embarrassment of the Episcopal Church in America in connection with the war, and the departure of many loyalist ministers, gave opportunity to other denominations as well as to certain bodies of Negroes.  The white members of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, however, determined to set apart its Negro membership and to segregate it in the gallery.  Then in 1787 came a day when the Negroes, choosing not to be insulted, and led by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, left the edifice, and with these two men as overseers on April 17 organized the Free African Society.  This was intended to be “without regard to religious tenets,” the members being banded together “to support one another in sickness and for the benefit of their widows and fatherless children.”  The society was in the strictest sense fraternal, there being only eight charter members:  Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, Samuel Boston, Joseph Johnson, Cato Freeman, Caesar Cranchell, James Potter, and William White.  By 1790 the society had on deposit in the Bank of North America L42 9s. id., and that it generally stood for racial enterprise may be seen from the fact that in 1788 an organization in Newport known as the Negro Union, in which Paul Cuffe was prominent, wrote proposing a general exodus of the Negroes to Africa.  Nothing came of the suggestion at the time, but at least it shows that representative Negroes of the day were beginning to think together about matters of general policy.

In course of time the Free African Society of Philadelphia resolved into an “African Church,” and this became affiliated with the Protestant Episcopal Church, whose bishop had exercised an interest in it.  Out of this organization developed St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church, organized in 1791 and formally opened for service July 17, 1794.  Allen was at first selected for ordination, but he decided to remain a Methodist and Jones was chosen in his stead and thus became the first Negro rector in the United States.  Meanwhile, however, in 1791, Allen himself had purchased a lot at the corner of Sixth and Lombard Streets; he at once set about arranging for the building that became Bethel Church; and in 1794 he formally sold the lot to the church and the new house of worship was dedicated by Bishop Asbury of the Methodist Episcopal Church.  With this general body Allen and his people for a number of years remained affiliated, but difficulties arose and separate churches having come into being in other places, a convention of Negro Methodists was at length called to meet in Philadelphia April 9, 1816.  To this came sixteen delegates—­Richard Allen, Jacob Tapsico, Clayton Durham, James Champion, Thomas Webster, of Philadelphia; Daniel Coker, Richard Williams, Henry Harden, Stephen Hill, Edward Williamson, Nicholas Gailliard, of Baltimore:  Jacob Marsh, Edward Jackson, William Andrew, of Attleborough, Penn.; Peter Spencer, of Wilmington, Del., and Peter Cuffe, of Salem, N.J.—­and these were the men who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church.  Coker, of whom we shall hear more in connection with Liberia, was elected bishop, but resigned in favor of Allen, who served until his death in 1831.