ABSTRACT
Part of the freedom of free Blacks in the North in the early nineteenth century was to conduct their own worship under no obvious control by whites, whether as congregations in black denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church (founded 1816) and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion (founded 1821) or as independent groups. In the absence of educated ministers, free African-American preachers shared a folk idiom with their hearers although, the sermon below suggests, the content was drawn from mainstream Christianity.
