Second Great Awakening - Slaves and Free Blacks

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.