The earliest churches in the Southevolved from plantation congregations. The first African Baptist Congregationhad its origins at the Brampton Plantation near Savannah. When the AmericanRevolution disrupted life in South Carolina, George Lisle, Davied George,Jesse Peters and others from Silver Bluff fled to Savannah wehre they tookrefuge behind British lines. After the patriot forces recaptured Savannahin 1782, George Leile, a slave preacher from Silver Bluff sailed with theBritish to Jamaica, where he established the First Baptist Church in Kingstonin 1784. David George, also a slave preacher from Silver Bluff sailed withthe British to Nova Scotia. Ten years later, he migrated to sierra Leone,where he again established a Baptist Church.

George Leile (Lisle), a black preacherborn a slave in Silver Bluff, South Carolina, often visited Savannah. Whenthe British occupied Savannah in late 1778, Leile, fellow preachers DavidGeorge and Jesse Peters, and some 50 enslaved parishioners fled SilverBluff and came to Savannah to be under British protection. Leile spentthe next four years preaching and baptizing at Yamacraw and at BramptonPlantation, a few miles west of the city.

Leile obviously had more faith inthe British than in the Americans and when the British evacuated the cityin 1782, he left with the British troops en route to Jamaica. David Georgehad already left, going first to Charleston, then to Nova Scotia, and finallyin 1792 to Sierra Leone. The third minister, Jesse Peters, returned toSilver Bluff. Shortly before Leile departed, he baptized his last groupof slave converts, among them Andrew Bryan, a slave of Jonathan Bryan,proprietor of Brampton Plantation.

The use of “African” in the titleof the local Baptist churches is attributed to the Rev. Henry Cunningham,longtime pastor of the Second African Baptist Church. The original namewas the Second Colored Baptist Church and apparently with Cunningham’sadvocacy “African” was substituted for “Colored.”

 This idea may have been newto Georgia but it had its northern precedents with the formal organizingof the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 in Philadelphia and theAfricanMethodist Episcopal Zion Church in New York. The term “African”had subtly indicated an autonomous church not as one of its apologistsindicated to exclude people of other ethnic backgrounds but to show thatin these churches people of African heritage were respected and given theirdignity. Cunningham is known to have had close connections in Philadelphiaand later to have lived there.

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