Excerpt from An Annual Publication of Historical Papers A leading Baptist minister, now quite old, said to me recently: About all the religion the negroes as a class got befare the war, they got from the Methodist and Bap tist churches. This remark, so far as it applies to the number who joined these churches, is entirely true. These two churches have been the churches for the people in North Carolina. In their doctrines and their methods they appealed to the popular mind. They have preached to the heart. They early appealed to the enslaved people around them. Other churches, undoubtedly, had negro members. All of them had a few; but no other churches had them in large numbers. In the other churches, as the Presbyterian and the Episcopal, the negroes in the church were mostly slaves or followers of families who had their membership there. In all denominations the negroes had equal rights so far as Instruction and communion went; but not equal privileges in the government. They were cared for faith fully by the whites and through patient teaching, many of them came to understand and to practice the fundamental principles of Christian living - a process which undoubt edly helped the slave to bear his servitude and operated to render slavery as a state perpetual. When there were only a few negro members they attended services with the whites, and a certain portion of the church was assigned to them. Where there was a large congregation of negroes2 N obth carolina methodism and slavery. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.