THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 \ 
 
 ,/ 
 
 -V 
 
 A/ 
 
 ■■^ 
 
 K,v)'
 
 NATION 
 BUILDERS 
 
 A Story 
 
 By 
 EDGAR MAYHEW BACON 
 
 Member of the American Historical Association 
 AND (THE LATE) 
 
 ANDREW CARPENTER WHEELER 
 
 NewYork: EATON & MAINS 
 Cincinnati : JENNINGS & GRAHAM
 
 Copyright, 1905, by 
 EATON & MAINS.
 
 3X 
 
 3)3 
 
 /VL- 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The plan of writing an appreciation of the itin- 
 erant preachers of Methodism, who went out to 
 possess the American frontier a century ago, was 
 suggested by the late Andrew Carpenter Wheeler, 
 well known by his pen name, /. P. Mozvbray. 
 
 Together we had been attracted to this field, 
 which investigation showed to have been generally 
 neglected by historians. Mr. Wheeler, who was 
 the son of Methodist parents, in later life developed 
 a strong impulse of filial veneration for the genius 
 and achievement of his father's church. Unhappily, 
 he did not live to complete the plan that was com- 
 menced with a keen literary zest and the ardor of 
 an affectionate impulse ; but, fortunately, he prepared 
 a reminiscent chapter relating to Henry Bascom, 
 and some pages that have been incorporated with 
 other material in the present work. 
 
 Although not claiming the same close affiliation 
 with the Methodist Church as did my greatly loved 
 associate, I have endeavored, with an earnest and 
 reverent spirit, to carry out alone the purpose which 
 we formed together. 
 
 Edgar Mayhew Bacon. 
 
 Tarrytown, New York. 
 
 550310
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Introductory 7 
 
 II. Along a Blazed Trail 29 
 
 III. The Field 52 
 
 IV. Some of the Sowers 75 
 
 V. From Cabin to Camp Meeting 105 
 
 VI. Frontier Women and Preachers' Wives 127 
 
 VII. Another Company of the Sowers 133 
 
 VIII. A Recollection of Bascom 158 
 
 IX. The Songs of Zion 164 
 
 X. From Small Beginnings 170 
 
 XI. The Methodist Church and the Union 186 
 
 XII. The After- Word 194
 
 NATION BUILDERS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Introductory 
 
 The recent practical modification of the itiner- 
 ancy, that distinctive and unique feature of the Meth- 
 odist Episcopal Church, has closed a very important 
 chapter of church history. Let it be frankly said 
 that if the chapter had been merely one of denomina- 
 tional record this book would never have taken the 
 form that it has. The magnificent and unexcelled 
 achievements of the Methodist itinerants belong to 
 the broader field of general history. Specifically, 
 they had to do with the social and practical, not less 
 than with the religious, development of an impor- 
 tant section of the United States. By keeping alive 
 the consciences of men and developing ideals of life 
 and character in people who would otherwise have 
 been lawless, they made strong and efficient citizens 
 of the republic. They influenced national legislation 
 by moral force, and put their permanent stamp upon
 
 8 Natiox Builders 
 
 the character of states. We submit with all confi- 
 dence that no institution, no agency, has accom- 
 plished more in these directions, and few have done 
 so much, as have the itinerant ministry of the Meth- 
 odist Episcopal Church. As a molding and govern- 
 ing influence, working for righteousness in state as 
 well as in church. Methodism stands, historically, in 
 the very first rank. 
 
 It would no more be possible to write the history 
 of some of our vSouthern and Western states fairly, 
 leaving out Methodism, than to write the story of 
 Scotland and omit John Knox, or to eliminate the 
 Reformed Church from the history of Holland. If 
 we would understand the development of the repub- 
 lic from the borders of the original states to the 
 INIississippi, between 1800 and 1830, we must study 
 the influence of the Methodist itinerant. 
 
 In glancing at the history of Methodism with the 
 narrative purpose of dealing mainly with its Amer- 
 ican development, it is not necessary to examine into 
 its doctrinal peculiarities nor to traverse again the 
 much harrowed field of evangelical theology; but it 
 is necessary to the purpose of this book to mark as 
 clearly as is possible one or two of the distinctive 
 features of that movement and to learn if possible 
 to what it owed its remarkable initial vigor and 
 increase. The history of Methodism presents us 
 with a combination of the spiritual and communal
 
 Introductory 9 
 
 impulses that was unique. Those impulses were con- 
 tributed on the one side by a return to the super- 
 natural element, and on the other side to the dem- 
 ocratic spirit which came to its aid. Dissimilar as 
 the motive powers were, and unsuspected as the alli- 
 ance was by John Wesley himself, there is now no 
 doubt that his practical application of the doctrine 
 of justification by faith and his direct appeal to the 
 common people were the joint factors in the estab- 
 lishment of a new church, to the ultimate success of 
 which his organizing ability and governmental tact 
 were to contribute in an extraordinary degree. 
 
 Like other religious movements which owed their 
 origin to a protest against ecclesiastical inertia or 
 endowed wrongs, it grew into an independent and 
 aggressive organization without the lust of power, 
 and wholly without the intention or desire of its 
 great organizer to detach himself from the parent 
 establishment, the Church of England. 
 
 History does not record many more brilliant ex- 
 amples of a reformer pushed by overruling events 
 against his own preferences and prejudices into a 
 stupendous task of reconstruction. Intellectually and 
 by choice he was an imperialist, and intensely loyal 
 to his king and church. On his religious side he be- 
 came in the course of events as stanch a democrat as 
 Saint Paul. Shut out of his own church by the stu- 
 pidity of institutionalism, he went straight to the
 
 10 Nation Builders 
 
 common people, not because he for one moment be- 
 lieved that the common people were denied any rights 
 even of opinion or action, but because he thought 
 they ought to be saved from their sins, and it never 
 once occurred to him that in this step he was making 
 an alliance with the democratic spirit which was 
 already stirring and for which a new continent was 
 opening. With an eloquence and logical astuteness 
 which, as JMacaulay acknowledges, might have made 
 him eminent in literature, and with a genius for gov- 
 ernment not inferior to that of Richelieu, he gave 
 himself to the humble and arduous work of saving 
 souls, and abandoned all honors that his genius 
 might have attained. In the words of John Nichols, 
 "Instead of being an ornament to literature he was 
 a blessing to his age, and instead of being the genius 
 of his age he preferred to be the servant of God." 
 
 He believed to the last in the sacraments and tradi- 
 tions of the mother church, but in his work he was 
 compelled to modify one and abandon the other. He 
 never outgrew his reverence and affection for the 
 aristocratic prerogatives and the ancient privileges 
 of that church, but events made him contravene 
 both. 
 
 There is not the slightest evidence that Wesley 
 at the beginning of his work contemplated even with 
 the eye of imagination the development of a free 
 church in a free state, or a self-supporting Chris-
 
 Introductory i i 
 
 tianity of many folds in independent but friendly 
 relation to the civil government. Nor is there any 
 reason to believe that he ever suspected that his 
 doctrinal utterances or his simplified ritual and pop- 
 ular appeals were powerful adjuncts to that demand 
 for freedom and individual right of judgment and 
 experience which was e\'ery day becoming more 
 manifest in English politics. 
 
 Doctrinally, the tenets of Wesley furnished noth- 
 ing absolutely new. That which proved a stumbling- 
 block to the Anglican establishment, namely, "justi- 
 fication by faith" and "the witness of the Spirit," lie 
 more or less conspicuous along the Christian high- 
 way from Saint Paul to Anselm and Luther, and 
 proclaim themselves in \A^yclif and Jonathan Ed- 
 wards. But it is very sure that with the exception 
 of Saint Paul not one of these eminent men, or a 
 score of others in both branches of the Christian 
 church, who held at various times that the regen- 
 eration of the sinner is a supernatural act of God, 
 often instantaneous and always attested by the con- 
 sciousness and corroborated by the life, ever made 
 such practical application of it or so caught the at- 
 tention of the mass of men by a simple and author- 
 itative presentment of it as did John Wesley. 
 
 One may sufficiently summarize the whole of 
 Wesley's doctrine in the early and familiar phrases : 
 "original sin," "repentance," "regeneration," "justi-
 
 12 Nation Builders 
 
 fication by faith," "sanctification," and "the witness 
 of the Spirit." The conflict raged for half a century 
 around the question of instantaneous conversion and 
 regeneration. Wesley stood squarely and invincibly 
 to it, and he did this the more efficaciously because 
 it was not the result of an induction, but the com- 
 manding announcement of a fact in his own experi- 
 ence — a fact which he did not hesitate to tell his 
 listeners was an attestation from on high within the 
 reach of the humblest of them. No one put the 
 claim of supernaturalism so insistently and so simply, 
 acknowledging flatly that every man could be in 
 himself the witness of a miracle. 
 
 In defense of his teaching he wrote : 
 "That the conversion of sinners is no miracle is 
 new doctrine indeed. So new to me that I never 
 heard of it before, either among Protestants or 
 Papists. I think a miracle is a work of omnipotence 
 wrought by the supernatural power of God. Now, 
 if the conversion of sinners to holiness is not such 
 a work I cannot tell what it is." 
 
 Wesley was thus corroborating what had been 
 said of him with unintentional accuracy by a bitter 
 ecclesiastical opponent — he was popularizing the 
 miraculous ; and this charge, filtered through the 
 dense brains of the conforming mobs, early ran into 
 that other charge, that the Methodists were in league 
 with the Papists. But whatever may have been the
 
 Introductory 13 
 
 motive of the first accusation and the ignoble sense 
 in which it was made, the fact remains that Wesley 
 did popularize the miraculous in the sense that he 
 brought the internal evidence and the external fruit 
 of it to the common apprehension. 
 
 Of the relation that Wesleyanism bears to its time 
 no estimate can be justly made that overlooks this 
 return to primitive belief. It is of less account to 
 us to know how far the purely human elements and 
 influences of excitement and emotional elation col- 
 ored and coerced the imagination and judgment of 
 the reformers than it is to know that Wesley planted 
 himself squarely against the first assaults of atheism 
 upon miracles, which assaults were to grow in a later 
 philosophy to be the most powerful and insidious 
 of arguments against Christianity. It was that de- 
 sideratum which Wesley, more than any other man, 
 met and answered in a singularly apostolic and sim- 
 ple manner. Vital Christianity in England was not 
 saved by its doctors and school men. At a divine 
 command it arose and walked. It survived the 
 assaults of skepticism and the deadening influence 
 of aestheticism not by an intellectual advance, but 
 by an evangelical return to its supernatural charac- 
 ter; and this return was not alone obedient, but 
 heroic. Its whole effort was not to furnish dis- 
 putants, but witnesses, and the sum total of the 
 rejoinder that it made both to the church and to the
 
 14 Nation Builders 
 
 philosophy of its time, far from being metaphysical 
 or doctrinal, shapes itself into the final and unan- 
 swerable reply of the blind man : '*\\'hether he be 
 a sinner or no, I know not : one thing I know, 
 that, whereas I was blind, now T see." 
 
 Whatever may be the later conclusion of a reli- 
 gious philosophy with regard to the mysterious 
 operation of the mind in what the Methodists call 
 a change of heart, there can be no sort of doubt 
 as to what John Wesley thought it was, nor 
 can there be any hesitancy in acknowledging the 
 work it accomplished in reanimating a fossilized 
 religion. 
 
