Big Bethel AME Church

Transcription

This is one of my favorite documents. It was petitioning Congress for compensation, asking for $7,000 for the destruction of their church by Union troops led by General Sherman. I’m Reginald Washington, I’m a senior archivist with the National Archives here in Washington, DC. The document lists 234 members of the congregation. Some of the names have Xs between the first and the surname. And that indicates that the person couldn’t read or write. And some of the other names are certainly written out, so it suggests to me that there were both free blacks and slaves as congregants in the church. “To the honorable Senate and House Representatives. During the late campaign of General Sherman through Georgia, our house of worship was torn down to the ground and utterly demolished by a party of Federal soldiers.” It was a very moving, very moving narrative and certainly it’s something that just fascinated me as I continued to do research. “It was a large, commodious and well finished edifice, that had been built by ourselves when in slavery. It was to us what the temple was to the Jews.” It raised several questions for me. First, the question was whether they got paid. Whether they were compensated for their loss. Secondly was whether the church exists today. “As almost all of us have been slaves all our lives, we are without pecuniary means to build another house of worship. Most of us are struggling for dear life.” Within the text of the document it mentions that it’s the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church of Atlanta. But there’s no reference to that church name in the index of the Court of Claims. I decided that, let’s take a look and see if the church claim was resubmitted by an individual. Two people came to mind: the pastor of the church, Joseph A. Wood. We looked under Joseph A. Wood, he wasn’t there in the index, but we did find a claim under Robert Webster, who was listed as the chairman of the trustee board. I’m looking at the case file for Robert Webster. He had made claim for some mules and horses and some tobacco that had been taken from him by Union forces. One of his witnesses was a Joseph Wood! “Joseph A. Wood being called and sworn says: ‘I am a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. I had charge of Big Bethel for two years.’” We went back to the indexes. There was a reference for the Big Bethel A.M.E. Church. Same claim, same church. This is a letter from Wesley J. Gaines who is now the pastor of the church. And he’s writing to the Freedmen’s Bureau to find out information about the initial claim that was filed in 1866. The letter is dated April 30, 1868. “I have the honor to request that an application be made to the proper authority to pay to the trustees of the A.M.E. Church of Atlanta, the value of their house of worship.” The Court of Claims collected the evidence and determined it probably wasn’t worth $7,000. “The reasonable value of the church building was the sum of nine hundred dollars, no part of which appears to have been paid.” The church had been used before the Union troops arrived as a confederate hospital. If it was destroyed by federal troops indeed, then it was by an act of war. “When the dark days of war had passed, and we gathered again here from our wanderings, ‘our holy and beautiful house’ was a mass of ruins.” 1915 there was introduced in Congress a huge omnibus bill that was going to deal with those persons or those institutions that had filed claims for compensation during the Civil War. No compensation was ever made for Big Bethel. What I’ve done in the case of this petition, most researchers can do the same thing. We make a great effort to try to assist researchers in every way we can. We don’t do the research for ‘em, but we map out the strategies that might be useful in finding records here at the National Archives.