rch, white and black, in Fayetteville, and the best
preacher of his time in that quarter." Evans, a free-born full-blooded
black, as Capers went on to relate, had been a shoemaker and licensed
preacher in Virginia, but while journeying toward Charleston in search
of better employment he had been so struck by the lack of religion and
morality among the negroes in Fayetteville that he determined upon their
conversion as his true mission in life. When the town authorities dispersed
his meetings he shifted his rude pulpit into the woods outside their
jurisdiction and invited surveillance by the whites to prove his lack
of offence. The palpable improvement in the morals of his followers led
erelong to his being invited to preach within the town again, where the
white people began to be numerous among his hearers. A regular congregation
comprising members of both races was organized and a church building
erected. But the white attendance grew so large as to threaten the crowding
out of the blacks. To provide room for these the side walls of the
church were torn off and sheds built on either flank; and these were the
conditions when Capers himself succeeded the aged negro in its pulpit in
1810 and found him on his own score an inspiration. Toward the ruling race,
Capers records, Evans was unfailingly deferential, "never speaking to a
white but with his hat under his arm; never allowing himself to be seated
in their houses.... 'The whites are kind to me and come to hear me preach,'
he would say, 'but I belong to my own sort and must not spoil them.' And
yet Henry Evans was a Boanerges; and in his duty feared not the face of
man." [23]

[Footnote 23: W.W. Wightman, _Life of William Capers_ (Nashville, 1858),
pp. 124-129.]

In the line of intellectual attainment and the like the principal
figures lived in the eighteenth century. One of them was described in a
contemporary news item which suggests that some journalists then were akin
to their successors of more modern times. "There is a Mr. St. George,
a Creole, son to the French governor of St. Domingo, now at Paris, who
realizes all the accomplishments attributed by Boyle and others to the
Admirable Creighton of the Scotch. He is so superior at the sword that
there is an edict of the Parliament of Paris to make his engagement in any
duel actual death. He is the first dancer (even before the Irish Singsby)
in the world. He plays upon seven instruments of music, beyond any other