that helped or hurt them in their fight against intemperance, but dry ministers in each tradition did their best to use their church structures to fight “demon rum” anyway.36
The problem of drinking in the black church continued throughout the seventies and eighties, and clergy efforts had less effect than they desired, partly because the clergy were not all abstainers themselves. During the 1885 prohibition campaign a speaker accused 80 percent of the members in Bishop Henry M. Turner’s conference of being drinkers. This might have been little more than electioneering hyperbole, but if it was too far from the general public perception of AME members it would have been politically overreaching or perhaps even scandalous, and there is no indication it was either. It is also striking to note that temperance committees did not begin complaining about intemperate black clergy until the 1880s. While the meaning of this is uncertain, one possible interpretation is that drinking clergy were not a major problem until the 1880s, suggesting that perhaps drinking in the church became worse with time, not better, just as it likely did in the black community in general. If this is true, it provides a stark contrast to trends among Southern white evangelicals, Baptists particularly. The white Baptist Convention of Georgia complained twice in the 1870s about intemperance in its churches, but in 1879 it declared them “comparatively free from the evil.” The only other complaint about drinking in white churches came in 1880 when the Convention complained about the “baneful practice” of church members using liquor moderately. During the eighties, state-level white temperance committees took comfort in the fact that the few cases of intemperance that did crop up were swiftly and strictly handled.37
Fig. 13—AME Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. One of Atlanta’s leading black prohibitionist clergymen. From Shadow and Light: An autobiography with reminiscences of the last and present century, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University
Fig. 14—AME Bishop Wesley J. Gaines. One of Atlanta’s leading black prohibitionist clergymen. Pastor of Big Bethel. From African Methodism in the South, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University
Although clergy temperance committee reports reveal the durability of antebellum evangelical and African worldview–inspired temperance arguments, the exigencies of church polity could undermine that message. When ecclesiastical realities hindered the temperance message, one thing a preacher could do was take his temperance message outside the church’s four walls and become a leader of a temperance lodge or fraternity and hopefully reach those not in the pews on Sundays. Black Atlanta’s most outspoken temperance clergy were AME ministers Joseph Wood, Henry McNeal Turner, Wesley J. Gaines, and E. R. Carter, who was raised as a slave, trained as a shoemaker after his emancipation, and graduated from Atlanta Baptist Seminary in 1884. Carter was the second pastor of Friendship Baptist, Atlanta’s oldest black Baptist church. These men eagerly involved themselves in lodges and the rough-and-tumble world of city politics.
Respectability: The Social Reform Efforts of Black Atlanta’s Lodges
Blacks from all social levels expressed their temperance sentiments through membership in a lodge. Church members who joined lodges might have seen their pastor again as an officer of the lodge. Like freed people elsewhere in the wake of emancipation, Atlanta’s blacks formed dozens of fraternal and benevolent societies. Among both whites and blacks, the postwar years were the “Golden Age of Fraternity” in America, with 40 percent or more of all adult males belonging to either a fraternal lodge or a benevolent society.38 Seen from the perspective of the temperance movement, there were three categories of black societies in Atlanta: national temperance fraternal orders, local benevolent and mutual aid societies, and “parallel” fraternal orders.
