Former slaves interviewed in Indiana generally were religious during and after slavery. Robert J. Cheatham said, “We read the Bible until the pages became dogeared and the leaves fell from their binding.” Rosaline Rogers reported that slaves were allowed to go to their master’s church, though they had to sit on one of seven benches at the back of the church. Rogers said, “I am 110 years old; my birth is recorded in the slave book. I have good health, fairly good eyesight, and a good memory, all of which I say is because of my love for God.” According to Callie Bracey, on special occasions older slaves were allowed to go to their master’s church, but they had to sit in the back of the church and could not take part in the service. Susan Smith agreed that slaves attended the same church as whites, and Louis Watkins was permitted to go to church with his parents on Sunday, a day of rest for the slaves.
Candies Richardson corroborated that slaves on her plantation attended a Baptist church with their owner and had to sit at the rear of the church, but she said the sermon was never preached to the slaves: “They never preached the Lord to us. They would just tell us not to steal. Don’t steal from your master!” She said slaves walked six miles and waded a stream to get to church just to hear the minister tell them, “Don’t steal from your master!” Richardson was “so happy to know that I have lived to see the day when you young people can serve God without slipping around to serve him like we old folks had to do.... But I lived to see both him and Miss Elizabeth [her owners] die a hard death. They both hated to die, although they belonged to church. Thank God for his mercy! Thank God!”
Richardson also claimed that her master beat her husband many times when he caught him praying, but she said the “beatings didn’t stop my husband from praying. He just kept on praying. He’d steal off to the woods and pray, but he prayed so loud that anybody close around could hear ‘cause he had such a loud voice. I prayed too, but I always prayed to myself.” She believed that it was her husband’s prayers and “a whole lot of other slaves’ [prayers] that caused you young folks to be free today.” She said, too, that slaves on her plantation did not have a Bible because it meant a beating or even “a killing if you’d be caught with one. But there were a lot of good slaves who knew how to pray, and some of the white folks loved to hear them pray ‘cause there was no put-on about it. That’s why we folks know how to sing and pray ‘cause we have gone through so much, but the Lord’s with us. The Lord’s with us, he is.”
According to John Moore, slaves were religious and always prayed for freedom, and emancipation was a major theme of the sermons of black preachers. Slaves preferred the sermons of black preachers because they preached from experience, not from the Bible. He said that slaves praised and worshiped God because they believed that God would deliver them from bondage. About religion and freedom, Robert Cheatham said, “The Negro preachers preached freedom into our ears, and our old men and women prophesied about it. We prayed, and our forefathers offered prayers for 275 [sic] years in American bondage that we might be given freedom.” James Childress, too, remembered that the slaves always prayed for freedom, and that black preachers always preached about the day when the slaves would be free and happy. He sang a stanza of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and said it related to God’s setting the blacks free. “My people loved God; they sang sacred songs. ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ was one of the best songs they knew.”
Slaves sometimes held religious services in their quarters. Harriet Cheatam said, “We often had prayer meeting out in the quarters, and to keep the folks in the big house from hearing us, we would take pots, turn them down, and put something under them. That let the sound go in the pots. We put them in a row by the door. Then our voices would not go out, and we could sing and pray to our hearts’ content.” Nelson Polk similarly described religious services in the slave quarters: “When the slaves held a religious service in their quarters, they were required to turn a tub against the door to catch the sound and absorb it before it reached the mansion of the plantation owner. If they couldn’t find a tub, they used a pot.”
Slaves and former slaves also had camp meetings and revivals. Nancy Whallen said that blacks held revivals in the woods. Sometimes they held services in a brush shelter with leaves for a roof, and the preaching and shouting lasted all day Sunday. Services usually were held away from white people, and blacks from miles around attended. Rachael Duncan agreed: “Camp meetings? Yes, ma’am. They used to have some grand ones down in Breckinridge County. They was always held out in the woods in a clear space, away off to ourselves, under a big tree. And they was preachin’ and singin’ and folks got religion right.” Samuel Bell was converted at a revival meeting in Evansville. He said the happiest time of his life was “when Jesus saved my soul and gave me the hope of eternal life.” Mollie Tate also was converted at a revival meeting, when she was about ten years old. John Cooper, a member of the Baptist Church, told a good personal-experience tale about how he reluctantly got religion at a meeting in Evansville and then the following day was baptized in a frozen river. Cooper allowed, “I ain’t never been nowhere only in the flock of the Lord since.”
