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The Southern Baptist Convention conducted a program of domestic mission work from its
establishment in 1845. Between 1845 and 1882 domestic mission work was carried out under
the auspices of a series of domestic boards. The Convention's domestic
mission fields included Southern whites, slaves, free blacks, Indians, and Chinese
immigrants in California.
While the work of the Convention continued on a limited basis during the Civil War and
Reconstruction, Southern Baptist churches and state conventions also accepted the
assistance of the American Baptist Home Mission Society of New York, the Northern
counterpart to the Convention's Domestic Mission Board. During and after the Civil War
the American Baptist Home Mission Society considered the war-torn South a mission
field, and it sent missionaries and resources into the South to assist freed blacks and to
help Southern Baptists rebuild or reinstate their churches.
Given the fact that many of these churches and state conventions had not been
significantly allied with the voluntary Southern Baptist Convention even before the war
(as America was still a society of "island communitites"), it was not particularly unusual that these churches and
conventions would cooperate with Northern Baptist societies.1 But from the perspective
of those among the Convention's leadership who wanted to see the Convention become a
strong South-wide denomination, the presence of Northern Baptists in Southern Baptist
territory was perceived to be a threat.
The Convention's leadership decided in 1882 to step up its efforts to "reclaim" the South
from Northern Baptist influence by strengthening the Convention's languishing domestic
mission board. A new Home Mission Board was assigned new headquarters in Atlanta,
and a new Corresponding Secretary, Isaac Taylor Tichenor, was hired.
Tichenor was born in Kentucky in 1825, received some schooling, and by the end of his
teens his preaching had won him the title "boy orator of Kentucky." His career in the
ministry included church work in several Southern states, and during the Civil War he
joined the Confederate Army as a chaplain and sharpshooter. After the war Tichenor left
the ministry for a career in industry. His Montevallo Coal Mining Company, located in
Alabama, utilized new scientific technologies for coal mining, and Tichenor drew upon
his oratorical skills to promote his ideas about Alabama's industrial potential. In 1872 he
became the first president of Alabama's State Agricultural and Mechanical College,
remaining in that position until he resigned to take over the work of the Southern Baptist
Convention's new Home Mission Board.2
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A Baptist minister turned progressive industrialist, Tichenor resembled historian Paul
Gaston's characterization of the "New South Prophets": educated Southern journalists
and businessmen who called for progress and industry in the interests of restoring a
defeated South.3 The New South prophets did not desire to see their region integrated and
homogenized into a replica of the Northeast; instead they believed that Southern Progress
would enable the region to direct its own affairs (or in the words of Wilbur J. Cash, to be
"forever impregnable" to further conquest).4
While the ostensible purpose of the Home Mission Board would continue to be
evangelism, the fact that the Convention chose Tichenor to overhaul the Home Mission
Board indicated more pressing purposes for domestic missions in the 1880s and 1890s:
to reclaim churches and conventions under Northern Baptist influence, to establish new
relationships where there had been none, and to set Southern Baptists upon a new course
of Progress and prosperity.
Tichenor and the Home Mission Board would work to accomplish these goals in two
major ways: evangelism and benevolent work among people not affiliated with the
Convention; and institutional efforts to create a more efficient, hierarchical Convention.
While the evangelism and benevolent work conducted by the new Home Mission Board
was domestic missions in a traditional sense, the rhetoric surrounding this work often
expressed calculations not of how many souls the Board was winning for Christ but of
how the Board's success among certain groups would strengthen the Convention's
influence in the South. The rhetoric did seem to vary, however, depending upon the
group in question. The Home Mission Board, in its reports to the Convention in the
1890s, clearly viewed the white Baptists of the mountain region, as well as city dwellers
and certain immigrant groups, to embody the greatest potential for Convention growth.
Less certain was the rhetoric surrounding Indians and Negroes, who should clearly be
evangelized but who did not rank with Southern whites as a potential power base for the
denomination.
The following are excerpts from the 1890s and early 1900s from Home Mission Board
reports and from articles in the Board's official publication, Our Home Field. These
excerpts typify the rhetoric attached to each distinct "people" or region considered to be a
mission field of the Board. The racial attitudes and confident belief in "uplift" expressed
in these passages characterized the thinking and rhetoric not only of Southern Baptist
leaders but of most progressive, middle-class Americans during this era.
