Methodist Episcopal Church, South,
a religious body organized at a convention in
Louisville, Ky., in 1845, by a number of annual Methodist conferences in the
Southern States.
The slavery agitation was the cause of the separation of the
Northern and Southern Methodists.
As early as 1780 a conference held at
Baltimore adopted a resolution requiring itinerant preachers who owned slaves to set them free, and urging lay slave-holders to do the same.
In 1789 the following sentence appeared in the rules of discipline which prohibited certain things: “The buying or selling the bodies and souls of men, women, or children, with an intention to enslave them.”
In 1816 the general conference passed an act that no slave-holder could hold any office in the
Church, except in such States where the laws did not “admit of emancipation and permit the liberated slave to enjoy freedom.”
The agitation caused by slavery which continually disturbed the
Church culminated in a serious condition in 1844, when
Bishop Andrew, of the
South, became a slave-holder by marriage.
At the general conference held in New York, in May, 1844, a resolution was adopted, by a vote of 111 to 69, that
Bishop Andrew “desist from the exercise of his office so long as he is connected with slavery.”
The outcome of the discussion was the report of a committee that the thirteen annual conferences in slave-holding States would “find it necessary to unite in a distinct ecclesiastical connection.”
In May of the following year these Southern conferences sent representatives to the convention in
Louisville, Ky., which formally organized the “Methodist Episcopal Church, South.”
During and for some years after the
Civil War the growth of the Southern Church was slow, but latterly it has been quite rapid.
In 1900 this Church reported 6,041 ministers, 14,244 churches, and 1,457,864 members.
