Rehearsal for Rebellion
On November 8, 1842, in Providence, Rhode Island, three well-known ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church announced they were seceding from that church. Jotham Horton, La Roy Sunderland, and Orange Scott all had made reputations as foes of slavery. Now they were protesting what they saw as infiltration by slave interests into the Methodist leadership so thorough as to be systematically silencing the church’s historic antislavery views. In a broadside, The Grounds of Secession from the M. E. Church, written by Scott, the men declared that their main reason for secession was that “The M. E. Church is not only a slave-holding, but a slavery defending church.”
This gesture shocked moderate Methodist clergy who had been trying to walk a line between antislavery colleagues in the northern and border states and ingrained proslavery sentiment among Methodists in the South. Southern members declared the seceders “radico-abolitionists” and boasted of having purged the church of their sworn foes’ influence.
Many northern ministers rallied to the side of the seceders, including moderates who found the proslavery political and moral response to this secession threadworn, if not disturbing.
Proslavery Methodists further entrenched themselves. That faction’s conviction regarding adherents’ right to own slaves and sense of moral superiority for “braving the pestilent malaria,” encountered in the South, to save enslaved souls led to a bitter 1844 schism. Imported into the colonies in the 1760s, Methodism by this time had grown to be the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The run up to and the repercussions of this sundering mirrored events in the rest of the country.
METHODISM BEGAN IN GREAT BRITAIN as a sect within the Church of
