5
Community
In 1817 Robert Goodloe Harper, a former U.S. senator from Maryland, observed that “you can manumit a slave, but you cannot make him a white man.” He offered this judgment as explanation for his support of African colonization. He went on to explain that manumission in Maryland had revealed the true character of the free African American, and it was deficient: “The debasement which was at first compulsory, has now become habitual and voluntary.”1 Free African Americans, he decided, could not be assimilated. Harper expressed his prejudices privately in a letter to a friend, but free African Americans knew what their white neighbors thought of them. African American leaders Richard Allen, David Walker, Daniel Payne, and even G. W. Offley all publicly worried that free African Americans would internalize these white prejudices. In a 1794 address entitled “To those who keep slaves and approve the practice,” the Reverend Richard Allen acknowledged that “the vile habits often acquired in a state of servitude, are not easily thrown.” But Allen also insisted that free African Americans seize every opportunity to define themselves.2
Map 3. “Talbot County, Maryland” (Baltimore: Hoen & Co., 1878). Map courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
What was the true character of a free African American? What defined, motivated, and inspired him? Allen saw the real character of a free African American as rooted in the Christian values shared by a majority of nineteenth-century African Americans. He urged former slaves and freeborn African Americans to live by simple Christian principles. Be compassionate and forgiving, especially toward your former masters. Be attentive to the needs of African Americans, because as “much depends upon us for the help of our colour—more than many are aware.” Be earnest and hardworking, because “if we are lazy and idle, the enemies of freedom plead it as a cause why we ought not to be free.” Be charitable, “bestowing some part of our substance, or the produce of our labours, towards the relief and support of the poor and needy.”3 Years later, G. W. Offley published his memoir, in part, to remind free African Americans that poverty and prejudice did not exempt African Americans from living according to Christian values. He reminded his fellow black Christians that it makes “no difference how poor we are, if we are respectable, honest, and upright, with God, ourselves, and our fellow man.”4
As elsewhere, free African Americans on the Eastern Shore of Maryland grappled with the challenge of self-definition in the face of prejudice. Social relations, work, and material possessions (or the lack thereof) all contributed to individual and group identity, but, as Reverend Allen suggested, free African Americans also needed to develop their spiritual identities. Allen wanted freedmen to rededicate themselves to Christianity. He believed that only in church would former slaves find a community that celebrated their resilience, affirmed their dignity, and validated their identity as a distinct people with a Christian mission. It was this conviction that inspired Allen to collaborate with other African American Christians from across the Middle Atlantic states to organize the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816.
An AME missionary arrived in Talbot County in 1818, and soon thereafter, the free African American community organized the Easton Bethel AME, the oldest AME church on the Eastern Shore. Within a few years, free African Americans in the neighboring communities of Hole-in-the-Wall and the newer, poorer community of Ivytown also organized AME worship communities. On the Eastern Shore, as elsewhere, the AME was a spiritual home, but it also served to raise free African Americans’ consciousness about their connections to other freed people across the Middle Atlantic region. For free African Americans on the Eastern Shore the work of building an AME church involved more than constructing a house of worship: it was part of the psychological process by which these former slaves transformed themselves into free African Americans.5
In 1818 the African Methodist Episcopal Church was a young church with a small membership and few assets. It was an urban church, with its roots firmly planted in cities in the Middle Atlantic states. Its leaders could easily have justified concentrating their attention and resources on growing their membership within the African American communities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Washington, D.C. However, Richard Allen, now a bishop, was head of the national church, and Rev. Daniel Coker was leader of the Baltimore congregation, and they may have had a special interest in developing missions to rural African Americans. The two men shared a rural heritage: Allen was from rural Delaware, and Coker was from western Maryland. Allen began his ministry traveling on a Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) circuit through Delaware and southern New Jersey before accepting a ministry in Philadelphia in 1784.6 In 1818 Allen and Coker were settled in Philadelphia and Baltimore respectively, but each continued to minister to rural immigrants who came to their congregations in search of spiritual, and perhaps material, support. Inestimable numbers of enslaved and free African Americans of diverse faiths had come to the AME Church from all over the Middle Atlantic region, and Allen and Coker undoubtedly knew that some of their congregants had taken enormous risks for the opportunity to worship in their respective churches. In 1797, three years after Allen opened the Methodist Episcopal Bethel church, Charles Goldsborough, a Talbot County slaveholder, complained to William Tilghman that his slave Bob had escaped to Philadelphia, but that he could be easily tracked if Tilghman could direct the catchers to Richard Allen’s church. According to Goldsborough, Bob was “a strict Methodist, brother to [another slave named] Joe, whom you remember and preaches every Sunday at Richard Allen’s meeting House in 6th St. This I understand is a meeting house for the blacks and well known in Philadelphia. By waiting on Sunday near this house he may easily be arrested.”7
Richard Allen, Daniel Coker, and the other founders of the AME Church accepted the challenge of evangelizing in the countryside, and they were quickly rewarded with new AME worship communities in southern New Jersey, rural Pennsylvania, western Maryland, and, indeed, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The Eastern Shore should have been especially fertile ground for an AME mission. After all, the Delmarva Peninsula was a stronghold of the MEC in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and both Allen and Coker, as former MEC preachers, would have known how to communicate the mission of the AME to African American Methodists.
