From the upland cotton belt a Presbyterian minister in the Chester district wrote:  “You are all aware, gentlemen, that the relation and intercourse between the whites and the blacks in the up-country are very different from what they are in the low-country.  With us they are neither so numerous nor kept so entirely separate, but constitute a part of our households, and are daily either with their masters or some member of the white family.  From this circumstance they feel themselves more identified with their owners than they can with you.  I minister steadily to two different congregations.  More than one hundred blacks attend....  The gallery, or a quarter of the house, is appropriated to them in all our churches, and they enjoy the preached gospel in common with the whites.”  Finally, from the Greenville district, on the upper edge of the Piedmont, where the Methodists and Baptists were completely dominant among whites and blacks alike, it was reported:  “About one fourth of the members in the churches are negroes.  In the years 1832, ’3 and ’4 great numbers of negroes joined the churches during a period of revival.  Many, I am sorry to say, have since been excommunicated.  As the general zeal in religion declined, they backslid.”  There were a few licensed negro preachers, this writer continued, who were thought to do some good; but the general improvement in negro character, he thought, was mainly due to the religious and moral training given by their masters, and still more largely by their mistresses.  From all quarters the expression was common that the promotion of religion among the slaves was not only the duty of masters but was to their interest as well in that it elevated the morals of the workmen and improved the quality of the service they rendered.[8]

[Footnote 8:  Proceedings of the Meeting in Charleston, S.C., May 13-15, 1845, on the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, together with the Report of the Committee and the Address to the Public (Charleston, 1845).  The reports of the Association for the Religious Instruction of Negroes in Liberty County, Georgia, printed annually for a dozen years or more in the ’thirties and ’forties, relate the career of a particularly interesting missionary work in that county on the rice coast, under the charge of the Reverend C.C.  Jones.  The tenth report in the series (1845) summarizes the work of the first decade, and the twelfth (1847) surveys the conditions then prevalent.  In C.F.  Deems ed., Annals of Southern Methodism for 1856 (Nashville, [1857]) the ninth chapter is made up of reports on the mission activities of that church among the negroes in various quarters of the South.]