National Temperance Fraternal Orders
Two national temperance fraternal orders arrived in Black Atlanta in the 1870s: the United Order of True Reformers and the Independent Order of Good Samaritans and Daughters of Samaria. The Independent Order of Good Templars (IOGT), a national temperance fraternity begun in upstate New York’s “burned-over district” in 1852, organized True Reformer “fountains” across the South for blacks. The Templars, an openly Christian organization that admitted no atheists and accepted the Bible as “the standard of faith and practice,”39 distinguished themselves from other fraternities by admitting women on a basis of “nominal equality” and by purposely refusing to include insurance benefits. This latter practice kept dues low enough to attract the young and the lower classes. The IOGT also distinguished itself by vigorously supporting national prohibition. Templars comprised a majority of the Prohibition Party’s organizing convention, and for many years the two organizations worked together closely. Templar lodges spread quickly through the North, and in the wake of the Civil War entered the South and crossed the Atlantic. U.S. membership exploded, peaking at over half a million in 1868. But racial troubles arose when the IOGT moved south.40
Fig. 15— Reverend E. R. Carter, pastor Friendship Baptist. One of Atlanta’s leading black prohibitionist clergymen. Archives Division, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System
William Washington Browne, a freedman, spread Good Templary among Southern blacks. The Georgia-born Browne, an army veteran, attended Clark University briefly and then settled in Alabama as a schoolteacher. Personal experiences led him to become a passionate opponent of alcohol. Inspired by an integrated temperance meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, Browne became a temperance speaker, often addressing standing-room-only crowds. His speeches presented intemperance as a major threat to the African American community. Browne argued that intemperance disfranchised blacks because not only was public drunkenness a crime but drunken people were more likely to commit other crimes, and convicted criminals were not permitted to vote. The fact that many blacks were convicted without a trial further increased the numbers of the disfranchised. In the early seventies, under Browne’s leadership, several black men from Alabama sought a charter from the Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Good Templars.41 Afraid of the social implications of creating a black lodge on an equal basis with white lodges but also not wanting to hinder temperance work among blacks, the Grand Lodge offered a “compromise.” It created a separate organization just for blacks called the United Order of True Reformers, whose lodges would be called “fountains” and be authorized to use Templar-like rituals. Disappointed at being forced into a segregated organization, Browne reluctantly accepted the offer as a step in the right direction and began organizing “fountains” in Alabama. By March 1874 he was a full-time organizer.42
Fig. 16—William A. Pledger, Grand Worthy Master of Georgia’s Grand Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers. From Shadow and Light: An autobiography with reminiscences of the last and present century, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University
Shortly after Browne began his work, the Grand Lodge appointed a white man, James G. Thrower of Atlanta, as the general superintendent to oversee the organization of all True Reformer fountains. Thrower was an English immigrant who had lived in New York and Minnesota before the war and moved to Atlanta following the war to work in construction. In the North, Thrower had been active in the IOGT, and within a year of arriving in Atlanta he had organized 18 men into Atlanta’s Lodge, No. 1. Thrower became the first of four Northerners instrumental in energizing and organizing Atlanta’s postbellum white temperance movement.43 During the seventies Atlanta’s IOGT hosted J. N. Stearns of the National Temperance Society on several occasions, and in the eighties Thrower helped plan NTS missionary C. H. Mead’s Georgia itinerary. The Grand Lodge possibly chose Thrower to organize blacks because they believed his foreign/Northern roots would increase his appeal to the freed people. Or perhaps he was chosen simply because they could not find a Southern white man willing to work with the freed people in potentially “compromising” social situations. In any case, Thrower expended considerable energy organizing True Reformer Fountains, in which role he proved to be divisive, yet he remained a leader in Atlanta temperance circles through the 1880s.44
In addition to his regional oversight responsibilities, Thrower also organized Georgia’s fountains. He organized the first True Reformer Fountain on November 28, 1873. Among the other white IOGT members present to bless the new venture were the pastors of Atlanta’s First and Second Baptist Churches. Thirty-five blacks turned out to organize Pioneer Fountain No. 1, and after listening to Thrower’s presentation they elected AME minister Joseph Wood as worthy master and Oliver Cromwell, a drayman, as worthy secretary. Eighteen fountains and 11 months later, 47 delegates met in Atlanta’s Wheat Street Baptist Church (black) to organize Georgia’s Grand Fountain, the first state grand lodge of the United Order of True Reformers. A succession of black and white speakers addressed the delegates, among them were William Pledger, alumnus of the Storrs School and current Atlanta University student; E. W. Warren, pastor of First Baptist (white); C. A. Evans, pastor of Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church (white); Thomas N. Chase, teacher and administrator at Atlanta University (white); and Andrew Jackson, pastor of Wheat Street Baptist (black). Following instructions from Thrower, the delegates, representing some two thousand fountain members across the state, selected a committee to draft a constitution and elected William A. Pledger as their grand worthy master.45