Methodism, however, was not the only influential theology on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Catholics and Quakers also contributed something to the religious education of African Americans. Jesuits had built plantations on the Eastern Shore in the eighteenth century, and the Catholic Church enjoyed some measure of success in converting Maryland slaves.8 One author has estimated that as many as 20 percent of Maryland Catholics were African Americans. Thomas W. Henry, a former slave who was ordained a minister in the AME Church in 1835, was educated in Catholic and Methodist theologies before joining the AME Church. In his autobiography he remembered: “I was raised in the Catholic faith, and followed that denomination until I was nineteen years old, and was catechized as well as could be reasonably expected from an uneducated boy.”9 One explanation for the Jesuits’ success was their willingness to teach slaves the catechism and to extend the sacraments of marriage and baptism to them.10 Jesuits offered slaves some education and an opportunity to participate as spiritual equals in the worship service. Even in the 1830s some Maryland Jesuits remained committed to a spiritual education for enslaved Catholics. In 1830 Father Aloysius Mudd, superior of the Jesuit White Marsh plantation in Prince George’s County, wanted to establish a novitiate at the plantation with the expectation that the novices could work among “our numerous black family.” Mudd explained that the novices could evangelize among slaves, who were more than adequate “substitutes for the poor, whom according to the practice of the society [of Jesus] should visit in prisons and hospitals.”11
In the eighteenth century the Quakers offered slaves religious education and spiritual equality, but they also went significantly further than the Jesuits by advocating the abolition of slavery. Pennsylvania Quakers declared themselves advocates of abolition in the last decade of the seventeenth century, and Maryland Quakers slowly followed their lead. In 1760 the Quaker general meeting at Third Haven in Easton, Talbot County, declared that “Friends should not in any [way] encourage the importation of Negroes, by buying or selling them, or other slaves.” Six years later, two Quakers, John Woolman and John Sleeper, embarked on a walking tour across the Delmarva Peninsula through Talbot County and into Delaware, denouncing the evils of slavery along the way. By 1785 Caroline County, neighbor to both Queen Anne’s and Talbot counties, became a stronghold for a fervent antislavery Quaker sect known as the Nicholites.12 The campaign to end slavery among Quakers was successful on the Eastern Shore. All Talbot County Quakers manumitted their slaves by 1790, and many continued to participate in Eastern Shore antislavery societies. One particularly ambitious Quaker antislavery activist organized a school for free African Americans in 1804.13 It is unclear how many manumitted slaves found a spiritual home in the Third Haven meeting house, but it seems that free African Americans recognized the Quakers as friends of black freedom. In 1783 seven of thirteen African Americans listed in a tax assessment lived within the neighborhood of the Third Haven meeting house in Easton.14
Methodist itinerants practiced what they preached. Among the most famous itinerant preachers to pass through the Upper Eastern Shore were Freeborn Garrettson and Joseph Everett, two former slaveholders who had manumitted their own slaves when they converted to Methodism. In the 1780s Garrettson and Everett typically met with individual slaveholders to discuss abolition and spiritual redemption, and they also used the occasion to minister to the slaves within the household. Francis Asbury, the first bishop of the MEC, considered Garrettson and Everett genuine Methodist heroes. Asbury, who admired the Quakers for their opposition to slavery, proudly noted in his journals any news of successful antislavery activism among his brethren. In November 1788, Asbury celebrated the itinerant preacher Everett, who, “with no less zeal and boldness [then a Quaker], cries aloud for liberty-emancipation.”19
