History of the Baptists in Perry County

Fresh from frontier revival of the Second Great Awakening, many white Baptists and their black slaves caught the "Alabama Fever" at the end of the Creek Indian War, when lands the natives were forced to cede to the American Government were made available to new Settlers. One of the six original counties created by the Alabama legislature in 1819, Perry County was named for Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, naval hero of the War of 1812. By 1817 settlers were growing cotton in the area, and the bumper crop of 1818 brought a rush of squatters, speculators, and more settlers.

Baptist settlers and their slaves chartered two churches in 1822: Siloam and Hopewell, and both congregations are active today. As more migrants from across the U.S. populated Perry County, the Baptists experimented with educational enterprises, as did the other denominations; and in 1838 members of Siloam Baptist Church, founded a Baptist college for females named in honor of Anne Hasseltine Judson, America's first female Baptist missionary. The first president of Judson College, Milo P. Jewett, a graduate of Dartmouth and Andover Theological Seminary, later returned to the north where he founded Vassar in the 1860s. In the past 160 years Judson has affirmed and prepared thousands of young women for leadership in Alabama, the United States, and all around the world. Today, Judson College remains committed tot he education of the "total woman" to be all that Christ calls her to be.

In the 1840s the Baptists had the largest church rolls of the various Christian denominations represented in Perry County. In 1843 Milo P. Jewett and Judson trustee Edwin King started The Alabama Baptist newspaper. In 1845 leaders of the new Southern Baptist Convention met a Siloam Baptist Church and formed the Domestic Mission Board, which later became the Home Mission Board and eventually the North America Mission Board. Their meeting table still resides at Siloam Baptist Church.

In 1842 Alabama Baptists opened classes for men at Howard College, which later became Samford University. In 1854 a fire swept through the campus. On of the president's slaves, a twenty-three year old man named Harry, lost his life after telling others, "I must awaken the boys." The students erected a monument to Harry, who was a faithful member of Siloam Baptist Church. Some of the galleries in which Baptist slaves worshipped may be seen in Siloam's sanctuary today.

By 1860 sixty-six percent of Perry County's population were slaves. Many white Perry County leaders favored Alabama secession from the United States, just as Alabama Baptists fifteen years earlier had seceded from the Tiennial Convention of Baptists. Alabama's "Secession Governor," Andrew Barry Moore, hailed from Perry County, and the "Stars and Bars' flag of the Confederacy was designed and sewn in Marion. But Judson College's former president, Milo P. Jewett, published his opposition to secession, and the Civil Ward divided Perry Count as it divided the country.

During the Civil Ward Howard College served as a Confederate Army hospital, and Nathan Bedford Forrest and his troops occupied Marion against attack from Union forces. According to oral history, at the end of the war, a wounded Union soldier taught former slaves to read and write while he recuperated in Perry County. In 1866-67 the newly freed people of Perry County--approximately sixty-six percent of the population-drew up a petition for the incorporation of Lincoln School in Marion, Alabama, in honor of recently assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. Pooling their resources, the former slaves erected buildings fro the school on land donated by a white man and appealed to the American Missionary Association for teachers from the North.

The AMA (Congregationalist) had formed from the support of the mutineers of the Amistad slave ship and provided missionary teachers to African-Americans, native Americans, and poor whites in the South who were not being assisted by white Baptists. Most of the Baptist churches in the area had been hard-hit by destruction, destitution, disorganization, and demoralization. The six rural congregations had not pastor were slowly dying. White Baptists often did not understand black Baptists' desire for their own churches without galleries, but black Baptists met a Siloam until they laid the cornerstone for Berean Baptist Church in 1873 with the assistance of the Siloam congregation. The two churches are located two-blocks apart. Similarly, the congregation of Hopewell and almost all other Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches divided into separate black and white congregations, as was the trend across the South. Today, the two Hopewell congregations continue to meet in separate buildings side-by-side in front of the old cemetery that contains their shared heritage.

Black Baptists worried that northern Congregationalist teachers might try to proselytize but welcomed them anyway. White Baptists gave the northern teachers the cold shoulder at best. The "outsiders" were subjected to rocks and epithets from local whites in downtown Marion. Due to the commitment and perseverance of AMA teachers in Perry County, many African-Americans in the area did join the new Congregational church. Alumni named Phillips Auditorium, used today by the community, in honor of Mary Elizabeth Phillips, the popular white principal who lived and worked at Lincoln for thirty-five years. The school would produce more Ph.D.s among its alumni than any other school for African-Americans in America.

The Ku Klux Klan operated illegally in the area, harassing and intimidating black and white voters until white conservative Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," recaptured the state government and reversed the effects of Republican Reconstruction. To prevent black Alabamians from leaving the state and taking their labor to the north or west, the Redeemers passed trespassing and vagrancy laws that allowed white enforcers to place strong black men on the chain gangs that provided cheap labor for the older planter elite's farms and businesses. Such practices were codified by the Alabama Constitution of 1901, which was "ratified" by ballot fraud in the Black Belt and disenfranchised by poor whites and African-Americans--the majority of Perry County's population. Although amended, the constitution remains in place in Alabama today.