Five out of seven of the leading planters in the region were Presbyterians. The others were, almost without exception, Episcopalians, and the two denominations affiliated more cordially than with Baptists, Methodists, and the sparse sprinkling of Campbellites, or “Christians,” as they preferred to call their sect. Slavery existed in Virginia in its mildest possible form, and nowhere was the master’s rule more paternal than in the group of counties I have named. The negroes were permitted to hold their own prayer-meetings in their cabins whenever it pleased them; they attended religious services as regularly as their owners, and, in a majority of the old families, were called in to family worship with the children of the household. No more convincing proof of their religious freedom could be desired than the fact that the bulk of the colored population belonged to the Baptist Church. Why, I could never make out. The Methodists would seem likely to attract them with equal force, their methods appealing to the emotional, excitable natures of the semi-tropical race as strongly as those of the denomination that found favor in their sight. Yet, when one of our servants “got through” the spiritual conflicts that ushered in a state of grace, we expected him, or her, to join the Baptist Church as confidently as we looked for the child of the Covenant, “ordered in all things and sure,” to confirm, when it arrived at “the age of discretion,” the vows taken by parents and sponsors in baptism. It was not singular, therefore, that the new pastor of the Village Church at Charlotte Court-House should find, at his installation in his cure of souls, the name of but one colored person upon the roll of communicants. We never spoke of them as “negroes” in that benighted age. “Uncle Cæsar,” the trusted “headman” upon the plantation of Colonel Marshall—Mrs. Henry’s father—had once partaken of the Lord’s Supper in the church in which his master was an elder. Which violation of the laws of his denomination, being duly reported, was the occasion of a case of discipline long talked of throughout the colored community. The recusant was sharply reprimanded, and notified that a second offence would be punished by ex-communication. The doughty old servitor thereupon declared that, as he hoped to sit down to the supper of the Lamb in heaven with his master, so he would continue to do on earth, when the Lord’s table was spread in the Village Church. An example was made of him for the edification of others, and Cæsar became a Presbyterian, taking his seat among the communicants gathered in the main body of the church, whenever a Communion season came around.