he influence of their rivals.

Before 1844, however, these great religious organizations in the South,
with a combined membership of nearly a million, received full
recognition. With a small-farmer and landless membership they had
opposed slavery and the whole aristocratic system before 1820, but as
the years passed, tobacco and cotton culture made many of them wealthy
and opened the way to all who were ambitious to rise. At once the
official attitude began to change. The preachers ceased first to
denounce "the institution," and finally without offense became
slave-owners themselves. The clergy's stern rebukes of fashion, of
dancing, and of "the wearing of fine raiment" ceased or lost its effect.
Presbyterians had long believed in an educated ministry, and when they
forced their influence into political life, they were already friendly
to the dominant ideas of the South. Now the Baptists and Methodists
built colleges for the training of young ministers, and preaching in
their simple churches was made to conform to the canons of good taste.
Throughout the South the churches became the allies of the existing
economic and social order, and they presented a solid front to those who
proposed to discipline men for holding other men in bondage. Their
clergy formulated a strong Biblical and patriarchal defense of the
South. Slavery, from being an institution to be lamented as an evil,
became a blessing sustained by the Holy Scriptures, according to the
ablest ministers of God.

When the Northern branches of these churches found how completely their
Southern brethren had yielded to the powerful social pressure of their
local life, a vigorous attempt was made to correct the tendency. It
failed, and in 1844-45 the Baptists of the East and those of the upper
Northwest refused to cooeperate with Southern churches which insisted on
the right to send out missionaries who owned slaves. A Southern Baptist
Church was the immediate result. In the same year, 1844, the Methodists
of the East and upper West refused to recognize the ministrations of a
bishop who owned slaves, and a break-up of the church followed. The
Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was organized at Louisville the
following year. The Presbyterians and Episcopalians had become so
completely reconciled to the aristocratic life which slavery connoted
that they sustained no serious breach in their ranks. In the North as
well as in the South they accepted slavery. A notable re