On the Eastern Shore, as in other slaveholding societies, Methodist classes, chapel events, and even revivals were segregated. Black and white Methodists only worshipped together on special occasions, such as the “love feast” at Queen Anne’s County that was attended by Bishop Asbury in May 1801. He noted in his journal that “we had a love feast for the whites and blacks: there might have been fifteen hundred people.”20 Segregation notwithstanding, Methodists believed that God could call on any man to preach, black or white, rich or poor. Francis Asbury and other Methodist leaders welcomed African Americans as preachers and deacons. Richard Allen and Daniel Coker were just two among countless other anonymous black preachers traveling around the Middle Atlantic region at that time. Bishop Asbury and other Methodist ministers noticed the black itinerants’ work, and so did local whites. In August 1822, Robert Goldsborough, the Talbot County slaveholder who hired dozens of free African Americans to work at his plantation, made a twenty-five cent “donation at the Negro camp meeting,” presumably a Methodist gathering.21 Another reference to a “Camp Meeting of the coloured people” near Easton also appears in court testimony taken in 1826.22
Quakers and Methodists who preached emancipation and spiritual equality among the races did so in the face of active opposition from Jesuits and Episcopalians. Jesuit Brother Joseph Mobberly insisted that the activism of the Methodists and Quakers had made slaves ungovernable. He found that slaves who had converted to Methodism believed that all slaveholders were ineligible for salvation and, hence, unqualified to govern Christian slaves.23 In 1797 the vestry members of St. Peter’s Parish, an Episcopal church in Talbot County, expressed similar concerns. Slaveholding Episcopalians argued that the Methodist practice of gradual emancipation was “laying a foundation for discontent & disturbances.”24 The Episcopalians believed that term slaves, in particular, were ineffective slaves because they knew that freedom was forthcoming.
The Episcopalians further complained that Quakers and Methodists who manumitted their slaves were not as altruistic as they seemed. They charged that Quakers and Methodists only manumitted their slaves for economic advantage, not out of a keen sense of Christian duty. They cited the example of the Quaker James Berry, who had been dismissed from and then later reinstated into the Society of Friends, as an example of someone who used manumission for economic gain. According to the vestry, Berry had paid off a debt to his sister-in-law by selling some of his slaves to her. When the sale was complete, he then persuaded his sister-in-law that her Christian duty required her to manumit the same slaves. He convinced her to contract the newly manumitted slaves to him, thereby obtaining “their labor at cheaper rate than when he held them as slaves.”25 Of course, if the vestry’s description of events was accurate, then Berry’s actions, while morally questionable, reflected his business savvy. Manumission for personal economic gain, as practiced by Berry in the 1760s, would be the driving force behind the manumissions of hundreds of slaves in the 1780s and 1790s by slaveholders of all denominations.
