Church Property Disputes, Religious Freedom, and the Ordeal of African Methodists in Antebellum St. Louis: Farrar v. Finney (1855)

Abstract

In October 1846, the men and women of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Louis (African Church) met to consider whether they would remain with the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) or align with the recently-formed Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS). Two years earlier, in 1844, amid growing conflict over the question of slavery within the national Methodist Church, its General Conference had adopted a Plan of Separation that provided for the withdrawal of the southern Methodists and the creation of their own ecclesiastical government. The Plan provided that each Border State congregation would have the right to determine for itself by a vote of the majority with which of the two churches it would affiliate.After the southern conferences had organized the new MECS in May 1845, the trustees of the all-white Fourth Street Methodist Church (Fourth Street Church), whose quarterly conference exercised nominal authority over the African Church, informed the black congregants that they could retain their house of worship only if they voted to join the southern Methodists. Throwing caution to the wind, and putting at risk a decade-and-a-half of patient efforts to achieve formal congregational independence within the Methodist Church, the black congregants voted decisively, by a 110 to 7 margin, to remain affiliated with the Northern Conference.