 What Wesley tried to do was to lift faith from 
 a merely moral observance to a positive religious 
 experience. Regeneration was an act of God regis- 
 tered in the soul quite independently of ceremonial 
 or decretal ; and, as God was no respecter of persons, 
 this experience was as possible in a coal mine as in 
 a cathedral. Old as this declaration may have been 
 to the established church, it was, at close range, a 
 I)iece of insufferable effrontery when it was not 
 .sheer blasphemy, ".^ir." said the Bishop (^f l'>ristol 
 to John Wesley, "this pretense to extraordinary gifts 
 of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid 
 thing, sir. T advi.se you to go hence." That nearly 
 all the bishops .so regarded il, and that some of them 
 did not .scruple to avail themselves of the prejudice
 
 Introductory 15 
 
 and ignorance of their followers to incite brutal 
 opposition to Wesley, no one now denies. 
 
 With the usual fatuity of institutionalism, the 
 church proceeded to thrust Wesley and his followers 
 into an independent and aggressive organization, 
 which was to bring about the very relations which 
 Wesley deprecated and the church feared. Once 
 organized and moving, it was very evident that 
 Methodism could not exist without either modifying 
 the conditions which opposed it or by finding a new 
 area for its expansion. It did both. A new evan- 
 gelicanism slowly permeated the English church, 
 and a new continent opened its broad arms to 
 receive it.^ 
 
 The most important and most immediate of the 
 temporal influences that led to the organization of 
 the Methodist Episcopal Church, and to its inde- 
 pendence from the Wesleyan connection in Eng- 
 land, was the conflict of the colonies with the mother 
 country. The spirit of independence was, as we 
 say, in the air, and must be supposed to have imbued 
 not only political, social, and business circles, but to 
 have influenced the counsels of religious bodies. 
 
 From the novel spectacle of a free state the minds 
 
 ' " Was it no boon to you that Charles Wesley, the sweet poet of the 
 Wesleyan movement, accompanied his brother to this country ? Thus to 
 you also was communicated, by strange interpositions of Providence, the 
 electric thrill of that awakening which startled the eighteenth century from 
 its torpor of indolence and death."— Farca/W/ Address of Archdeacon Farrar 
 in America.
 
 1 6 Nation Builders 
 
 of men advanced, as by a natural sequence, to the 
 contemplation of an independent church — that is, 
 a church not only dissociated from state control, but 
 also released from a restrictive subservience to a 
 foreign ecclesiastical authority. While retaining 
 a close paternal relationship with English Wesleyan- 
 ism, and abating no jot of reverence and love for its 
 great founder, the Alethodist Society in America 
 began to feel the necessity of a separation in church 
 organization. This impulse was greatly strength- 
 ened by the departure from America of nearly all 
 the English preachers and exhorters of the society 
 and the assumption of their work by a number of 
 young men of American birth. At one time Francis 
 Asbury seems to have been the only Methodist 
 preacher of English birth in the thirteen states, and 
 Asbury 's sympathies were all American. 
 
 The Presbyterian, Congregational, Dutch Re- 
 formed, and several other churches did not suffer 
 such depletion in tlie ranks of their ministry, because 
 a larger proportion of their clergy were, either by 
 birth or interest, more closely identified with the 
 fortunes of the states. Next to the Methodists the 
 older branch of the Episcopal Church suffered. The 
 slicplierds departed, never to return, and tlu-ir places 
 could be filled only by extraordinary means. 
 
 There was a most serious lack of men who by 
 ordination were authorized to administer any of the
 
 Introductory 17 
 
 rites which con\iction and custom prescribe for the 
 church. Nor was it possible, without great difficulty 
 and sacrifice, to supply this deficiency. Only by 
 extraordinary means could the candidate for ordina- 
 tion or appointment accomplish his purpose, for in 
 all the American world there was no bishop. Such 
 aspirants as there were for the Episcopal ministry, 
 whether of the conservative establishment or the 
 Wesleyan connection, A\ere obliged to go to England 
 for ordination. The x^rchbishop of Canterbury de- 
 cided that such applicants must take the oath of 
 allegiance to the King of England before being per- 
 mitted to preach the gospel of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. That this objection was not an insuperable 
 one the continuance of the older branch in America 
 has shown; but the Methodists, left almost without 
 ministers, and put to the greatest inconvenience for 
 lack of those who were authorized to administer the 
 sacraments, to marry, baptize, and bury them, re- 
 sorted to extraordinary measures. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin, who affiliated with no church, 
 yet was the friend and adviser of all, was consulted. 
 Two young men who had in vain applied to Canter- 
 bury went to Paris to have a talk with Dr. Franklin, 
 and his advice was delightfully characteristic. Let 
 the Episcopalian clergy in America either become 
 Presbyterians, he suggested, or else elect a bishop 
 for themselves. This matter-of-fact, shrewd counsel
 
 1 8 Nation Builders 
 
 was, to an English churchman's views, as heretical 
 as it was revolutionary. It met no favor from the 
 clergy of the established English church, and it hor- 
 rified even so ardent a reformer as Charles Wesley. 
 There were, however, certain men, inspired with a 
 desire to proclaim salvation, who heard the advice 
 of America's foremost philosopher with deep satis- 
 faction. That advice coincided in spirit with the 
 counsel given by John Wesley to his American fol- 
 lowers. It is probable that Franklin was not the 
 first to conceive the idea of separation from the 
 English church, but there can be little doubt that his 
 words had weight even with those who deplored 
 what they were accustomed to call his rationalism. 
 
 Whatever the relative influence of several coun- 
 selors, the influence of events was pressing in one 
 direction — toward the separation of the American 
 followers of Wesley from the parent church, to 
 which he still claimed allegiance. 
 
 There seems to have been a strong and persistent 
 inclination among the young men w ho were gather- 
 ing around Francis Asbury to organize an inde- 
 pendent body, but not until Wesley's views upon the 
 subject hacl been received did Asbury feel satisfied 
 to advance. \Vhcn first appealed to, W'eslcy had 
 advised patience, and the veneration of his American 
 co-religionists for his almost apostolic personality 
 kcpl tlicii- impntieiuc in clicrk. and llicy wisely
 
 Introductory 19 
 
 waited for an initiative that bore the weight of his 
 authority. 
 
 As elsewhere noted, Mr. Wesley's final attitude 
 toward the organization of a separate church in 
 America showed how far he had drifted, and how 
 insensibly, from the method and government of the 
 Episcopal Church. His ordination of Dr. Coke to 
 a superintendency that was in all but name a bish- 
 opric was accompanied by an avowal of his implicit 
 belief in his own providential calling to perform that 
 act, which might justly at that time have been 
 regarded as a usurpation of episcopal authority. 
 When Francis Asbury was designated by Wesley 
 as Coke's coadjutor the new superintendent was 
 greatly impressed by "the wisdom, consideration, 
 love, meekness, and authority" of his associate. 
 
 A "Conference" — the word was not as familiar 
 then as it has since become — w^as called at Balti- 
 more, w^hen sixty out of the eighty-one American 
 ministers of Wesley's following met, either on 
 Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, in 1784, and there 
 established the form of worship and of church gov- 
 ernment to which, in the main, their successors have 
 adhered for a century. Then a unanimous vote de- 
 cided the independence of the American church, to 
 which the name Methodist Episcopal was officially 
 and formally given. 
 
 Asbury was ordained, lirsl, deacon; then, elder;
 
 20 Nation Builders 
 
 and finally — the appointment by Wesley having 
 been popularly sustained — was invested by the lay- 
 ing on of hands with the authority of a bishop, 
 though at first the title ''superintendent" was used 
 instead of the older Episcopal name. Before long the 
 word "bishop" was substituted for "superintendent," 
 at first in popular usage and afterward in the printed 
 Minutes and Discipline of the society. So in a few 
 years Wesleyism had already outrun Wesley, and 
 the great initiative was solemnly assumed by the 
 fathers of American Methodism. The government 
 of the new body consisted of superintendents (or 
 bishops), elders, and deacons. Of the elders there 
 were two classes : first, the presiding elders ; and, sec- 
 ond, the traveling elders, who were also empowered 
 to "administer the ordinances and perform the office 
 of marrying," and who were elected by the Annual 
 Conference and ordained by bishops and elders by a 
 laying on of hands. A bishop, having been elected 
 by the General Conference, must be ordained by the 
 imposition of hands by three bishops, or one bishop 
 and two elders. 
 
 The great, vital feature of the new church was 
 its itinerant system. There had been itinerants be- 
 fore in llic world's history, and missionaries of 
 nearly every creed, and their labors and devotion 
 have been the subject of an almost endless succes- 
 sion of books, while admiration for their incslima-
 
 Introductory 21 
 
 ble courage has swayed the hearts of all Christen- 
 dom; but never before did a church destined to 
 become great and powerful in the family of Christ 
 establish as its main working force a body of men 
 devoted to a perpetual pilgrimage, yet held strictly 
 to the rules and discipline of ecclesiastical govern- 
 ment. 
 
 This was the strangest anomaly of the times. 
 The man who shook his bishop's hand after Con- 
 ference and turned his horse's head toward the 
 forest, with no property except the animal he be- 
 strode, the homespun clothes upon his back, and the 
 Bible in his pocket, with no protection from the dan- 
 gers of the wilderness save in the outreaching arm 
 of an ever-present Providence, with no constraint 
 upon his movements save that imposed by his own 
 conscience, was held to a strict accountability 
 through all his trackless circuit, and at stated inter- 
 vals returned to render a report to the body — the 
 very democratic and elective body — of which he was 
 a member. Never in the world have the principles 
 and methods of democracy been more triumphantly 
 illustrated than by the Methodist circuit riders, who, 
 having aided to elect an ecclesiastical superior, fol- 
 lowed his commands with the obedience of soldiers, 
 even to death. 
 
 The first Methodist Conference held in America 
 was in Philadelphia, on July 14, 1773, in Saint
 
 22 Nation Builders 
 
 George's (Episcopal) Church. The Episcopal 
 churches and clergymen in America seem to have 
 been at first hospitable to the new body. It should 
 never be forgotten that Methodism was at the outset 
 distinctly a reformation within the church. It was 
 not an effort to found a new church, though circum- 
 stances led to that end. 
 
 The ten members of the Methodist connection 
 who were present at the Philadelphia Conference 
 were Thomas Rankin, Richard Boardman, Joseph 
 Pilmoor, Francis Asbury. Richard Wright, George 
 Shadford, Thomas Webb, John King, Abraham 
 Whitworth, and Joseph Yearbry. The membership 
 then reported was i,i6o. By 1775 the membership 
 had grown to 3,148. In 1777 the roll of members 
 showed 6,968 and 38 itinerants. In 1783, shortly 
 after the close of the war for independence, Francis 
 Asbury wrote: "We have about 14,000 members. 
 80 traveling preachers, and between 30 and 40 cir- 
 cuits. . . . The gospel has taken a universal spread." 
 
 Even in colonial days New ^'ork city was a 
 refuge for all the creeds of Christendom and for 
 some with wliicli Christendom had no dealings 
 whatever. It was from an early date a very cos- 
 mopolis of sects, vying with Khtulc island in this 
 particular, for it is said that it harbored no less 
 than a dozen societies or congregations at a time 
 when 1I1C neighboring colonies drew sliail lines, and
 
 Introductory 23 
 
 some even advocated the whipping post and the 
 fagot. By the middle of the eighteenth century 
 two Protestant denominations had so far outgrown 
 all others that they probably included more than 
 half of the churchgoing population. The Dutch 
 Reformed Church, by right of priority, might ha\'e 
 claimed the honors due to an established form of 
 worship; but the Episcopal service, being more 
 familiar to the high officials from England, became 
 a strong rival. About these twain gathered Pres- 
 byterians. Roman Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, 
 Quakers, and every familiar form of ecclesiastical 
 dissent. 
 