A peripatetic figure, William Anderson Pledger was a leader in Republican Atlanta politics and temperance from the time he arrived in 1870 to attend school. After leaving school in 1876 he moved back and forth between Atlanta, Athens, and other Southern cities but always considered Athens his home. He edited several newspapers, held government patronage jobs, practiced law, and was an influential member of Georgia’s Republican Central Committee and delegate to the national convention for more than 20 years. Pledger also represented Georgia’s blacks in several national black conventions. When he became grand worthy master in 1874 Pledger was only 22, but like many other men he did not stay involved in the organized temperance movement past his twenties. Like many Northern antebellum black temperance reformers, his argument drew on the power of the concept of virtue to transform African Americans’ quality of life in a racist society. In an 1876 memo to members he explained:
As a general thing, we are credited as being a vicious, lazy people, which is not as a whole people true, but as a part really true, and it is our mission to make our people a sober people indeed. The chain-gang has now over eight hundred colored, to only ninety white convicts. It is said the augmentation of this number of colored, is because of intemperance; of course we know this is not wholly true, . . . yet many of them are sent there for that reason, and should be a warning to us in the cause. . . . Never can we own land, shares in Railroads, College, Academies, and other sources of wealth and knowledge, till we practice temperance.46
Not only did Pledger believe that abstinence would improve economic prospects for blacks by reducing their crime rate and freeing up money for wealth-producing activity, but a secondary effect would be to produce “that harmony which is so much needed in the South between races.” Pledger believed that the influence of preachers and teachers was so important that he refused to give money to or serve under ones who drank. He challenged all True Reformers to follow his example. It is not insignificant that Pledger, like Browne, sat under Northern missionary teachers. Their temperance work could have only made their teachers proud, and there is little reason to think they would have opposed the race-specific ends each man pursued through the lodges.47
The True Reformers maintained high ethical standards for their members, which generally earned them a good reputation. True Reformers were required not only to abstain from alcohol but also to be above reproach in financial matters and not to associate with “persons of suspicious character.” Because failure in any of these areas was grounds for expulsion, members could proudly claim to be “some of the best people of our race.” As Willard B. Gatewood and other scholars have argued, values and behavior were often more important indicators of status than income for the better class of blacks. Clergy, skilled and unskilled workers, and university students were counted among True Reformers. In 1876 the Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia specifically commended the work of the United Order of True Reformers.48
The True Reformers’ high moral standards, however, failed to undermine the prejudices and fears of local whites. The Reformers met every Friday evening in a hall on Broad Street. In 1875 someone leaked information about one of their meetings where they had discussed how difficult it was for blacks to earn a living and had suggested some causes and possible solutions. They had apparently even dared discuss some recent incidents of racial violence in central Georgia, the upcoming elections, and the enfranchisement of Confederate loyalists, all politically sensitive issues. Some members reportedly blamed white people for blacks’ slow economic progress since emancipation, while others said it was unjust that individuals who supported the Confederacy should be enfranchised. Even worse, rumor had it that some members supported a violent response to a recent white-on-black episode of violence. An Atlanta Constitution reporter interviewed an anonymous member who produced all the “right” answers to calm white Atlantans’ fears, but some members still felt compelled to issue a formal statement asserting the respectability of their membership and organization, and to assure whites that nothing had been said “to which the best citizens of Atlanta could object.” While the comfort of this black-only space encouraged “free” conversation on current events, this incident revealed the limits of such “independence” in the era of Reconstruction.49
Between 1876 and 1887 the IOGT suffered a schism that destroyed True Reformer fountains. Insisting on the right of blacks to join the order on equal terms with whites, the English and Scottish Grand Lodges seceded and organized the Right Worthy Grand Lodge of the World. They immediately began organizing black lodges in the South. The original Good Templars’ Grand Lodge, representing the United States and Canada, decided to compete with the secessionist branch for black members by reorganizing True Reformers into a Good Templars’ “dual grand lodge” system in each state. In this competing system blacks would now be considered Good Templars—not True Reformers any more—and would have their own segregated local lodges and (state) grand lodges. Almost simultaneously with the split of the IOGT, Pledger resigned as head of Georgia’s Grand Fountain, despite the fact that under his leadership he had more than quadrupled statewide membership. Just when Georgia’s True Reformers were most in need of leadership, they had none.
