formed a church. At first he was subjected to persecution; nevertheless
by 1791 he had baptized over four hundred persons. Eight or nine months
after he left for Jamaica, Andrew Bryan began to preach, and at first he
was permitted to use a building at Yamacraw, in the suburbs of Savannah.
Of this, however, he was in course of time dispossessed, the place being
a rendezvous for those Negroes who had been taken away from their homes
by the British. Many of these men were taken before the magistrates
from time to time, and some were whipped and others imprisoned.
Bryan himself, having incurred the ire of the authorities, was twice
imprisoned and once publicly whipped, being so cut that he "bled
abundantly"; but he told his persecutors that he "would freely suffer
death for the cause of Jesus Christ," and after a while he was permitted
to go on with his work. For some time he used a barn, being assisted
by his brother Sampson; then for £50 he purchased his freedom, and
afterwards he began to use for worship a house that Sampson had been
permitted to erect. By 1791 his church had two hundred members, but over
a hundred more had been received as converted members though they
had not won their masters' permission to be baptized. An interesting
sidelight on these people is furnished by the statement that probably
fifty of them could read though only three could write. Years
afterwards, in 1832, when the church had grown to great numbers, a large
part of the congregation left the Bryan Church and formed what is now
the First African Baptist Church of Savannah. Both congregations,
however, remembered their early leader as one "clear in the grand
doctrines of the Gospel, truly pious, and the instrument of doing more
good among the poor slaves than all the learned doctors in America."

[Footnote 1: Walter H. Brooks: _The Silver Bluff Church_.]

[Footnote 2: See letters in Journal of Negro History, January, 1916,