 Some immigrants, arriving in 1760, brought with 
 them a revitalized conception of an old faith, to 
 add to the already long list of creeds. They w'ere 
 but a handful, a poor company of unfortunate Ger- 
 mans, originally from the Palatinate, but hailing 
 last from Balligarame, in Ireland. They had been 
 twice or thrice banished, but they had found in 
 religion that vitality which the church of the Dutch 
 first families in New York and the church of the 
 British officers were in danger of forgetting save 
 as a vague tradition. The Palatines brought to 
 America the seed for a new planting. 
 
 Their novel development of faith bore the im- 
 press of John Wesley's character, and was after- 
 ward for a while known by his name, though we
 
 24 Nation Builders 
 
 generally know it as jNIelhodism. Its introduction 
 into New York was so unostentatious that not a 
 dozen people were aware of its arrival. The ser- 
 mons that were preached from old conservative 
 pulpits were wordy and doctrinal. Men and wom- 
 en were to be saved or damned according to the 
 logic of their creeds. Those who brought a fresh 
 confidence in the vitality of faith came with a 
 mission. 
 
 For the first six years the Palatines were without 
 church or chapel, content to live quietly, governed 
 by conscience, avoiding wrangling, and cleaving to 
 their ideals. Then one of them — a woman named 
 Barbara Heck — remonstrated with her co-religion- 
 ists about their inactivity. How long it was neces- 
 sary to urge them we do not know, but it is a historic 
 fact that in 1766 Philip Embury, who had been a 
 local preacher in Ireland, opened his house for 
 ])ublic worship, and there held the first service of 
 the first Methodist church in America. The impor- 
 tant landmark was situated on what is now Park 
 Place, then called Barrack Street. It was some- 
 what far uptown in that day, and wc are told 
 that the congregation that met there numbered six 
 .souls. 
 
 A year passed, and the vitality which has .so dis- 
 tinguished this denomination began to evince itself. 
 The congregation had grown — had outgrown its
 
 Introductory 25 
 
 contracted rooms on Barrack Street, and now wor- 
 shiped in more commodious quarters. It hired the 
 rigging loft at what is now 120 WilHam Street. 
 The entire denomination ought to own that spot and 
 erect there a memorial worthy of it. The rigging 
 loft stood for nearly a century after the Methodists 
 began to meet there. The most notable figure in 
 this early chapter of church history was Captain 
 Thomas Webb, an officer in the British army, who 
 preached in his scarlet regimentals. Tradition tells 
 us that he was large and imposing in figure and that 
 he was blind in one eye. He was said to be an 
 eloquent exhorter, and did much to draw people 
 to the new religious society. 
 
 A year more, and the rigging loft was abandoned 
 for a church — an actual church, built on a lot on 
 John Street. The lot cost about fifteen hundred 
 dollars, which was raised by subscription, the mili- 
 tant preacher heading the list with thirty pounds. 
 It is both interesting and instructive to read the list 
 of the friends that the new movement had won in 
 two years' time. The English clergymen gave "ac- 
 cording to their means." Oliver de Lancey put 
 down £6 I OS., and James Jarvis gave in all three 
 times as much ; while William Lupton equaled Cap- 
 tain Webb's munificent gift. The names of the Liv- 
 ingstons, Rhinelanders, Goelet, Walton, Rutgers, 
 Desbrosses, Van Wyck, Duane, De Peyster, and
 
 26 Nation Builders 
 
 twenty others that are part of the city's foun- 
 dation walls are to be found on that subscription 
 list. 
 
 The new church was dedicated in 1768. It was 
 a little back from the thoroughfare, probably with 
 a grassy yard in front, and it was flanked by the 
 preacher's house, or parsonage. This first John 
 Street Methodist Church was a stone structure, sixty 
 by forty-two feet, with galleries that were reached 
 by ladders. It was called the Wesleyan Chapel, and 
 it is interesting to know that this was the first use 
 of the name. There were no other rooms than the 
 main auditorium, where the worshipers were divided 
 according to sex. There was no sumptuous ease and 
 no discrimination made for churchgoers of quality. 
 The seats, or benches, had neither cushions nor 
 backs. Mr. Embury was the regular minister until 
 1770, and it is a tradition that he assisted to build 
 the church and made its uncomfortable furniture, 
 for he was a carpenter and worked at his trade for 
 a livelihood. 
 
 When the congregation had grown to a thou- 
 sand people, which it did in about four years from 
 the start, Mr. Robert Williams, who had from 
 Wesley a commission to preach, took the pastorate. 
 The following extract from tlic minute book of the 
 church, showing the disbursements on Mr. Wil- 
 haiiis's account, has been published:
 
 Introductory 27 
 
 1769 
 
 Sept. 20. Mr. Jarvis for a hat for Mr. Williams f^i 5 o 
 
 Sept. 22. Book for Mr. Williams 9 
 
 Oct. 9. Cloak for Mr. Robert Williams 3 06 
 
 1770 
 July 26. Paid Mr. Maloney for shaving preachers. . . 256 
 Nov. 22. Paid Mr. Boardman for one quarter's 
 
 clothing 7 10 o 
 
 1771 
 May 16. Castor oil for Mr. Pilmoor o 30 
 
 1772 
 July 16. Cleaning the dwelHng-house and house- 
 keeping, washing for the preacher, etc. .5 38 
 
 The Mr. Boardman, who is mentioned as having 
 recei\-ed a quarter's clothing — whatever that may 
 mean — and Mr. Pihnoor, were two missionaries 
 that John Wesley sent out at the same time that he 
 gave Mr. Williams his warrant to preach. In fact, 
 Williams was to report to the two missionaries and 
 work under their direction, but he arrived in New 
 York before them, with the result that he was set- 
 tled in the new church for a while. Mr. Pilmoor 
 afterward became a clergyman of the Church of 
 England. Mr. Boardman returned to England be- 
 fore the War of the Re\'olution, and died there in 
 1782. The missionaries who succeeded these two 
 were the great Francis Asbury, the father of the 
 Methodist Church in America, and Richard Wright, 
 his associate. 
 
 In 1773 Thomas Rankin became the pastor of 
 the John Street Church, and then, at intervals of
 
 28 Nation Builders 
 
 one year, George Shadford, James Dempster, Daniel 
 Ruff, and John JMann. The last-named came in 
 troublous times (1778), and simply took up the 
 work which others had somewhat hastily laid down. 
 He was a "local preacher," who was not to be 
 scared away from his post by war's alarms till relief 
 came. He preached with all the power that was in 
 him, and resigned at length to Mr. Samuel Spraggs, 
 who came from Philadelphia and stayed five years, 
 being unable to get away or to procure anyone to 
 take his place. 
 
 In war time the Methodists, as a body, did not 
 allow political differences to interfere with church 
 worship any more than absolutely necessary. The 
 Hessians shared the building, their chaplains offi- 
 ciating on Sunday mornings and the regular con- 
 gregation in the evenings. The fact that many of 
 the ministers had left the city and churches were 
 closed in consequence led to an increase rather than 
 a falling off in the attendance at the Wesleyan 
 Chapel. 
 
 As there has never been a recorded instance of a 
 Methodist meeting where a collection was not taken, 
 it will surprise no one to know that the years of the 
 British occupancy of New York, during the war for 
 American independence, were not the least prosper- 
 ous of all during the first quarter century of the 
 church's history.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 Along a Blazed Trail 
 
 The course of the circuit rider was a blazed trail. 
 He was a pioneer among the pioneers, swept onward 
 by the impulse of advancing population, in the very 
 forefront of the great race migration that finally 
 peopled the West and that made the wilderness to 
 blossom, if not with the rose, at least with the more 
 prosaic fruits of industry and intelligence. 
 
 The earliest chapters of Methodist history in Eng- 
 land have been touched upon lightly in the intro- 
 ductory pages of this book; not fully, because, 
 though of themselves interesting, yet they form no 
 direct part of our theme. The revival that com- 
 menced within the cloistered walls of Oxford, which 
 drew together the little band of devout youth that 
 won the derisive name of the Pious Club, and which 
 sent John Wesley and his devoted companions out 
 to preach a revitalized religion in the cities and by- 
 ways of England, may be referred to here only as 
 the genesis of American Methodism. Our study is 
 of the men who went into the wilderness to preach 
 the gospel, of the tragedy, the pathos, the humor, 
 and the heroism of their lives, but more particularly 
 of the meaning and the result of their mission.
 
 30 Nation Builders 
 
 It is necessary that we try to understand as fully 
 as possible the religious condition of the United 
 States when the government was in its infancy ; 
 that we examine as far as possible the character and 
 causes of the great advance that filled the forests 
 and the plains, that swept over the mountains and 
 followed the course of the Cumberland and the 
 Ohio ; and that we scrutinize the sources of the pop- 
 ulation of the border states, which were the great 
 field in which Bishop Asbury and his brave sub- 
 ordinates sowed the seed for future harvests. 
 
 At the founding of the republic there was for the 
 first time in the history of the world a complete 
 divorce between church and state. Before that time 
 the secular arm had always been prompt to interfere 
 with religious dogma and jiractice. The idea that 
 any state could with safety permit the independence 
 of the church within its domain, or that the church 
 could stand secure without the support of the state, 
 had never been generally considered as sane proposi- 
 tions till advanced in America. 11ic most dissolute 
 monarchs that e\cr disgraced their crowns were, 
 by virtue of their office, in positions of ecclesiastical 
 authority, and even that aristocracy which is known 
 to history as the Dutch republic clung to the 
 universal theory of a dependent and subsidized 
 church. 
 
 Jt is worth remembering that the conceptiiMi (»f
 
 Along a Blazed Trail 31 
 
 a free church in a free state was not only part of 
 the American idea, but that it was second to no 
 feature of that national movement in its originality 
 and importance. Advanced in early colonial days 
 by Roger Williams, it was adopted by the men who 
 signed the Declaration of Independence and is 
 amply guaranteed by the Constitution of the United 
 States. American church history, therefore, is the 
 record of free and independent societies. In this 
 respect it differs from any record of similar bodies 
 in the Old W^orld. 
 
 The voluntary surrender of all rights of inter- 
 ference by the government of the United States 
 made the natural development of all religious sects 
 possible. Over all the land men prayed or preached 
 as they chose, without priority of rank claimed by 
 one denomination above another. Xew England 
 Congregationalists, Pennsylvania Presbyterians and 
 Quakers, New York Reformed Dutch, Maryland 
 Catholics, Virginia Episcopalians, or Rhode Island 
 Baptists — all expanded or contracted their spheres 
 of ecclesiastical influence, made differences and set- 
 tled them — or left them unsettled — established mis- 
 sions, conferences, publication offices, seminaries, 
 and boards without hindrance or assistance from 
 the government. 
 
 In such a rivalry there could be but one result : 
 the more virile and competent churches forged to the
 
 ^2 Nation Builders 
 
 front, and each society found the field best fitted to 
 its enterprise. 
 
 In the North and East the Presbyterian and Con- 
 gregational Churches were strong and sound. The 
 first named had also a staunch following in the more 
 southern of the seaboard states, particularly among 
 the Scotch-Irish inhabitants. The Baptists, except 
 in Rhode Island, had not reached the importance 
 they afterward attained. The Episcopal Church, 
 especially in Virginia, had been during colonial days 
 ministered to by men whose notoriously lax lives 
 were a reproach to their generation. At the sound 
 of the Lexington fray these fox-hunting, dram- 
 drinking parsons fied to England. 
 
 During the same period the more austere and 
 intellectual New England divine was hammering out 
 and attenuating his nugget of truth into long-spun 
 wires of theological webs. The water of life seemed 
 often in danger of being absorbed and dissipated 
 in the dry sands of polemical controversy. 
 