With the True Reformers in disarray, James Thrower was able to pressure Atlanta’s—and many of the state’s—fountains to become colored Good Templars’ lodges under the auspices of the original IOGT, and in the fall of 1876 he organized the first colored “Dual” Grand Lodge in the South.50 But confusion reigned, as Thrower enrolled local lodges by falsely claiming that the two IOGT factions had reunited, and at least one Dual Lodge member secretly worked to persuade local lodges to join the British-based Right Worthy Grand Lodge. Thrower asked Pledger to return to lead the Grand Lodge, which he did briefly. In the confusion of the period, Pledger claimed to be recognized by both Templar bodies, but in 1879 he left Atlanta and the organization again, moving to Athens to teach school and edit the Athens Blade. In 1880 Atlanta still boasted about two hundred black Good Templars in three lodges, but despite the installation of a new black grand worthy master from Savannah, a statewide decline followed Pledger’s departure, and the grand lodge had ceased operating by the end of 1881. In the spring of 1882 Thrower tried to revitalize the Grand Lodge with a meeting at Big Bethel AME, where Wesley J. Gaines had been pastor. The speakers included NTS president William E. Dodge and his friend Governor Alfred Colquitt, but even this star power could not overcome the unappealing confusion of the IOGT schism, and in 1883 the Dual Grand Lodge collapsed.51
In 1886 Thrower tried yet again to reorganize Georgia’s 23 remaining lodges and 2,300 members into a state Dual Grand Lodge. Atlantans filled eight out of the fourteen elected positions, and three of them were clergy: Friendship Baptist’s pastor E. R. Carter, a graduate of Atlanta Baptist Seminary, became grand worthy chief templar; former Big Bethel pastor and AME presiding elder Wesley J. Gaines was made representative to the national Grand Lodge; and Allen Temple’s pastor, J. G. Yeiser, became grand chaplain. Another prominent black Atlantan, Alice D. Carey, principal of Morris Brown College, was made grand worthy secretary. Even with this who’s who of Atlantans, Georgia’s Dual Grand Lodge fizzled. Black lodges struggled not only because of the IOGT’s internal conflicts but also because of the limited resources and literacy of their members. By 1900 black Good Templary in the United States was all but dead.52
Black Atlanta’s more enduring temperance order was the Independent Order of Good Samaritans and Daughters of Samaria. The Samaritans were also a Northern antebellum lodge founded on the principle of total abstinence, but from the beginning the order differed from the IOGT in important ways. Samaritans not only signed an abstinence pledge but also committed themselves to caring for the “distressed families of those who pledge themselves to abstain from all intoxicating drinks.” Openly benevolent, the order aimed to “spread the principles of true charity in the hearts of members.” Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan illustrated the values it promoted and was the “centerpiece” of its rituals. The order originated in New York City in 1847, and although it welcomed any abstinent person, it particularly sought to “reform and restore” drunkards. From its first year the order organized women and blacks into separate lodges but allowed them representation at the Grand Lodge and National Grand Lodge levels. The Good Samaritans’ history is unique in that during the 1870s the order became a majority black group because freed people organized so many of the new lodges. By 1877 black representation in the National Lodge had increased so much that they elected a black national grand sire. Under black leadership white membership dwindled. From the end of the 1870s the Samaritans became essentially a black temperance fraternity.53
As with the True Reformers, black Atlantans organized Georgia’s first Good Samaritan lodge, named Crystal Fount Lodge, No. 1. Crystal Fount was organized in July 1875, but in 1876, to stimulate growth, the Grand Lodge No. 1 of New York appointed Smith W. Easley Jr. the district deputy in charge of organizing lodges throughout Georgia. A correspondent for black newspapers in the seventies, by the eighties Easley had become a railway postal clerk. Easley had founded ten lodges by 1885, so that year he organized the state Grand Lodge, and the delegates elected him right worthy grand chief. In 1886 and 1887 he was elected right worthy grand secretary. Easley worked for several publications as writer, manager, editor, and correspondent, but perhaps most importantly, like Browne and Pledger, he had also sat under Northern missionary teachers in Atlanta. Easley attended the Storrs School briefly in the late 1860s. Although Easley did not remain in school long, the Lincoln Temperance Pledge he signed there started him out on a life of war against “King Alcohol.” The similarity of the Storrs School and Good Samaritan pledges made Samaritan membership seem natural to him.54
Like the national Grand Lodge, Atlanta’s Good Samaritans were a modestly successful order. The Crystal Fount Lodge, No. 1, began with 28 members. In 1876 Easley organized Atlanta’s second lodge, Morning Star Lodge, No. 4, with 164 members, under AME minister Joseph Wood. It was the third temperance society of which Wood had become leader since 1873. The Samaritans grew steadily and prospered. Although Crystal Fount Lodge’s membership shot up to 123 within three years, Morning Star’s membership dropped to 57. By 1891 there were 2,000 members in six Atlanta lodges, and 100,000 members nationwide. Like the True Reformers, the Good Samaritans’ members represented a range of socioeconomic levels, from AME bishop Wesley J. Gaines and financially comfortable grocer Charles H. Morgan to the lumber mill worker Joseph Hankerson. Several women, many of whom appear to have been wives or daughters of male members, also held elected office.55
