With these prefatory remarks, I present you the rose with its thorns, trusting that God will give sweetness and beauty to the former and allow the latter to do no harm. I cheerfully record my debt of gratitude to my faithful wife, Mattie Alice, who has been in this labor, as in all others, my abiding, sure support. [Illustration] HISTORY OF THE COLORED BAPTISTS OF ALABAMA. _I. INTRODUCTION._ ORIGIN. In turning to the subject under consideration it seems fitting that we should first review those facts and events which gave us our denominational existence. Such a course, it seems to the writer, will serve to give us a proper “setting.” It is not definitely known just when, where and by whom, Baptist principles were first propagated upon the American continent; it is, however, an historic fact that these principles assumed organic form in Providence, R. I., in 1639, in the constitution of a Baptist church under Roger Williams as pastor. Other churches soon followed, out of the union of which there early rose Associations, Conventions and Missionary Societies. In 1620, nineteen years before the organization of the church in Providence, the African was brought into Virginia as a slave. The North and the South joined heartily in the work of binding their black brother with the chains of cruel bondage. Thus the naked savage was taken from his freedom and from his gods and chained to the chariot wheels of Christian (?) civilization to be coerced, dragged into new observations, new experiences, and a new life. CHANGES. In order to give a glancing look at the progress and decline of slavery in the North, and at the sort of fruit the gospel was bearing in the soul and conduct of the slave, I copy the following from the “Baptist Home Missions in America” (Jubilee volume): “By 1776 there were about 300,000 slaves in America. In 1793 there were comparatively few slaves to be found in the Northern States. * * * In 1790 there were 697,897 slaves in the United States; of this number there were 17 in Vermont, 158 in New Hampshire, 2,759 in Connecticut, 3,707 in Pennsylvania, 11,423 in New Jersey, and 20,000 in New York. * * * Before 1830 slavery disappeared from all the Northern States. In Vermont it was abolished in 1777; in Massachusetts in 1780; while acts for the gradual emancipation of slaves were passed in other States--in New York, 1799; in New Jersey, 1804. The final act of abolition in New York being passed in 1817, declaring all slaves free on July 4, 1827.