 Ill all the land there had l)ecn an awakening to 
 evangelical light when Whitcficld made his memor- 
 able lour of Ibo colonics; all sects had felt the influ- 
 ence of his preaching, but the vigor of that inspira- 
 tion was greatly diminished before the outbreak of 
 the Revolution, and in tlic troubled years that fol- 
 Inwcd that outbreak religion languished in America. 
 
 \\'ilh the rehabilitation of business and social life,
 
 Along a Blazed Trail 33 
 
 the readjustment of old conditions, and the adoption 
 of new ones under the new government, the oppor- 
 tunity for the development of a rehgious body that 
 could adapt its methods to the exigencies of rapidly 
 expanding national life was phenomenally great. 
 The Methodist Church enjoyed the great advantage 
 of being, like the nation, in its formative stage. In 
 commonwithother societies, it was relieved from sec- 
 ular control and could pursue its destiny unchecked. 
 There was no preempted territory for it to claim 
 as its right, but it proved the potentiality of the 
 grain of mustard seed. Its opportunity, unlike that 
 of the older and more definitely organized bodies, 
 was obviously in newly settled regions, where its 
 Presbyterian, Congregational, or Dutch Reformed 
 neighbors had not the advantage of a century of 
 occupation. 
 
 The preachers of the new method were obliged 
 to contend with tremendous difficulties, arising from 
 the unsettled condition of the border states when 
 their greatest work was accomplished. These diffi- 
 culties were of two sorts, the first grouping all of 
 the material obstacles and physical perils presented 
 by an almost uninhabited wilderness, and the second 
 combining the several impediments to progress that 
 were inseparable from communities scattered loosely 
 over a wide territory and living without common 
 interests or aims.
 
 34 Nation Builders 
 
 The first experimental confederation of states 
 lately emerged from the condition of colonial de- 
 pendence did not embrace a homogeneous popula- 
 tion. Except in a few seaboard cities, as we shall 
 have occasion to show, little groups of settlers or 
 scattered individuals upon the frontiers lived isolated 
 lives. The one common bond of sympathy and 
 union had been the war, and after the war there was 
 a tendency toward segregation, especially in farm 
 and frontier life. Even the large cities of the sea- 
 board were but imperfectly informed about each 
 other. New York and Boston were connected by 
 a precarious stage service, and a journey from 
 Providence to Baltimore was almost what a jour- 
 ney from Chicago to Manila would be at the present 
 day. As a startling illustration of the tardiness with 
 which news was conveyed, Ave may be reminded 
 that George Washington, having closed his eyes 
 upon life at Mount Vernon, was buried before Con- 
 gress, then sitting at Philadelphia, was informed of 
 his death. Ordinary news did not travel, even 
 slowly. It was too discouraged to move, and stayed 
 at lionic. 
 
 By reviewing such facts as these we receive a just 
 impression of the conditions which the older gen- 
 eration of the Methodist ministers had to face. Wc 
 know that there are explosive substances whose 
 energy is expended along the line of greatest re-
 
 Along a Blazed Trail 35 
 
 sistance — so ^Methodism exerted itself with the 
 greatest vigor where the obstacles were greatest. 
 It displayed an apostolic prescience in discovering 
 in the barred way the way of opportunity. 
 
 The Alethodist preachers, though not always men 
 of education, were, in the broadest and truest sense, 
 picked men. They went into their field w-ith strong 
 convictions, an overmastering sense of responsibility, 
 the courage of soldiers, and the spirit of martyrs. 
 No man of weak will or faltering resolution could 
 have taken up the life of danger and self-sacrifice 
 demanded of every candidate for this work, and no 
 man w^ho had not a fair physical constitution could 
 possibly have persevered in it. The whole moving 
 frontier of our country, that rolled westward year 
 after year like a resistless tide, covered the graves 
 of hundreds of Methodist itinerants who died hero- 
 ically at their posts. 
 
 A single circuit in the old days might embrace 
 several hundred miles of unbroken wilderness, 
 where the ring of the pioneer's ax had only begun 
 to be heard at remote distances; where the most 
 familiar sounds were the cry of the panther and the 
 yell of the equally savage Indian. If the settler, in 
 partial touch, perhaps, w^ith two or three others of 
 his adventurous kind, provided with firearms and 
 protected by the log walls of his shanty or by a 
 palisade of logs, was in constant danger from wild
 
 36 Nation Builders 
 
 beasts and marauding savages, what must be thought 
 of the courage and fortitude of the preachers who 
 multipHed tenfold those common dangers by expos- 
 ing themseh'es unshehered, unaccompanied, and 
 unarmed in e\'ery lonely valley and desolate moun- 
 tain, in the vicinity of camps of hostile red men, 
 by fever-haunted swamps, and in the path of the 
 tempest ? We read in every story of that heroic day 
 the almost uninterrupted chronicle of pillage, tor- 
 ture, and massacre, but we have no record of any 
 Methodist preacher who ever flinched or turned aside 
 from his circuit for fear of Creek or Cherokee. 
 
 Men in all lands read with a thrill of romance 
 the sagas of old heroes, the knightly tales of an out- 
 worn chivalry, the adventurous and gilded brigand- 
 age of Sir Launcelots and Sir Bediveres and Sir 
 Gawains, A\ho went a-questing in that very misty 
 period that is known as "once upon a time"; but 
 a nobler chivalry, a more exalted bravery, was ex- 
 hibited almost within our own time by the humble 
 and often forgotten saddlebag men of Methodism. 
 
 It is not a forced comparison that places the itin- 
 erant preacher on a par with the knight who prances 
 through the pages of Mallory's Arthurian fables. 
 No Galahad ever sought the Holy Grail with purer 
 purpose than did the Axleys and Burkes, the Big- 
 elows and Akcns, in Virginia, Kentucky, and Ten- 
 nessee, in Xcw York, Ohio, and Indiana. What
 
 Along a Blazed Trail 37 
 
 are apocryphal dragons and "orgulous" beasts, 
 strangely misplaced lions, or even knights and 
 vague enchantments, compared with forest fires, 
 congestive fevers, perils of flood and tornado, pierc- 
 ing cold, hungry wild beasts, and almost ubiquitous 
 savages of the American forests? The giants and 
 ogres of fable were invented by men who did not 
 know the Snake and the Blackfeet, the Pawnee and 
 the Sioux. You may search all the pages of ro- 
 mance and recall all that has ever been written in 
 celebration of heroism and yet find nothing to excel 
 the manliness of the men who stood again and again 
 before Asbury, at the close of a Conference, and 
 waited, with the cheerfulness and fortitude of good 
 soldiers, for orders. If any man had an uncommonly 
 good record, was distinguished by health of body, 
 vigor of mind, or peculiar beauty of character — if he 
 was one to whom the heart of the great leader went 
 out with tenderness — that was the man who was apt 
 to find himself assigned to the hardest and most dan- 
 gerous circuit. The post of danger was considered 
 the post of honor, and the man who died at his 
 station was as one who had been signally favored 
 of God. 
 
 The first associates of Bishop Asbury were 
 Thomas Rankin, Richard Boardman, Joseph Pil- 
 moor, Richard Wright, George Shadford, Thomas 
 Webb, John King, Abraham Whitworth, and Jo-
 
 38 Nation Builders 
 
 seph Yearbry. They were at first missionaries to 
 the older cities and centers of population. Pil- 
 moor, Shadford, Boardman, Webb, and others 
 officiated at different times at the old John Street 
 Church in Xew York, of which we have already 
 written. 
 
 As we have seen, it was not until the famous 
 Christmas Conference in Baltimore, in 1784, that 
 the Methodist Church was organized as a separate 
 body. In the interval of a hundred and twenty 
 years the few thousands of that early communion 
 have increased to millions, the handful of preachers 
 has become an army, and the weight of their influ- 
 ence has been mighty in every important question 
 which has come before the American people. If 
 we would understand the springs of action that have 
 swayed whole sections of country at particular 
 crises in our national life, we must go back to the 
 saddlebag men of Methodism. To the fact that 
 they rooted out the thistle and planted the grape 
 is due that other fact that in our day grapes and 
 not thistles have been the main har\est. 
 
 No better illustration can be given of the hard- 
 ships that beset the itinerant preacher than may be 
 found in the unadorned narrative of the venerable 
 Elder Burke. Speaking of the circumstances at- 
 tending a Conference at Masterscn's Station, in 
 Kentucky, as early as 1793, he says:
 
 Along a Blazed Trail 39 
 
 "Previous to the meeting of the Conference we 
 raised a company of twelve persons to proceed to 
 the seat of tlie Conference, for the purpose of guard- 
 ing Bishop Asbury through the wilderness. We 
 met a company at the Crab Orchard, the place we 
 usually met, by advertisement circulated for the 
 purpose of collecting a sufficient number for protec- 
 tion against the Indians. 
 
 "The company, when assembled, consisted of 
 about sixty, all well armed. We organized that 
 night, and I was appointed commander. In the 
 morning, all things being in readiness for our de- 
 parture, we proceeded through the wilderness. The 
 day previous there had started a large company, 
 and among the number were four preachers — two 
 Baptists and two Dunkards. The company with 
 A\'hom they traveled treated them in such an un- 
 gentlemanly and unchristian manner during the first 
 day and night that in the morning of the second 
 day they all four started in advance, and had not 
 proceeded more than one mile before they were sur- 
 prised by a party of Indians, and all four killed and 
 scalped, and their horses and all that they had taken 
 off by the Indians. We camped the first night not 
 far from Big Laurel River, and the next morning 
 passed the spot where the dead bodies of the 
 preachers were thrown into a sink hole, and cov- 
 ered in part Avith some logs, and the wild beasts
 
 40 Nation Builders 
 
 had torn and mangled them in a most shocking 
 manner. 
 
 "That day we crossed the Cumberland River, and 
 passed up the narrows to Turkey Creek, and camped 
 on the bank. I had not slept on any of the two 
 preceding nights, and that night I intended to take 
 a good sleep. Accordingly, after placing out the 
 sentinels and securing my horse, I spread my saddle 
 blankets and, with saddle and saddlebags for my 
 pillow, laid me down close to my horse, and was. 
 in a few minutes, fast asleep. It was not an hour 
 before the company were alarmed. Some said they 
 heard Indians ; others affirmed that they heard them 
 cutting cane for their horses and heard their dogs 
 barking at their camp up the creek ; and before they 
 awakened me the greater part of the company were 
 on their horses and had left the sentinels at their 
 posts. Such was the panic that I immediately har- 
 nessed up my horse and mounted, and had the 
 guards brought in. The niglit was very dark, and 
 we had to cross the creek immediately. The bank 
 was very steep, and wc had to cross in Indian file; 
 and before all had passed the bank became very 
 slippery, and the horses would get nearly to the top 
 and slide back into the creek again. I was in front, 
 and the word passed along the line, 'Halt in front.' 
 At length all got safely over, and proceeded about 
 four miles, to Cannon Creek. The night being very
 
 Along a Blazed Trail 41 
 
 dark, and finding great difficulty in keeping the 
 path, I ordered a halt, and directed every man to 
 turn out to the left and dismount and hold his horse 
 by the bridle. They accordingly did so, and I threw 
 the reins of my bridle over my arm and laid down 
 at the root of a beech tree and was soon asleep. 
 I had previously given orders that we should form 
 one hour before daybreak and be on the road, in 
 order to elude the Indians, should they be in pursuit 
 of us. . . . We crossed the Cumberland Mountains 
 early in the morning, and that night arrived at 
 Bean's Station, near the Hoi stein River, where we 
 were met by the intelligence that Bishop Asbury, in 
 consequence of ill health, could not attend the Con- 
 ference in Kentucky." 
 
