Soul Liberty

Front matter

The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia

Soul

Libert

CHAPTER FIVE Politics of Engagement 106 Conclusion 144

Appendix I. Black Politicians and Religious Affiliations, 1865-1890 149 Appendix II. Baptist Association Membership and Churches 153 Notes 157

Figures, Graphs, Maps, and Tables

FIGURES 5.1 Professor John Mercer Langston, Howard University 109 5.2 Readjuster State Convention at Richmond 112

5.3 James M. Gregory 120

GRAPHS 3.1 Roles of Gilfield members in church records 60 3.2 Occupations of select Gilfield members 62

3.3 Gilfield restorations, 1861-1862 70

MAPS

5.1 Comparative map of conventions and Mahone canvass, c. 1883 130 5.2 Map of 1877 gubernatorial election results 133

5.3 Map of 1881 gubernatorial election results 134

5.4 Map of 1885 gubernatorial election results 136

TABLES

1 Black politicians and religious affiliations, 1865-1890 150 2A Bethany Baptist Association (BBA) 153

2B Bluestone Colored Baptist Association (BCBA) 154

2C (Colored) Shiloh Baptist Association (CSBA) 154

2D Virginia Baptist State Convention (VBSC) 155

Note from the Author about the Digital Humanities and This Book

THE THREE VERSIONS OF SOUL LIBERTY

This book expands the digital humanities by appearing in three versions published by the University of North Carolina Press: first, the print book; second, a verbatim open-access (OA) e-book; and third, an enhanced OA e-book on a companion website hosted by Fulcrum, an innovative publishing platform launched by Michigan Publishing at the University of Michigan Library. The Fulcrum version of the book can be located using this link: https:// doi.org/10.5149/9781469655253_Turner.

The print book and verbatim OA e-book contain three charts, three illustrations, and four maps. The Fulcrum enhanced OA e-book contains the complete text found in the print and the verbatim e-book—and more. It contains vignettes featuring interactive maps that allow the reader to better follow the argument about how black religious politics evolved by clicking within the text to see different configurations of layers on the related maps. A link in the resources will connect to the digital project website where the interested reader can re-create the maps or explore further.

MY TURN TO THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES

I turned to technologies of mapping as a method to interpret the archive of black religion and politics in postemancipation Virginia because I initially viewed the archives I used as lists of geographically based information. The lists of people and churches I found in the records of the Baptist, Zion Union Apostolic, and Episcopal churches and the manuscript collection of political magnate William Mahone contained a wealth of geographic and social information. As I read through nearly thirty years of annual state convention minutes and diocesan council journals, and scattered records of the Zion Union denomination and four regional associations in Southside, with the longest extant runs of minutes over the same period, I found lists of individuals who participated in the meetings and their hometowns; of all the churches that were associated in the conventions and their post office boxes; and of delegates who were sent from their local associations to meetings in other regions of the state. Similarly, Mahone’s voluminous archive of xi correspondence revealed robust geographic information about political networks and strategy. In addition to the hundreds of letters he received from throughout the state in the months leading up to the 1879, 1883, and 1889 elections, he gathered names of churches and pastors from correspondents in 1883 and again in 1889. He organized this information into lists by county. That Mahone specifically canvassed black churches as part of his political machine drew my attention and was something I wanted to better understand. But an explanation was not easily culled from the canvass reports. These lists by themselves did not yield much beyond what was already known about Mahone’s engagement with black churches.

My understanding was transformed when I decided to map the information I was gathering in order to visualize the political landscape. I chose to map the churches, conventions, and election returns as separate layers of a single map. I thought that being able to view each layer separately and then in different configurations might help me to better understand the relationship between these elements. But I could not process the changing outlines of the boundaries of the conventions, the locations of hundreds of churches, and the results of six elections efficiently by hand. With the help of Laurie Allen, a university librarian, I learned to use ArcGIS well enough to create maps of the convention boundaries, the membership reports, and the electoral returns as a way to explore the potential relationship between churches and political outcomes.