The Episcopalians and Jesuits levied their charges against the Methodists just as the MEC began a steady retreat from its antislavery heritage.26 While many Methodists welcomed enslaved and free African Americans as congregants, preachers, and deacons, even Bishop Asbury refused to sponsor a black ministry. It was a decision that would fracture the Methodist Episcopal Church. African American deacons and lay preachers could not administer the sacraments, and so seemingly autonomous African American congregations still relied on white ministers to officiate at weddings, funerals, and communion.27 Although they led and directed fast-growing congregations of devoted followers, Richard Allen and Daniel Coker remained second-class citizens within the MEC. Allen had led the MEC Bethel Church in Philadelphia under such restrictions for nearly twenty-five years, but on April 9, 1816, he and his fellow preachers from cities across the Middle Atlantic region resolved to quit the MEC and form the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.28
Moreover, the MEC antislavery principal did not extend deep into the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where some Methodists manumitted their slaves in the 1780s and 1790s but just as many purchased slaves during the same period. This divide between slaveholding Methodists and antislavery Methodists would also split the Eastern Shore MEC into proslavery and antislavery camps. The 1819 trial of a Talbot County Methodist convicted of selling a term slave out of state showed the indifference of some white Methodists to antislavery principles. In 1811 Alice Austin, a Methodist, had purchased Lydia from Thomas Harwood, another Methodist. Soon after the sale, the Methodist Society of Talbot County brought both Alice and Thomas before a hearing for their participation in this transaction. The Methodists were not concerned about the sale of Lydia but about Lydia’s status at the time of the sale. Did Thomas Harwood sell her as a slave-for-life? If he had, then he had violated the antislavery principles of the MEC. If Lydia was a term slave, anticipating manumission, then the sale was in keeping with the antislavery principles.29
Alice Austin and Thomas Harwood responded differently to the charges levied against them. When brought before the Methodist meeting, Harwood said that “it was in his power to Manumitt the Negro and [he] would satisfy the society.” Accordingly, Harwood appeared before the Talbot County Court on September 29, 1812, to manumit Lydia: a full nineteen months after he had sold her to Alice Austin. Alice was less apologetic in her response. She insisted that she had purchased Lydia from Harwood “for life and she would come out of the meeting [i.e., quit the Methodist Society (church)] rather than give the said Negro up.” Moreover, Alice’s husband, William Austin, charged not only that Alice had bought the slave-for-life, but also that Harwood intended to sell Lydia as a slave-for-life. In 1811 Alice Austin had paid $120 for Lydia, who was then just nine years old. According to her husband’s attorney, this was an “enormous price” for a female slave scheduled for manumission in fifteen years. Alice Austin, he urged, would never have paid $120 for an enslaved child unless she knew that she was buying a slave-for-life.30
African American Methodists who participated in and witnessed the growth of the MEC on the Eastern Shore in the 1780s and 1790s must have been disheartened by the declaration of a fellow Methodist that she would leave the MEC altogether rather than surrender her claim to a slave-for-life. In 1819 there may have been some elderly African American Methodists who remembered hearing Freeborn Garrettson, Joseph Everett, or the African American preacher Harry Orien address crowds of white and black Methodists thirty years earlier. Surely, some of the elderly African American living in Talbot in 1819 owed their personal liberty to the early antislavery campaigns of Garrettson and Everett. Some may have attended the celebrated 1801 love feast that so impressed Bishop Asbury. Some of these older African Americans may have achieved their freedom as a result of their conversion experience. In November 1790, Francis Asbury claimed to have met an Eastern Shore slaveholder who liberated “an old Negro woman because she had too much religion for him.”31 It must have been evident to free African Americans that the same church that had liberated them from slavery and fostered their spiritual independence was increasingly ambivalent about extending or preserving their freedom.
Within two years of the incorporation of the AME Church, and at about the same time that Alice Austin insisted on her rights to Lydia, an AME minister arrived in Easton. He preached from the back of a horse cart to an audience of free African Americans that included Washington Dorrell, son of butcher John Dorrell.32 Evidently, Dorrell was moved by what he heard. The AME itinerant worked with Dorrell and barber Joseph Chain to organize a prayer group, or a class, for converts. For those who participated, the Easton AME class must have been a powerful experience. In class, manumitted and freeborn men and women studied and encouraged one another in their respective journeys toward a spiritual awakening. But discussion of spiritual matters surely led to friendships and discussions of more earthly matters: work, wages, family, and politics. The class fostered among free African Americans an increased awareness that they constituted a unique community, with interests that were distinct from the interests of slaves and slaveholders. Surely, the 1819 controversy over the sale of Lydia confirmed that the interests of African American Methodists were distinct from and, at times, in conflict with the interests of white Methodists.
