e
watch. Such was the confidence the governor placed in the missionaries,
and the slaves under their care.

Indeed it has invariably occurred in the missions to these people that
the planters have perceived the good effects of their labours on the
slaves, and found it in every respect best to have the gospel preached
upon their estates. While on this general subject, it may be proper to
assert what none will or can with truth deny, viz., that no class of
negroes well instructed in Christianity, and connected with churches
under the care of white pastors, have ever been engaged in any
insurrectionary disturbances. Thus the poor, miserable fanatic, who a
few years ago headed a band of drunken murderers in one of the counties
of Virginia, was not himself a member of any Christian church; nor had
he any follower who had ever received sound and systematic religious
instruction; or was connected with any church having a white man for a
pastor or teacher. So also in reference to the plot of 1822 in
Charleston, S.C., the coloured members of the Methodist Episcopal Church
were by report accused of some participation. But the Hon. Charles
Cotesworth Pinckney, Lieutenant Governor of the State, and himself not a
Methodist, in his address before the Agricultural Society of South
Carolina, says; "On investigation it appeared that all concerned in that
transaction, except one, had seceded from the regular Methodist Church
in 1817, and formed a separate establishment, in connection with the
African Methodist Society in Philadelphia; whose Bishop, a coloured man,
named Allen, had assumed that office being himself a seceder from the
Methodist Church of Pennsylvania. At this period, Mr. S. Bryan, the
local minister of the regular Methodist Church of Charleston, was so
apprehensive of sinister designs, that he addressed a letter to the City
Council, on file in the Council Chamber, dated 8th November, 1817,
stating at length the reasons of his suspicion."

In proof of the importance of Christianizing the negroes, even in a
political point of view, it is not unworthy of notice, that soon after
the commencement of the war between England and France during the last
quarter of the last century, the governor of Tortola received
information, that the French inhabitants of Guadaloupe meditated a
descent on the island. He immediately sent for Mr. Turner, the
superintendant of the Methodist Missions in Tortola and the other Virgin
Islands, and hav