Despite his outspoken plea to legalize slavery in Georgia, and his employment of slaves at the orphan house, he increasingly sought out audiences of slaves and wrote on their behalf. Historian Gary B. Nash dates “the advent of black Christianity” in Philadelphia to Whitefield’s first preaching tour. Perhaps a thousand slaves heard Whitefield’s sermons in Philadelphia, often in private supplemental meetings. They heard from him that they had souls as surely as the white folk who had enslaved them,