Introduction

David George was introduced to Christianity by another slave became a Baptist minister. When the British invaded Georgia during the American Revolution, George again sought his freedom. George survived the siege of Savannah and a case of smallpox he accepted a British offer for free passage to Nova Scotia, along with other white and black loyalist refugees. George continued to work as a minister in Sierra Leone, often mediating when resentments flared between his fellow settlers and British agents. In a brief auto-biographical narrative he composed in the 1790s, George expressed consciousness of his race, noting his parents’ African origins and his introduction to Christianity by a “man of my own color,” but his most insistent self-identification was as a Christian. The history of the Atlantic World is the story of David George writ large, of intercontinental exchanges and conflicts between human societies set in motion by the collision of Europe, Africa, and the Americas.