But they insisted that the reunion must take place upon terms named by the "loyal" churches, that the Negroes must also come under "loyal" religious direction, and that tests must be applied to the Confederate sinners asking for admission, in order that the enormity of their crimes should be made plain to them.

But this policy did not succeed.

The Confederates objected to being treated as "rebels and traitors" and to "sitting upon stools of repentance" before they should be received again into the fold.
Only two denominations were reunited--the Methodist Protestant, the northern section of which came over to the southern, and the Protestant Episcopal, in which moderate counsels prevailed and into which Southerners were welcomed back.

The Southern Baptists maintained their separate existence and reorganized the Southern Baptist Convention, to which came many of the Baptist associations in the Border States; the Catholics did not divide before 1861 and therefore had no reconstruction problems to solve; and the smaller denominations maintained the organizations which they had before 1861.

A Unionist preacher testified before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that even the Southern Quakers "are about as decided in regard to the respectability of secession as any other class of people." Two other great Southern churches, the Presbyterian and the Methodist Episcopal, grew stronger after the Civil War.