Richard Allen, Jarena Lee, and the Second Great Awakening

“And it shall come to pass . . . that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”

Joel 2:28
Acts 2:17

In 1784, formerly enslaved Richard Allen of Delaware was one of two Black preachers witnessing the creation of the Methodist Episcopal Church of America. British Methodist founder John Wesley sent his ablest disciples, Francis Asbury, Thomas Coke, and William Whatcoat, to capitalize on a spiritual movement known as the Second Awakening, which was spreading throughout the new nation. Wesley instructed that the new Church be anti-slavery. However, American Methodists equivocated, arguing that slaveholding was contrary to the Law of God, not of man. Hence, stalwart church members held slaves.

In 1786 Allen rejected Bishop Asbury’s offer to travel with him and instead settled in Philadelphia. Slavery was still practiced in the North, but Pennsylvania had passed a gradual abolition law, thereby creating a large, freed class and escape route for the enslaved. Allen met fellow Methodist Absalom Jones and they established the Free African Society. Its mission was bilateral: to offer spiritual comfort “without regard to religious tenets” and to promote community solidarity through benevolence for “widows and fatherless children,” monitor moral behavior including family life, and support underground antislavery.[1] The wisdom in promoting self-determination through sacred–secular consciousness was soon evident.

In 1787, Whites at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church physically ejected Allen, Jones, and others from service while they knelt in prayer. They withdrew and began raising funds for an independent congregation, using the Society as their “African Church.” But dissention arose over the Society’s continued anger with White Methodists and Allen’s commitment to the denomination.

In 1793, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, implored Allen and Jones to encourage Blacks to aid Whites stricken with yellow fever. Dr. Rush claimed that Blacks were immune to the disease. Blacks cleaned White homes, cooked, nursed them, carried out their dead, and dug their graves. After the danger passed, Philadelphia Whites vilified Blacks as money-grubbing opportunists and thieves. Outraged, Allen and Jones wrote a narrative recounting their people’s charitable spirit, empathy, self-sacrifice, and Christian courage. They critiqued mean-spirited White ingratitude and denied Dr. Rush’s false claim of Black immunity.

When the church was completed in 1794, White Methodists had no intention of sanctioning a separate congregation. The Episcopalians agreed to embrace the Black church, while Richard Allen insisted that no denomination “would suit the capacity of the colored people as well as the Methodists.”[2] Hence, St. Thomas African Episcopal Church was founded under Absalom Jones, who was ordained a preacher and eventually became America’s first Black Episcopal priest. Twelve days after St. Thomas was dedicated dedication, Bishop Asbury consecrated an old blacksmith shop that Allen had purchased as “Bethel Church.” Asbury also ordained Allen the first Black deacon.

Bethel Church attracted many people, including Whites, but was especially a working-class church with an underground component. Unpaid by Bethel, and providing for a growing family eventually numbering six children, Allen undertook secular work that made him known in the community. His organizational skills, magnetic preaching, and warm personality contributed to Bethel’s increase “by thousands.”[3] In 1807, reportedly 700 Blacks identified as Methodists out of a citywide total of 1800. Allen sent exhorters out to establish African societies and spread Methodism. A young free-born woman from New Jersey named Jarena sought transformation. Born in 1783, she moved to Philadelphia in 1805, was converted by Allen, and six years later confessed a calling to preach. Allen insisted that “our Discipline . . . did not call for women preachers.”[4] Yet he knew that unlicensed White women combed the countryside. Moreover, in 1803, Allen and the trustees had denied the request of Dorothy Ripley, a British woman, to preach. Bethel was also still under White Methodist control. Jarena eventually married and left Philadelphia.

Allen was an activist pastor. Just as he challenged city fathers during the yellow fever epidemic, in 1813 he protested Pennsylvania’s proposed law against Black immigration and for taxing all free Black residents. Allen joined other Black leaders in “a remonstrance from sundry free people of color . . . against . . . a law for the regulation of the people of color.”[5] The legislation was probably rejected because of America’s current war with England. In 1814, at the behest of Whites fearing a British invasion, Allen led in mobilizing Black volunteers as a “Committee of Defense” to protect the city.

In 1816, Richard Allen’s long struggle for his people’s right to religious self- determination ended when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court forever removed White control. Dissatisfied Black churches elsewhere immediately joined Bethel in creating “one body.” The African Methodist Episcopal Conference was a momentous founding, comprising five churches in four states, soon including South Carolina. Although Philadelphia’s Bethel was the most influential and the largest congregation, Allen was only elected bishop after Baltimore’s Daniel Coker declined. Coker soon went to Africa through the American Colonization Society (ACS).

Southern Presbyterian slaveholders and northerners established the ACS in 1816 intending to send free Blacks to Africa either by persuasion or coercion, supposedly as missionaries and to prosper free from racism. But Blacks were not fooled. They considered the ACS a nefarious, frightening scheme to eventually remove all free Blacks via political mandate rather than choice. In January 1817, two weeks after the founding of the ACS, Allen hosted a three-thousand-person mass protest at Bethel. Backed by Absalom Jones, Black Presbyterian cleric John Gloucester, and wealthy businessman James Forten, this first national action of freedmen spread to other cities. But colonization also spread among Whites and some Blacks. The anti-colonization struggle eventually led to the first Colored Convention in 1830.