This approach turned out to be pivotal to my understanding of the relationship between black church networks and the political action in which black Virginians engaged. In fact, I might have missed the most significant insight gained from the laborious process of transcribing the churches’ and participants’ information had I only used my archival research notes. I probably would not have understood how church networks established through the associations suffused the political culture of black Virginians and provided the foundation for the political turn that reinforced the idea among white politicians and black religious folks that black churches were an important network to engage. Thus, mapping shifted my focus to the robust ways that black religious folks conceived, nurtured, and used these networks, a perspective that has been too easily elided, even in narratives that acknowledge the existence of these black church networks as part of Mahone’s political organizing strategy. The sense of connection and political efficacy black Virginians cultivated evolved because of the associations’ regular meetings. I implicitly knew that churches were important sites, but I did not xii Note from the Author about the Digital Humanities and This Book know exactly how they became so. Reading the maps alongside the archival evidence made that relationship clearer.

With all the information I gathered to explain how black religious politics evolved and especially how black churches as sites of political organizing came to be, the two-dimensional maps reproduced in this printed version simply cannot fully express the intellectual architecture of both the research design and the method. This print version cannot make underlying data freely available and easily manipulatable, nor can it expand beyond the many and well-established limitations of two-dimensional maps that attempt to contain, explain, erase, and elide ambiguity and complexity. Neither could the two-dimensional maps in this book speak to the political abuses that the mapping of black communities has effected. These concerns properly belong in a study of black religious politics, especially one that fully deploys maps as a method of analysis.

Another venue was required to address these concerns and then to share the findings of the study more broadly: a black digital humanities project, to be exact. Such a project would not simply use digital tools to explore African American religious history but go beyond that to center black people’s lives and ideas, and engage in an act of recovery and representation characteristic of work that resides at the nexus of black history and digital humanities, as Kim Gallon argues in “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities” (in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2016). With the assistance of Erin White, Shariq Torres and Todd Easter of Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries and Jeff Everhart and Tom Woodward of the Virginia Commonwealth University AltLab, I began working on the website, Mapping Black Religion (www.mappingblackreligion.com).

The digital project in the form of a website with interactive user interfaces and deep maps would afford the opportunity to make not just the argument of the book but also the underlying data more widely available. And the interactive version of the maps created using black religious folks’ self-documentation would deploy a spatial methodology for exploring religious history.

Discussions with my UNC Press editor, Elaine Maisner, and others at both the Press and Fulcrum about publishing the book on Fulcrum’s open-access (OA) platform as an enhanced e-book brought the chance to explore a new frontier in academic publishing —a frontier that could bring together the print book with the website by featuring my e-book with significant enhancements hosted by Fulcrum.

Note from the Author about the Digital Humanities and This Book xiii

This new formulation—the enhancement — incorporates some of the interactivity of the website into the book and makes it much more than a book: it makes an enhanced e-book that expands the argument and allows you to see, as I have, how layering data can raise new questions and answer them, and how making spatial geography central to the narrative of history using digital methods can expand the explanatory power of archival research.

The enhanced e-book serves as a provocation to more questions and more research as you click to view different layers of maps that undergird the book’s argument and connect to the website to explore further. The enhanced e-book invites conversation by moving this author’s voice from the center to the side and to the center again as you read and consider my argument and conclusions and then my evidence and analysis. Realizing the enhanced reading experience that the digital humanities affords was the goal. Thus, the enhanced e-book is two arguments in one—one about black religion and politics, and the other about how we can use digital tools to enhance and expand study and interpretation in the humanities.

N.M.T.

July 2019 xiv Note from the Author about the Digital Humanities and This Book

Acknowledgments

Someone asked me, “What makes it possible for you to do your best work?” Over the long gestation of this project, I learned that good company, time, and financial support are the keys. I am grateful that my cup has run over in these areas. It is my great honor to acknowledge the many sources here. First, I want to give thanks to God who makes all things possible. Research that involves traveling to archives and generous amounts of time to think, write, and workshop cannot be sustained without financial support. I am grateful for the generous funding I received from the Mellon Fellowship of the Virginia Historical Society and the John Hope Franklin Fellowship of Duke University’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library for support of the early stages of my research, and for Virginia Commonwealth University faculty start up funds for research support and conference attendance. I am indebted to Bill Blair and the Richards Civil War Era Center for the postdoctoral fellowship that allowed me time to reconsider the project and deepen my approach. A teaching release from VCU's Humanities Research Center (HRC) afforded me much needed time to finalize revisions of this manuscript while being in conversation with excellent colleagues. I acknowledge the encouragement and support that Richard Godbeer and Brooke Newman have shown to me and my cohort of fellows. Good company comes in many forms. My deep gratitude goes to my church family at St. Paul’s Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, and my pastor, the Reverend Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood, in whose company and under whose leadership my interest in this subject matter was provoked and encouraged. Excellent teachers have fostered my development as a researcher and thinker. I am grateful to Mary Frances Berry, Anthea Butler, Steve Hahn, Stephanie McCurry, and Barbara Savage, who shepherded me through doctoral studies. Tracey Hucks, who alerted me to the possibility of studying religion in graduate school, and Michael W. Harris, who helped me find my methodological home, deserve special thanks. Workshopping chapters at conferences allowed me to consider provocative questions and sharpen my thinking. I am pleased to acknowledge the opportunities given to me at the CLAW Symposium, organized by Adam Domby and Simon Fraser at the College of Charleston and at the invitation

