<P> Methodist missionaries were also active in the late colonial period . From 1776 to 1815 Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury made 42 trips into the western parts to visit Methodist congregations . He preached at Benns Methodist Church, near Smithfield, Virginia in 1804 . Methodists encouraged an end to slavery, and welcomed free blacks and slaves into active roles in the congregations . Like the Baptists, Methodists made conversions among slaves and free blacks, and provided more of a welcome to them than in the Anglican Church . Some blacks were selected as preachers . During the Revolutionary War, about 700 Methodist slaves sought freedom behind British lines . The British transported them and other Black Loyalists, as they were called, for resettlement to its colony of Nova Scotia . In 1791 Britain helped some of the Black Loyalists, who had encountered racism among other Loyalists, and problems with the climate and land given to them, to resettle in Sierra Leone in Africa . </P> <P> Following the Revolution, in the 1780s, itinerant Methodist preachers carried copies of an anti-slavery petition in their saddlebags throughout the state, calling for an end to slavery . In addition, they encouraged slaveholders to manumit their slaves . So many slaveholders did so that the proportion of free blacks in Virginia in the first two decades after the Revolutionary War increased to 7.3 percent of the population, from less than one percent . At the same time, counter-petitions were circulated . The petitions were presented to the Assembly; they were debated, but no legislative action was taken, and after 1800 there was gradually reduced religious opposition to slavery as it had renewed economic importance after invention of the cotton gin . </P> <P> The Baptists and Presbyterians were subject to many legal constraints and faced growing persecution; between 1768 and 1774, about half of the Baptists ministers in Virginia were jailed for preaching . In 1689, the Act of Toleration had allowed freedom of worship . At the start of the Revolution, the Anglican Patriots realized that they needed dissenter support for effective wartime mobilization, so they met most of the dissenters' demands in return for their support of the war effort . </P> <P> After the American victory in the war, the Anglican establishment sought to reintroduce state support for religion . This effort failed when non-Anglicans gave their support to Thomas Jefferson's "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom", which eventually became law in 1786 . With freedom of religion the new watchword, the Church of England was dis - established in Virginia . During the war, 24 (20%) of the 124 Anglican ministers were active Loyalists . They generally went into exile, and Britain paid some of their financial losses . When possible, worship continued in the usual fashion, but the local vestry no longer distributed tax money or had local government functions such as poor relief . The Right Reverend James Madison (1749--1812), a cousin of Patriot James Madison, was appointed in 1790 as the first Episcopal Bishop of Virginia and he slowly rebuilt the denomination within freedom of choice of belief and worship . </P>

What christian denomination was illegal in the colony of virginia