August 14, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, David George was enslaved, captured, and chased across colonies before he found anything close to freedom. But something else held through the chaos: his faith. After escaping bondage, George helped plant the roots of what would become the Black Baptist Church in North America. Historian Woody Holton of the University of South Carolina shares how David George’s story shaped the foundations of Black religious life in North America and why his legacy continues to matter.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Up next, a story about our fight for independence, our
original sin, and a man who escaped it. His name
(00:34):
was David George and his lasting legacy can still be
found all across our country today. Here to tell his
story is Professor Woody Holton of the University of South Carolina.
Take it Away.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
One of the lesser known but more interesting facts about
the American Revolution is that one in five Americans at
the time were enslaved African Americans, and many of them,
in this battle among whites, found opportunity for themselves to
become free. Nearly ten thousand fought on the American side,
(01:26):
and Rhode Island had a whole regiment of black soldiers
fighting for the freedom of the country, but also for
their own freedom because that was the deal. But in
the South, where ninety percent of African Americans lived, the
patriots did not offer freedom to enslave to people, so
the chance for them to get free in the soun
(01:49):
was by fighting for the British side. David George was
from Virginia, born sometime around seventeen forty two, and had
a terrible master. Ironically, the master's last name was Chapel,
as in church. But he brutally whipped not only David George,
(02:12):
but his brothers and sisters. And worst of all for
David George was watching his mother be whipped. And as
he wrote in his narrative, master's rough and cruel usage
was the reason of my running away. So he did run.
(02:39):
We don't know the exact year, but he escaped from
Virginia headed south. You know, you think of slaves escaping
following the drinking Gord, that is the North Star to
freedom up north of freedom in Canada. But for him
freedom lay to the south, and so he crossed the
ironic river into North Carolina. Spent some time working in
(03:03):
South Carolina, but then was advised by his employers to
head further south. So he crossed the Savannah River into
Georgia and spent a couple of years there. But then
he heard his owner was still coming after him.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
So this was.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Clearly relentless owner, mister Chappell, trying to track him down.
So this time David George decided the place that he
had the best chance of remaining free was in the west,
so he headed into what was then now part of
Georgia but was then Muscogee Country, or that is, the
Indians that the English called the Creeks. And they kind
(03:43):
of enslaved him too, but certainly relative to what he'd
experienced back in Virginia, they were pretty decent slave owners.
But once again, this relentless master reminds me of javert
in Les Miserabla tracked him down, he escaped, eventually persuaded
his Native American captors to sell him to a white
(04:07):
man named Goffin, who was very tight with the Native
Americans of that area because he was a deer skin trader.
He would buy thousands of deer skins from Native Americans
and in return supplied them with guns and ammunition and
alcohol and other things they needed. And as he wrote,
(04:36):
I was with him about four years. I think before
I married here, I lived a bad life and had
no serious thoughts about my soul. But after my wife
was delivered of our first child, a man of my
own color named Cyrus, who came from Charleston, South Carolina
to silver Bluff. Told me one day in the woods
(04:59):
that if I lived so, I should never see the
face of God and glory. And that apparently is what
made the difference this man Cyrus, but he says, this
was the first thing that disturbed me and gave me
much concern. I thought then that I must be saved
(05:22):
by prayer. Okay. So David George was owned by and
(05:43):
working for George Goffin, and his base was at silver
Bluff on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River, where,
having become converted to Christ himself, he helped another man
named George Lyle form a Black Baptist church at silver Bluff,
(06:03):
South Carolina, on the South Carolina bank of the Savannah River.
And that was the first Black Baptist church formed anywhere
in the world, and the Black Baptist Church is one
of the vibrant, most vibrant churches in America today. It
all began with David George and George Leal. Still both
(06:24):
of them enslaved well. In seventeen seventy eight, the British
captured Savannah, Georgia from the Patriots. Savannah was then the
(06:44):
capital of Georgia, and it looked like the British were
going to go to capture that whole area, and so
George Galfin ran away. He was a patriot, and so
he was worried that the British would imprison him, and
so he took off. And that made David George free,
bove defiling.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
And you're listening to Professor Woody Houlton of the University
of South Carolina tell one heck of a story, the
story of David George, the founder of the first Black
Baptist church in America and the world. More of David
George's story, part of America's story when our American Stories continued.
