Emanuel's Beginnings
Emanuel AME Church's history begins with the founding of a 1797 prayer band. That band became the Hampstead congregation of the Bethel AME circuit, 10 years before Ft. Sumter was built.
Emanuel AME Church is the oldest AME Church in the South, founded in 1818, during slavery. When white Methodists wanted to build a hearse barn (a structure for storing horse-drawn wagons built for transporting coffins) on top of black burial sites, three slave congregations, including Hampstead's, withdrew from Charleston's Methodist Churches in protest.
Morris Brown, a Charleston Methodist leader contacted Richard Allen in Philadelphia. Allen had become the first black Methodist bishop when Francis Asbury consecrated him in 1816. Brown requested Charleston's three congregations affiliate as a the Bethel circuit of Allen's newly formed African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church.
Having been physically restrained while praying for refusing to segregate themselves in St. George's church balcony in 1787, Allen and the others formed the Free African Society in 1787, meeting in blacksmith shop, using an anvil as a pulpit.
.Allen, a devout Methodist, chartered Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia in 1794. President George Washington was among those who gave Bethel a financial gift.
Calls from faith communities in other cities and states led Bishop Richard Allen to an unprecedented next step in 1817. Allen convened a Philadelphia conference and linked churches in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland--and Charleston, SC-into a new Methodist denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.
The AME Church, a national church established without white oversight, took the courageous step to create an institution of freedom and bind it to God. Rather than a church with the freedom to practice its religious faith, Allen's AME Church became a place where African-Americans could practice their faith
in freedom .
With churches in San Francisco by 1850, in Africa by 1891, (and with 2 million members by 1995!), Richard Allen ‘s 42 member church turned into an international institution of faith. His Church is the first American institution to fully offer American freedom for the enslaved faithful.
Morris Brown--Charleston
Although he would not meet Bishop Allen for another five years, in 1823, Charleston's Morris Brown shared his vision, and is a founding father of American liberty no less than Charleston's Pinckneys, Rutledges, or Henry Laurens.
Morris Brown carried the story of the salvation of Christ and the freedom of the AME Church to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin; he convened the Canadian conference, and went as far west as Oklahoma. He then returned to pastor Mother Bethel as Allen's health declined. In 1828, Morris Brown was selected the second AME Bishop, having complete oversight and charge of the Church's affairs, convening its general and area conferences from Allen's 1829 health decline to Brown's own decline in 1844.
If "Black" Harry Hoiser, a circuit preacher (who met Richard Allen in 1784) can be compared to St. John the Baptist, (Hosier ‘sexhorting converted thopusands of souls to faith in Christ and fellowship in the Methodist Church), Charleston's Morris Brown, was Paul to Richard Allen's Peter.
First Shot
Ft. Sumter, with its 5 foot thick wall and its 70,000 tons of New England granite rising 50 feet above the sea's low tide began construction in 1827. The early conflicts of the church grew to occupy the national stage.
In 1861, the first shot fired at Charleston's Fort Sumter began a 4 year civil war that took 600,000 American lives. On February 21, 1865, Charleston surrendered, and civil authority of Charleston and Fort Sumter returned to the Union.
Then Freedom Came The 33 rd Regiment USCT, SC V-a regiment of South Carolina African-American soldiers who were Union volunteers-marched down meeting Street before noon, wearing red pants, shouldering Springfield and Enfield rifles, and singing Methodist hymns, in a cadence step that took them pass the auction blocks where some had been sold.
To the beating of pans and washboards and dancing, followed by the singing of spirituals like "Great Day," the soldiers passed Calhoun Street. One older woman reminded a Union officer of her faith, telling him "her Jesus" freed the city's 18,000 slaves.
What Happened when Slavery Ended; How Did Freedmen Fare?
The question loomed, with slavery ended, what would freedom bring?
The desire to praise God, for one. By April Rev. Richard H. Cain and 8 missionary preachers sailed into Charleston under the Union flag flying over Fort Sumter.
Daniel A. Payne, a Charleston native son and the AME Church's 12th bishop had arrived earlier, returning home for the first time in 30 years.
