Henry McNeal Turner (February 1, 1834, South Carolina, U.S. – May 8, 1915, Ontario, Canada) was an American minister, politician, and the 12th elected and consecrated bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). After the American Civil War, he worked to establish new A.M.E. congregations among African Americans in Georgia. Born free in South Carolina, Turner learned to read and write and became a Methodist preacher. He joined the AME Church in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1858, where he became a minister. Founded by free blacks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the early 19th century, the A.M.E. Church was the first independent black denomination in the United States. Later Turner had pastorates in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC.
In 1863 during the American Civil War, Turner was appointed by the US Army as the first African-American chaplain in the United States Colored Troops. After the war, he was appointed to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia. He settled in Macon and was elected to the state legislature in 1868 during the Reconstruction era. An A.M.E. missionary, he also planted many AME churches in Georgia after the war. In 1880 he was elected as the first Southern bishop of the AME Church, after a fierce battle within the denomination because of its Northern roots.
Angered by the Democrats' regaining power and instituting laws in the late nineteenth century South, Turner began to support and emigration of blacks to the African continent. This movement started before the Civil War, though Turner was the chief figure in the late nineteenth century to support such emigration to Liberia; most African-American leaders of the time were pushing for rights in the United States.
Early life Henry McNeal Turner was born free in 1834 in Newberry, South Carolina, to Sarah Greer and Hardy Turner, who were both of mixed African-European ancestry. Some sources say he was born in Abbeville, South Carolina. His paternal grandparents were a white woman planter and an African man. According to the legal standard of partus sequitur ventrem, the white woman's mixed-race children were born free, because she was white and free.
According to the family's oral tradition, his maternal grandfather had been enslaved in the African continent and imported to South Carolina, where he was renamed as David Greer. Slave traders subsequently noticed that he had royal Mandingo tribal marks, and freed him from slavery. According to the same family lore, Greer began to work for a Quaker family in South Carolina.Stephen Ward Angell, "Henry McNeal Turner" , New Georgia Encyclopedia, accessed 13 May 2012 Greer married a free African woman. Henry Turner grew up with his mother Sarah (Greer) Turner and maternal grandmother.
At the time, South Carolina law prohibited teaching Africans to read and write. When Turner was apprenticed to work in cotton fields alongside captured Africans, he ran away to Abbeville.Smith, John David, African Soldiers in Blue: African Troops in the Civil War Era, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002, pp. 336-339 He found a job as a custodian for a law firm in Abbeville.
Early career At the age of 14, Turner was inspired by a Methodist revival and swore to become a pastor. He received his preacher's license at the age of 19 from the Methodist Church South in 1853 (the national church had divided into North and South units in 1844 over slavery and other issues). Turner traveled through the South for a few years as an evangelist and exhorter, a position usually reserved for young, unmarried men.
In 1858 he moved with his young family (he had married two years earlier) to Saint Louis, Missouri. The demand for slaves in the South had made him fear that members of his family might be kidnapped and sold into slavery, as has been documented for hundreds of free blacks. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 had increased incentives for the capture of refugee slaves and offered few protections for free blacks against illegal capture. It required little documentation by slave traders or people hired as slavecatchers to prove a person's slave status.
In St. Louis, Turner became ordained as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), which had been founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the first independent black denomination in the United States. He studied the classics, Hebrew and divinity at Trinity College.
Turner served in pastorates in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC, where he met influential Republicans in the early 1860s.
When the Civil War broke out, Turner was still training in Baltimore. In April 1862 he was assigned to Israel Bethel Church on Capitol Hill; it was the largest AME church in Washington, D.C. It was near the heart of government and the war in Virginia. Congressmen and army officers visited to hear Turner preach.
Marriage and family In 1856, Turner had married Eliza Peacher, daughter of a wealthy free black contractor in Columbia, South Carolina. They had a total of 14 children together, four of whom lived to adulthood. Eliza died in 1889.
The widower Turner married Martha Elizabeth DeWitt in 1893. After she died, he married Harriet A. Wayman in 1900. She also died in a few years. He married Laura Pearl Lemon in 1907, and outlived three of his four wives.
