About this time, Williamsburg and Augusta had one each, and Savannah three colored Baptist churches.
By 1822 the Negroes of Petersburg had in addition to two churches of this denomination, a flourishing African Missionary Society.[1] In Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston the free blacks had experienced such a rapid religious development that colored churches in these cities were no longer considered unusual.
[Footnote 1: Adams, _Anti-slavery_, etc., pp.

73 and 74.] The increase in the population of cities brought a larger number of these unfortunates into helpful contact with the urban element of white people who, having few Negroes, often opposed the institution of slavery.

But thrown among colored people brought in their crude state into sections of culture, the antislavery men of towns and cities developed from theorists, discussing a problem of concern to persons far away, into actual workers striving by means of education to pave the way for universal freedom.[1] Large as the number of abolitionists became and bright as the future of their cause seemed, the more the antislavery men saw of the freedmen in congested districts, the more inclined the reformers were to think that instant abolition was an event which they "could not reasonably expect, and perhaps could not desire." Being in a state of deplorable ignorance, the slaves did not possess sufficient information "to render their immediate emancipation a blessing either to themselves or to society."[2] [Footnote 1: As some masters regarded the ignorance of the slaves as an argument against their emancipation, the antislavery men's problem became the education of the master as well as that of the slave.
Believing that intellectual and moral improvement is a "safe and permanent basis on which the arch of freedom could be erected," Jesse Torrey, harking back to Jefferson's proposition, recommended that it begin by instructing the slaveholders, overseers, their sons and daughters, hitherto deprived of the blessing of education.

Then he thought that such enlightened masters should see to it that every slave less than thirty years of age should be taught the art of reading sufficiently for receiving moral and religious instruction from books in the English language.

In presenting this scheme Torrey had the idea of most of the antislavery men of that day, who advocated the education of slaves because they believed that, whenever the slaves should become qualified by intelligence and moral cultivation for the rational enjoyment of liberty and the performance of the various social duties, enlightened legislators would listen to the voice of reason and justice and the spirit of the social organization, and permit the release of the slave without banishing him as a traitor from his native land.