The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, with a much larger number of Negro members than all of these denominations easily solved the problem of Negro membership, as the Cumberland Presbyterians had done. While the Methodists in the North reluctantly loosed their hold on the Negro membership by granting the people of color active participation in their affairs through an annual conference, the Methodist Church, South, almost voluntarily agreed to organize its Negro constituency as a separate organization known as the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. Whether the southern Methodists did this to eliminate the Negroes or because they thought that the Negroes in their new status as freemen could do their own work better than white men, is a much mooted question. It is clear that many of the slaveholding type of Christians would want to get rid of the Negro members since they could no longer determine their faith and how it should be exercised. The only reason there was for the Negro to belong to the same church as that of his master was to control the exercise of his religious belief. As this was no longer necessary, the Negroes, so far as one element was concerned, could then easily go. Desiring to attach to this branch of the Methodist Church the stigma of their having been once connected with their oppressors, some Negroes themselves have referred to these Colored Methodists as "seceders" and "a Democratic Rebel concern" intended to lead the Negroes back into slavery. Such statements are most uncharitable and they not only do the Negroes concerned an injustice but question the good motives of a number of benevolent southern men who took this step, feeling that it was the best way for the Negroes to develop their religious life after emancipation. There were many masters who believed that, since the Negroes had finally become free, they should have every encouragement to learn how to take care of themselves. It would be most uncharitable, moreover, to suffer any stigma to attach to the Colored Methodists on this account. The Negroes who constituted this church went with the southern wing of that denomination at the time of its secession because they were compelled so to do. The independent African Methodists were by law and public opinion prohibited from extensive proselyting in the South and prior to the Civil War they had with the exception of their establishments in the liberal border States hardly touched the large body of the black population south of the Mason and Dixon line. The free Negroes in the South were, as in the case of Morris Brown and his followers in 1822, cut off from their brethren in the North and the slaves were compelled to worship according to the rigid regulations set forth above and in the same churches to which their masters belonged.