Thomas Nicholas Swigle [Swiegle] 

Thomas Nicholas Swigle [Swiegle] (d. 1811) was a black Baptist minister in Jamaica who preached to a congregation of 700 near Kingston, laboring for many years in association with Moses Baker and some other black preachers in Jamaica before the arrival of the BMS missionaries. Swigle had been baptized by George Liele and began as his assistant and deacon. In 1797 he was being assisted in his church-planting work in Kingston by two of his own members, James Pascall and John Gilbert. Several letters by Swigle to Rippon were printed in the Baptist Annual Register between 1793 and 1802. In 1802 Swigle was prohibited for a time from preaching by the passage of a bill in Jamaica that made it illegal, under penalty of hard labor and flogging, for dissenters to instruct any person in a state of slavery. Eventually, the bill was overturned. See John Rippon, ed., Baptist Annual Register, vol. 3 (1798-1801), pp. 212-214; F. A. Cox, History of the Baptist Missionary Society, from 1792 to 1842, 2 vols. (London: T. Ward, and G. and J. Dyer, 1842), 2:18-19; John Clarke, Memorials of the Baptist Missionaries in Jamaica (London: Yates and Alexander, 1869), 30-31; Ernest A. Payne, “Baptist Work in Jamaica before the Arrival of the Missionaries,” Baptist Quarterly 7 (1934-1935), 23-24.