The Bethel Society, as the prayer group was known, quickly matured into the Easton Bethel AME Church, the oldest AME church on the Eastern Shore. Building an AME church in rural slaveholding Maryland required extraordinary courage and ambition on the part of the founders. Washington Dorrell’s path to leadership in the rural AME church illustrates the history and experience of a first-generation AME preacher and the role played by the AME Church in raising free African Americans’ consciousness about their unique place in a slaveholding society. As leaders of the Bethel Society, Dorrell and Chain faced two challenges in those formative years: to recruit members and to establish a house of worship. Finding new members proved more of a challenge than Dorrell and his brethren may have anticipated. Talbot County had a strong Methodist tradition, and in 1810 nearly 13 percent of African Americans belonged to the MEC.33 Although black membership had declined by 34 percent between 1810 and 1820 (from 916 to 600 members), the decline did not reflect a siphoning of African American Methodists from the MEC to the AME. Four years into its mission, the Bethel Society claimed just twenty-two members. It seems that the AME did not appeal to all free African Americans, but to a specific group who shared Richard Allen and Daniel Coker’s call for uplift and autonomy.
Enslaved African Americans probably had little choice in where they worshiped, and some slaveholders strictly forbade their slaves to interact with the Bethel Society. Rev. Thomas W. Henry, who served as the minister of the Easton Bethel AME Church in 1859, remembered that a white friend warned him against interacting with slaves. When Henry began his Easton ministry, he asked Dr. Horatio Graves, a white resident, “how [he] might best get along with the people in this part of the States?” He reported, “[Graves told me] to go on with my regular meetings, and, whatever I done, not to make myself familiar with the slaves or go to the people’s houses or quarters.”34
Dorrell’s and Chain’s second objective, to find a suitable house of worship for the Bethel Society, proved considerably easier for these tradesmen. The two had frequent contact with white residents, and a few of their clients supported the Bethel Society in their church-building efforts. According to one account of the history of the church, Joseph Chain bought a carpenter shop from a Quaker and altered it to make it a suitable house of worship. Within a few years, however, his creditors seized the property as payment for outstanding debts. When Chain’s creditors auctioned the property, a court clerk who was “in sympathy with the organization” purchased it and then deeded it back to the Bethel Society.35 Within two years of acquiring the property, the trustees had built “the building called the ‘bethel church’.”36
In 1830 the five trustees of the Bethel Society, Jacob Howard, William Benson, John Dobson, William Dobson, and Pere Dobson, articulated their ambitions for the church in the Talbot County land records. They pledged to “erect or build thereon a house or place of worship for the use of the members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the USA.” They further explained the guidelines that would govern the church. The ministry at Easton Bethel would be appointed “by the general conference of the ministers and preachers of the said African Methodist Episcopal Church or by the annual conference authorized by the said general conference to preach and expound God’s Holy Word therein.” If one of the trustees died, a new trustee would be elected by the adult male members “in order to keep up the five trustees forever.”37
As in AME churches in Baltimore and Philadelphia, the Easton Bethel AME Church allowed only adult male members to hold leadership positions. The AME Church did not expressly forbid slaves from serving as church leaders, but the Easton church was organized and led by freedmen who likely followed the precedent set by the trustees of Philadelphia Bethel and Baltimore Bethel, where slaves were welcomed as members but not as leaders. Every AME church drew its leadership from the growing populations of what could be called elite free African Americans. In Philadelphia, the black elite were readily distinguished by their wealth, their leadership positions within the black churches and mutual aid societies, and their increased involvement in the abolitionist movement.38 As early as twenty years before Reverend Allen separated his congregation from the MEC, black entrepreneurs and self-employed freedmen already represented half of the trustees.39 This class divide was just as evident in the Baltimore congregation. Between 1825 and 1853, 85 percent of the Baltimore Bethel AME class leaders (twenty-eight of thirty-three) were men identified as skilled or semiskilled laborers; only five class leaders were identified as common laborers.40
