On this episode of Our American Stories, Woody Holton of the University of South Carolina tells the story about David George, a man who would escape his bondage only to find himself with new captors, a newfound faith, and eventually... a new freedom in Canada.
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Episode Transcript
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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.
(01:27):
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 people, so the chance for
(01:47):
them to get free in the Sound 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
(02:10):
he brutally whipped not only David George, 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. We don't
(02:40):
know the exact year, but he escaped from Virginia headed south.
You know, you think of slaves escaping following the drinking
gored 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 South Carolina, but
(03:05):
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. So this was 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,
(03:28):
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
of enslaved him too, but certainly relative to what he'd
experienced back in Virginia, they were pretty decent slave owners.
(03:51):
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
man named Golfin, who was very tight with the Native
(04:12):
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 be able 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.
By defining.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
And you're listening to Professor Woody Hulton 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 continues. Folks,
(07:31):
if you love the stories we tell about this great country,
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith, are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their
(07:53):
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to learn more. And we continue with our American stories
and with David George's story. When we last left off,
(08:15):
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 the British
(08:37):
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 they are 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 to Charleston, but then a bunch
(10:39):
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 owned by Patriots. And in his case,
(11:03):
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 George's story is that even though blacks and
(11:24):
whites had taken refuge there together, the whites were terrible
to the blacks. You know, they were used to A
lot of them would 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 as equals, and they refused
to treat them as equals. And David George had an
(11:47):
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 that his people in the British Empire,
because the official Church of England, which today in America
(12:10):
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 really oppressed evangelicals, including Baptists. And so, for instance,
a crowd of veteran retired British soldiers pulled down David
(12:35):
George's house to punish him for all the preaching that
he did. He once baptized a couple named William and
Deborah Holmes, 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.
(12:56):
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 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
(13:16):
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 her from going down into the water to be baptized.
(13:37):
The persecution, as he said, only increased, and in fact,
some African Americans, I'm sad 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,
they really grasped an opportunity that British left them. The
(14:02):
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
of these African Americans who had first taken refuge in
Nova Scotia after the war, they now were offered this
(14:25):
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 sale 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, African
(15:09):
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
Baptist 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 in 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
(17:13):
caller 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
(17:36):
in America. 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.
(01:27):
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 people, so the chance for
(01:47):
them to get free in the Sound 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
(02:10):
he brutally whipped not only David George, 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. We don't
(02:40):
know the exact year, but he escaped from Virginia headed south.
You know, you think of slaves escaping following the drinking
gored 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 South Carolina, but
(03:05):
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. So this was 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,
(03:28):
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
of enslaved him too, but certainly relative to what he'd
experienced back in Virginia, they were pretty decent slave owners.
(03:51):
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
man named Golfin, who was very tight with the Native
(04:12):
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 be able 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.
By defining.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
And you're listening to Professor Woody Hulton 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 continues. Folks,
(07:31):
if you love the stories we tell about this great country,
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith, are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their
(07:53):
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to learn more. And we continue with our American stories
and with David George's story. When we last left off,
(08:15):
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 the British
(08:37):
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 they are 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 to Charleston, but then a bunch
(10:39):
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 owned by Patriots. And in his case,
(11:03):
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 George's story is that even though blacks and
(11:24):
whites had taken refuge there together, the whites were terrible
to the blacks. You know, they were used to A
lot of them would 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 as equals, and they refused
to treat them as equals. And David George had an
(11:47):
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 that his people in the British Empire,
because the official Church of England, which today in America
(12:10):
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 really oppressed evangelicals, including Baptists. And so, for instance,
a crowd of veteran retired British soldiers pulled down David
(12:35):
George's house to punish him for all the preaching that
he did. He once baptized a couple named William and
Deborah Holmes, 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.
(12:56):
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 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
(13:16):
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 her from going down into the water to be baptized.
(13:37):
The persecution, as he said, only increased, and in fact,
some African Americans, I'm sad 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,
they really grasped an opportunity that British left them. The
(14:02):
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
of these African Americans who had first taken refuge in
Nova Scotia after the war, they now were offered this
(14:25):
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 sale 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, African
(15:09):
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
Baptist 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 in 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
(17:13):
caller 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
(17:36):
in America. Here on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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