Two hundred fifty years ago, enslaved Baptists founded a church. This month, Colonial Williamsburg gave them their building back.
In 1776, on the outskirts of Williamsburg, free and enslaved Black Virginians began congregating for worship in defiance of laws that restricted such gatherings for African Americans. Now 250 years later, on Oct. 9, , hundreds of people stood on Nassau Street to rededicate a reconstruction of the meeting house those worshippers eventually built for themselves. It stood until 1956, when it was torn down for a parking lot; 70 years later, a church stands there again.
That same summer, in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress declared that all men were created equal. That October, nearly 10,000 Virginian religious dissenters, largely Baptists, petitioned the new General Assembly for “equal liberty” to practice their religion.
The congregation that became First Baptist Church of Williamsburg requested something similar but harder to obtain because of their race, seeking the freedom to practice on their own terms in a society that owned many of them. While white political elites wrote America’s revolutionary promise, everyday Americans, especially those the Founders left out, gave it meaning.
First Baptist Church’s earliest members worshipped alongside an itinerant Black preacher remembered only as Moses. In 1810, Robert Semple wrote that Moses was repeatedly whipped for holding services. Oral tradition places those first services in the woods of the Green Spring Plantation to avoid patrols’ watchful eyes. Indeed, Virginia law had outlawed gatherings of enslaved people since at least 1723, and a free Black person caught among them faced a fine or 20 lashes.
“Before building anything, they built a community that chose its own pastor and decided on its own worship.”
Leadership passed from Moses to Gowan Pamphlet, an enslaved man who worked at the King’s Arms Tavern. By 1781, the collective, roughly 200 strong, had organized as a Baptist church with Pamphlet as pastor. He would not be freed for another 12 years. Before building anything, they built a community that chose its own pastor and decided on its own worship, even as the law denied its members many basic political and moral rights.
Similarly, white Baptists in Virginia were dissenters. Given the established Anglican Church, Baptists’ preachers were jailed and their services were interrupted, a story Rhys Isaac detailed in the William and Mary Quarterly of the Baptist challenge to the gentry. Emerging from these persecutions came the petitions that, as Thomas Buckley showed, drove disestablishment and produced that 1786 Statute for Religious Freedom.
However, the liberty they achieved did not extend evenly to all, particularly along racial lines. Around 1783, the General Association, the regional Baptist body, learned of Pamphlet’s work and declared that no person of color be allowed to preach, threatening excommunication for violating this rule. He kept preaching anyway.
In 1790, the Baptist General Committee declared slavery was a violent deprivation of the rights of nature; within four years, it had declared the subject none of its business, contributing to a painful irony in which Virginia Baptists sought to reconcile notions of liberty with slaveholding, an irony traced separately by scholars such as Jewel Spangler and Randolph Scully.
Both groups could appeal to freedom of conscience, but only one could exercise it without an enslaver’s written permission. The Williamsburg story suggests that religious liberty requires more than negative liberty, ensuring a government stays out of the way; it also depends on positive liberty, whether marginalized people can practice their faith.
Dover Baptist Association, a regional body run by white Baptists, showed how these competing notions of liberty worked in practice. In 1793, it voted to accept Pamphlet’s congregation as a member church, quite an accomplishment given that a church normally had to meet the association’s standards of order to get in.
“Both groups could appeal to freedom of conscience, but only one could exercise it without an enslaver’s written permission.”
The minutes from the vote say the Black congregation “could not have done better in their circumstances,” so they admitted it anyway. Meanwhile, white ministers close to the congregation should go over and fix whatever was lacking, they said.
The “circumstances” were slavery. The congregation was made up of enslaved and free Black people in a town where few Black residents were free, and its pastor had led it for more than a decade while being a slave. The white Baptists saw that as a handicap that explained why the Black church fell short of their standards. They did not see it as a wrong their own belief in liberty of conscience should have induced them to oppose. The same people who had fought for their own religious freedom shrugged at the chains on their fellow Baptists, instead sending ministers to “fix” the congregation.
Digging since 2020, Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists found the brick foundation of a frame meeting house built around 1805, with its south wall visibly tipping. The builders used recycled bricks and whatever else they could scrounge. Older accounts credit a white businessman, Jesse Cole, with giving the congregation the building and the land. The evidence now suggests the members built it themselves.
James Ingram portraying Baptist pastor Gowan Pamphlet at Colonial Williamsburg
A tornado destroyed that structure in 1834. A brick church rose in its place in 1856, standing for a century. Then, in 1955, Colonial Williamsburg bought the Nassau Street property, demolished the church, and turned it into a parking lot, believing the building did not fit the town’s 18th-century aesthetic. Sixty-two graves were laid under the parking lot. For decades, one of the institutions that interprets the nation’s founding era left this vital chapter out.
The congregation and its descendants undertook the church’s reconstruction, guiding every decision about the graves. Black Americans were present at the founding. At 250, one of the country’s oldest Black congregations hands Baptists an anniversary that should raise questions befitting America’s semiquincentennial:
- Whose freedom gets recognized?
- What kind of freedom should be prioritized?
- Who holds the institutional power to enjoy this freedom?
Those questions outlived slavery. They decided who got a plaque and who got a parking lot.
The Declaration sits under glass in Washington. The meeting house on Nassau Street is pine and white oak, with hand-blown glass and a half-round brick step, raised again where people who refused to be written out once raised it in secret.
Reginald Davis, First Baptist’s current pastor, put it plainly on rededication day: “Black history is American history.” The other declaration of independence in 1776 came with no signatures. Its authors sang it.
Conner Huey
Conner Huey was a Fulbright Scholar in the Netherlands, where he researched education policy and democracy. He previously worked as a civic education researcher at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation hosted by Harvard University, where he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in government and history in 2025.
Related:
Historic Williamsburg church marks 250th year with celebration
Voices of freedom continue to speak from Colonial Williamsburg church
How we’re learning to see and hear the Black experience at Colonial Williamsburg | Analysis by Ella Wall Prichard