Each locality was likely to have some outstanding figure among these.  In Georgia the most notable was Austin Dabney, who as a mulatto youth served in the Revolutionary army and attached himself ever afterward to the white family who saved his life when he had been wounded in battle.  The Georgia legislature by special act gave him a farm; he was welcomed in the tavern circle of chatting lawyers whenever his favorite Judge Dooly held court at his home village; and once when the formality of drawing his pension carried him to Savannah the governor of the state, seeing him pass, dragged him from his horse and quartered him as a guest in his house.[21] John Eady of the South Carolina lowlands by a like service in the War for Independence earned a somewhat similar recognition which he retained throughout a very long life.[22]

[Footnote 21:  George R. Giltner, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia (New York, 1855), pp. 212-215.]

[Footnote 22:  Diary of Thomas P. Porcher.  MS. in private possession.]

Others were esteemed rather for piety and benevolence than for heroic services.  “Such,” wrote Bishop Capers of the Southern Methodist Church, “were my old friends Castile Selby and John Bouquet of Charleston, Will Campbell and Harry Myrick of Wilmington, York Cohen of Savannah, and others I might name.  These I might call remarkable for their goodness.  But I use the word in a broader sense for Henry Evans, who was confessedly the father of the Methodist church, white and black, in Fayetteville, and the best preacher of his time in that quarter.”  Evans, a free-born full-blooded black, as Capers went on to relate, had been a shoemaker and licensed preacher in Virginia, but while journeying toward Charleston in search of better employment he had been so struck by the lack of religion and morality among the negroes in Fayetteville that he determined upon their conversion as his true mission in life.  When the town authorities dispersed his meetings he shifted his rude pulpit into the woods outside their jurisdiction and invited surveillance by the whites to prove his lack of offence.  The palpable improvement in the morals of his followers led erelong to his being invited to preach within the town again, where the white people began to be numerous among his hearers.  A regular congregation comprising members of both races was organized and a church building erected.  But the white attendance grew so large as to threaten the crowding out of the blacks.  To provide room for these the side walls of the church were torn off and sheds built on either flank; and these were the conditions when Capers himself succeeded the aged negro in its pulpit in 1810 and found him on his own score an inspiration.  Toward the ruling race, Capers records, Evans was unfailingly deferential, “never speaking to a white but with his hat under his arm; never allowing himself to be seated in their houses....  ‘The whites are kind to me and come to hear me preach,’ he would say, ‘but I belong to my own sort and must not spoil them.’  And yet Henry Evans was a Boanerges; and in his duty feared not the face of man.” [23]