. This change was easily made
in certain towns and cities where Negroes already had churches of
their own. Before 1815 there was a Methodist church in Charleston,
South Carolina, with a membership of eighteen hundred, more than one
thousand of whom were persons of color. About this time, Williamsburg
and Augusta had one each, and Savannah three colored Baptist churches.
By 1822 the Negroes of Petersburg had in addition to two churches of
this denomination, a flourishing African Missionary Society.[1] In
Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston the free
blacks had experienced such a rapid religious development that colored
churches in these cities were no longer considered unusual.

[Footnote 1: Adams, _Anti-slavery_, etc., pp. 73 and 74.]

The increase in the population of cities brought a larger number of
these unfortunates into helpful contact with the urban element of
white people who, having few Negroes, often opposed the institution of
slavery. But thrown among colored people brought in their crude state
into sections of culture, the antislavery men of towns and cities
developed from theorists, discussing a problem of concern to persons
far away, into actual workers striving by means of education to pave
the way for universal freedom.[1] Large as the number of abolitionists
became and bright as the future of their cause seemed, the more the
antislavery men saw of the freedmen in congested districts, the more
inclined the reformers were to think that instant abolition was an
event which they "could not reasonably expect, and perhaps could not
desire." Being in a state of deplorable ignorance, the slaves did not
possess sufficient information "to render their immediate emancipation
a blessing either to themselves or to society."[2]

[Footnote 1: As some masters regarded the ignorance of the slaves as
an argument against their emancipation, the antislavery men's problem
became the education of the master as well as that of the slave.
Believing that intellectual and moral improvement is a "safe and
permanent basis on which the arch of freedom could be erected," Jesse
Torrey, harking back to Jefferson's proposition, recommended that
it begin by instructing the slaveholders, overseers, their sons and
daughters, hitherto deprived of the blessing of education. Then he
thought that such enlightened masters should see to it that every
slave less than thirty years of age should be taught the art of
reading