Seventeen of the twenty-one founding fathers, trustees, and early preachers of Easton Bethel appear in public records as property owners and heads of households.41 They were not wealthy men, but they were not as poor as some rural African Americans. Nine of the twenty-one leaders appeared as owners of taxable assets before 1832, and the average value of their individual estates was never more than $135. Some men owned real estate, livestock, and tools; some, like Abraham Dobson, owned large quantities of livestock and other taxable property without land; and still others had no assets at all. Even Washington Dorrell claimed only $57 worth of taxable property in 1826, considerably less than the $74 average. Two trustees, Dorrell and Perry Sprouse, resided on lots in Easton “near Bethel Meeting House.” Another, Adam Hercules, who served as a Bethel trustee in 1820, leased a lot at Ivytown, a neighborhood that in 1824 would sponsor another AME class. But as many as eleven of the Easton Bethel founding fathers did not own enough assets to appear in tax records before 1832.42
All but four of the twenty-one church leaders listed in various records between 1818 and 1831 appear as free men in public records. Most of the original leaders of the Bethel Society were older manumitted men. Nace Gibson was typical. Born in 1772, he was manumitted from slavery sometime before 1812 and was fifty-five years old when he served as a trustee in 1827. Edward Adams, also a former slave, was forty-eight years old when he served as a trustee in 1827. Washington Dorrell’s youth made him exceptional among the leaders. Although Dorrell spent most of his youth as a term slave, he was a free man, only twenty-seven years old, when he joined the Bethel Society in 1818.43
The leaders of the Easton AME church were also family men. Eleven leaders, including Washington Dorrell, were identified as heads of households. In 1820 his household included himself, an adult woman (presumably his wife), and four children under fourteen. Since at least 1826, the Dorrell family had lived in a small, framed house on an Easton lot that was “near Bethel.”44 His household, along with the households of the other ten leaders, may have contributed as many as sixty-two men, women, and children to the Easton Bethel AME Church each week. Moreover, because the free black population of Talbot County was quite youthful (one-third of the free African Americans were under age ten in 1832), Easton Bethel likely bustled with youthful energy. Among the sixty-two people related to the Bethel leaders, twenty were children under age ten, the sons, daughters, and extended family of the incorporators, trustees, and preachers. Those children matured with a powerful image of free African American men as patriarchs and community leaders. Some of these young boys, the first generation of freeborn African Americans, would inherit their fathers’ property and leadership positions. In the trustees these young men had a distinct “model of black manhood” that stressed leadership as well as Christian piety.45
Certainly, young Josiah Dobson benefited from his intimate knowledge of the Easton Bethel AME Church. In 1831, when his father, John Dobson, served as a trustee, Josiah was an impressionable twelve-year-old. His father would later become a preacher for the church, and by 1851, Josiah would follow his father’s example and serve as a trustee for Easton Bethel AME Church.46 Or perhaps young Josiah was following the example of an uncle: beginning in 1820, four different Dobson men (Abraham, John, William, and Perry) served as trustees and preachers for the Easton Bethel AME Church.
The AME Church denied female members formal leadership roles within the organization, but women were undoubtedly active and influential members of this congregation. At Baltimore Bethel AME female members were consistently in the majority between 1825 and 1853.47 At Philadelphia Bethel AME female members exercised considerable moral authority over the congregation. They shared with their male coreligionists the expectation that the AME church would exhibit a respectable image to wider Philadelphia. Women also assumed the responsibility of regulating morality within their congregations. Women who suspected fellow churchgoers of immoral or questionable behavior could bring the wrongdoers before a disciplinary committee that had the power to strip them of their membership.48 In policing their sisters, the dutiful women of Philadelphia Bethel played a critical role in defining “acceptable behavior” for all of its members.