Until the mid-nineties Atlanta’s Samaritans were a well-run order. Attentive to the needs of others, during the seventies and eighties they donated to yellow fever victims in Savannah and to cholera victims in Memphis. They were Atlanta’s first black fraternal group to purchase real estate. They purchased lots in Atlanta’s black-owned South-View Cemetery for their members and built their own four-story brick building on Ivy Street in 1890, hiring Alexander Hamilton, a local black contractor. The building dedication was a five-day celebration that included addresses from Governor John B. Gordon, the Reverend E. R. Carter, and Bishop Henry M. Turner. In September 1891 Atlanta’s lodges hosted the national Good Samaritan convention, with more than three hundred delegates. In 1895 Fulton County taxed the Samaritans on $7,500 worth of property, making them the wealthiest black order in Atlanta at the time, but by 1898 they had lost their building because of financial mismanagement.56
Mutual Aid Societies and Temperance
Far more common than temperance fraternities in Black Atlanta were mutual aid and benevolent societies. The desire for independence—or the fear of dependence on whites—made these societies extremely popular among African Americans throughout the United States, even among the poorest. Continuing a free black practice dating to at least 1780, Atlanta’s mutual aid societies served as reciprocal aid societies (or proto-insurance companies) by providing financial assistance to their members in case of sickness, unemployment, or death. Some of these societies evolved into commercial life insurance companies. Historically, benevolent societies often originated with the members of a particular church, as ministers sought to provide an economic safety net for their largely working-class parishioners, but in some cases churches grew from benevolent societies. The AME Church is an example of the latter, as it grew from Richard Allen’s Free African Society of Philadelphia.57
Fig. 17—Good Samaritan Hall. From The Black Side, Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center
Atlanta’s mutual aid societies retained the antebellum practice of requiring their members to lead virtuous lives. The Reverend E. R. Carter observed of the Colored Men’s Protective Association that “Those who are received must take most solemnly the pledge which strictly requires good morals, decency and uprightness of character, and so soon as one violates this pledge he is excommunicated.” Intemperance would certainly have disqualified anyone for membership in the Colored Men’s Protective Association. Some societies were so insistent on abstinence that they included temperance in their name. By 1886 the Temperance Mutual Benefit Association of Philadelphia, probably an interracial group, was soliciting blacks in Georgia. Its state office was in Atlanta, and James Thrower was on its local board of managers. Founded in 1870, the Temperance Mutual Benefit Association offered benefits to sick members and provided accident and life insurance. Women’s groups maintained the same standards. In 1883 an Atlanta Constitution reporter identified 15 African American female benevolence societies composed primarily of working-class women and noted that among them “temperance obligations” were “very strong and binding.” Big Bethel’s pastor F. Jesse Peck founded one of them, the Daughters of Bethel, in 1870, but it ran into difficulties. Former members reorganized it into the Independent Daughters of Bethel in 1880.58
It is difficult to estimate the number of black Atlantans belonging to benevolent societies. Some societies existed for only a few years, new ones were constantly organizing, their sizes varied significantly, and few if any records have been preserved. In 1880 the Gospel Aid Society had about 250 members, while the Brothers of Love and Charity had only 75. By 1890 Atlanta had over 30 of these societies, with probably over 1,000 members, out of a total black population of almost 30,000. But the numbers may have even been much higher, because in antebellum times Northern free blacks were known to maintain as many as 70 or 80 benevolent societies in one city, with as many as one-half of all adults holding membership in at least one society. Long after the eighties mutual aid societies remained popular among blacks.59
Parallel Fraternal Societies and Temperance
The final category of society is what some scholars have called “parallel” societies, because they modeled their name and rituals after white societies. The two parallel societies with Atlanta lodges in this period were the Odd Fellows and Prince Hall Masons. Both orders began in the antebellum North, but because American lodges refused to charter them they received their original charters from England. Neither of these orders (nor the Knights of Pythias, which organized in Atlanta in the early nineties) made abstinence a cornerstone of membership, but they were concerned with the “respectability” of their members. Members could likely drink moderately at home and retain their “good standing.”
