RICHMOND — The responses of Christians in the American South toward the institution of slavery and those it enslaved were inconsistent and complex — bequeathing a legacy which continues to complicate racial reconciliation 150 years after emancipation, said the president of the University of Richmond.
But “talking about the very past that first divided us and has divided us for so long can be a valuable place to come together, a place to find what can more fully unite us,” Edward Ayers told participants at a conference on racial reconciliation.
Ayers was one of several keynote speakers at “Faith, Freedom, Forgiveness: Religion and the Civil War, Emancipation and Reconciliation in Our Time,” the May 20-22 annual conference of the Baptist History & Heritage Society.
University of Richmond president Edward Ayers (center) joined conference hosts Bruce Gourley (left) of the Baptist History & Heritage Society and Fred Anderson of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society. (Religious Herald photo)
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Several hundred people gathered for the society’s meeting in Richmond, a city with a troubled racial past. That past can be better understood by focusing on individuals, Ayers said, including one of his predecessors — 19th-century Baptist minister Robert Ryland, who was the University of Richmond’s first president.
“Ryland tried to behave in a Christian way with the African-American people even as he presided over what he realized was a compromised expression of the Church,” said Ayers.
“We’re not sure what to do with such a person,” he added. “To live as a white person in the [antebellum] South was to be unavoidably implicated in its system. To give all you had to the Confederacy also was to be implicated.” Ryland did both, he noted.
Baptized in Bruington (Va.) Baptist Church in 1824, Ryland earned two degrees from Washington’s Columbian College, now George Washington University but then a school with close Baptist ties. After serving as a pastor in Lynchburg, Va., he was named head in 1841 of what became the University of Richmond, a position he held until 1866.
“Ryland embodied the struggles of his time and place” over slavery and race, said Ayers, noting the pastor once wrote, “I feel the perplexity of the subject.” While Ryland believed Scripture implicitly sanctioned slavery, he was reluctant to be its advocate. “He didn’t think slavery itself was a sin but that grievous sins were constantly connected with it,” said Ayers.
A ‘bold experiment’
At about the time Ryland became president of UR, he assumed the pastorate of Richmond’s First African Baptist Church. The congregation had recently been organized by black members of First Baptist Church, actively encouraged by First Baptists’ white members, who wanted to worship without the “disruptive” presence of its many African-Americans — both enslaved and free.
Virginia law, ever sensitive to unrest among the state’s enslaved population, prohibited blacks from gathering in large numbers without the presence of white men. To comply with the law, First African would require a white pastor, and the church turned to Ryland.
“It would have been wise for such a man [as Ryland] to keep his head down,” said Ayers. “Maybe he should have thought about not complicating his life, but in those years he became part of this bold experiment. … He felt he had no right to excuse himself from helping to forward this cause. … He took the job, knowing he would lose status and be under deep suspicion” — from both whites and blacks.
During his tenure as pastor, Ryland saw successes — the church eventually drew more than 3,000 worshippers, raised enough in “penny offerings” to pay Ryland’s salary, and engaged in benevolent acts in the city.
But the experience also exacerbated his “perplexity” over slavery and highlighted the inconsistencies in both his and society’s views. “Ryland said he treated the congregation just as he would a white congregation,” said Ayers. “He wrote, ‘If they were slaves, I thought of them as Christ’s freedman; if free, then as Christ’s bondsmen.’ Immediately after writing those words, however, Ryland described his aim “to preach out of their minds dreams and fancies.”
An exhibit at the Virginia Baptist Historical Society reflects some of the themes explored at the Baptist History & Heritage Society's annual conference. The exhibit was concurrent with the conference. (Religious Herald photo)
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“Were those dreams of freedom or of reuniting a family?” asked Ayers.
A catechism Ryland compiled for his congregation also reflected the dichotomy. It included injunctions to “obey your master,” yet was criticized by Richmond’s mayor because it suggested slaves ought to be able to read — a crime in antebellum Virginia.
In the 1850s a series of events left their mark on Ryland, said Ayers. Church members who had found their way North to freedom frequently wrote to family and friends remaining in Richmond, sending the letters to their former pastor. At the end of each worship service, Ryland distributed the letters — unopened — to their recipients.
At one point it was discovered that some of the letters detailed escape routes for enslaved Richmonders, prompting white leaders in the city to insist Ryland open each document before delivering it.
“Ryland responded, ‘My role is to preach the gospel, not to be a policeman,’” said Ayers. But Ryland recognized the danger to himself and the church. “He was equally mortified to think he would be expected to turn people in or that he would aid people running away from slavery,” Ayers said.
After the Civil War, Ryland lost most of his possessions, retaining only a cow whose milk he sold from door to door to support himself. The university, also destitute, could no longer pay him and he stepped down from the presidency, as well as from the pastorate of First African, which could now employ a black leader.
He briefly taught at a new theological institute for black ministers which eventually became Virginia Union University, but in 1868 he moved to Kentucky, where he was president of two female colleges.
Before he died in 1899, he would be able to write that blacks “are our fellowmen, and some are our fellow Christians,” said Ayers. “But most Southerners didn’t follow his lead. … Long before official segregation settled over the South, a profound silence developed between black and whites.”
“[Ryland] holds up a mirror to our own time,” he said. “How will we be judged by those who follow us? We too are complicit in the injustice that is all around us in this nation.
“We are reminded that people are people and the conditions in which we live matter. They define our lives … It’s not enough to change hearts and minds. We also much change the conditions in which people live.”
Robert Dilday ([email protected]) is managing editor of the Religious Herald.