"It is not proper for the Board in this report to speculate upon the fate of the Indian tribes,
but we cannot shut our eyes to the fact they are dying nationalities, and that sooner or
later the hour of dissolution will overtake them. The beautiful names they have given to
our mountains and rivers will live for long centuries after their homes shall have
mouldered into dust and their graves have been desecrated by the white man's plow.
While we lament their impending fate, let us do what we can to make them citizens of
that better city whose maker and builder is God." 5
"The work of evangelization has been largely accomplished, and the
demand for Christian development and education is upon us, and is
increasing as the years go by. The days of the Indian are numbered. Ere
long their tribal organizations will be dissolved, and they will become
merged into the white race or will disappear forever." 6
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"The whole island is open to the gospel and in the name of our Lord we should go up and
possess the land."7
"Should the present struggle result in the freedom of Cuba, there will be presented such
an opportunity for the extension of our Baptist faith as never has been furnished by any
nation. One result of it will be the disestablishment of the Catholic Church and the
enthronement of religious freedom over the island. Then with no restriction upon us,
with our present mission organization reinforced to equal the demands of the new
condition, our Baptist people, the only people of the Protestant fait having church
organizations upon the island, might with the blessings of God sweep over it and win it
for the Master." 8
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On Immigrant Missions
"The fact that [foreign immigrants] are coming throws upon us the mighty
responsibilities to meet them with the gospel. Self-interest for our country, as well as
obedience to Christ's command, demands this of us. Our civilization is to be tested by
our ability to assimilate and Christianize these foreigners." 9
Recently baptized Italian immigrants, Texas, 1912 |
On Missions among Southern Blacks
"There is not a white man of the front rank in the South, what ever his culture and refinement, can be
a true Southerner and neglect the fact of ten million Negroes." 10
North Carolinian J.C. Scarboro made the following argument in favor of Southern Baptist
support for the Home Mission Board's program of establishing local institutes to educate
Black ministers:
"Out of this Institute work are to come results long prayed for by our white
pastors and people. The lifting of colored Baptists to a higher and better home life,
church life, intellectual life, better living, and to self-development as men and women.
To quicken desire for better home surroundings and better homes, for higher Christian
education and consequent better citizenship. It will result in practical and more effective
missionary work to be done by them among themselves at home, and enlarge their
notions as to their mission to the world. . . .
Then, too, the benefits will be large and many in number which will come to our
white Baptists in the South from this work. . . . It will enlarge our views of
the capacity of the Negro. It will enlarge and broaden our sympathies for him, and enable
us to do, unselfishly, Christian work for him, with stronger and better hope for him as a
man and a brother in Christ. . . . It will help us to see clearly the necessity of lifting him
up, for if he is not lifted upon he will pull us down. It will show us more clearly the
necessity of Christian citizenship in order to realize somewhat the ideal of the American
system of government. It will revivify and renew afresh our kindly feelings for the race
which in our time of sorest trial and greatest hardship and bitter anxiety stood in its place,
stormy though it was, and waited patiently for deliverance to come as the result of the
conflict then being waged. It will place them and us in a better position to find the good
in each other, and to cultivate that, rather than to magnify the faults of each other. It will
do all this, and more, for the white and the black men of the South. Then, too, it will help
you men of the North to know more about the white men of the South in our better
qualities, especially more about the white Baptist church members, and our willingness
and desire to help the colored people to better living and to a higher plane of church life
and work." 11
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"While our denomination is the most numerous one in the Southern States our strength
lies largely in the rural districts. A glance at the religious condition of our chief cities
will show how weak we are relatively in many of these centers of population." 12
"[S]ee in how few of [these cities] our Baptist churches are equal in numbers, intelligence
and wealth and social position to those of other denominations. These are the centers of
greatest influence. They are the depositories of the wealth of our country. They are the
seats of industrial activity and enterprise. From them in proportion to membership come
larger contributions to support our Missions Boards, endow our colleges and help
forward all our denominational interest. In many of them is found a wide field for our
Board." 13
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On Mountain Missions (among rural whites)
"Our Board has no where a broader or more inviting field than this, none whose
needs for culture are more urgent. Its present population is largely Baptists. The work of
evangelization among them has been chiefly done by men, who though thoroughly
devoted to the Master's work, and deserving of all praise for what they have
accomplished under so many disadvantages, have not sought to lead their converts to the
higher realms of truth or the broader fields of christian activity. Their churches have
been content to be centers of local influence, seeking for nothing beyond the conversion
of the children of their membership and of those immediately about them. They cherish
no broad ideas of Christian obligation, have never entered into sympathy with the design
of our Redeemer to give the gospel to all the world, and are for the most part living upon
the lowest plane of christian life." 14
"Of the various departments of our work, among the Indians, the foreign
population, along the frontiers in Arkansas and Texas, in New Orleans or the
unevangelized masses of Southern Louisiana, in Cuba, or even among the millions of
Negroes that in common with us inhabit this wide land we call our home, there are no
people whose wants are more pressing, whose condition demands more of thought to
devise plans to meet their necessities, or more of wisdom in their application.