XV of Adam Bond at the Samuel Dewitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University. Generous audiences at the annual meetings of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the American Historical Association, the American Society of Church Historians, and a very memorable African American Digital Humanities conference at the University of Maryland, College Park, offered insightful comments on various aspects of the project.

Archivists and librarians make this work possible in so many ways. I am especially indebted to folks who have helped me orient myself to the various and voluminous archives. At the Library of Virginia, Brent Tarter was as welcoming and resourceful as other researchers had promised he would be. Lucius Edwards and Jessica Johnson were hospitable and accommodating during each of my visits to the Johnston Memorial Library at Virginia State University. I especially enjoyed Mr. Edwards's tour of Petersburg and Pocahontas Island. Leslie Rowland oriented me to the Freedmen and Southern Society Project’s records. Deborah Price (St. Paul’s College Archive) and Julia Randle, Christopher Pote, and Joseph Thompson (African American Episcopal Historical Collection, Bishop Payne Library, Virginia Theological Seminary) helped me find my way in their collections, pointing out records of interest to me.

Research staff in libraries and archives made the work possible, but folks close to home made the journey more enjoyable. My fellow graduate students in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, the Fontaine Society, and the Africana Studies Summer Institute helped me to have a balanced and supported experience. My thanks go to Yea Afolabi-Pillischer, Joanna Cohen, Abigail Cooper, Jack Dwiggins, Kim T. Gallon, Clem Harris, Richara Heyward, Angela McMillan Howell, Ricardo Howell, Matt Karp, Will Kuby, Alicia Lee, the late Chike Lloyd, Sarah Manekin, Erik Mathisen, Maisha Phillips, Maryan Soliman, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Khadijah Costley White, and Brandon Teray Woods. The Africana Studies Summer Institute and the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) provided generative, stimulative, and supportive environments in which I could think and serve. Special thanks to Bruce Lenthall and Cathy Turner of the CTL for their leadership and guidance.

In the world of scholars, there are many brilliant and generous interlocutors. I have enjoyed many conversations that have shaped my project and my intellectual journey in important ways. For sharing their thoughts and good conversation, I thank Gabeba Baderoon, Brandon Bayne, Bill Blair, Adam Bond, Kimberly N. Brown, Melanie Buffington, Cara Burnidge, Emily Clark, xvi Acknowledgments

Ana Edwards, Antonio Espinoza, Andrew Friedman, Brett Grainger, Rachel Gross, Michael R. Hall, Mathew Cooper Harriss, Errol A. Henderson, Cheryl Hicks, Justine Howe, Elizabeth Jemison, Kathryn Lofton, AnneMarie Mingo, Bernard Moitt, Brooke Newman, Crystal Sanders, Leigh Schmidt, Katherine Shively, Asali Solomon, Brandi Summers, Dan Vaca, Heather Williams, and Nan Woodruff. For sharing research references and for reading chapter drafts— contributions that have enriched the work—I thank Sarah Jane Brubaker, Chris Cynn, Hilary Green, Melis Hafez, Errol A. Henderson, Shermaine Jones, Kathryn Lofton, Karen Rader, and Heather Williams. Special thanks to John Kneebone, who read the entire manuscript during the busiest time of the academic year. I am also grateful to my cohort of HRC fellows with whom this project and its extension have been incubated. Winnie Chan, Ryan Smith, and Faedah Totah have workshopped chapters and shared readings that have refined my ideas. I appreciate the insightful comments and suggestions offered by Elsa Barkley Brown, Alison Gise-Johnson, Thavolia Glymph, Faith B. Harris, Tera Hunter, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, and Giuliana Perrone. I am grateful for the guidance of my editor, Elaine Maisner. Readers Mary Beth Mathews and Kidada Williams pushed my analysis and inspired me with their rigorous and thoughtful feedback. Any shortcomings are mine.