Civil War During the American Civil War, Turner organized one of the first regiments of black troops (Company B of the First United States Colored Troops), and was appointed as its chaplain. Turner urged both free-born blacks and "contrabands" to enlist. (The latter term refers to enslaved people who had escaped slavery and had their status classified as "unreturnable" because their former masters were engaged in war against the US government). Turner regularly preached to the men while they trained and reminded them that the "destiny of their race depended on their loyalty and courage". The regiment often marched to Turner's church to hear his patriotic speeches. In July 1863, the regiment had completed its formation and was preparing to leave for war. In November of that year, Turner was commissioned as chaplain, becoming the only black officer in the 1st USCT.
Turner discovered that the duties of a Union army chaplain in the Civil War were not well defined. Before the war, chaplains taught school at army posts. During the war, the duties expanded to include holding worship services and prayer meetings, visiting the sick and wounded in hospitals, and burying the dead. Each chaplain had to work out his role in his regiment, based on the expectations of the men in his care and his own talents. For Turner, this appointment enabled him to grow in influence among African Americans.
Turner was a chaplain for two years. Shortly after reporting for duty, he caught smallpox and spent months in the hospital recovering. He returned to his company in May 1864, just before they participated in their first armed conflict, the Battle of Wilson's Wharf on the James River. From May through December, his unit participated in the fighting around Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia. At the end of the year, they fought in the massive amphibious attack against Fort Fisher.
Turner spent the spring of 1865 with his men as they joined Sherman's march through North Carolina. When the fighting ended, he was sent to Roanoke Island to help supervise a large settlement of freed people. Discharged in September, Turner was commissioned as chaplain of a different African-American regiment, which was assigned to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia. Shortly after arriving there, he resigned and left the army.
He turned his attention to politics, civil rights, black nationalism, and evangelizing for the A.M.E. Church among Southern freedmen. Turner became a politician during the Reconstruction era, being elected to state government. He also was a powerful churchman, and a national race leader. While serving in the army, Turner had refined his thinking about the African race and its future in America.
He gained wider attention nationally by two activities related to the war. First, he had written numerous letters from the battlefield which were published in newspapers, and gained him attention from readers and admirers in the North. These were his base for a lifetime of journalism. Second, in the first months after the war ended, he used his position as army chaplain to attract emancipated people into the A.M.E. Church. Most former slaves had formerly belonged to white-dominated churches. The expansion of the independent AME Church in the South strongly influenced African-American life. Turner was the first of the 14 black chaplains to be appointed during the war. Both the A.M.E. Church and the A.M.E. Zion Church, based in New York, also had numerous missionaries appealing to freedmen in the South.
After the war, Turner was appointed by President Andrew Johnson to work with the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia during Reconstruction. White clergy from the North and former military officers also led some Freedmen's Bureau operations.
Political influence In the postwar years, Turner became politically active with the Republican Party, whose officials had led the war effort and, under Abraham Lincoln, emancipated the slaves throughout the Confederacy. He helped found the Republican Party of Georgia. Turner ran for political office from Macon and was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1868. At the time, the Democratic Party still controlled the legislature and refused to seat Turner and 26 other newly elected black legislators, all Republicans. (See Original 33.) After the federal government protested, the Democrats allowed Turner and his fellow legislators to take their seats during the second session.
In 1869, Turner was appointed by the Republican administration as postmaster of Macon, which was considered a political plum. He was dismayed after the Democrats regained power in the state and throughout the South by the late 1870s. He had seen the rise in violence at the polls, where Democrats had used intimidation and fraud to suppress black voting. In 1883, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875, forbidding racial discrimination in hotels, trains, and other public places, was unconstitutional.
Turner was incensed: The world has never witnessed such barbarous laws entailed upon a free people as have grown out of the decision of the United States Supreme Court, issued October 15, 1883. For that decision alone authorized and now sustains all the unjust discriminations, proscriptions and robberies perpetrated by public carriers upon millions of the nation's most loyal defenders. It fathers all the 'Jim-Crow cars' into which colored people are huddled and compelled to pay as much as the whites, who are given the finest accommodations. It has made the ballot of the black man a parody, his citizenship a nullity and his freedom a burlesque. It has engendered the bitterest feeling between the whites and blacks, and resulted in the deaths of thousands, who would have been living and enjoying life today."Ingersoll, R. G., Bradley, J. P., Douglass, F., Turner, H. M., & Harlan, J. M. (1893). The Barbarous Decision of the United States Supreme Court Declaring the Civil Rights Act Unconstitutional and Disrobing the Colored Race of All Civil Protection. The Most Cruel and Inhuman Verdict Against a Loyal People in the History of the World. Also the Powerful Speeches of Hon. Frederick Douglass and Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, Jurist and Famous Orator. p3