 On the return journey the caravan was increased 
 to about one hundred and twenty by the accession 
 of a large number of immigrants and their pack 
 horses. The guard which had come through to 
 escort the bishop, it was agreed, should bring up the 
 rear of the procession. When they arrived at the 
 Cumberland River they found that stream very 
 much swollen,* and upon the opposite bank were a 
 number of hostile Indians. The preacher-captain 
 called for volunteers to ford the river with him, and 
 managed to get eleven companions, who crossed, the 
 savages retiring before them. The whole party then 
 passed the river in safety, and, after a number of
 
 42 Nation Builders 
 
 alarms and narrow escapes, reached the Crab Or- 
 chard in safety, their numbers augmented by several 
 IMethodist preachers who. at the imminent risk of 
 their lives, were working their way through tlie 
 wilds to the Conference. 
 
 At that Conference ]\Ir. Burke received his ap- 
 pointment to the Hinckton Circuit, Kentucky. For 
 the sake of a clearer understanding of the labors of 
 a man of his class, let us see how far the circuit 
 extended. Its northern and eastern boundaries con- 
 sisted of the then frontier settlements — the circuit 
 itself lying beyond the frontier. On the south ran 
 the Kentucky River, and westward was the great 
 Lexington Circuit. It was called a "three weeks' 
 circuit," that meaning that a vigorous traveler could 
 go the rounds of its scattered clearings in that length 
 of time, and it included the three counties of Clarke, 
 Boone, and Montgomery. During the "summer of 
 Wayne's campaign" (against tlio Indians) "great 
 numbers were out in the service," and Burke was 
 transferred to the Salt River Circuit. That was a 
 four weeks' circuit, between four and five hundred 
 miles around, and included Washington, Nelson, 
 Jefferson, Shelby, and Greene Counties. 
 
 Think carefully of all that the distance and the 
 time involved in covering such a circuit implied. 
 Once in four weeks every settler in four counties 
 was visited by the same earnest preacher, who
 
 Along a Blazed Trail 43 
 
 brought, besides his heavenly message, all of the 
 news of the widely scattered members of his parish, 
 and made the lonely individuals of his flock inter- 
 ested participants in the lives of some hundreds of 
 other people. What the preacher on the Salt River 
 Circuit or the Hinckton Circuit was doing every 
 other itinerant in the Methodist connection was do- 
 ing in his appointed field. Throughout the whole 
 borderland this agency, and this agency alone, was 
 laboring not only for the spread of the gospel, but 
 for the creation and the conservation of unity — 
 unity in thought, in spirit, in interest. 
 
 Once in four weeks, twelve times in the year, the 
 itinerant on Salt River made his round, an expected 
 and welcome guest at many a cabin, the friend and 
 counselor of men and women, the instructor of the 
 children. He learned to know the woods and the 
 watercourses, the signs of fair weather or foul, the 
 cry of beast and the note of bird, to avoid danger, 
 to endure hardship, to escape death by the exercise 
 of woodcraft. He learned to travel alone in a re- 
 gion beset often by warring Indians and yet keep 
 his scalp, which was a remarkable feat in those days. 
 
 After two years spent amid the fatigue and perils 
 of this Indian-infested, wild-beast-haunted circuit 
 the staunch old warrior could remember only one 
 remarkable hardship. He says : ''Nothing worthy of 
 record — except hard times. I was reduced to the
 
 44 Nation Builders 
 
 last pinch. My clothes were nearly all gone ; I had 
 patch upon patch and patch by patch, and I received 
 only money sufficient to buy a waistcoat, and not 
 enough for the making, during the two quarters I 
 remained on the circuit." 
 
 During the long struggle of the colonies for in- 
 dependence religion withdrew unto the closet. If 
 it did not languish in the hearts of men it certainly 
 did not declare itself in their stupendous tasks. But 
 when the strife was over, and the young nation 
 found itself face to face with measureless respon- 
 sibilities and untried duties, a new sense of thank- 
 fulness and a new ardor of patriotism began to 
 make themselves known, and gave an exaltant lift 
 to the ambitions for which freedom had opened 
 the way. 
 
 Then it was that religion took up her burden 
 again, with unshackled arms and a lighter heart. 
 The war had left its inevitable heritage of poverty 
 and exhaustion. The nation was poor, and the ex- 
 tinction of martial excitement was followed by the 
 usual reaction, in which carelessness and idleness 
 were distressing elements. But over all was the ex- 
 hilaration of a great work accomplished and the 
 promise of a great future assured. 
 
 All at once measureless opportunities were open- 
 ing to a hardy race that had won its right to govern 
 itself, and a new. clean continental vista unfolded
 
 Along a Blazed Trail 45 
 
 to the energies and the ambition of peace. Vast as 
 the new field was, lying in the unexplored shadows 
 of the wilderness, where lurked the fiercest of human 
 enemies and the most formidable of natural foes, 
 it was nevertheless unstained by any of the iniqui- 
 ties that man had instituted in the train of the Prince 
 of Peace. 
 
 Grim as the vista mav have looked to the timid 
 eye, there were no memorials of Christian hatred 
 in it. No fagots had been lit in its primeval depths 
 in the name of Christ, and no dungeons erected on 
 its grassy plateaus for the cause of love. Beasts of 
 prey and red-handed savages might dispute every 
 foot of the advance, but there were no chartered 
 regents of the Most High to burn and mangle for 
 the Saviour's cause. The echoing spaces were desti- 
 tute of all the comforts and refinements which rob 
 life of its hardships and death of many of its terrors, 
 but they were also free from the traditions of a 
 Henry VHI, a Borgia, or a Torquemada, to which 
 unAvilling obeisance must be made. The most nox- 
 ious everglades and the most inhospitable crags were 
 alike ignorant of the precedents of Dort or the in- 
 tolerance of Westminster, and gave little heed to the 
 claims of Rome or the mistakes of Geneva. The 
 sword had cut the continuity and the authority of 
 religious strife, and, as events proved, the couriers 
 of the faith were to suffer less from cruel nature
 
 46 Nation Builders 
 
 than they had suffered from an overplous brother- 
 hood of man. 
 
 How well the founders of our commonwealth 
 availed themselves of the priceless opportunity we 
 now know, though \\q do not perhaps gi\'e that 
 heed to it which it deserves. They determined not 
 only to open a pathway through the wilderness to 
 life and love, but to close the door to religious strife 
 which lay behind them. They were not only to 
 drive out the enemies of the present, but to put an 
 everlasting curb on the enemies of the past. 
 
 In the conventions which met in 1788 to ratify 
 the Constitution we see the religious men all the 
 ardent defenders of that clause which says that Con- 
 gress shall make no law respecting the establishment 
 of religion or prohibiting the free exercise of speech 
 or of the press. In Massachusetts, where the oppo- 
 sition to the abolishment of religious tests was the 
 strongest, its ablest defenders were clergymen, and 
 it was here that the Rev. Mr. Payson declared that 
 human tribunals for the consciences of men were 
 an impious encroachment on the prerogatives of 
 God. 
 
 The Constitution was adopted by seven states be- 
 fore the close of the year 1788, and went into opera- 
 tion in 1789. It was thus that the nineteenth cen- 
 tury was greeted \\ith a new guarantee, and reli- 
 gious freedom, like a fresh beacon, shed its invita-
 
 Along a Blazed Trail 47 
 
 tion over the peaks of the Alleghanies as if a new 
 sunrise were hghtening in the west. 
 
 The states which under a loose and imperfect 
 confederation had succeeded in defeating Great 
 Britain seemed in that struggle to have exhausted 
 their common stock of vitality, and were like a sick 
 man after a wearing fever has left him. The alli- 
 ance, for it was hardly more than that, which had 
 brought the thirteen colonies together in a common 
 cause against the crown, was utterly ineffectual to 
 build a political structure which should command 
 reverence at home or respect abroad. The states 
 pulled in various directions, each one for itself, each 
 apparently trying to outvie the other in preposterous 
 legislation to remedy local embarrassments. 
 
 If there was little travel, there was less trade be- 
 tween the principal markets of the land. Never was 
 a population of equal size and intelligence poorer. 
 The scarcity of money was so great that the expedi- 
 ent of barter in trade was commonly resorted to; 
 the condition of the little coin in circulation so bad 
 that every merchant kept his coin scales upon the 
 counter. The public treasury was as impoverished 
 as the private purse. At one time the national treas- 
 ury was absolutely without a dollar. Abroad, it 
 was impossible to raise loans, except from the Jews 
 at exorbitant rates of interest. Robert Morris, who 
 had spent his large private fortune for his country's
 
 48 Nation Builders 
 
 aid, actually drew upon the American ambassadors 
 abroad for money, sold the drafts for cash with 
 which to run the machinery of the government, and 
 left the luckless ministers in France or Holland to 
 scrape together by hook or crook the loans which 
 would keep them from being dishonored. American 
 credit was the laughingstock of the world. Protec- 
 tion for American citizens abroad was absolutely 
 unknown. 
 
 Under such conditions it is not hard to understand 
 that there was little or no union sentiment among 
 the people. A man rarely went outside his own 
 state; knew nothing about the man across the bor- 
 der, except to distrust him. The Union as we know 
 it was not born yet. Tlic war wliich was ended 
 was a war for liberty, but it was for the liberty of 
 each separate colony, Ijanded together only because 
 not one could have made any effectual struggle alone. 
 The war for the preservation of the Union, in which 
 a population was willing to lay down its life for a 
 loyal idea, was tlic culminating act of a faith that 
 lirid only begun to germinate three quarters of a 
 century before. 
 
 yVmong communities which did not travel the 
 ■Methodist itinerants came and went. To people 
 isolated through vast agricultural regions and scat- 
 tered in frontier settlements they formed almost the 
 sole cementing bond. To the men who could not
 
 Along a Blazed Trail 49 
 
 see across their hill ranges and over their forests 
 they taught the tenets of a universal brotherhood. 
 They gathered the population of a country in camp 
 meetings and collected a congress of representatives 
 from remote states in Conferences. More than any 
 other agency, more than the political candidate, the 
 officer of the government, or the occasional school- 
 master, the Methodist preachers leavened the lump 
 with democracy. They alone went everywhere, 
 penetrated to every remotest hamlet, every ultimate 
 cabin in the mountains, and, like the wandering pil- 
 grims of mediaeval times, were the news carriers, the 
 idea mongers of their day. More than any other class 
 of men in the New World the itinerant preachers 
 of Methodism were propagandists of the democratic 
 idea. The very form of religion which they pro- 
 fessed was democratic in its origin and tendency, 
 if not in its form of government. The importance 
 of the individual and the claim of the community 
 were everywhere insisted upon. In practical work- 
 ing the religious government was from the class to 
 the circuit and from the circuit to the Conference. 
 
 From the Eastern centers of civilization and 
 thought to the farthest confines of the then Western 
 country, from Baltimore to Canada, from Philadel- 
 phia to the extreme frontier hamlets of Ohio and 
 Indiana, it was the tireless Methodist preacher who 
 carried with his message of gospel freedom the lat-
 
 50 Nation Builders 
 
 est proclamation of civil liberty. Over many hun- 
 dreds of miles of the new country he alone kept the 
 men of the Kentucky clearings and the Tennessee 
 mountains, of farm and forest and valley, in touch 
 with the cities of the seaboard. From his Confer- 
 ences he not only took back to his field of labor the 
 counsels and experiences of his co-religionists, but 
 also the echoes of strenuous words and the acts of 
 a struggling Congress. With the theology of Saint 
 Paul and Saint John went hand in hand the political 
 principles of Hamilton and Madison. The same 
 men who carried the Bible into the wilderness car- 
 ried the Federalist also. 
 
