Moses Baker

Moses Baker (1755-1822) came to Jamaica from New York in 1783 as free black and worked in Kingston as a barber. Converted under the ministry of George Liele (1750?-1828), he soon began preaching in a house in Kingston and formed the first Baptist church there. He would later found the second Baptist church in Jamaica at Crooked Spring, on the estate of I. L. Winn, a Quaker. Winn’s estate was later purchased by Samuel Vaughan, who was sympathetic to Baker’s ministry. Thomas N. Swigle (see biographical entry below), like Baker, a black preacher who ministered in Kingston for many years, described Baker’s work in a letter to John Rippon, published in the Baptist Annual Register in 1797:  “Moses Baker [is] a free brown man, who is also one of our brethren, and now resides on Stretch and Sett sugar estate, in the parish of Saint James, about 140 miles westward from Kingston; he is employed there by Isaac Lascelles Winn, Esquire, to preach to his negroes on that property; and another gentleman —Vaughan, Esq. of that parish, who has a great number of slaves on his estate, has also employed brother Baker for that purpose; and allows him a compensation. And on those sugar estates, where permission is not granted, their slaves hungering after the good word of God, come of their own accord to brother Baker, at his place of residence, to be instructed by him: so he has in number abut one thousand brethren there; and the greater part of the hearers are converted souls.”  In 1802 new regulations passed by the authorities in Jamaica prohibited Baker from preaching to the slaves on the plantations, a ban which lasted for several years. During that time Baker became a correspondent of Rippon and Ryland, pleading for the cause of the slaves and for a white preacher to come and minister to them. Ryland struggled for several years to find a candidate to assist Baker, finally sending John Rowe (1788-1816) to Jamaica in 1814. See John Ryland’s accounts of Baker in the Evangelical Magazine 11 (1803), 365, 550; and 12 (1804): 469; Christopher Brent Ballew, The Impact of African-American Antecedents on the Baptist Foreign Missionary Movement: 1782-1825 (Lewiston [NY]: Edwin Mellon Press, 2004); Baptist Annual Register, 3:212-214; Edward A. Holmes, “George Liele: Negro Slavery’s Prophet of Deliverance,” Baptist Quarterly 20 (1963-1964): 340-351, 361; F. A. Cox, History of the Baptist Missionary Society, from 1792 to 1842, 2 vols. (London: T. Ward, and G. and J. Dyer, 1842), vol. 2; John Clarke, Memorials of the Baptist Missionaries in Jamaica (London: Yates and Alexander, 1869), 18-30; Leslie Brooke, Baptists in Yeovil: History of the Yeovil Baptist Church (Bath: Ralph Allen, 2002), 13-14.