Black people in the North were much more likely to attend church services. In 1794 Richard Allen founded the first church for black people in Philadelphia. Two years later Peter Williams , a wealthy tobacco merchant who felt unwelcome in the local Methodist Church , established a similar church in New York . In 1816 a group of churchmen led by Richard Allen formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church . Allen became the church's first bishop.
Slaveholders hide themselves behind the church.
A more praying, preaching, psalm-singing people cannot be found than the slaveholders at the south. The religion of the south is referred to every day, to prove that slaveholders are good, pious men. But with all their pretensions, and all the aid which they get from the northern church, they cannot succeed in deceiving the Christian portion of the world. The American slave-trader, with the constitution in his hat and his license in his pocket, marches his gang of chained men and women under the very eaves of the nation's capitol. And this, too, in a country professing to be the freest nation in the world.