anized and their treasuries were empty. The Unionists, scattered
here and there but numerous in the mountain districts, no longer wished
to attend the Southern churches.

The military censorship in church matters, which continued for a year in
some districts, was irritating, especially in the Border States and in
the Union districts where Northern preachers installed by the army were
endeavoring to remain against the will of the people. Mobs sometimes
drove them out; others were left to preach to empty houses or to a few
Unionists and officers, while the congregation withdrew to build a new
church. The problems of Negro membership in the white churches and of
the future relations of the Northern and Southern denominations were
pressing for settlement.

All Northern organizations acted in 1865 upon the assumption that a
reunion of the churches must take place and that the divisions existing
before the war should not be continued, since slavery, the cause of the
division, had been destroyed. But they insisted that the reunion must
take place upon terms named by the "loyal" churches, that the Negroes
must also come under "loyal" religious direction, and that tests must be
applied to the Confederate sinners asking for admission, in order that
the enormity of their crimes should be made plain to them. But this
policy did not succeed. The Confederates objected to being treated as
"rebels and traitors" and to "sitting upon stools of repentance" before
they should be received again into the fold.

Only two denominations were reunited--the Methodist Protestant, the
northern section of which came over to the southern, and the Protestant
Episcopal, in which moderate counsels prevailed and into which
Southerners were welcomed back. The Southern Baptists maintained their
separate existence and reorganized the Southern Baptist Convention, to
which came many of the Baptist associations in the Border States; the
Catholics did not divide before 1861 and therefore had no reconstruction
problems to solve; and the smaller denominations maintained the
organizations which they had before 1861. A Unionist preacher testified
before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that even the Southern
Quakers "are about as decided in regard to the respectability of
secession as any other class of people."

Two other great Southern churches, the Presbyterian and the Methodist
Episcopal, grew stronger after the Civil War. The tendency toward
reunion o