In some cases the withdrawal of the blacks had the full character of secession.  An example in this line had been set in Philadelphia when some of the negroes who had been attending white churches of various denominations were prompted by the antipathy of the whites and by the ambition of the colored leaders to found, in 1791, an African church with a negro minister.  In the course of a few years this was divided into congregations of the several sects.  Among these the Methodists prospered to such degree that in 1816 they launched the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with congregations in Baltimore and other neighboring cities included within its jurisdiction.[55] Richard Allen as its first bishop soon entered into communication with Morris Brown and other colored Methodists of Charleston who were aggrieved at this time by the loss of their autonomy.  In former years the several thousand colored Methodists, who outnumbered by tenfold the whites in the congregations there, had enjoyed a quarterly conference of their own, with the custody of their collections and with control over the church trials of colored members; but on the ground of abuses these privileges were cancelled in 1815.  A secret agitation then ensued which led on the one hand to the increase of the negro Methodists by some two thousand souls, and on the other to the visit of two of their leaders to Philadelphia where they were formally ordained for Charleston pastorates.  When affairs were thus ripened, a dispute as to the custody of one of their burial grounds precipitated their intended stroke in 1818.  Nearly all the colored class leaders gave up their papers simultaneously, and more than three-quarters of their six thousand fellows withdrew their membership from the white Methodist churches.  “The galleries, hitherto crowded, were almost completely deserted,” wrote a contemporary, “and it was a vacancy that could be felt.  The absence of their responses and hearty songs were really felt to be a loss to those so long accustomed to hear them....  The schismatics combined, and after great exertion succeeded in erecting a neat church building....  Their organization was called the African Church,” and one of its ministers was constituted bishop.  Its career, however, was to be short lived, for the city authorities promptly proceeded against them, first by arresting a number of participants at one of their meetings but dismissing them with a warning that their conduct was violative of a statute of 1800 prohibiting the assemblage of slaves and free negroes for mental instruction without the presence of white persons; next by refusing, on the grounds that both power and willingness were lacking, a plea by the colored preachers for a special dispensation; and finally by the seizure of all the attendants at another of their meetings and the sentencing of the bishop and a dozen exhorters, some to a month’s imprisonment or departure from the state, others to ten lashes or ten dollars’ fine.  The church