Writing can be the loneliest part of this work. However, I was never completely alone thanks to my writing partners: Robert Goldberg, Kim P. Fields, and Rachel Gross. I have been fortunate to have the assistance of researchers: Laura Ague and Antoinette Brown. And when I needed to step away from the computer and enrich other aspects of my being, my girls have been the best companions: Trelane Clark, Lanita Culinane, Ellen C. Scott, Ingrid Walker-Descartes, and Candice Watkins. Caregivers Kenyatta Allison, Genevieve Cervantes, and Cristal Marte helped me balance work and family. And my family support network— April Byrd, Lauren Entrekin, Ryan Keaton, Simone Knight, Melissa Margolis, David and Stacey Smith, and Deb Yorkman— showed up in countless ways to make this journey a little easier.

My posse—my family—rolls deep. They hold me up and they hold me down in every way. With love and gratitude I acknowledge them: the late Emily Warner, elder historian Thelma Reese, Thelma Hannah, Hellen Turner and the late Daniel Turner, Sr., and Traci and Wil Wilkerson. My siblings are the best friends I did not choose; Dwayne Childs, Tosca Myers, and Clayton Myers are gifts who keep me laughing and focused on faith. Gwendolyn Warner has been my stalwart prayer warrior, covering me every step of the way. My parents, Dolores Myers and Harmon Myers, with constant

Acknowledgments xvii faith and love, gave me a great foundation. I am ever grateful for their sacrifices and guidance.

I could not do this work without a partner who shares the work of having a family and makinga life. Dan Turner did not type a single word of this work, but he is in every one of them. His love and support have made this work possible in immeasurable ways. Eisa Turner brings so much light, love, and laughter into each day. He has shared “mommy time” with this book—not quite the sibling he would like—for his entire life. For his good cheer and patience nonetheless, it is to him that I dedicate this work.

xviii Acknowledgments

Abbreviations in the Text

ABHMS AME AMEZ BBA BCBA BRFAL BTS CABMC CSBA CME DMS FSSP GFB JACPEVA

MP MSRC NNBA NUBA PETS RBMSCL RZUA

American Baptist Home Mission Society

African Methodist Episcopal

African Methodist Episcopal Zion

Bethany Baptist Association

Bluestone Colored Baptist Association

Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands Branch Theological School

Consolidated American Baptist Missionary Convention (Colored) Shiloh Baptist Association

Christian Methodist Episcopal

Diocesan Missionary Society

Freedmen and Southern Society Project

George Freeman Bragg Papers

Journal of the Annual Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia

Mahone Papers

Moorland Spingarn Research Center

Northern Neck Baptist Association

Norfolk Union Baptist Association

Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary

Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library

Reformed Zion Union Apostolic

XIX

VBSC Virginia Baptist State Convention

VHS Virginia Historical Society VSU Virginia State University ZUA Zion Union Apostolic xx Abbreviations in the Text

Soul Liberty

Introduction

In May 1872, Rev. Henry Williams Jr., pastor of the Gilfield Baptist Church, was elected to the Petersburg Common Council. He took his seat alongside two fellow church members and several other citizens of Petersburg, Virginia, including a member of the all-black congregation at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church. In his capacity as city council member, Williams presented a proposal to restrict from appointment to the police force any man judged to be a drunkard and a proposal to extend a city street. Through these contributions, Williams showed himself to be equal parts moral guardian and administrator, roles he also fulfilled as pastor at one of Petersburg’s leading black churches.’

Williams’s election to the Petersburg Common Council came seven years into his leadership of Gilfield and two years after black men in Virginia received the right to vote. Among the first cohort of Petersburg’s elected officials in 1870 were lay members of Williams’s congregation. These pioneer church members and politicians established a foundation for black church members’ contributions to policy and governance of the city. They also seta precedent for black political engagement that would come to be a highly scrutinized and politically powerful platform for black people during the postemancipation period.

