Caesar Blackwell

Caesar Blackwell (1769–1845) was an enslaved African-American preacher in Alabama, one of a number of black preachers in the South who preached to a mixed congregation. He was either bought or freed by the Alabama Baptist Association, and preached in the Antioch Baptist Church in Montgomery County, Alabama.

Caesar Blackwell was a slave owned by a John Blackwell. In 1821, "by experience and baptism" he joined the Antioch Baptist Church,which had been founded three years before by James McLemore, a preacher who had come from Georgia. He preached to an audience of both blacks and whites, and, a modern historian notes, drew "standing-room-only crowds".

Sources do not agree on one important fact of Blackwell's life. Some sources claim his freedom was bought in 1825 by the Alabama Baptist Association, an association of Baptist churches founded in 1819; this account is given by Albert J. Raboteau, who cites B. F. Riley (History of the Baptists in the Southern States East of the Mississippi, Philadelphia, 1898, pp. 318–19): "After Blackwell's owner died, the Alabama Baptist Association bought and freed the slave to preach to his people". Others disagree: Wayne Flint, in his Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie, says that the Antioch congregation tried to buy him his freedom in 1828 but was unsuccessful, and that in the end he was bought by the Alabama Baptist Association, and became a preaching assistant to one of its ministers, the aforementioned James McLemore, who already owned Blackwell's wife and child. Flynt's account is cited by others, including Gary Burton (pastor of Pintlala Baptist Church, Hope Hull, Alabama). James Benson Sellers, Slavery in Alabama (1994), offers another, slightly different account which states that Blackwell was owned by McLemore, and was either bought or freed by the ABA after McLemore's death:

Another extraordinary Baptist preacher was Caesar Blackwell, a fullblood African slave, a bright, smart, robust fellow. He began his preaching at Elam and soon attracted so much attention that his master, the Reverend McLemore, often took him along on his tours. After McLemore died, the Baptist association made arrangements for Caesar's purchase. W. G. Robertson, in his Recollections of the Early Settlers of Montgomery County, written in 1892, says that he was bought for $1,000 and a guardian appointed for him. Another report, however, says that he was bought for $625 and set free.[56] Whatever the facts in the case were, Caesar was certainly listened to throughout his life with the utmost respect from whites and blacks alike. He was a frequent visitor in white homes. From a report of his trustees, we find that he preached and performed baptisms at Elam Church, Antioch, Rehoboth, Wetumpka, Mount Gilead, Cubihatchie, and Montgomery. When he became too feeble to preach, his trustees were recommended to furnish him with all the necessities of life.[57] He lived to a good old age, and when he died a stone was erected in his memory.

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