"Silver Bluff Baptist Church" (1773)

The Silver Bluff Baptist Church in Aiken County,South Carolina,was

founded by several enslaved African Americans who organized under elder David George in 1773-1775.The American Revolutionary War,David and his congregation of 30 slaves went to the city for freedom behind their lines.The British had promised freedom behind their lines.The British had promised freedom to slaves who escaped from rebel masters.Those members who stayed after the end of the American Revolutionary War evolved in the First African Baptist Church.David was highly influential in the early African American Baptist movement.Resetting with his family and Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia,he founded a congregation there.David also founded a congregation and Baptist church in Freetown,Sierra Leone,where he and his family migrated in 1792.In the Great Awaken,northern Baptist and Methodist preachers traveled around the south,converting both whites and enslaved African Americans.The Baptists especially offered roles in congregations and churches to African Americans,and some men were licensed as preachers and elders.The founders of Silver Bluff Baptist Church were enslaved African Americans who were converted by the preaching of a white Baptist church named Wait Palmer,and perhaps a slave preacher named George Leile.There were eight original founders:David George and his wife Jesse Pete (aka Jesse Galphin,),and five others.Wait was so impressed by David's preaching that he appointed him elder of the group.They brought in other members and started about 1774-1775 at Gaphin's Mill,owned by David's master George Galphin.When the British in 1778 occupied Savannah across the river,the church was disrupted.A Patriot,George fled his plantation.David and the 30 enslaved members of Silver Bluff Baptist Church went to Savannah to seek promised freedom behind the British lines.They joined with minister George Lelie and his group there.Along with thousands of other African Americans,David and his family evacuated with the British in 1782 after the end of the war.They were transported to freedom in Nova Scotia,where he preached in Shelburne and planted another British congregation.George Leile went to Jamaica with the British,where he founded a Baptist church in Kingston.In 1792 the George family migrated from Nova Scotia to the colony of Sierra Leone,assisted  by British abolitionists.David was one of the founders of Freetown and its first Baptist church.Andrew Bryan converted in 1782,was  the only on of the three early African Americans Baptists preachers in Georgia to stay in Savannah.He later purchased his freedom and that of his wife.He continued preaching and converting,and in 1788 organized the First African Baptist Church of Savannah.In 1793 he brought land for a structure,which the congregation built in 1794.The church grew to have more than 400 members before Andrew's death.After the war n 1783,Jesse Pete Galphin (the name he took after he gained his freedom)led other Baptists congregants from the Silver Bluff congregation to Augusta Georgia.They founded the first African Baptist church of that city.It was later known as Springfield Baptist Church.Because Jesse Peter Galphin was linked to the original Silver Bluff congregation,in 1922 the historian Walter Brooks,identified Springfield Baptist Church (as they were then known in Augusta) as the oldest black Baptist church in in the nation.