From one of the most productive scholars of American religions, Gordon Melton in A Will to Choose reclaims the lost stories of enslaved and free black men and women who embraced and advanced variant expressions of African-American Methodism from 1770-1870. His narrative sparkles as a moving chronicle of the active and creative presence of these amazing black Christians in the Wesleyan tradition from its very beginnings in North America and functions as a sharp corrective to a scholarship that has more often than not made these African-American Methodists invisible within the largest Protestant movement throughout the 19th century in the US. This book culminates a generation of Melton's devoted research and joins the ever-growing and engaging literature of African-American religious history.