(07:29):
Leah Abib here and I'm inviting you to help our
American Stories celebrate this country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday
only a short time away. If you want to help
inspire countless others to love America like we do, and
want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories
told ear to millions for years to come, please consider
making a tax deductible donation to our American Stories. Go
(07:51):
to Alamericanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give
a little, give a lot, Any amount helps go to
Alamericanstories dot Com and give and we continue with our
American stories and with David George's story. When we last
(08:15):
left off, Professor Woody Houlton of the University of South
Carolina was telling us about how David George escaped from
bondage in Virginia, only to be enslaved again in South Carolina,
where George would have a spiritual awakening in the woods
due to the efforts of another African American. He would
go on to found the Black Baptist Church, and soon
(08:36):
the British invasion of South Carolina would create new possibilities
for enslaved people. Let's get back to the story.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
His owner had run away and so he was free.
He eventually moved into Savannah. By that time he'd gotten married.
He got by in various ways. He ran a butcher's stall,
yet another reminder of all of the things that enslaved
people did besides work out in the field. A lot
(09:10):
of them were merchants. Now he's now free, but a
lot of enslaved people worked as merchants for their owners,
you know, giving most of the profits to their owners.
And he and his family moved up to Charleston, South
Carolina and where there in seventeen eighty two when the
British agreed to evacuate Charleston at the end of the war,
(09:33):
and so his family evacuated with many other people who
had been loyal to the British Crown, both black and white,
and where they evacuated to was Halifax, Nova Scotia. So
that was a place for him and thousands of other
loyalists to the Crown, both black and white, to take
(09:55):
refuge after the war. On the one hand, we have
to praise the British for issuing what amounted to emancipation
proclamations that resulted in the freedom of thousands of African Americans.
On the other hand, we don't want to put that
(10:15):
British on a pedestal because they were not great allies. So,
for instance, at one point when David George was in Savannah, Georgia,
and he really wanted to get up to Charleston, South Carolina,
and he made the money he needed to pay for
the ship passage for his whole family to go up
(10:36):
to Charleston, but then a bunch of British cavalrymen came
and stole all his money. So we certainly don't want
to imagine that they were all great heroes who were
sympathetic to African Americans, and it's not like they're ready
for freeing their own slaves. They used tended to make
these efferts only to people like David George who were
(11:00):
owned by Patriots. And in his case, he didn't have
to escape Gaffin because Gaffin kind of ran away from him.
His owner ran away from him. But Nova Scotia remained
loyal to the crown, and so that was a place
for him and thousands of other loyalists to the Crown,
both black and white, to take refuge after the war.
And one of the sad parts of David Georgie's story
(11:22):
is that even though blacks and whites had taken refuge
there together, the whites were terrible to the blacks. You know,
they were used to a lot of them had come
from places were all thirteen of the original colonies that
rebelled had slavery, and so many of them were former
slave owners themselves that were not used to seeing blacks
(11:42):
as equals, and they refused to treat them as equals.
And David George had an additional liability, and that was
by this time, as I mentioned, he had become a
Baptist preacher, and the Baptists as evangelicals, were really on
the out with the rest of English speaking people, and
(12:04):
that his people in the British Empire, because the official
Church of England, which today in America we called the
Episcopal Church, they still call it the Anglican Church. In England,
you know, they had an official government church, as did
most of the English colonies in America. The church was
the state and the state was the church, and they
(12:24):
really oppressed evangelicals, including Baptists. And so, for instance, a
crowd of veteran retired British soldiers pulled down David George's
house to punish him for all the preaching that he did.
He once baptized a couple named William and Deborah Holmes,
(12:45):
a white couple, and another reminder that there was tremendous
cooperation between blacks and whites, and the evangelical churches were
really one of the real locations of that. That is,
people took seriously the passage in the Bible about God
in Christ there is no east nor west. That were
all won. And so there was a tremendous amount of
(13:06):
interracial cooperation. So he had this white couple that wanted
to be baptized, and they went down to the river,
and as he wrote, their relations that as their relatives
who lived in the town were very angry, they raised
a mob and endeavored to hinder them being baptized. Missus
Holmes's sister especially laid hold of her hair to keep
(13:30):
her from going down into the water to be baptized.
