Historian David Hempton correctly describes Methodism as a “transatlantic/transnational religious movement” that rapidly spread from Great Britain to its colonies in the Americas in the mid-eighteenth century. As the British consolidated their hegemony across the globe, particularly among various vulnerable populations, “mobile” Methodist preachers connected with “cultural outsiders” in both British and American society. Their emotional, extemporaneous preaching, their plain appeals to sinners to be saved, and their ecstatic expressions of “enthusiasm” resonated with non-elites in both Britain and the Americas.1 Hence, Scipio Africanus, one of a few hundred blacks in London, regularly attended evangelical services in about 1739 and became, according to one scholar, “the first black Methodist.” The receptivity that Africans experienced among British Methodists continued into the early nineteenth century.