f their meetings and the sentencing of the bishop and a dozen
exhorters, some to a month's imprisonment or departure from the state,
others to ten lashes or ten dollars' fine. The church nevertheless
continued in existence until 1822 when in consequence of the discovery of a
plot for insurrection among the Charleston negroes the city government had
the church building demolished. Morris Brown moved to Philadelphia, where
he afterward became bishop of the African Church, and the whole Charleston
project was ended.[56] The bulk of the blacks returned to the white
congregations, where they soon overflowed the galleries and even the
"boxes" which were assigned them at the rear on the main floors. Some of
the older negroes by special privilege then took seats forward in the main
body of the churches, and others not so esteemed followed their example in
such numbers that the whites were cramped for room. After complaints on
this score had failed for several years to bring remedy, a crisis came
in Bethel Church on a Sunday in 1833 when Dr. Capers was to preach. More
whites came than could be seated the forward-sitting negroes refused
to vacate their seats for them; and a committee of young white members
forcibly ejected these blacks At a "love-feast" shortly afterward one of
the preachers criticized the action of the committee thereby giving the
younger element of the whites great umbrage. Efforts at reconciliation
failing, nine of the young men were expelled from membership, whereupon
a hundred and fifty others followed them into a new organization which
entered affiliation with the schismatic Methodist Protestant Church.[57]
Race relations in the orthodox congregations were doubtless thereafter more
placid.

[Footnote 55: E.R. Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_ (Washington, 1911),
pp. 134-136.]

[Footnote 56: Charleston _Courier_, June 9, 1818; Charleston _City
Gazette_, quoted in the _Louisiana Gazette_ (New Orleans), July 10, 1818;
J.L.E.W. Shecut, _Medical and Philosophical Essays_ (Charleston, 1819),
p. 34; C.F. Deems ed., _Annals of Southern Methodism for 1856_ (Nashville
[1857]), pp. 212-214, 232; H.M. Henry, _Police Control of the Slave in
South Carolina_, p. 142.]

[Footnote 57: C.F. Deems ed., _Annals of Southern Methodism for 1856_, pp.
215-217.]

In most of the permanent segregations the colored preachers were ordained
and their congregations instituted under the patronage of the whites.
At Savannah as early