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ARTICLE III (Cont.)
In 1830 another rupture occurred. About 5,000 preachers and lay people left the church because it would not grant representation to the laity or permit the election of presiding elders (district superintendents).
The new church was called the Methodist Protestant and it remained strong until 1939 when it united with the Methodist Church.
From 1844-65 the big issues confronting the churches were the slavery question and the Civil War. John Wesley had been an ardent opponent of slavery. In 1774 he published a very powerful tract against it, titled "Thoughts Upon Slavery."
Many of the leaders of early Methodism such as Thomas Coke and Asbury shared his hatred for this form of human bondage. As the 19th Century progressed, it became evident that tensions were deepening in Methodism and the nation as a whole over the slavery question. Membership was not limited to a region, class or race, and the internal conflicts which grew, ultimately split Methodism into separate northern and southern churches.
The slavery issue was successfully put aside at the Methodist Episcopal General Conference of 1836 and 1840, but it could not be evaded when the 1844 General Conference convened in New York City.
The first skirmish concerned an appeal from Francis Harding of Baltimore who had been suspended for his failure to free slaves aquired by marriage. The appeal lost by a sizeable margin.
The second clash was more serious. It focused on Bishop Jas. 0. Andrew one of the five bishops of the church, who had likewise acquired slaves in a bequest from his first wife, and in his subsequent second marriage
When the vote was finally taken, after withering verbal warfare, Andrew was suspended from exercising his Episcopal powers so long as he could not or would not free his slaves.
A few days after the crucial vote, a 'Plan of Separation' was drafted which permitted the annual conferences in slaveholding states to separate from the Methodist Episcopal Church in order to organize their own ecclesiastial structure.
The plan was adopted and groundwork prepared for the creation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Delegates met in Louisville, Ky. in 1845 to organize and their first General Conference met in Petersburg, Va. the following year. Here a discipline and hymnbook were adopted.
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Bitterness between northern and southern Methodists expanded in the years leading to Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 and then through the carnage of the Civil War.
Each church claimed for its region, divine sanction and prayed ferventl for God's will to be accomplished and victory for its side.