Both orders organized lodges about the same time in Atlanta. In the fall of 1870 the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows organized the St. James Lodge and the Star of the South Lodge. Within two years they claimed 275 members, and by 1880, 600 members. By the end of the eighties the Odd Fellows had probably 1,000 members in seven lodges, making it Black Atlanta’s largest fraternity. The Odd Fellows had simultaneously become one of the largest fraternities in America, with more than 52,000 members in 29 states by 1886. In 1870 Big Bethel’s pastor, F. Jesse Peck, who had become a Prince Hall Mason while living in Boston, received a charter to organize a Masonic lodge. In March 1871 the St. James Lodge No. 4 became Atlanta’s first Prince Hall lodge. Because of their selectivity, Masons grew at a relatively slow rate; they had only 50 members in 1880. Both groups had ladies’ auxiliaries. The Households of Ruth complemented the Odd Fellows, while the Order of the Eastern Star complemented the Masons.60
These traditional secret fraternal orders insisted upon their members being models of middle-class bourgeois respectability. While the Odd Fellows functioned as both a benevolent and a fraternal society, the Masons set initiation and other fees so high the very fact that members could afford them probably meant they were unlikely to need assistance. The Masons designed their admission process to admit only those who were already demonstrating a commitment to middle-class values. Having steady work, a good reputation in the community, and a character that modeled “producer” traits such as thrift, sobriety, and regularity were essential for membership in the Masons. Although the Odd Fellows were not known to be as selective, Atlanta’s white press found them “respectable” and “intelligent” and always spoke positively of their decorum during their anniversary parades and other social activities. Their connection to accepted standards of morality was strengthened by their relationship to the black church. Anniversary celebrations were often held in churches—usually Bethel AME or Wheat Street Baptist—and participants were usually addressed by local pastors, even when the events were not held in a church.61
All three types of African American societies projected an image of middle-class morality that embraced temperance. The AMA praised all three for encouraging “habits of sobriety and economy,” and the local press praised the Odd Fellows for availing themselves of the opportunity to improve their “morals and mental culture.” Mutual aid societies and parallel fraternities, however, tended to be more opposed to drunkenness than to drinking per se.62 Despite the fact that not all fraternal lodges demanded teetotalism of their members, stories like that of Atlantan Lena Edwards, who was picked up for public drunkenness, demonstrate that nonlodge members were well aware of the image of the sober black lodge member. While before the judge, Edwards mocked her situation by arguing that her disorderly conduct assisted lodges in spreading the abstinence message. (She brought up lodges on her own initiative; they had nothing to do with her trial.) Since many people did not attend lodge meetings, she argued, they would not receive the temperance message, but her public display of drunkenness educated them about the dangers of whiskey. Despite Edwards’s quick-wittedness—or humor—she still had to pay the customary fine.63
Social Reform in Black Public Schools
Sources on Black Atlanta’s fraternal and benevolent societies during the 1870s and 1880s are extremely limited, but even more limited is information about black teachers in Atlanta’s public schools, who were also agents of temperance. Once the Atlanta Board of Education agreed to hire black teachers for black schools in the late 1870s, Atlanta University fed its graduates into the schools in disproportionate numbers relative to the other missionary schools. In 1888, 23 of the 28 black teachers in Atlanta’s public schools were AU graduates. In 1890 all of the teachers in the Houston Street School were AU graduates. By the late nineties, grads from the other schools were making inroads, as AU alumni comprised only 70 percent of the city’s black teachers. While it is clear that AU alumni had been well instructed in temperance, it is not clear how much time they dwelt on the subject in the public school classroom. Atlanta first mandated scientific temperance instruction in 1887. Also, black teachers taught significantly larger classes than white teachers and had far fewer resources, compromising the effectiveness of instruction. But black students in Atlanta’s public schools at least had the personal example of teetotaling teachers educated in the “social settlements” known as Atlanta University and Spelman. Their employment in the Atlanta Public Schools showed the “talented tenth” principle at work. So even those African Americans of lesser means were implicitly “reached” with the temperance message that had traveled across many decades, through multiple institutions, being reinterpreted all along the way.64