 The only libraries for a large portion of the people 
 of rural America were the books in the packs of the 
 Methodist parsons. The only professors of political 
 economy were the professors of the gospel of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 An old Methodist minister once preached a 
 Thanksgiving sermon in which he said : "We back- 
 woods people ought to thank God most heartily for 
 two things, namely, the Indians and the Methodist 
 preachers. For in the settlement of this great coun- 
 try the Indians kept the white population from scat- 
 tering into clans and taking possession of certain 
 districts of country, claiming them and forming 
 governments of their own — thus confining them to 
 the government: of the country. While the waves of
 
 Along a Blazed Trail 51 
 
 population rolled out westward, the Indians rolled 
 them back again and kept them together. Then the 
 itinerant Methodist preachers, in the true spirit of 
 their Master, followed up the emigrants from block- 
 house to blockhouse and from cabin to cabin." 
 
 This is possibly the only occasion on record when 
 one who had been acquainted with the dangers of 
 frontier life found reason to thank his Maker for 
 the Indians, but the argument used is worth consid- 
 eration. We may be sure that the divine destiny 
 that shaped the ends of the republic bent all agencies 
 to that result which we of to-day sum up in one 
 phrase — the Union.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 The Field 
 
 The latter part of the eighteenth century saw 
 the formation in America of numberless land com- 
 panies, some of them organized with statesmanlike 
 purpose to people new lands and increase the boun- 
 daries of the new republic, others to further the 
 financial fortunes of less patriotic speculators, but 
 all tending toward the same general result — the peo- 
 pling of the new lands that were then known as 
 the West. 
 
 It is hard to realize at this day the diversity of 
 the conditions under which pioneer settlers pushed 
 forward into the wild land beyond the inhabited 
 borders of the thirteen original states. The first to 
 advance — the skirmish line, as it were — consisted 
 of lonely adventurers, generally single men, trap- 
 pers and hunters, who fulfilled their mission, died, 
 and were forgotten. They were the ephemera of 
 population, leaves fluttering before the breeze, straws 
 floating on the edge of the tide. They sometimes 
 made discoveries and opened new patlis. They not 
 infrequently allied themselves with the savages and 
 U-ft a progeny of lialf-brecd children. But they rarely
 
 The Field 53 
 
 became permanent factors in the problem of settle- 
 ment. The second class, closely following these 
 forerunners of population, were divided between 
 those who may be called free agents, making choice 
 of a home beyond the borders of civilization, 
 partly no doubt through the influence of an indefi- 
 nite popular fever for emigration, and those who 
 were persuaded by land agents to a step of which 
 they could not measure the magnitude. 
 
 The scheme of Rufus Putnam and others threw 
 many Revolutionary veterans into Ohio. Private 
 land enterprises decreased the population of Vir- 
 ginia and other states. Political sentiment and dis- 
 content stripped North Carolina of her surplus pop- 
 ulation. New York sent out hordes, so that an 
 Albany correspondent to a New York paper at that 
 time wrote of a constant stream of people, an end- 
 less caravan, moving through that city westward. 
 A census taker in Kentucky in 1790 showed a popu- 
 lation of over seventy thousand, and numbered in 
 the region between the Ohio and the Great Lakes, 
 west of the Pennsylvania line, about four thousand 
 souls. The next census, taken ten years later, gave 
 forty-five thousand to Ohio alone, and above two 
 hundred and twenty thousand to Kentucky. Be- 
 tween 1790 and 1800 the contagious fever of emi- 
 gration from the seaboard states became almost a 
 delirium. Men disposed of whatever they owned
 
 54 Nation Builders 
 
 to raise the money necessary to move with their fam- 
 ilies westward, into regions that were painted to 
 the imagination with every ahuring color, but which 
 lost many supernal attractions upon a closer view. 
 In a single decade, we are told by statisticians, the 
 center of population in the United States moved 
 westward forty-one miles. The majority of the ear- 
 liest settlers in Tennessee came from North Carolina. 
 There were a few straggling forerunners, whose 
 status can hardly be accounted that of actual settlers, 
 wdio drifted into the woods in advance of the tide of 
 immigration that was soon to rise. 
 
 The cabin that William Bean built upon the Wa- 
 tauga in 1769, where a year later James ^^'atson and 
 others joined him, has been put down as the first 
 bona fide settlement. Within the next year another 
 company built a few huts near Rogcrsville, and 
 about the same time the first store west of the Cum- 
 berland Mountains was opened, on the Nollichucky, 
 by Jacob Brown. Following these initial attempts 
 at colonization a number of North Carolinians 
 planted themselves upon what they at first supposed 
 to be Virginia soil, but, finding that the territory 
 belonged to North Carolina, they formed an alli- 
 ance with the other settlements, under the name of 
 I he Watauga Association. It was a confederation 
 for protective purposes, and survived several years. 
 
 To Colonel Richard Ikiidci m'U. who took up land
 
 The Field 55 
 
 between the Cumberland and Kentucky Rivers in 
 1775, is due a larger plan of government than any 
 contemplated by the W^atauga x^ssociation. A num- 
 ber of settlers, induced by Colonel Henderson's rep- 
 resentations to follow him, built their cabins in that 
 part of the country, and between them and the com- 
 panies of James Robertson a compact of government 
 was drawn up. It is needless to say that such a com- 
 pact was of the crudest and loosest construction. 
 If any measures facilitating the operation of courts 
 of law were contemplated, or any means to secure 
 the administration of justice, the provisions made 
 for their operation generall}^ proved inadequate, in 
 the face of the conditions of backwoods life. In the 
 towns there may have been some slight attempt to 
 enforce them, but for years the very meaning of the 
 terms "law" and "order" were forgotten by the men 
 of the border. 
 
 In spite of the dangers to which the frontiersmen 
 were exposed the majority occupied lonely cabins 
 in the woods, though through that section of coun- 
 try which borders the Cumberland River the excess- 
 ive and pertinacious hostility of the Creek Indians 
 made settlement life much more common than upon 
 some other parts of the frontier. Along the Cum- 
 berland bluffs there was a series of small villages, 
 with the cabins of isolated families scattered behind 
 them through the border of the timber land. The
 
 56 Nation Builders 
 
 death rate from the knives and tomahawks of the 
 savages was frightful. "No man dared to fell a 
 tree, to plant an acre of corn, to pick a berry from 
 a bush, to go to the nearest spring for water, or 
 even to sit in the shade of his own cabin, but his 
 gun and powderhorn were ready l^eside him. In 
 1787 thirty-three men were killed by Indians within 
 seven miles of Nashville." 
 
 At the close of the eighteenth century Nashville 
 was the largest and most important city in Tennes- 
 see, though its claims to rank as a metropolis rested 
 upon a couple of hundred log cabins, many of them 
 floorless, with unglazed windows and clapboarded 
 roofs. Besides these dwellings there were a court 
 house, a jail, and several public houses. Beyond 
 Nashville there was nothing to the west, nothing 
 northward short of the Kentucky border, nothing- 
 eastward except a little chain of equally crazy set- 
 tlements on the Cumberland, or the hamlet of Knox- 
 ville, distant about a hundred and fifty miles as 
 the crow flies, but fifteen days away in time. 
 To reach it from Nashville men usually traveled 
 well armed and in bands large enough to make head 
 against the hostile Indians with which the country 
 swarmed. 
 
 An advertisement in the North Carolina State 
 Gazette announced in November, 1788, the comple- 
 tion of a road cut through the forest from Camp-
 
 The Field 57 
 
 bell's Station to Nashville, and the attendance of 
 a guard to escort those who wished to travel to 
 the latter place. It was further announced that the 
 guard would again be in attendance at the same place 
 a year later. 
 
 Under the leadership of such men as John Sevier, 
 long known as Nollichucky Jack, the men of the 
 Carolina outposts that subsequently contributed to 
 form the state of Tennessee not only held their own 
 against the Indians, but actually made headway at 
 an astonishing rate. Before there was any estab- 
 lished court in that territory, except in one or two 
 of the principal settlements, there began to be dis- 
 putes concerning property, and Nashville presented 
 a field for lawyers before the mud was dry in the 
 chinks of its log huts. One of the early lights of 
 that frontier was the young Andrew Jackson, who 
 took his first lessons in warcraft from the Indian 
 fighters of the Cumberland. 
 
 In 1 79 1 the crushing defeat of Saint Clair by the 
 Indians under Joseph Brent spread terror through 
 the whole Western country. In Ohio, Tennessee, 
 Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and wherever in 
 the wilds the foot of a white man had trod, there 
 was panic at the dreadful tale of atrocities, that in 
 some mysterious way was circulated even to the 
 remotest fastnesses of the forest. 
 
 To a preacher crossing the Cumberland range to
 
 58 Nation Builders 
 
 penetrate the promised land lying to the west of 
 them there was always an immediate prospect of 
 hardships and dangers, of some of which we are not 
 ignorant, even at this distance of time. First of all, 
 there was the ever-present peril from the Indians. 
 It was an old saying that the Creeks were always 
 upon the warpath, and, indeed, that statement hardly 
 exceeded the truth. Through the forest to Knox- 
 ville, and beyond that embryo city to the more dis- 
 tant Cumberland lands, there was a well-marked 
 trail, emphasized upon more than one occasion by 
 the passage of troops sent to deal with the savages, 
 and traveled almost constantly in the autumn by 
 bands of immigrants. Yet in spite of the fact that 
 the trail was a highway for the annual passage of 
 hundreds of people, it was a lonely and dangerous 
 path, beset by every peril to which travelers in an 
 American wilderness could be subjected. It bor- 
 dered, if, indeed, it did not trespass upon, the res- 
 ervation which even at that early day our govern- 
 ment guaranteed to the Indians. It led through low 
 lands where there were no streams, and through 
 forests where panthers and wolves abounded. The 
 way was long and arduous, but it was also one of 
 exceeding natural beauty, and even its very ruggcd- 
 ness must have spoken to the awakened mind of 
 a traveling preacher of the sublimity of the Creator's 
 handiwork.
 
 The Field 59 
 
 In another chapter of this book reference is made 
 to a rendezvous of preachers at the Crab Orchard, 
 where they united to form an escort for Bishop 
 Asbury, then expected to travel westward. That 
 famous spot has been described in the journal of 
 an English traveler of that day in the following 
 words : 
 
 "It is a fine, large plain, or natural meadow, con- 
 taining many hundred acres, and covered through- 
 out its whole extent with a tall, rich grass, sur- 
 rounded on every side by the neighboring mountains, 
 and watered with several fine springs, which flow 
 from one end to the other. The scenery of the 
 craggy mountains, covered with trees to their very 
 top, contrasted with the smooth level of the plain, 
 afforded us a view highly picturesque, novel, and 
 enchanting, and one which we could not dwell on 
 but with pleasure. Near one end of it and not far 
 from the road is a very great natural curiosity. It 
 is a subterraneous cavity in a rock under the moun- 
 tains, down which you descend by some steps cut 
 in the stone into a large, spacious room, through 
 which runs a clear, limpid stream of water, which 
 rises from the rock at one end and flows out at 
 the other through a passage underground, and dis- 
 gorges itself in the open air not far from the en- 
 trance to the cave." 
 
