The Bryan Family, the Great Awakening, and the Black Baptist Churches of Savannah

This article traces the connections among the Bryan family, the Great Awakening, and the development of Savannah’s earliest Black Baptist churches. It begins with Hugh and Jonathan Bryan in colonial South Carolina, examining their participation in the evangelical movement associated with George Whitefield, the organization of Stoney Creek Independent Presbyterian Church, and the admission of enslaved Black Christians into its fellowship during the 1740s. It also examines Hugh Bryan’s prophetic campaign against the moral failures of slaveholding society, the controversy it provoked, and the persistence of slavery within the evangelical communities he helped build. The article then follows the Bryan family connection into Georgia through Jonathan Bryan’s household at Brampton, where Andrew Bryan was enslaved. It reconstructs Andrew Bryan’s relationship to George Liele, his baptism and ordination, his emergence as a Black Baptist leader, his acquisition of freedom and property, and the establishment of the Savannah congregation formally constituted in 1788. The surviving evidence places Andrew Bryan within a religious network that extended back through Jonathan Bryan to the evangelical movement of the 1740s. The final section examines the theological and institutional dispute of the 1830s that divided the congregation and produced competing claims of continuity by First African Baptist Church and First Bryan Baptist Church. It traces the controversy surrounding Andrew C. Marshall and Alexander Campbell, the division between Marshall’s majority and Adam Arguile Johnson’s minority, and the later dispute over which body represented the institutional continuation of Andrew Bryan’s church.