Mrs. Hockaday said that slaves were mainly Methodists and Baptists, that most slaves belonged to the same church the slaveholder belonged to, and that generally they continued to attend the same church after the war. At the time of her death, Candies Richardson was a member of the West 10th Street Free Church of God in Indianapolis. Elizabeth Russell had been a member of the Methodist Church since childhood. Moses Slaughter was baptized in the Cumberland River when he was a slave, and was baptized again in the Ohio River when he joined a Baptist church in Evansville.
Several former slaves living in Indiana were Roman Catholics. Sarah O’Donnell was baptized, confirmed, and married in the Catholic Church. John Rudd was a devout Catholic who believed that religion and freedom were the two richest blessings ever given to human beings. Carl Boone stressed that “I became connected with the Colored Catholic Church and have tried to live a Christian life. I have only missed church service twice in twenty years.” Matthew Hume pointed out that the slaveowner’s wife on a neighboring plantation was a devout Catholic who gathered all the slave children each Sunday afternoon to study the catechism and repeat the Lord’s Prayer. After the service, she always served candy or a cup of sugar. Hume said although she led them to Christ, she was not very successful in converting them to Catholicism, for when they grew up, most of them became either Baptists or Methodists. He said he did not learn much of the catechism; he attended only for the candy and sugar.
After the war, many former slaves living in Indiana remained active in church work, several becoming Protestant ministers. For instance, in 1903 Henry Clay Moorman moved to Franklin to become pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which he served for twelve years. When interviewed, Barney Stone had been a Baptist preacher for sixty-nine years and had been instrumental in building seven churches. Elvira Lee helped organize one of the first black churches in New Albany and outlived all the other charter members. Edna Boy-saw was an active church worker in Brazil and often was asked to speak at white churches as well as black churches. One of her daughters was a talented singer, and Boysaw appeared on many church programs with her. According to Boy-saw’s obituary in the Brazil Daily Times (January 8, 1942), this was the fulfillment of a childhood dream: “When Mrs. Boysaw was a small slave girl she had a dream in which she had a vision that she would some day go from city to city, county to county and state to state spreading the gospel.”
H. H. Edmunds, who served as a minister for many years, was very religious, but he felt that religion had greatly changed from the “old time religion.” He believed that in slavery days, blacks were so suppressed and uneducated that they were especially susceptible to religion, and they poured out their religious feelings in their spirituals. Be that as it may, Christianity offered slaves some comfort in the present and some hope for the future. Bettie Jones said, “What God wills must happen to us, and we do not save ourselves by trying to run away. Just as well stay and face it as to try to get away. Of course, I’m a Christian. I’m a religious woman and hope to meet my friends in heaven.” Adeline Rose Lennox said her “one ambition in life is to live so that I may claim heaven as my home when I die.”
Christianity also helped slaves and former slaves understand their situations. John Daugherty thought that slaveholders behaved as well as they could with the little knowledge of the Bible they had. Slaveholders, he felt, had not read enough of the Scriptures to know that it was wrong to hold human beings in bondage. Samuel Bell concluded, “Religion is worth the greatest fortune. It explains why man must labor and suffer, and his trying experiences make him more worthy of the great reward promised by the kind Father. When his years of sorrow are fulfilled, he will understand and appreciate the reward, which is heaven.” Billy Slaughter sometimes wondered why he was still left on earth when all his brothers, sisters, and friends were gone; however, he read the Bible often, and “the Bible,” he said, “says that two shall be working in the field together, and one shall be taken, and the other left. I am the one who is left.” Slaughter believed he was still living because somebody had to be around to tell stories about the old days.