scopal Zion Church
was formally organized. To the first conference came 19 preachers
representing 6 churches and 1,426 members. Varick was elected district
chairman, but soon afterwards was made bishop. The polity of this church
from the first differed somewhat from that of the A.M.E. denomination in
that representation of the laity was a prominent feature and there was
no bar to the ordination of women.

Of denominations other than the Baptist and the Methodist, the most
prominent in the earlier years was the Presbyterian, whose first Negro
ministers were John Gloucester and John Chavis. Gloucester owed his
training to the liberal tendencies that about 1800 were still strong in
eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, and in 1810 took charge of the African
Presbyterian Church which in 1807 had been established in Philadelphia.
He was distinguished by a rich musical voice and the general dignity
of his life, and he himself became the father of four Presbyterian
ministers. Chavis had a very unusual career. After passing "through
a regular course of academic studies" at Washington Academy, now
Washington and Lee University, in 1801 he was commissioned by the
General Assembly of the Presbyterians as a missionary to the Negroes. He
worked with increasing reputation until Nat Turner's insurrection caused
the North Carolina legislature in 1832 to pass an act silencing all
Negro preachers. Then in Wake County and elsewhere he conducted schools
for white boys until his death in 1838. In these early years distinction
also attaches to Lemuel Haynes, a Revolutionary patriot and the first
Negro preacher of the Congregational denomination. In 1785 he became the
pastor of a white congregation in Torrington, Conn., and in 1818 began
to serve another in Manchester, N.H.

After the church the strongest organization among Negroes has
undoubtedly been that of secret societies commonly known as "lodges."
The benefit societies were not necessarily secret and call for separate
consideration. On March 6, 1775, an army lodge attached to one of the
regiments stationed under General Gage in or near Boston initiated
Prince Hall and fourteen other colored men into the mysteries of
Freemasonry.[1] These fifteen men on March 2, 1784, applied to the Grand
Lodge of England for a warrant. This was issued to "African Lodge, No.
459," with Prince Hall as master, September 29, 1784. Various delays and
misadventures befell the warrant, however, so that it was not