For more than half a century the largest growth of the church had been in the Southern States, and Southern views as to slavery modified legislation in relation to that institution. On the other hand, with the development of the West and Northwest, the balance of legislative influence shifted northward until in the historic General Conference of 1844, Bishop Andrews of Georgia, having become related to slavery by marriage, was requested by a vote of 111 to 69 "to desist from the exercise of his episcopal office so long as this impediment remained."[11] Then followed the inevitable division, and the organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Only seventeen years later the Civil War began and Southern Methodist hosts gave their sympathies, prayers, votes, money and sons to the Army of Gray; while Methodists in the North, to quote the words of Lincoln, "sent more prayers to heaven and soldiers to the field" for the Army in Blue, than any other Christian church. Thus may people of God of like faith have diverse consciences and differ, first, in sentiment and policies, then in conviction and duty, and at last prayerfully face each other at the cannon's mouth in deadly combat. The years from 1844 to 1846 were indeed momentous in the history of the American Methodism in its relation to the Negro. That little company of five in New York in seventy-eight years had in 1845 come to be a multitude of 1,139,583 communicants, whose presence and spiritual energy were felt in every community of the republic, North, South, East and West. Of that membership, 150,120 were Negroes, chiefly in the South, and mostly gathered from among the slave population. But now there was to be division, the North to be more and more anti-slavery and the South to be more and more pro-slavery. Then followed three Methodist divisions as related to the Negro: First, the African organizations already mentioned, with their chief strength in the Eastern States; and second, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, with a total membership of 447,961 in 1846. Of these 118,904 were Negro slaves with few exceptions. This church occupied all the territory of the Southern States exclusively, except along the border. Methodists in Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia, including the Baltimore and part of the Philadelphia Annual Conferences, and also many members along the border farther west, did not join in the Southern movement. In the third place, then, there remained in the Methodist Episcopal Church still (1846) a total membership of 644,558. Of these 30,516 were Negroes, of whom about 20,000 were slaves.