IGHR (Samford) — Day 4 — Migration, Platting, & Blacks in Antebellum Churches

The fourth, and penul­ti­mate, day at Sam­ford is always bit­ter­sweet. It’s the last full day, and is capped with the ban­quet.

In the Vir­ginia class, Bar­bara Vines Lit­tle talked about land tax records and migra­tion trails and set­tle­ment clus­ters. We also had a mini-course on land plat­ting and Deed Map­per from Vic Dunn. The last lec­ture of the day was on “Find­ing the Answers in Vir­gini­a’s Neigh­bors Records,” dri­ving home a point that has been made con­sis­tent­ly this week: The record may be a place you don’t expect it to be. The bride and groom in Vir­ginia may go to Mary­land to get mar­ried, per­haps because the laws make it eas­i­er to accom­plish there at that time, or per­haps because they are Catholic, and there are so few Catholic parish­es in Vir­ginia.

After the class I went to the Sam­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Library, Spe­cial Col­lec­tions room and pulled a fold­er from the Bap­tist records.

I was not look­ing for any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, but want­ed to see what ear­ly records exist­ed for the ear­ly church­es in Alaba­ma. I found records of the Canaan Bap­tist Church, Jef­fer­son Coun­ty, Alaba­ma. The church was found­ed in 1818, a year before state­hood. The find­ing aid for the Can­nan Bap­tist Church col­lec­tion (gath­ered by Simon J. Smith) says that the col­lec­tion includes:

• plat maps (I guess these are of the church prop­er­ty)
• wills
• a pic­ture and obit­u­ary of a mem­ber (W. A. Ivey)
• sketch­es of the his­to­ry of the church with some infor­ma­tion on church mem­bers and pas­tors
• a biog­ra­phy of Job
• some pic­tures of the church and of its mem­bers
• a Hous­ton fam­i­ly tree
• “Many genealog­i­cal records (1500 est. pp.)”
• news­pa­per clip­pings of two mur­ders
• war ration books with stamps
• war­ran­ty deeds for a John Vines
• love let­ters between S. E. Reeves and J.G. Smith
• “Fam­i­ly charts.”

The first fold­er con­tained a typed tran­script of the mem­ber­ship toll of the Canaan Church from 1818 to 1834. This tran­scrip­tion itself appears to be based on a pre­vi­ous tran­scrip­tion, from Decem­ber 1834. The lists are divid­ed by race, and then, in the case of the white mem­bers, by gen­der. They are tran­scribed roll by roll. Each roll con­tains approx­i­mate­ly 40 names.

The roll that con­tains the “Col­ored Mem­bers” of the con­gre­ga­tion, indi­cates the sur­name of their own­er, for exam­ple:

At the end of the list of col­ored mem­bers, there is the fol­low­ing note:

“Many of the names of the own­ers of these slaves do not belong to Canaan Church and nev­er did. It is evi­dent that they were not church mem­bers. It is pos­si­ble that they belonged to the Methodist Church or maybe the Pres­by­ter­ian.” So, the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, which we have wit­ness strug­gle with its racist past, was actu­al­ly more open than the Methodist and Pres­by­ter­ian church­es, at least dur­ing the ante­bel­lum peri­od.

I will be going back tomor­row to read the biog­ra­phy of Job, and under­stand as much as I can about the ante­bel­lum Bap­tist church, which allowed for the ordi­na­tion of black min­is­ters.

Janet Duits­man Cor­nelius. Slave Mis­sions and the Black Church in the Ante­bel­lum South. (Colum­bia: Uni­ver­si­ty of South Car­oli­na Press, 1999).

Simon J. Smith, com­pil­er. “Canaan Bap­tist Church: Alpha­bet­i­cal Mem­ber­ship Records,” Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Sam­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Library, Birm­ing­ham, AL: SCB 711, Box 1, Fold­er 2.