That night at Old Bethel Church on Calhoun Street, Bishop Payne, Rev. Cain, and the others celebrated the first public official AME meeting in more than 40 years and with many of the original members sat in the pews, reclaimed the AME allegiance.
The congregation gathered new members, purchased land on the Calhoun Street's north side, and built a wooden church which soon served 5,000 members-the largest congregation of ex-slaves, their family and children, anywhere in the South, in the first years after the Civil War.
The Charleston congregation, renamed Emanuel ("God is with us"), because of its size and early action in building one of the largest sanctuaries, became the Mother Church of Southern Freedom.
Emanuel's Witness Emanuel AME Church is a powerful witness and answer to the fears and doubts that haunted the character and actions of the city's ex-slaves. Its story includes men of extraordinary vision and leadership. Emanuel was the first American mega-church. At its founding in 1817, its 5,000 members were the largest autonomous slave meeting in the South, and the largest African-American congregation in the nation.
It was disbanded, its meeting house burned and destroyed in 1822, when a former congregation member and lay leader, Denmark Vesey, a carpenter, ship's navigator, and linguist (Vesey spoke 9 languages), planned the largest, most elaborate American insurrection ever organized (12,000 slaves!), foiled just hours before it was signaled to begin.
Daniel Payne became the first African-American college president, at Wilberforce University, in Ohio. Richard H. Cain, Emanuel's new pastor, was twice elected to the US Congress, and became the 14 th AME bishop. A later pastor, Moses B. Salters, became the 21 st AME bishop.
Emanuel AME Church is Charleston's most important historic African-American heritage site. It bridges the past and present of a house once divided (a nation slave and free). Born in slavery, Emanuel was built in freedom.
The House of Emanuel The present sanctuary completed in 1891, was erected after the 1886 earthquake. As the bricks toppled from Ft. Sumter in fierce conflict, the brick walls of Emanuel towered toward the horizon in thanksgiving and peace. Its magnificent Victorian portions, its original pews, heart pine flooring, wainscoting, gas lamps and chandeliers, and embossed pressed tin ceiling still greet each visitor and member and enhance the worship experience. Charleston artist John Green painted its dramatic murals of Christ in the 1940's. The organ pipe-case, installed in 1908, sits in the rear balcony. The single pulpit for reading scriptural lessons and preaching the sermon has roots in the AME tradition that God's works, words, and current message are united and inseparable.
Emanuel actively celebrates two early American Methodist practices. The Thursday night prayer band continues the love feast observed by John Wesley in Europe among Moravian Christians. Emanuel's monthly love feast celebrates the forgiving love of Christ at Calvary, by singing praise hymns, offering prayers, giving testimony of grace--and a non-eucharistic meal, sharing broken bread and water.
"Waiting for the hour" describes the historic Methodist watch night service, celebrated at Emanuel every New Year's Eve, followed by a mid-night dinner of "hoppin' John" and collard greens," traditionally associated in Charleston with prosperity and good fortune.
At Emanuel History Unites With Grace Separated by sea, three miles, and by land, three blocks from the boarding terminal, Ft. Sumter and Emanuel AME tie together America's greatest struggles of liberty and equality.
Patriot Christopher Gadsden built a colonial pier here, once America's largest wharf. From his wharf, the British sailed with 5,000 slaves at the end of the American Revolution.
In 1808, Congress ended the importation of Africans as slaves in the United States. The previous year, 1807, saw Gadsden's wharf serve as the landing site of slave ships from Senegal to Angola, with sales taking place directly from the wharf's ships and buildings.
The Africans confined to the wharf suffered, dysentery, small pox, other fatal ills, and daily, carpenters build shells for the dead. Perhaps as many as 1600 Africans died in one 4 month period.
From the trade along this dock, just three blocks down the street, Emanuel arose. Emanuel's mission has always gone beyond guilt to grace. For it celebrated the full grace of love and mercy as it remembered those lost and sold; for it offered thanksgiving and praise when the jubilee of freedom came by soldier's feet. Mercy and forgiveness poured out of this congregation as it built its walls as a place for the faithful to worship, and the high calling of mercy is present in its open arms today.
