This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
At the Methodist Episcopal Church's General Conference in New York in 1844, delegates confronted Bishop James O. Andrew of Georgia, who had come to own enslaved people through marriage, and effectively suspended him from his episcopal duties over it. The confrontation brought a tension the church had carried for years to an open break, one side of American Methodism judging that a bishop could not hold his office while owning enslaved people, the other refusing to accept that judgment.
Southern delegates concluded the dispute could not be repaired within a single church, and the following year, meeting at Louisville in 1845, they organised themselves into a separate body, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. What had been one institutional structure covering Methodism across the United States split into two, divided along the same line that would soon divide the country itself.
What this split changed for Methodism's spread was a rupture that outlasted slavery itself by more than seven decades. The two churches remained separate long after the Civil War had ended the institution that had divided them, and it was not until 1939 that the northern and southern churches reunited, joined that year by the Methodist Protestant Church as well, into a single Methodist Church once again.