The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours

It is Richard Allen's own account of his life — born a slave in Philadelphia, converted under Methodist preaching, buying his freedom, and founding the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It includes his narrative of the 1793 yellow-fever epidemic and his addresses to slaveholders and to the free people of colour, making it both a spiritual autobiography and a landmark document of early Black American Christianity.

Born a slave in 1760, Richard Allen bought his own freedom, became a pioneering preacher, and in 1816 founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church — the first fully independent Black denomination in America — becoming its first bishop. His life bridged slavery and freedom, and he became one of the most important religious leaders in early American history.

After he and other Black worshippers were pulled from their knees during prayer and directed to segregated seating at St George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Allen led a withdrawal to form their own place of worship. Out of that grew Bethel Church and eventually, in 1816, the independent African Methodist Episcopal Church — a response to the indignity of segregation within the church itself.

Allen recounts how, during the deadly Philadelphia epidemic, he and Absalom Jones organized the Black community to nurse the sick and bury the dead when much of the city had fled. When their service was later slandered in print, Allen answered the charges, and his narrative both records the community's sacrifice and defends its honour.

Allen includes direct appeals: an address to those who keep slaves, pressing the wrong of slavery on the Christian conscience, and an address to the free people of colour, urging them to live in a way that would honour God and answer their detractors. They show him as both a prophet against slavery and a pastor to his own people.

Because it is a first-hand testimony from a formerly enslaved man who became a founder of independent Black Christianity in America. Allen's account preserves the voice of one who lived through slavery, the founding of a denomination, and the epidemic of 1793, making it a rare and valuable record of faith, dignity, and leadership in the early American republic.

A faith forged in hardship and expressed in action — personal conversion joined to a lifelong labour for his people and against slavery. Allen's Christianity is inseparable from his fight for dignity and freedom, and his narrative shows a man who took the gospel he received and spent it in gospel labours, as the title says, for others.

At the beginning, with Allen's account of his early life in slavery and his conversion, which grounds everything that follows. The autobiography, the yellow-fever narrative, and the addresses each add a facet; read together they give the whole measure of a man who rose from slavery to found a church and speak for a people.