The persecution, as he said, only increased, and in fact,
some African Americans, I'm said to say, joined in the
persecution again because it was a religious battle rather than
an ethnic or racial battle. Because of all that persecution,
(13:53):
they really grasped an opportunity that British left them. The
British had just established a new colony on the west
coast of Africa called Sierra Leone. The capital was called Freetown,
which is a pretty good omen. And so twelve hundred
(14:17):
of these African Americans who had first taken refuge in
Nova Scotia after the war, they now were offered this
new opportunity in seventeen ninety one of becoming refugees again
and going to Sierra Leone in Africa. And David George
caught at that opportunity. The first day they landed, he preached. Obviously,
(14:47):
they had no building already, so that he preached under
a sail. Continued to until they got the church built.
But they did make a go of it in this
settlement called Sierra Leone. Their descendants are still there today.
But those first few decades were really rough. One of
the ways that the British oppressed these African columns of
(15:08):
African American colonists, I should call them. One of the
things the British did to them was levy really heavy taxes,
and some of them actually rebelled against these taxes. And
one of the leaders of that rebellion was a man
named Harry Washington. And Harry Washington years earlier, had been
owned by George Washington and had escaped from George Washington
(15:32):
and joined in the same exodus. And what did Harry
Washington do there? He did just what his owner, George
Washington had done, which was he took a lead in
a rebellion against taxation without representation. One last thing to
(15:55):
say about David George is that as a leading back
this minister, he was very interested to go meet the
Baptist in England, and they agreed to finance his trip.
And so that's why we have an account of his
amazing journey, is that while there, they asked him to
(16:16):
write up his pilgrimage as he called it, for one
of their magazines. And so we don't know much about
his life after that, but we do have this account
that he wrote up, you know. And I'll be honestly,
I'm not a super religious person myself, but I'm so
grateful for these guys' faith because and again, different faiths
have different attitudes about this, but many faiths are really
(16:39):
into having people write down their religious pilgrimage and it's
been a real boom for historians. David George was the
guy who founded the first who founded the Black church
in America, would be another.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Way of looking at it, and a terrific job on
the production and storytelling by Faith Buchanan and Montgomery, and
a special thanks to Professor Woody Polton of the University
of South Carolina. And my goodness, without God, the story
is not possible. Of course, the founder of the first
Black church in America, a man of my own Collor
(17:13):
told me, if I lived so and he was not
living well, I would never get to see the face
of God or his glory. I must be saved by prayer.
Thus started the spiritual journey of David George. And thus
started this remarkable transformation. His life's journey, his story, David
George's story, the founder of the first Black church in America.
(17:37):
Here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American People.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Up next, a story about our fight for independence, our
original sin, and a man who escaped it. His name
(00:34):
was David George and his lasting legacy can still be
found all across our country today. Here to tell his
story is Professor Woody Holton of the University of South Carolina.
Take it Away.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
One of the lesser known but more interesting facts about
the American Revolution is that one in five Americans at
the time were enslaved African Americans, and many of them,
in this battle among whites, found opportunity for themselves to
become free. Nearly ten thousand fought on the American side,
(01:26):
and Rhode Island had a whole regiment of black soldiers
fighting for the freedom of the country, but also for
their own freedom because that was the deal. But in
the South, where ninety percent of African Americans lived, the
patriots did not offer freedom to enslave to people, so
the chance for them to get free in the soun
(01:49):
was by fighting for the British side. David George was
from Virginia, born sometime around seventeen forty two, and had
a terrible master. Ironically, the master's last name was Chapel,
as in church. But he brutally whipped not only David George,
(02:12):
but his brothers and sisters. And worst of all for
David George was watching his mother be whipped. And as
he wrote in his narrative, master's rough and cruel usage
was the reason of my running away. So he did run.
(02:39):
We don't know the exact year, but he escaped from
Virginia headed south. You know, you think of slaves escaping
following the drinking Gord, that is the North Star to
freedom up north of freedom in Canada. But for him
freedom lay to the south, and so he crossed the
ironic river into North Carolina. Spent some time working in
(03:03):
South Carolina, but then was advised by his employers to
head further south. So he crossed the Savannah River into
Georgia and spent a couple of years there. But then
he heard his owner was still coming after him.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
So this was.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Clearly relentless owner, mister Chappell, trying to track him down.
So this time David George decided the place that he
had the best chance of remaining free was in the west,
so he headed into what was then now part of
Georgia but was then Muscogee Country, or that is, the
Indians that the English called the Creeks. And they kind
(03:43):
of enslaved him too, but certainly relative to what he'd
experienced back in Virginia, they were pretty decent slave owners.