 The whole of the way was full of surprises, and to
 
 6o Nation Builders 
 
 a poetic or imaginative traveler must have afforded 
 no little satisfaction; but its distressing features 
 would prevent a too great absorption in its beauties. 
 Not only were the Indians dangerous, but the newly- 
 established white inhabitants, when they could be 
 found, were generally inhospitable and poor. It 
 was no uncommon experience for a preacher to ar- 
 rive at a cabin tired and hungry, after twenty or 
 thirty miles of travel, or perhaps a night spent with- 
 out shelter in the woods, and be told that the family 
 had not enough for themselves and could not give 
 to strangers. If hospitality was ever shown it was 
 to a neighbor, whose good will might be worth hav- 
 ing, but the wayfarer must not expect favors. Food 
 was seldom given away until the preachers had 
 gained something of a foothold in the country. 
 When one had money or other equivalent to offer 
 he might hope for pork and beans, hominy and 
 bacon, or cornbread ; beyond this the larder was 
 usually empty save for what the forest provided. 
 Many a preacher has recorded a repulse at this or 
 that cabin in the wilderness, when he was obliged to 
 lie down, hungry and thirsty, under a tree in the 
 forest, and commit himself to the care of Him whose 
 servant he was. 
 
 A lodging in a Tennessee or Kentucky cabin, 
 even when obtained, was not a thing to be coveted 
 by fastidious people. A pile of husks without a bed-
 
 The Field 6i 
 
 stead, in a room occupied by half a dozen other 
 people, on a floor of rough slabs so loosely placed 
 that snakes not infrequently came up between and 
 slept with the family, was all that a traveler usually 
 dared to hope for. At the very rare houses of pub- 
 lic entertainment that were by courtesy called inns 
 it was customary to put a number of beds in one 
 room, and if they were all full a newcomer might, 
 according to a custom of the country, bunk with any 
 one of the occupants he might choose, waiving the 
 formality of an introduction. For such a lodging 
 and a breakfast, such as a New England housekeeper 
 would blush to offer to a tramp, a not unusual charge 
 was a dollar. From such accounts as we have it 
 would seem that the people of that region, though 
 brave and persevering, were selfish and sordid, till 
 awakened by a spiritual experience. 
 
 The marvelous persistence of the Methodist 
 preachers was exemplified in every clearing in the 
 frontier woods, and the spiritual experience which 
 alone could have worked a reformation in the 
 habits of life and thought of the people and sub- 
 ordinated their sordid anxiety to the splendid reality 
 of a triumphant faith, was due to the ceaseless en- 
 ergy, the tireless patience, with which the itinerants 
 went, almost as mendicants, but full of beneficent 
 purpose, from clearing to clearing, till the gospel 
 was preached to every creature.
 
 62 Nation Builders 
 
 Along the Ohio River near the close of the eight- 
 eenth century the settlements were as few as upon 
 the Cumberland, and they were in as poor and as 
 dangerous condition. Wheeling, with fifty log 
 cabins, Marietta, with two hundred, and a few. 
 smaller groups of humanity, were all that lay be- 
 yond Pittsburg, from which point voyagers, well 
 armed, trusted themselves with their families in 
 clumsy boats to the current of the river, and pre- 
 pared for a running fight with the fierce and crafty 
 foes that at certain points along the shore were very 
 sure to oppose their passage. There were several 
 sorts of craft used by the Ohio River pioneers, the 
 principal ones being flatboats, keel boats, and arks, 
 the latter roofed in a fashion not unlike the popular 
 conception of the ark in which the sur^^ivors of the 
 Noachian deluge came safe to land. Such vessels, 
 when laden with the women and children and the 
 property and provisions of immigrants setting out 
 for frontier homes, generally sailed in consort with 
 others of their kind. Provided with strong slab 
 bulwarks, they were practically floating forts, from 
 which the long rifles of their defenders might be 
 used with deadly effect. Their steering apparatus 
 consisted of sweeps projecting astern, and suggest- 
 ing the steering board of the ancient Norse galleys. 
 These flotillas, long remembered upon the Ohio, 
 were as distinctive as the wagon, called a prairie
 
 The Field 63 
 
 schooner, which came into use upon the plains of 
 the farther West nearly a generation later. 
 
 The woods and marshes that bordered the river 
 abounded with game. The last of the buffalo were 
 disappearing from that part of the country when 
 the first rank of settlers came in. This fact should 
 be noticed as evidence that in at least one instance 
 the decline of the bison was not due to the wasteful 
 energy of white hunters. Everywhere wild turkey, 
 deer, elk, and bear were common, while the waters 
 of the river teemed with palatable fish. 
 
 Those voyages in company must have been won- 
 derful, rememberable experiences. The life of 
 almost complete idleness, enjoyed by men to whom 
 tradition attributes wonderful qualities of courage 
 and hardiness, to match their unrivaled stature and 
 strength, but imputes also such vices as laziness and 
 a love for strong drink, was varied by adventures 
 which in another age and country would have been 
 celebrated in heroic stanzas. The women, chatting 
 together, or occupied with those domestic cares that 
 were not to be intermitted even upon such a jour- 
 ney, and the children, living in a real wonder-world 
 of which they could not guess the extent or the 
 value, were making the most of an experience that 
 would probably never be repeated. 
 
 Limestone, Columbia, and Newport were started 
 — mere clusters of log huts. Cincinnati was a prom-
 
 64 Nation Builders 
 
 ise of something metropolitan, Louisville a place 
 for carousals. There it happened that when Samuel 
 S. Forman set up a store opposite the slab tavern, 
 and greatly surprised his neighbors by shutting up 
 shop on Sunday, some one expostulated with him, 
 on the ground that Sunday had not come over the 
 mountains. 
 
 "O yes it has," answered Forman, cheerfully, 
 "I brought it." 
 
 Near the mouth of the Scioto River the Indians 
 had a cave where they made their rendezvous when 
 preparing for an attack upon a party of immigrants, 
 and the evil fame of this place spread throughout 
 all the frontier. 
 
 After the flatboats and arks had reached their 
 several destinations and the voyagers parted to 
 establish their separate homes, the memory of that 
 brief social experience and the moving panorama 
 of the country through which they had passed must 
 have remained long with them, and even brightened 
 by contrast the loneliness of their lives. Into a 
 world to which ideas never came, where news sel- 
 dom visited them, where the realities of life were 
 nearly all hard, cruel, and exceedingly bitter, a world 
 where terror and calamity were almost the only 
 relief from an appalling monotony, the exiles of a 
 century ago dropi)ed and were lost to sight. 
 
 Most of the pioneers came not from the centers
 
 The Field 65 
 
 of population, where alone at that day the facilities 
 for education could be enjoyed. They had always 
 lived near the border of the world. Finally they 
 went over that border. They were not generally 
 people who had within themselves those resources 
 which might enable a family possessing them to 
 endure a Selkirk existence without repining. They 
 had what was perhaps a much better equipment for 
 the work designed by Providence for them — that 
 is, a store of superabundant physical vitality. Yet 
 we cannot but believe that the lives of the pioneer 
 w^omen of America must have been purgatorial. 
 
 The lawlessness of the Kentucky pioneer was so 
 proverbial that the very term "Kentuck" was a syn- 
 onym for all manner of deviltry. The Kentucky 
 boatmen, we are told, were a class almost as greatly 
 feared as the Indians. Their life was a savage alter- 
 nation of displays of great physical strength and 
 endurance and the most bestial debaucheries. Mod- 
 ern parallels to their mode of life may be found in 
 the Western mining camps of the forties or among 
 the ranches of a latter day. In those days they were 
 unmatched except by the teamsters of the Tennessee 
 woods. It would be erroneous and wrong to picture 
 the pioneer of that time as devoid of all Christian 
 theory or practice, but it was at least like the leaven 
 hidden in a measure of meal, and its working had 
 not commenced. There were undoubtedly members
 
 66 Nation Builders 
 
 of different Christian denominations in Knoxville, 
 Nashville, Cincinnati, and other prominent settle- 
 ments at a very early day. These were mostly Pres- 
 byterians, Baptists, and Methodists, their church 
 affiliations depending largely upon the part of the 
 East from which they had come out. These Chris- 
 tian people sometimes formed small congregations 
 and were ministered to by preachers who were ani- 
 mated by a holy zeal. The Methodists alone formed 
 circuits outside of the centers of population and 
 visited for religious purposes with anything like 
 regularity the outlying cabins and plantations that 
 increased by the thousands every twelvemonth. 
 
 Kentucky, which had gained the nickname of 
 "Satan's Stronghold," became the object of especial 
 solicitude to the preachers of Methodism. In Ken- 
 tucky commenced the visible work of revival that 
 soon was to assume a magnitude unparalleled in the 
 history of modern religious movements, and unex- 
 celled for force and potency even in the days when 
 Peter the Hermit carried his enthusiasm like a fire- 
 brand through the towns and hamlets of Europe, 
 preaching a crusade for the recovery of the Holy 
 City. Of the Red River revival John Bach Mc- 
 Master makes this significant note : 
 
 "Two young men began the great work in the 
 summer of 1799. They were brothers, preachers, 
 and on their way across the pine barrens to Ohio^
 
 The Field 67 
 
 but turned aside to be present at a sacramental 
 solemnity on Red River. The people were accus- 
 tomed to gather at such times on a Friday, and by 
 praying, singing, and hearing sermons prepare them- 
 selves for the reception of the sacrament on Sun- 
 day. At the Red River meeting the brothers were 
 asked to preach, and one did so with astonishing 
 fervor. As he spoke the people were deeply moved, 
 tears ran streaming down their faces, and one, a 
 woman, far in the rear of the house, broke through 
 order and began to shout. For two hours after the 
 regular preachers had gone the crowd lingered and 
 were loath to depart. While they tarried one of the 
 brothers was irresistibly impelled to speak. He 
 rose and told them that he felt called to preach; 
 that he could not be silent. The words which then 
 fell from his lips roused the people before him to 
 *a pungent sense of sin.' Again and again the 
 woman shouted, and would not be silent. He started 
 to go to her. The crowd begged him to turn back. 
 Something within him urged him on, and he went 
 through the house shouting and exhorting and prais- 
 ing God. In a moment the floor, to use his own 
 words, *was covered with the slain.' Their cries for 
 mercy were terrible to hear. Some found forgive- 
 ness, but many went away 'spiritually wounded' 
 and suffering unutterable agony of soul. Nothing 
 could allay the excitement. Every settlement along
 
 68 Nation Builders 
 
 the Green River and the Cumberland was full of 
 religious fervor. Men fitted their wagons with beds 
 and provisions and traveled fifty miles to camp upon 
 the ground and hear him preach. The idea was 
 new. Hundreds adopted it, and camp meetings be- 
 gan. There was now no longer any excuse to stay 
 away from preaching. Neither distance nor lack of 
 houses nor scarcity of food nor daily occupations 
 prevailed." 
 
 In a succeeding chapter we will dwell more par- 
 ticularly upon the events here described. 
 
 The settlement of Ohio and Indiana differed 
 somewhat from that of the region we have been par- 
 ticularly considering. 
 
 During the entire period of national life in the 
 United States few subjects that have claimed the 
 attention of Congress have proved more provocative 
 of discussion than the disposal of undefined, or ill 
 defined. Western territory. From Virginia, that 
 claimed vast tracts of land beyond the Ohio, to 
 Maryland, stoutly refusing to join the first confed- 
 eration of states till a settlement on that head had 
 been reached, tiic representatives of the thirteen 
 embryo states represented almost as many shades of 
 political opinion. New York broke the deadlock 
 which was the result of that discussion by a proposi- 
 tion to cede the Western land claimed by her to the 
 federal government, under certain restrictions and
 
 The Field 69 
 
 subject to certain conditions and reservations. 
 Other states subsequently fell in line. In October, 
 1780, Congress agreed to dispose of all lands so 
 ceded for the common advantage. 
 