Richard Allen believed that Bethel and Philadelphia represented the best progress and hope for Blacks. That imperious perspective cost his denomination a unification opportunity with New York City Black Methodists, who instead formed the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Allen shrewdly engineered Philadelphia as the site for the first Colored Convention. The elderly Bishop’s final achievement was presiding over the Convention.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church benefited greatly from Richard Allen being ahead of his time on gender equality. In 1818, Jarena, now Mrs. Lee, a widow and mother, returned to Philadelphia and to Bethel. At one service interrupting a guest minister who had “lost the spirit,” Jarena delivered a spontaneous self-reflective exhortation that exposed Allen’s denial of her profession. She feared that “indecorum” would lead to expulsion. Instead, Bishop Allen rose, corroborated her story, admitted his error, and declared Jarena Lee as called “as any of the preachers present.”[6]

Thus, the first licensed African Methodist woman’s ministry began during the Great Awakening and continued throughout its 1840s ebb. Jarena preached during a moment of intense spiritual fervor when faith linked with natural rights philosophy, morality, and social justice, and addressed the deep inequalities in American life. Methodists and Presbyterians were the most devoted sects. Jarena preached to all races and all sects in the North, Upper South, and Canada. Her earliest congregations also included the enslaved.

Jarena traveled thousands of miles annually, mostly on foot, sometimes preaching three times daily. She spoke in churches, backwoods, and forests, and at revivals, funerals, camp meetings, conventions, in schoolrooms, in homes, and on vessels. “I met with many troubles” because of racism, she related, and “prejudices against women.” Sometimes, she said, “I was tempted to withdraw from the Methodist Church.” Some objected because in her early ministry, “I was not licensed.”[7]

Allen protected Jarena and also showcased her. “The Bishop gave me an invitation to speak in Bethel Church; but here my heart fluttered with fear,” she wrote in 1822. Jarena accompanied Allen, his new bishop, Morris Brown of Charleston, and the elders to national Conferences; she sat with the bishops and preached. She often spoke in churches on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, in Delaware, in New Jersey, and in Brooklyn. After four years, she wrote of traveling “sixteen hundred miles . . . walked two hundred and eleven miles and preached the kingdom of God.”[8]

Although Allen did license Jarena, it is unclear when. She was licensed before traveling to New York’s “Burnt District” in 1827–1828, where she participated in revivals headlining the fiery Presbyterian Charles Finney. She went on two extended tours among her “scattered nation” in Canada. Jarena was licensed by 1829–1830 when she planted African Methodism in Ohio. In Ohio, she spoke to large Black and White Methodist and Presbyterian congregations, including to the Methodist governor. She was often challenged even after showing her credentials. “I wrote a letter to bishop Allen . . . of my grievances . . . and I wanted it settled at Conference.”[9] At Conference it was settled, but not for the public.

Richard Allen’s spiritual mission fit the Second Great Awakening’s liberal philosophy that merged religion with social reform. By the time of Allen’s death, African Methodism claimed over 10,000 American members, and had spread to Santo Domingo, Haiti. Thanks largely to Jarena Lee, it spread to Canada and the Allegheny West. Her journal ends in 1842, after “having been two years . . . almost incessantly traveling.” Jarena suggests that the bishops who succeeded Allen treated her with respect. “I have been instrumental in the hands of God” she wrote, raising money and “raising societies” that became “large churches.”[10] This unsung Second Awakening figure was also a women’s rights advocate. In 1840, she sat with Zion’s Hester Lane at the factional American Anti-Slavery Society Meeting in New York. They watched as many men walked out when the first women were elected to the Executive Committee. In 1853 Jarena shared the platform with Sojourner Truth at the American Society’s twentieth anniversary in Philadelphia. Both women preachers spoke against colonization. Jarena Lee died in Philadelphia in 1864 at age 81. Although not mentioned in AME Church history, she was ordained posthumously in 2016.

Margaret Washington is the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of American History at Cornell University. Her publications include Sojourner Truth’s America (2009), “Meaning of Scripture in Gullah Religion” in African Americans and the Bible, ed. Vincent Wimbush (2000), and A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (1998). In 2018, she was featured in the PBS documentary film “Tell Them We Are Rising”: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities, directed by MacArthur Award–winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson.

[1] Marcia M. Mathews, Richard Allen: A Former Slave Becomes the First Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Baltimore, 1963), 55.

[2] Richard Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (Philadelphia, 1833; repr. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1944), 29.

[3] Carol George, Segregated Sabbath: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches, 1760–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 80.

[4] Jarena Lee, Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel. Revised and Corrected from the Original (1836) Manuscript, Written by Herself (Philadelphia, 1849), 10.

[5] Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 18–19.

[6] Lee, Religious Experience, 44, 45.

[7] Lee, Religious Experience, 22–24, 65.

[8] Lee, Religious Experience, 28, 35.

[9] Lee, Religious Experience, 53, 64.

[10] Lee, Religious Experience, 85, 93.