But once again, this relentless master reminds me of javert
in Les Miserabla tracked him down, he escaped, eventually persuaded
his Native American captors to sell him to a white
(04:07):
man named Goffin, who was very tight with the Native
Americans of that area because he was a deer skin trader.
He would buy thousands of deer skins from Native Americans
and in return supplied them with guns and ammunition and
alcohol and other things they needed. And as he wrote,
(04:36):
I was with him about four years. I think before
I married here, I lived a bad life and had
no serious thoughts about my soul. But after my wife
was delivered of our first child, a man of my
own color named Cyrus, who came from Charleston, South Carolina
to silver Bluff. Told me one day in the woods
(04:59):
that if I lived so, I should never see the
face of God and glory. And that apparently is what
made the difference this man Cyrus, but he says, this
was the first thing that disturbed me and gave me
much concern. I thought then that I must be saved
(05:22):
by prayer. Okay. So David George was owned by and
(05:43):
working for George Goffin, and his base was at silver
Bluff on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River, where,
having become converted to Christ himself, he helped another man
named George Lyle form a Black Baptist church at silver Bluff,
(06:03):
South Carolina, on the South Carolina bank of the Savannah River.
And that was the first Black Baptist church formed anywhere
in the world, and the Black Baptist Church is one
of the vibrant, most vibrant churches in America today. It
all began with David George and George Leal. Still both
(06:24):
of them enslaved well. In seventeen seventy eight, the British
captured Savannah, Georgia from the Patriots. Savannah was then the
(06:44):
capital of Georgia, and it looked like the British were
going to go to capture that whole area, and so
George Galfin ran away. He was a patriot, and so
he was worried that the British would imprison him, and
so he took off. And that made David George free,
bove defiling.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
And you're listening to Professor Woody Houlton of the University
of South Carolina tell one heck of a story, the
story of David George, the founder of the first Black
Baptist church in America and the world. More of David
George's story, part of America's story when our American Stories continued.
(07:29):
Leah Abib here and I'm inviting you to help our
American Stories celebrate this country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday
only a short time away. If you want to help
inspire countless others to love America like we do, and
want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories
told ear to millions for years to come, please consider
making a tax deductible donation to our American Stories. Go
(07:51):
to Alamericanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give
a little, give a lot, Any amount helps go to
Alamericanstories dot Com and give and we continue with our
American stories and with David George's story. When we last
(08:15):
left off, Professor Woody Houlton of the University of South
Carolina was telling us about how David George escaped from
bondage in Virginia, only to be enslaved again in South Carolina,
where George would have a spiritual awakening in the woods
due to the efforts of another African American. He would
go on to found the Black Baptist Church, and soon
(08:36):
the British invasion of South Carolina would create new possibilities
for enslaved people. Let's get back to the story.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
His owner had run away and so he was free.
He eventually moved into Savannah. By that time he'd gotten married.
He got by in various ways. He ran a butcher's stall,
yet another reminder of all of the things that enslaved
people did besides work out in the field. A lot
(09:10):
of them were merchants. Now he's now free, but a
lot of enslaved people worked as merchants for their owners,
you know, giving most of the profits to their owners.
And he and his family moved up to Charleston, South
Carolina and where there in seventeen eighty two when the
British agreed to evacuate Charleston at the end of the war,
(09:33):
and so his family evacuated with many other people who
had been loyal to the British Crown, both black and white,
and where they evacuated to was Halifax, Nova Scotia. So
that was a place for him and thousands of other
loyalists to the Crown, both black and white, to take
(09:55):
refuge after the war. On the one hand, we have
to praise the British for issuing what amounted to emancipation
proclamations that resulted in the freedom of thousands of African Americans.
On the other hand, we don't want to put that
(10:15):
British on a pedestal because they were not great allies. So,
for instance, at one point when David George was in Savannah, Georgia,
and he really wanted to get up to Charleston, South Carolina,
and he made the money he needed to pay for
the ship passage for his whole family to go up
(10:36):
to Charleston, but then a bunch of British cavalrymen came
and stole all his money. So we certainly don't want
to imagine that they were all great heroes who were
sympathetic to African Americans, and it's not like they're ready
for freeing their own slaves. They used tended to make
these efferts only to people like David George who were
(11:00):
owned by Patriots. And in his case, he didn't have
to escape Gaffin because Gaffin kind of ran away from him.
