The most serious of all the controversies was about the missionary societies, national and state. Those who sought in the primitive church a model for all the procedures of the church, as well as a blueprint for its structure, found no justification for societies. There had been some protests when district and state meetings were first proposed and more when the national convention and missionary society were organized. This opposition had waned, but it was revived in the 1860's with new vigor and new journalistic champions. The war, the loyalty resolutions, acrimony over the organ, the failure of the society's three foreign missions, and the widening social and economic gap between the plain people of the country churches and the more sophisticated townsfolk--these all helped to bring in an era of ill will. Cultural isolation and the lack of educated leaders in this middle period favored the tendency toward a narrow legalism. The death of Alexander Campbell on March 4, 1866, after he had been president of the American Christian Missionary Society for more than sixteen years, made it possible for its opponents to dig up and reprint under his name the antisociety fulminations of the _Christian Baptist_ forty years earlier. Almost at the same time Benjamin Franklin turned against the society and made his _American Christian Review_ a powerful weapon of attack. The main onslaught was not against the management of the society but against the idea of having any society at all. However, all these hostile influences were the more damaging because the A.C.M.S. was not, in fact, doing much work.
To satisfy the critics and prevent the threatened disruption, a completely new plan of cooperation was devised by a committee of twenty, including both society and antisociety men. The product of its labors was the "Louisville Plan," which was adopted almost unanimously by the convention of 1869. Under this plan the A.C.M.S. ceased to function. Its place was taken by a system of general, state, and district conventions, with boards, secretaries, and treasurers springing from and reporting to the three levels of conventions. In theory, it was a closely knit fabric of delegate conventions, the General Convention being composed of delegates from the state conventions, these of delegates from district conventions, and the district conventions of messengers elected by the churches. The wonder is that the antisociety men accepted it for a moment as (Ben Franklin's words) "a simple and scriptural plan." They did not accept it long, and even the friends of the society were cool to it. "Scriptural" or not, it was incredibly cumbersome and impractical. Receipts for national missionary work fell off from about $10,000 to an average of less than $4,000 a year for the next decade. Missionary cooperation had to take a fresh start; and so it did with the beginning of the next period.