Williams served only one term and then returned his focus to leading his church and supporting the spread of the Baptist state and regional conventions throughout the state. Williams’s brief foray into politics highlights an important if understudied facet of the postemancipation period—the intersection between religion and politics and how the relationship between the two realms developed. Though scholars have long debated the role of the church in black political struggles and chastised it for its sometimes limited participation, this study aims to explore the relationship between black religious institutions and black political participation in Virginia during the postemancipation period—one of the signal moments of political and cultural transformation in the African American experience—in order to understand how the relationship evolved rather than to judge it.” Moreover, this study draws important cues from the early twentieth-century studies of black churches, which were descendants of the postemancipation churches I

I study. Hence, I explore questions of leadership, organization, membership, and politics, but I ground my analysis in the particularities of the postemancipation era. My central findings expose how the intersection of religion and politics in the African American experience of the late nineteenth century shaped black political participation. In so doing, this study offers a nuanced perspective on the process that shaped the dialogic moments of engagement and withdrawal that characterized the relationship between black religion and politics after emancipation.‘ This study describes how black Christians in postemancipation Virginia pursued soul liberty—a combination of religious freedom, righteousness, equity, and justice —through their churches, conventions, and seminary education. Their efforts were shaped by the shifting political context from emancipation to citizenship. The expressions were not uniform or easily pegged to one political orientation or another because the political terrain was so complex. Though the goals were clear, the ways they could be manifest were very much shaped by the context. Black religious politics of the postemancipation period was dynamic, responsive, and a bit hard to pin down.

TWO CENTRAL CONTENTIONS direct this study. First, I argue that the relationships between black religious institutions and political institutions changed from slavery to emancipation because black people went from being property to being citizens. As formerly enslaved people became citizens, they continued to negotiate the means to obtain the resources that would make real the freedom for which they had prayed and fought. The particular tasks of defining black capacity for obtaining political office, securing education, and negotiating biracial coalitions called on churches and other institutions to perform in different ways. The false binary of viewing churches as either engaged or disengaged with worldly circumstances oversimplifies the more nuanced reality of their members’ simultaneous spiritual exultation over emancipation and material concern for the social, political, and economic aspects of freedom. Consequently, I explore how the context shaped the shifting orientations of churches in relationship to political participation.” The black churches of Reconstruction were not caught between being an opiate or an inspiration; they were caught in the position of mediating black life on totally new terms. When coupled with the aims and practices of democratic politics and party development, the function and structure of churches and conventions not only made churches vulnerable to political exploitation but also caused a merger of values, such that women were marginalized while ministerial leadership was lionized.° These developments also shaped racial identification in a way that influenced interracial politics, which were so central to the period.

My second point derives from the first. I aim to disrupt the leadership paradigm that focuses attention on the male ministerial elite by drawing attention to the processes that demarcated ministerial positions as male. Some scholars explain the apparent overlap between ministerial and political leadership in terms of educational attainment, divine appointment, and the authority that being a minister provided.’ I argue that though limited, theological education provided the context for the development of black Protestants’ interracial political strategies and the development of gendered roles and ideas among theological students.

Further, I expand the view of the relationship between leaders and politics beyond the pulpit to the pews. To examine only the leaders who were ministers limits consideration of other church members who held political office. For example, not only did Rev. Henry Williams and Rev. Guy Powell—a minister and politician from Brunswick County—hold elected and appointed offices, but so did church officers and members, an even deeper indication of the level of overlap between church people and political leadership and participation.* Moreover, churches as collective bodies provided the votes necessary to bring elected officials to power. Furthermore, looking only at ministers as political leaders excludes women’s political participation completely. Scholars only reinforce the structural processes that excluded women when they approach the interpretation of religion and politics this way. That approach omits the places within churches and religious spaces where women may have exercised control, including in church meetings, where they could vote and exercise leadership by conducting prayer meetings. By approaching the narrative of the political preacher with some skepticism, I capture the development of that role. Looking at the laity destabilizes the notion that men were made for the ministry (in black churches, anyway).