From emancipation through the eighties one searches in vain for African American opposition to the Northerners’ temperance message. Black Atlantans had their share of complaints about how the schools were run, their failure to employ black teachers, and the racial attitudes of some Northerners, but never does one find a complaint about their constant harping on temperance. It is important to remember this was not a white message, but a Northern message, because Northern blacks like Bishop J. M. Brown and Southern-born but Northern-educated blacks like Henry M. Turner and Bishop Daniel Payne also preached the temperance message. One element accounting for the ease of acceptance could well be the relatively high esteem the freed people placed on Northern life and culture in the wake of emancipation. But this chapter has more importantly argued that there was an intersection between key elements of Northern revival theology and traditional African spirituality. This intersection made it seem almost “natural” to some Northern antebellum blacks to embrace temperance, and when this brand of Christianity presented itself in the persons of the newly arrived Northerners, Southern blacks likewise readily accepted the message insofar as they accepted the broader Northern religio-cultural message at all. Temperance seems to have been an issue on which for some, the unique “twoness” of black identity—as African and American—might have ironically mutually reinforced acceptance of a cultural value. Blacks who embraced temperance saw it as an exemplary individual virtue not unrelated to the health of the whole community. To provide an even stronger image, the analogy may be stretched. For those who participated in the social wing of temperance reform by joining an abstinence-based society, the act was psychologically and socially analogous to singing call-and-response spirituals, for as Lawrence Levine has observed, such performances offered a potential outlet for one’s “individual feelings even while it continually drew him back into the communal presence and permitted him the comfort of basking in the warmth of the shared assumption of those around him.” To be a black teetotaler in 1880s Black Atlanta was to make a social statement.65
But not all black Atlantans embraced the temperance implications of this fortuitous theological/worldview convergence. The second half of this chapter has demonstrated how the talented tenth principle functioned to spread Northern temperance values in black Atlanta. In an effort to create a temperance-based moral community, pastors preached temperance sermons, ministers organized lodges, blacks joined benevolent societies, and the emerging better class of blacks through their lodge membership exemplified moderate use of intoxicating beverages, if not outright teetotalism. Temperance permeated all major institutions in Black Atlanta, whether controlled by whites or blacks. Despite these efforts, throughout the 1880s black clergy continued to complain about intemperance in the church, and black temperance fraternities struggled and failed, calling into question the effectiveness of their efforts.
Although the talented tenth seem to have been effectively trained by Northern missionaries, once they attempted to convey the temperance message to the masses of their own people they faced daunting obstacles. The grinding poverty of blacks limited participation in fraternal groups, and black churches and lodges were, by definition, voluntary, competitive associations, which diluted the rigor of their discipline relative to that of the missionary schools. Black-run institutions had limited resources and relatively little leverage over their members. The hostile racial environment only seemed to worsen with time, and opportunities for upward economic mobility shrank as the nadir of black life approached at the end of the century. Undoubtedly many blacks seriously questioned the economic and social “benefits” the virtue of temperance promised. Perhaps, as W. J. Rorabaugh argued for antebellum America, all the talk about intemperance in Black Atlanta simply proved that it was becoming a bigger problem as the years passed. If this was the case, and moral suasion efforts proved ineffective, then the logic of the next phase of the movement became readily apparent. If voluntary social efforts at reforming people did not work, then why not move to the political arena? Temperance reformers turned to legal suasion—prohibition—to reinforce their message, replicating the trajectory of antebellum Northern temperance.
The Temperance wave o’er the South is spreading;
It is what saloons are dreading.
Look away! Look away!
Look away! Dixie Land.
In Dixie land where I was born in,
People are ’gainst rum a-stormin’
Look away! Look away!
Look away! Dixie land.
Down South they fight it by local option;
“No rum sold by our adoption.”
Look away! Look away!
Look away! Dixie Land.
That motto should all men inspire
To rise and fight this rum-fiend’s fire,
Look away! Look away!
Look away! Dixie Land.
—“Dixie Land for Temperance,” first and third verses