His owner ran away from him. But Nova Scotia remained
loyal to the crown, and so that was a place
for him and thousands of other loyalists to the Crown,
both black and white, to take refuge after the war.
And one of the sad parts of David Georgie's story
(11:22):
is that even though blacks and whites had taken refuge
there together, the whites were terrible to the blacks. You know,
they were used to a lot of them had come
from places were all thirteen of the original colonies that
rebelled had slavery, and so many of them were former
slave owners themselves that were not used to seeing blacks
(11:42):
as equals, and they refused to treat them as equals.
And David George had an additional liability, and that was
by this time, as I mentioned, he had become a
Baptist preacher, and the Baptists as evangelicals, were really on
the out with the rest of English speaking people, and
(12:04):
that his people in the British Empire, because the official
Church of England, which today in America we called the
Episcopal Church, they still call it the Anglican Church. In England,
you know, they had an official government church, as did
most of the English colonies in America. The church was
the state and the state was the church, and they
(12:24):
really oppressed evangelicals, including Baptists. And so, for instance, a
crowd of veteran retired British soldiers pulled down David George's
house to punish him for all the preaching that he did.
He once baptized a couple named William and Deborah Holmes,
(12:45):
a white couple, and another reminder that there was tremendous
cooperation between blacks and whites, and the evangelical churches were
really one of the real locations of that. That is,
people took seriously the passage in the Bible about God
in Christ there is no east nor west. That were
all won. And so there was a tremendous amount of
(13:06):
interracial cooperation. So he had this white couple that wanted
to be baptized, and they went down to the river,
and as he wrote, their relations that as their relatives
who lived in the town were very angry, they raised
a mob and endeavored to hinder them being baptized. Missus
Holmes's sister especially laid hold of her hair to keep
(13:30):
her from going down into the water to be baptized.
The persecution, as he said, only increased, and in fact,
some African Americans, I'm said to say, joined in the
persecution again because it was a religious battle rather than
an ethnic or racial battle. Because of all that persecution,
(13:53):
they really grasped an opportunity that British left them. The
British had just established a new colony on the west
coast of Africa called Sierra Leone. The capital was called Freetown,
which is a pretty good omen. And so twelve hundred
(14:17):
of these African Americans who had first taken refuge in
Nova Scotia after the war, they now were offered this
new opportunity in seventeen ninety one of becoming refugees again
and going to Sierra Leone in Africa. And David George
caught at that opportunity. The first day they landed, he preached. Obviously,
(14:47):
they had no building already, so that he preached under
a sail. Continued to until they got the church built.
But they did make a go of it in this
settlement called Sierra Leone. Their descendants are still there today.
But those first few decades were really rough. One of
the ways that the British oppressed these African columns of
(15:08):
African American colonists, I should call them. One of the
things the British did to them was levy really heavy taxes,
and some of them actually rebelled against these taxes. And
one of the leaders of that rebellion was a man
named Harry Washington. And Harry Washington years earlier, had been
owned by George Washington and had escaped from George Washington
(15:32):
and joined in the same exodus. And what did Harry
Washington do there? He did just what his owner, George
Washington had done, which was he took a lead in
a rebellion against taxation without representation. One last thing to
(15:55):
say about David George is that as a leading back
this minister, he was very interested to go meet the
Baptist in England, and they agreed to finance his trip.
And so that's why we have an account of his
amazing journey, is that while there, they asked him to
(16:16):
write up his pilgrimage as he called it, for one
of their magazines. And so we don't know much about
his life after that, but we do have this account
that he wrote up, you know. And I'll be honestly,
I'm not a super religious person myself, but I'm so
grateful for these guys' faith because and again, different faiths
have different attitudes about this, but many faiths are really
(16:39):
into having people write down their religious pilgrimage and it's
been a real boom for historians. David George was the
guy who founded the first who founded the Black church
in America, would be another.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Way of looking at it, and a terrific job on
the production and storytelling by Faith Buchanan and Montgomery, and
a special thanks to Professor Woody Polton of the University
of South Carolina. And my goodness, without God, the story
is not possible. Of course, the founder of the first
Black church in America, a man of my own Collor
(17:13):
told me, if I lived so and he was not
living well, I would never get to see the face
of God or his glory. I must be saved by prayer.
Thus started the spiritual journey of David George. And thus
started this remarkable transformation. His life's journey, his story, David
George's story, the founder of the first Black church in America.
(17:37):
Here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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