The Negro church continued to go forward. Eight years after the organization of the African Methodist Episcopal Church the membership easily reached 9,888, including 14 elders, 26 deacons, and 101 licentiates, itinerant and local. Its expansion had been so rapid that it was soon necessary to establish a western conference to administer the affairs of the many churches then rising in Ohio. Wishing further to extend its operations, the church ordained the Rev. Scipio Bean in 1827 to do mission work in the Island of Haiti. The church established there had as many as 72 members in 1828, and in 1830 it had extended its operations into the Spanish port of the Island and gained a foothold in the peninsula of Samana. That same year the Rev. R. Roberts was ordained a deacon and afterward an elder for missionary work in the same island, then under the successful administration of President Boyer. Although he met with some success in the beginning in answering this cry for help in a distant land, the work undertaken there was not finally successful. There was an apparent falling off in the membership of certain conferences after 1830, but this did not indicate any step backward. Practically the whole membership in South Carolina was by the public opinion, custom, and laws of that commonwealth, cut off from the church. There was during this same period extensive progress in the west, especially in Cincinnati. Great efforts were made to put the church on a firm foundation. During the conferences of the thirties much attention was given to the preparation of the ministry through education, cleanliness in dress, high character, and loyalty to the church. The work suffered a loss, however, in that Bishop Allen, who had for years led this flock, passed away in 1831. Bishop Morris Brown, who had been ordained to the episcopacy in 1828, became then the sole bishop and continued so until 1836 when Edward Waters was ordained as his assistant. Proceeding on a sound basis, the church could not but succeed. The membership rapidly grew, as is evidenced by the necessity for the organization of two other conferences in the year 1840. This was the conference of Canada, which was organized by Bishop Brown at Toronto, and then came the conference of Indianapolis as a culmination of the successful missionary labors of William Paul Quinn who was later honored as the fourth bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. There was an improvement in church literature such as the _Book of Discipline_ and the conference of the year 1836 decreed the publication of a quarterly magazine for the use and benefit of the connection, appointing George Hogarth of the city of Brooklyn as General Book Steward.