Slaves and Free Blacks
Baptists and Methodists in the South preached to slaveholders and slaves alike. Conversions and congregations started with the First Great Awakening, resulting in Baptist and Methodist preachers being authorized among slaves and free blacks more than a decade before 1800. Free blacks in Philadelphia left a Methodist church because of its discrimination. By the late eighteenth century, they founded the first African Episcopal Church and first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches in Philadelphia. In 1816, several AME congregations joined in association to establish the AME denomination, the first independent black denomination in the United States. Soon after that, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME Zion) was founded as another denomination in New York City.
Early Baptist congregations were formed by slaves and free blacks in South Carolina and Virginia. Especially in the Baptist Church, blacks were welcomed as members and as preachers. By the early 19th century, independent black congregations numbered in the several hundred in some cities of the South, such as Charleston, South Carolina, and Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia. With the growth in congregations and churches, Baptist associations formed in Virginia, for instance, as well as Kentucky and other states.
The revival also inspired slaves to demand freedom. In 1800, out of black revival meetings in Virginia, a plan for slave rebellion was devised by Gabriel Prosser, although the rebellion was discovered and crushed before it started. Despite white attempts to control independent black congregations, especially after the Nat Turner Uprising of 1831, a number of black congregations managed to maintain their separation as independent congregations in Baptist associations. State legislatures passed laws requiring them always to have a white man present at their worship meetings.
Read more about this topic: Second Great Awakening
Famous quotes containing the words slaves, free and/or blacks:
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“It may be affirmed, without extravagance, that the free institutions we enjoy, have developed the powers, and improved the condition, of our whole people, beyond any example in the world.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.”
—W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)