Establishing and maintaining a standard of acceptable behavior for free African Americans was an important objective of the leaders of the AME churches in Baltimore and Philadelphia. For men like Richard Allen, independence from the MEC was an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how ably African American Methodists could uphold and defend the Christian faith. Prohibited from achieving leadership in the MEC, they needed to go elsewhere to fulfill their personal ambitions and to prove their abilities. Black elites in Philadelphia and Baltimore were “concerned with acceptability to the larger white society,” and black churches, led by the black elite, readily instructed other free African Americans in acceptable behaviors.49 To demonstrate their self-reliance, free African Americans organized dozens of mutual aid organizations, moral improvement societies, and schools for free African Americans in early national Baltimore, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and elsewhere. In Baltimore free African Americans organized fraternal societies and the Mental and Moral Improvement Society of Bethel. Rev. Daniel Coker, leader of the Sharp Street Church in Baltimore, spearheaded a campaign to educate African American youth in 1809.50 Nearly all of the African American societies organized in early national Baltimore drew their leadership from the most prominent members of the black churches.51
The Easton Bethel AME Church enjoyed steady growth under the leadership of men like Washington Dorrell and Joseph Chain. What began as a prayer group for nine men grew into a congregation that included twenty-two members in 1822, and the AME annual conference of that year counted 330 AME members across the Eastern Shore. In 1824 the annual conference recognized a distinct Easton circuit with 543 church members.52 The men and women at Easton Bethel probably deserve some credit for this growth. Philadelphia-based ministers were rightly fearful of traveling to slave states, and so the responsibility for building the AME Church on the Eastern Shore would have fallen to local members. Washington Dorrell and Joseph Chain probably assisted in organizing new prayer classes in other free African American neighborhoods. By 1824 an AME class existed at Hole-in-the-Wall, a community that, like Easton, had a fair share of free African American property owners.53 In 1817 the African American community at Hole-in-the-Wall included ten property owners, and by 1832, nearly half of the property owners listed in the tax assessment were free African Americans. Hole-in-the-Wall was unique among African American communities in Talbot County because five of the ten property owners listed in the 1817 assessment were African American women. It seems extremely likely that that these women were instrumental in bringing an AME class to this community, and it is interesting to imagine how they influenced the life of the church.
Initially, the trustees of Easton Bethel exercised some authority over these new AME classes, but by 1826 the trustees of Easton Bethel were in conflict with at least one of the new classes. The conflict between the trustees and Adam Hercules began when Hercules organized an AME class in neighboring Ivytown without the express permission of the Easton Bethel trustees.54 Hercules, a freedman since at least 1813, had been a trustee of Easton Bethel in 1820, but he had since resettled in Ivytown, where he had purchased a lot. It is unknown why the Easton Bethel trustees did not approve of the Ivytown group, but it is clear that the tension was high between the two. The Easton-Ivytown conflict was severe enough that the respective church leaders requested Bishop Allen’s intervention. Writing from the 1826 annual conference in Baltimore, Allen instructed that the Ivytown class should return “to the Church in Easton, and that no class shall meet at Ivorytown but the class that was formed for the aged and infirm.” He appealed to both congregations to “let all hardness and ill thoughts be done away [so] that your preachers and people will strive to pull together for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.”55
The conflict between the Easton and Ivytown congregations was not an isolated event, or an event peculiar to the rural AME. Bishop Allen contended with a very public defection from the Mother Bethel that, like the Easton-Ivytown split, highlighted the heterogeneity of early free African American communities. The event that prompted the Philadelphia defection was the expulsion of parishioner Jonathan Tudas, a freeborn African American who had joined the Bethel community in the 1810s. In 1820 the trustees of the church convicted Tudas of sexual misconduct for fathering an illegitimate child and summarily dismissed him from the church. Tudas protested, and his protest resonated with a handful of other members who disagreed with the verdict. The disaffected congregants left AME Bethel and proceeded to build a new congregation, the Wesley Church, but Jonathan Tudas also publicly challenged the leadership of Richard Allen and the trustees. He published a pamphlet in which he implied that Allen had mishandled the finances of Bethel AME. Bishop Allen denounced the defectors and insisted that church members could not legally secede from Bethel without the consent of the AME hierarchy. Allen claimed the defection was illegitimate and at one point insisted that the Wesley Church was not a separate church at all but another prayer group or class. His haughty directives to the Wesley Church only widened the breach, and Allen never succeeded in recovering his lost parishioners.56
Historian Albert Raboteau has argued that such discord within and between African American congregations was ordinary and even necessary in these formative years.57 Manumitted African Americans wanted fellowship, but not at the expense of hard-won autonomy. Richard Allen struggled to balance these values. He knew experientially why African Americans preferred local control of their prayer groups and congregation. After all, he had led the fight for the independence of African American Methodists from the MEC. At the same time, he longed to merge the AME Church with the other African American Methodist denominations in the region, the Union Church of Africans (Wilmington, Delaware) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (New York City). Neither of these denominations shared Allen’s dream of a single African Methodist denomination. Union and Zion valued independence and local control more than unity.
