The year following emancipation was one of religious excitement for large
numbers of the blacks. Before 1865, the Negro church members were attached to
white congregations or were organized into missions, with nearly always a
white minister in charge and a black assistant. With the coming of freedom the
races very soon separated in religious matters. For this there were two
principal reasons: the Negro preachers could exercise more influence in
independent churches; and new church organizations from the North were seeking
Negro membership. Sometimes Negro members were urged to insist on the right
"to sit together" with the whites. In a Richmond church a Negro from the
street pushed his way to the communion altar and knelt. There was a noticeable
pause; then General Robert E. Lee went forward and knelt beside the Negro; and
the congregation followed his example. But this was a solitary instance. When
the race issue was raised by either color, the church membership usually
divided. There was much churchgoing by the Negroes, day and night, and church
festivities and baptisms were common. The blacks preferred immersion and,
wanted a new baptism each time they changed to a new church. Baptizings in
ponds, creeks, or rivers were great occasions and were largely attended.
"Shouting" the candidates went into the water and "shouting" they came out.
One old woman came up screaming, "Freed from slavery! freed from sin! Bless
God and General Grant!"

In the effort to realize their new-found freedom, the Negroes were heavily
handicapped by their extreme poverty and their ignorance. The total value of
free Negro property ran up into the millions in 1860, but the majority of the
Negroes had nothing. There were a few educated Negroes in the South, and more
in the North and in Canada, but the mass of the race was too densely ignorant
to furnish its own leadership. The case, however, was not hopeless; the Negro
was able to work and in large territories had little competition; wages were
high, even though paid in shares of the crop; the cost of living was low; and