ate neighborhood of Silver Bluff. William Tennett informs us
that the Hammond place was in South Carolina, four miles from Augusta,
Georgia and Lossing, Abraham Marshall, and others, that Silver Bluff
was also in South Carolina, twelve miles from Augusta. It was easy,
therefore, for Henry Francis to attend divine service at the Silver
Bluff Church. In the second place, it was the custom of the slaves on
the neighboring plantations to attend preaching at Silver Bluff during
the pastorate of David George,[36] and the custom doubtless prevailed
during Jesse Peter's pastorate. If Henry Francis attended church at
Silver Bluff, he did only what other slaves of the neighborhood did.
Furthermore, there was no other Baptist church, white or colored, in
the neighborhood, for Francis to join. Marshall's church at Kiokee,
Georgia, was twenty miles above Augusta, while Botsford's Meeting
House, in the opposite direction, was "25 or 30 miles below
Augusta."[37] In Augusta itself, there was no Negro Baptist church
until 1793,[38] and no white Baptist church until 1817.[39] To our
mind the conclusion is inevitable that Henry Francis, in 1785, was a
member of the Negro Baptist church, at Silver Bluff, South Carolina.

In reaching this conclusion, moreover, we have been not a little
influenced by the fact that when Henry Francis was formerly ordained
to the ministry at Savannah, Georgia, seventeen years after he had
commenced to preach, and when he was an officer in the Negro church at
Savannah, the ordination sermon was not preached by Dr. Henry
Holcombe, of the white church of that city, nor by Andrew Bryan of the
First African, but by Jesse Peter,[40] pastor of the Silver Bluff
Church. We can account for the deference shown Jesse Peter, on this
occasion, only on the presumption that Henry Francis was converted,
baptized, and licensed to preach at Silver Bluff, and that Jesse Peter
was the instrument used in bringing these results to pass. It is
evident, then, that the Ogeeche African Baptist Church,[41] on the
Ogeeche River, fourteen miles south of Savannah, organized in the year
1803, is more indebted to the Silver Bluff Church for her first
preacher and instructor of youth than to any other church.

Of Jesse Peter's ministry at Silver Bluff, as a resident pastor, we
are not well informed. In a letter written from Kiokee, Georgia, May
1, 1793, Abraham Marshall speaks of him as follows: "I am intimately
acquainted with Jesse Golfin;