was subjected to persecution; nevertheless by 1791 he had baptized over four hundred persons.  Eight or nine months after he left for Jamaica, Andrew Bryan began to preach, and at first he was permitted to use a building at Yamacraw, in the suburbs of Savannah.  Of this, however, he was in course of time dispossessed, the place being a rendezvous for those Negroes who had been taken away from their homes by the British.  Many of these men were taken before the magistrates from time to time, and some were whipped and others imprisoned.  Bryan himself, having incurred the ire of the authorities, was twice imprisoned and once publicly whipped, being so cut that he “bled abundantly”; but he told his persecutors that he “would freely suffer death for the cause of Jesus Christ,” and after a while he was permitted to go on with his work.  For some time he used a barn, being assisted by his brother Sampson; then for L50 he purchased his freedom, and afterwards he began to use for worship a house that Sampson had been permitted to erect.  By 1791 his church had two hundred members, but over a hundred more had been received as converted members though they had not won their masters’ permission to be baptized.  An interesting sidelight on these people is furnished by the statement that probably fifty of them could read though only three could write.  Years afterwards, in 1832, when the church had grown to great numbers, a large part of the congregation left the Bryan Church and formed what is now the First African Baptist Church of Savannah.  Both congregations, however, remembered their early leader as one “clear in the grand doctrines of the Gospel, truly pious, and the instrument of doing more good among the poor slaves than all the learned doctors in America.”

[Footnote 1:  Walter H. Brooks:  The Silver Bluff Church.]

[Footnote 2:  See letters in Journal of Negro History, January, 1916, 69-97.]

While Bryan was working in Savannah, in Richmond, Va., rose Lott Cary, a man of massive and erect frame and of great personality.  Born a slave in 1780, Cary worked for a number of years in a tobacco factory, leading a wicked life.  Converted in 1807, he made rapid advance in education and he was licensed as a Baptist preacher.  He purchased his own freedom and that of his children (his first wife having died), organized a missionary society, and then in 1821 himself went as a missionary to the new colony of Liberia, in whose interest he worked heroically until his death in 1828.

More clearly defined than the origin of Negro Baptist churches are the beginnings of African Methodism.  Almost from the time of its introduction in the country Methodism made converts among the Negroes and in 1786 there were nearly two thousand Negroes in the regular churches of the denomination, which, like the Baptist denomination, it must be remembered, was before the Revolution largely overshadowed in official circles by the Protestant Episcopal Church.  The general