There are no people whose future, when they shall be properly developed,
promise so much of usefulness to the world. They are bone of our bone and flesh of our
flesh. They have the intelligence and that high born spirit of enterprise common to our
Ango Saxon blood. . . . The blood of heroes is in their veins. . . . What shall this
Convention do for them? Or rather, what shall the Convention do for itself and for the
world when it calls these men out of their narrow ideas of what God designs for them to
do, and with their hearts newly elate with the joy of conquest, ranges them in under the
banner of our King for the conquest of the world." 15
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On White Southerners in General
"Today [white people] hold one-sixth of the soil of the globe. They highways of
the nations, the gateways of the continents, the pasts of commerce are in their hands.
They have a vast empire in North America, in South Africa, in India, in Australia.
Already 120 millions speak their language, and they are rapidly filling up their vast
domain with a population whose industry and skill and enterprise and courage and
intelligence and moral power is unexampled among the nations past or present.
Such a people has God raised up in these last days." 16
"No portion of this race has been dowered with more magnificent advantages than
that one which inhabits this Southern land. With a million of square miles rich with the
most munificent gifts the All-wise could create, or the Omnipotent bestow -- a land out of
which you might carve a hundred Palestines more generous in its rewards of human toil
than that one which God gave to his ancient people -- a land which the Almighty has
concentrated every element that ministers to the development of power, physical,
intellectual, spiritual, to make its people leaders in the enlightenment of the nations. Who
can doubt that he means to give [the South] the post of honor as the light-bearer of the
world?" 17
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White Southerners, both rural and urban, were considered the source of future strength
for the Southern Baptist Convention. And the "uplift" of their rural brethren (many of
whom would refuse to join the Convention) was represented in the Home Mission
Board's rhetoric as a step toward Southern progress as much as it was an evangelization or
enlistment effort. For Tichenor and his fellow progressives in the Southern Baptist
Convention, doing work for the South was inextricable from doing work for the
Kingdom.
Tichenor and the revitalized Home Mission Board would eventually succeed in unifying
Southern Baptist churches and state bodies under the Convention's control and creating a
denominational institution that encompassed virtually all aspects of Southern Baptist life.
The Home Mission Board's greatest contribution to this development would be its
leadership in establishing two new organizations of the Convention: The Woman's
Missionary Union and the Sunday School Board. While many Southern Baptists opposed
the creation of the Sunday School Board in part because they feared it might detract from
the Convention's traditional emphasis on missions, home mission leader I.T. Tichenor campaigned for this very shift in emphasis. For Tichenor, establishing both the
Woman's Missionary Union and the Sunday School Board would be huge strides in the
effort to create a New South and a New Southern Baptist Convention.
As the twentieth century dawned, the Convention would increasingly focus upon
institutionalizing and expanding its work within the South at least as much as it directed
its energies outward toward evangelizing the "heathen." Even evangelism itself would
shift somewhat in emphasis from straight prosthelytizing to an increased focus upon meeting
people's material and social needs. Thus the Home Mission Board, as it worked to
strengthen this particularly regional Convention, also took part in larger American trends
toward incorporation and the social gospel.
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