as quickly as
possible in the general body politic.

[Footnote 1: Nell: _Colored Patriots of the American Revolution_, 356.]

We have seen that the Church was from the first the race's foremost form
of social organization, and that sometimes in very close touch with
it developed the early lodges of such a body as the Masons. By 1800
emancipation was well under way; then began emigration from the South
to the central West; emigration brought into being the Underground
Railroad; and finally all forces worked together for the development of
Negro business, the press, conventions, and other forms of activity. It
was natural that states so close to the border as Pennsylvania and Ohio
should be important in this early development.

The Church continued the growth that it had begun several decades
before. The A.M.E. denomination advanced rapidly from 7 churches and 400
members in 1816 to 286 churches and 73,000 members by the close of the
Civil War. Naturally such a distinctively Negro organization could
make little progress in the South before the war, but there were small
congregations in Charleston and New Orleans, and William Paul Quinn
blazed a path in the West, going from Pittsburgh to St. Louis.

In 1847 the Prince Hall Lodge of the Masons in Massachusetts, the First
Independent African Grand Lodge in Pennsylvania, and the Hiram Grand
Lodge of Pennsylvania formed a National Grand Lodge, and from one or
another of these all other Grand Lodges among Negroes have descended. In
1842 the members of the Philomathean Institute of New York and of the
Philadelphia Library Company and Debating Society applied for admission
to the International Order of Odd Fellows. They were refused on account
of their race. Thereupon Peter Ogden, a Negro, who had already joined
the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows of England, secured a charter for
the first Negro American lodge, Philomathean, No. 646, of New York,
which was set up March 1, 1843. It was followed within the next two
years by lodges in New York, Philadelphia, Albany, and Poughkeepsie. The
Knights of Pythias were not organized until 1864 in Washington; but the
Grand Order of Galilean Fishermen started on its career in Baltimore in
1856.

The benefit societies developed apace. At first they were small and
confined to a group of persons well known to each other, thus being
genuinely fraternal. Simple in form, they imposed an initiation fee of
hardly less than $2.50 or more than