A LOCAL STUDY OF Petersburg and the surrounding counties structures and anchors my approach, allowing me to represent the dynamic evolution of black religion and politics. Examination of census returns, local election returns, newspapers, and church and convention minutes allows the interwoven threads of community, social, and political life to come into full view. Documenting interactions between church members, between members and leaders, and between churches and government officials at this level is essential to articulating a clear sense of the evolution of political movements, for as Steven Hahn posits, the best way to understand a political movement is “by analyzing how its participants directly experienced social changes.” Focusing on the development of church conventions, like the statewide Virginia Baptist State Convention; a handful of regional associations spread across the Tidewater and Southside regions, like the (Colored) Shiloh Baptist Association and the Bluestone Colored Baptist Association; and the Zion Union Apostolic Church gives a sense of the local roots of black church organization. This approach, coupled with a prosopography of the church community and an examination of census data, Freedmen’s Bureau records, traveler accounts, and city government records, provides insight into the lived experience of the community. The voluminous William Mahone Papers, which include his correspondence with political agents throughout Virginia, provide a window into the evolution of coalition politics within the state.

Before I delve into an overview of Virginia politics, let me offer a brief discussion of my conceptualization of politics. While significant advances have been made in expanding the definition of politics for African Americans, who have spent the majority of their existence in the United States excluded from the formal arena of electoral politics, a concerted focus on this very aspect during the postemancipation period is very much in order. With the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and related revisions of state constitutions, formerly enslaved people became citizens and black men part of the electorate. This does not suggest that the tools of evasion, misdirection, and doublespeak characteristic of the infrapolitics employed by those excluded from the formal arena were no longer necessary. The dynamics of power, domination, and resistance that characterized the relationships between slave owners and the enslaved remained in place for a long time. Freedpeople had to work for their former owners for wages or crop shares and had to depend on white benevolence to develop their first generation of educated people. These relationships required negotiation.” The stark contrast between the enslaved past and the emancipated present was most powerfully articulated in legal and political terms.” Social and cultural transformations were fuzzier. While earlier generations of scholars have depicted black people as political dupes at worst and as politically naive at best, my study credits these new citizens with working to protect their own interests.” I follow them as their gaze shifted to realizing the soul freedom they had dreamed, prayed, and fought for. For some, freeing the spirit required voting and holding office, which allowed them to participate in the distribution of resources and defining the terms of that freedom.

In addition to focusing on black participation in electoral politics, I examine the terms of the biracial political coalition evident within the Readjuster movement of the late 1870s and early 1880s. This biracial coalition effectively fulfilled what was Virginia’s era of Reconstruction and is an important example of how Reconstruction attempted to remake American society —the very idea of American democracy—without slavery." Major General William Mahone— political titan, railroad magnate, and a former Confederate— spearheaded the movement of western white farmers, urban lawyers, and freedpeople.” At its apex, the movement united black and white Republicans against Conservatives, later called Democrats, known for their support of paying the state’s debt (which included debts accrued while West Virginia was still part of the state and while black people were enslaved) at full face value and at the expense of public education. They were called Funders based on their position regarding the debt. By the time the Readjusters—so named because of their belief that the debt should be “adjusted” — built a majority coalition in Virginia’s General Assembly in 1879 and elected William E. Cameron as governor in 1881, schools had been shut down for lack of funding. With control of the state and general assembly, however, Readjusters effected Virginia’s de facto Reconstruction, welcoming black people into almost all levels of political participation (as voters, delegates, and state legislators, but not as elected federal officials) and supported legislation that reduced the debt burden, secured state-funded education, funded a college for black people, banned the whipping post, and established an insane asylum for black people so that the mentally ill would no longer be stigmatized and treated poorly by being placed in jail.!° Black people’s political aims were achieved through the coalition and with its political support at the legislative level.’

One of the ways I interpret the intersection of religion and politics is through the ways that William Mahone and his organizers viewed black churches. Early in the movement, they seemed to be unaware of black churches and their roles in the community because there were few references to them in the correspondence. In 1883, however, Mahone actively sought information about black churches and their leaders after someone recommended he do so. Underlying the view of black voters as individuals and constituents, however, was the view of black people as members of organized churches. I replace emphasis on Mahone’s attempt to marshal information about black churches in preparation for the 1883 state election and his 1889 gubernatorial bid with a focus on the church convention networks that were already extant.’* Mahone’s rudimentary contact lists paled in comparison to what black church conventions already knew about their constituents. In the distance between the two was the voting power of black churches. Comparing Mahone’s lists to the voter polls, election returns, and church conventions’ statistical information reveals just how much political power black churches potentially wielded and suggests a nascent awakening in Mahone to what twenty-first-century politicians now believe to be true: the way to reach black voters en masse is through their churches.” Readjusters needed blocs of votes, not individuals, to retain political office. Black churches became important parts of the Readjusters’ political strategy.