The African Americans at Ivytown did not want to start their own denomination, but plainly they wanted independence from the Easton Bethel trustees. Although Adam Hercules did not explain why he and the other Ivytown Methodists separated from Easton Bethel, it is possible that money and class factored into their decision. Both the Ivytown and the Easton congregations included African Americans who owned property, but the Ivytown congregation was slightly poorer than the Easton congregation. In 1817, when Ivytown first appeared in the assessment records, it claimed only two black property owners and no white residents. It remained an exclusively black neighborhood into the 1830s, and even at that time, Adam Hercules was one of only two African American property owners in the community. Simply put, the free African Americans at Ivytown were not like their coreligionists at Easton. They were not tradesmen but agricultural workers. Ivytown was a distinctive place, and its residents had different needs. Adam Hercules and those who would lead Ivytown AME no doubt wanted to worship in a church that reflected the values of the Ivytown African American community.
Bishop Allen handled the Easton-Ivytown split with more tact than the Bethel-Wesley split. He directed the Ivytown congregation to return to Easton Bethel, but he never implied that the defecting congregants were malcontents. Instead, he acknowledged that both parties had legitimate grievances by making reference to the hard feelings and ill thoughts among them. In any case, the Ivytown class dismissed the bishop’s request to return to the Easton church. In time, the class that splintered from Easton became Queen Esther AME Church, the second-oldest AME church in Talbot County.
Joining the AME Church brought Washington Dorrell and Joseph Chain into a larger community of free African Americans that spread across the eastern seaboard. Chain and Dorrell regularly attended the Baltimore annual conferences, and in 1820 the conference admitted Chain as a preacher “on trial.” Two years later the conference honored him with the title Deacon of the Eastern Shore Circuit.58 As deacon, Chain was second only to Jeremiah Miller, elder in charge of the Eastern Shore Circuit. In 1827 Washington Dorrell also accepted two leadership positions in the AME Church. First, his Easton congregation made him a trustee. At thirty-five, he was among the youngest of the trustees in the AME organization. Later, at the AME annual conference in Baltimore, his superiors accepted him on trial as a preacher.59
Without local preachers like Dorrell and Chain, the AME Church never would have matured into the first black institution to serve African Americans nationwide. Although the axis of AME power originated in Philadelphia and Baltimore, the men and women who participated in rural prayer classes played central roles in forwarding the AME mission. In his 1891 history of the denomination, church historian Rev. Daniel T. Payne conceded that the mother churches lacked both the revenue and the manpower to support the rural Methodist societies organized by the first generation of AME missionaries.60 Contending with chronic shortages of funds and clergy, the early church relied on men like Washington Dorrell and Joseph Chain, who went to annual conferences seeking appointments as preachers on trial in rural congregations. Temporary positions often became permanent when the conference failed to appoint regular clergy to rural churches.61 If Philadelphia Bethel AME Church was the heart of the AME Church, men like Washington Dorrell and Joseph Chain were the arteries that carried the mission and kept it viable in the countryside.
In the decade after his conversion, preacher Washington Dorrell witnessed remarkable changes in the free African American community that his father John Dorrell helped create. His father was among a handful of former slaves who settled in Easton, rented property, established businesses, and built independent households. That generation of freedmen laid the foundations for African American communities in Easton, Trappe, Hole-in-the-Wall, and Ivytown. Washington Dorrell inherited his father’s legacy and made his own contribution to those communities and their development. In forwarding the missionary efforts of the AME Church in the countryside, Dorrell nurtured those clusters of independent black households as they matured into communities. When Dorrell accepted a position as an AME preacher, he became part of a second generation of AME preachers charged with shepherding the classes and small congregations established by the founders of the AME denomination. Preacher Dorrell led the Easton Bethel AME Church until at least 1830, when he may have moved to another church or even joined the traveling preachers in their missionary efforts. He left his family, his friends, and his community a legacy of inestimable value.