The Methodist people did more for the negro than any other denomination, whether for abolition or for their general improvement. Peter Cartwright once said that the Methodist Episcopal Church had “been the cause of the emancipation of more slaves in these United States than all other religious denominations put together.”[88] “It is a notorious fact,” said Cartwright, “that all the preachers from the slaveholding states denounced slavery as a moral evil; but asked of the General Conference mercy and forbearance on account of the civil disabilities they labored under so that we got along tolerably smooth. I do not recollect a single Methodist preacher at that day that justified slavery.... Methodist preachers in those days made it a matter of conscience not to hold their fellow creatures in bondage, if it was practicable to emancipate them, conformably to the laws of the state in which they lived. Methodism increased and spread, and many Methodist preachers, taken from comparative poverty, not able to own a negro, and who preached loudly against it, improved and became popular among slaveholding families, and became personally interested in slave property. They then began to apologize for the evil; then to justify it, on legal principles; then on Bible principles.”[89] II. THE BAPTISTS. The Baptists were among the original settlers in Tennessee. They were strong in North Carolina by 1750,[90] and by 1780 were coming into Tennessee from both Virginia and North Carolina in great numbers.[91] They settled in the Holston country and on Boone’s Creek, but they were not so numerous in these early days as the Presbyterians and Methodists.[92] In 1784 there were 400 Baptists in Tennessee; 900 in 1792, and 11,325 in 1812. The Baptists were anti-slavery in the early period of American history, just as were the Methodists. 1783 the Baptists said: It is the duty of every master of a family to give his slaves liberty to attend the worship of God in his family, and likewise it is his duty to convince them of their duty; and then to leave them to their own choice.[93] In 1789 John Leland proposed the following resolution in the Triennial Convention, which was adopted: Resolved, That slavery is a violent deprivation of the rights of nature, and inconsistent with a republican government, and therefore recommend it to our brethren, to make use of every legal measure to extirpate this horrid evil from the land; and pray Almighty God that our honorable legislature may have it in their power to proclaim the great Jubilee consistent with the principles of good policy.[94] This protest, while very strong in its declaration, was ineffective. The Baptists were no exception to mankind as to slaveholding. The Baptists became slaveholders in large numbers, and adopted the policy that it was the work of the church to mitigate slavery into a humane institution.[95]