 We may be permitted to go back to a still earlier 
 period in order to understand the conditions pre- 
 ceding and partly influencing the occupation of the 
 Northwest by English-speaking immigrants. The 
 first actual settlers of that part of the country that 
 is now Indiana were Frenchmen, whose life was 
 a free, irresponsible, reckless, half-savage existence. 
 Their means of subsistence were such as satisfied 
 their Indian neighbors. There was neither tillage 
 nor manufacture. The few posts or settlements 
 were mainly along the Wabash or its tributaries, at 
 Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Ouitanon, and several other 
 points. The business of the inhabitants being hunt- 
 ing and kindred occupations, their trade staples were 
 hides, pelts, tallow, and beeswax, in which commod- 
 ities they, through their factors or agents, did quite 
 a thriving business as early as 1735 or 1740. They 
 lived contentedly under commandants, as their gov- 
 ernors were called, and looked up to such exalted 
 personages as 'Sieur de Vincennes, or Jean Saint 
 Ange de Belle Rive, as of quite another clay from 
 common mortals. 
 
 The first French comers laid claim to all the 
 Mississippi valley and the broad belt of country
 
 70 Nation Builders 
 
 watered by its tributaries, and their explorers, as 
 well as the more far-seeing of the French states- 
 men of the day, dreamed of empire — a dream that 
 might have been realized had the territory possessed 
 a seacoast. The lives of the people were under the 
 domination of courtiers and favorites, ambitious 
 adventurers, and self-sacrificing priests of the Rom- 
 ish Church. 
 
 English dominion over the region referred to 
 commenced with Wolfe's victory over Montcalm, 
 a victory which the late Professor John Fiske char- 
 acterizes as "the greatest turning point yet discov- 
 erable in modern history." It was the decisive an- 
 swer to the question whether French or English 
 ideas and institutions should govern the destinies 
 of the North American continent. When Saint 
 Ange evacuated Vincennes he closed the chapter 
 of French imperialism, picturesque indolence, and 
 ignorance, and priestly domination. Admirable in 
 their courage, devotion, and faith as the missionary 
 priests were, it is doubtful if they would ever have 
 stimulated their roving parishioners to clear think- 
 ing or effective living. 
 
 The English settlers who followed on the heels 
 of the French were harder, coarser in the grain, 
 more practical, less picturesque. The gayeties of 
 the frontier villages gave place somewhat to bru- 
 talities. The men who danced and sang, played the
 
 The Field 71 
 
 fiddle, and appreciated the romantic and dramatic 
 possibilities of the wonderland they inhabited gave 
 place to a race that swung the ax and planted corn 
 in the clearings, fought and hunted for recreation, 
 were content to do without either politeness or reli- 
 gion. Of course, the French settlers did not disap- 
 pear when the English rule commenced, but they 
 were no longer the dominant race, and new ideas 
 ruled. The development of this frontier from the 
 battle of the Heights of Abraham to the struggle 
 for American independence was gradual and his- 
 torically uneventful. 
 
 The exploit of Colonel George Rogers Clark, who 
 in February, 1779, captured Vincennes, was of tre- 
 mendous importance to the future of the United 
 States. In view of our great development it is safe 
 to say that no more fruitful victory has ever been 
 achieved within the borders of the United States. 
 It was decisive in this important particular — that it 
 enabled the young nation to maintain her claim to 
 the territory that had once belonged to France, 
 reaching to the line of the Spanish possessions, and, 
 when the credit of the infant government was at its 
 lowest ebb, to base loans upon these lands, then the 
 only available collateral that the nation possessed. 
 Mr. E. A. Bryan, writing for the Magazine of 
 American History in 1889, has justly said: "All 
 who have weighed the difficulties and dangers at-
 
 y2 Nation Builders 
 
 tending the construction period following the Rev- 
 olutionary War know that the basis of the marvelous 
 success attending the financial management of the 
 illustrious Hamilton lay in the millions of fertile 
 acres which the genius and the sword of Clark had 
 won." 
 
 In the territory so acquired the sale of homestead 
 land and the colonization of veteran soldiers was 
 accomplished by the formation of the Ohio Com- 
 pany, a plan first proposed by General Rufus Put- 
 nam and put into effect as soon as titles could be 
 obtained from the Indians and approximate surveys 
 made. The company, in brief, was organized upon 
 the proposal to take all the magnificent country 
 north of the Ohio River and sell it in township lots 
 to impoverished soldiers at a nominal price for each 
 lot. To the individual settler his section was almost 
 a free gift, so small was the price, but the aggregate 
 provided a welcome and necessary addition to the 
 depleted national treasury. A ])rovision for terri- 
 torial government was also made, and the develop- 
 ment into states of the newly settled lands was a 
 l)art of the far-reaching plan. The work of coloni- 
 zation was done through the Ohio Joint Stock Com- 
 pany, by whose agency lands were purchased and 
 the details of the scheme worked out. 
 
 These were the sources of population in Ohio and 
 Indiana and all of the so-called Northwestern Tcr-
 
 The Field 73 
 
 ritory. First the French conrcurs des hois, in scat- 
 tered trading posts; then the coarser but far more 
 energetic Enghsh hunters and frontiersmen ; and, 
 last of all, a sudden influx of resolute New Eng- 
 landers and Virginians, men who had proved their 
 hardiness on the battlefields of the republic from 
 Concord to Yorktown. Into this abounding wilder- 
 ness thousands of the latter class went and were 
 apparently swallowed up in the shado\AS of the 
 universal woods. An army poured westward, seg- 
 regated, and spread like the bursting of a rocket 
 and became the isolated units who in time should 
 form nuclei for villages and towns. 
 
 It was upon such a field as this that the tra\'eling 
 preachers entered. In the northern region there 
 was perhaps a greater basis of character, serious- 
 ness of mind, and inherited tendency toward religion 
 and morality to work upon than in the south. A 
 large portion of the country was settled by dis- 
 ciplined New Englanders. In the Cumberland and 
 the Kentucky settlements the people seem to have 
 been less self-controlled, more nervous, and more 
 emotional, and perhaps these differences will account 
 for the fact that the flame when once kindled in 
 the south spread like a conflagration in the forest, 
 leaping from hamlet to hamlet with the swiftness 
 and something of the consuming power of flame, 
 while northward the fire crept more slowly and
 
 74 Nation Builders 
 
 individuals were separately won. Both north and 
 south the preachers had to contend with the same 
 absence of the restraints of a well-organized gov- 
 ernment or the controlling influences of civilized life.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Some of the Sowers 
 
 At the commencement of the nineteenth century 
 Ohio, as we have seen, was the home of a scattered 
 population of about forty-five thousand souls — that 
 is to say, a handful when compared with the extent of 
 the territory over which they were distributed. John 
 Kobler, a Virginian by birth, is supposed to have 
 been the very first preacher to proclaim the gospel 
 message in that wild country. Sent out by Asbury, 
 he pushed his way as far as the hardiest pioneer 
 had penetrated, and spent eighteen years of his life 
 in unremitting toil, in the face of incredible hard- 
 ships, and then the overtaxed body gave out, and 
 he was retired from the itinerant field, to be shortly 
 afterward put upon the superannuated list. 
 
 It will perhaps best serve the purpose of this work 
 to give a part of John Kobler's experiences in his 
 own words, as he wrote them in 1841 for the West- 
 ern Historical Society: 
 
 "In the year 1798 the writer of this article was 
 sent by Bishop Asbury as a missionary to this region 
 of country, then called the Northwest Territory, 
 now Ohio State, to form a new circuit and to plant 
 the first principles of the gospel.
 
 76 Nation Builders 
 
 "In passing through the country I found it ahiiost 
 in its native, rude, and uncultivated state. The in- 
 habitants were settled in small neighborhoods, few 
 and far between, and little or no improvement about 
 them. No sound of the everlasting gospel had yet 
 broken upon their ears. The site where Cincinnati 
 now stands was nearly a dense and uncultivated 
 forest. No improvement was to be seen but Fort 
 Washington, which was built on the brow of the 
 hill and extended down to the margin of the river; 
 around which was built a number of cabins, in which 
 resided the settlers of the place. This fortress was 
 then under the command of General Harrison, and 
 was the great place of rendezvous for the federal 
 troops which were sent by the government to 
 guard the frontiers or to go forth to war with the 
 Indians." 
 
 Kobler is described as a man of more than ordi- 
 nary strength and endurance, with mental endow- 
 ments above the average. He was the first of that 
 devoted band of missionary preachers who stood at 
 the threshold of new destinies, to guide the popula- 
 tion of the Ohio frontier into the ways of order, law, 
 and religion. WHiat incalculable influence he and 
 his colaborers wielded can only be guessed. The 
 first communion table spread in Ohio by John 
 Kobler drew together from all quarters between 
 twenty-five and thiily communicants. Forty years
 
 Some of the Sowers 77 
 
 later the Methodist Church had enrolled there a hun- 
 dred thousand members. 
 
 Benjamin Lakin was another of the early preach- 
 ers in Ohio. He followed Kobler closel}^, and was 
 appointed to the Southern Miami District, as it was 
 called ; and, what makes his case somewhat unique 
 for that place and time, he took his young- wife with 
 him. A personal account given by J. B. Finley of 
 his first meeting- with this courageous preacher re- 
 fers to the year 1802 : "It was during this year we 
 became acquainted with this pioneer. We met him 
 as he was moving from Kentucky to the field of his 
 labor. The point where we met him was on the 
 eastern side of the Little Miami, the track of the 
 railroad now (1855) occupying the spot. Then 
 there was nothing which deserved the name of a 
 road — a kind of a trace. We were surprised to see 
 a man and a woman in a cart drawn by one horse ; 
 surprised, because this was a superior way of trav- 
 eling, not known to the settlers, who traveled and 
 carried their movables on pack horses. As we came 
 up we halted to look at his vehicle." 
 
 There is something very naive and charming in 
 the picture here suggested, the horseman looking 
 with more admiration and curiosity on the luxury 
 of a springless. rough, two-wheeled cart than we 
 would bestow upon the latest triumph from the 
 shops of fashionable manufacturers.
 
 78 Nation Builders 
 
 'As we stopped, he inquired how far it was to 
 the next house. This we were unable to tell, for 
 the road was uninhabited. We then had the curi- 
 osity to ask him who he was, where he was going, 
 and what was his business. He quickly replied: 
 'My name is Lakin ; I am a jMethodist preacher, and 
 am going to preach the gospel to lost sinners in the 
 Miami and Scioto country." 
 
 Sixteen years Lakin stood it; then he went back 
 and was put on the superannuated list. It was a 
 hard life, that might superannuate a man of thirty- 
 five or forty. How gloriously they spent them- 
 selves, those great, brave fellows of a heroic time! 
 They did not go blindfold, but with open eyes faced 
 the conditions that meant a shortened life for most 
 of them. Some of them got no pay, and none of 
 them ever received much. They would not beg for 
 themselves, being proud and self-reliant men, and 
 they were often hungry and cold — a long proces- 
 sion of them, four thousand ordained by Bishop 
 Asbury alone; old young men, prematurely worn 
 out, victims of fever, of starvation, of exhaustion; 
 but no record has ever reached us of any complaint 
 from a man of them, save this, that they could not 
 spend their lives faster in their barter for souls. 
 
 There have been other martyrs in the world's 
 story, and will doubtless be many more as long as 
 the path of duty starts away at right angles from
 
 SCME OF THE SoWERS 79 
 
 "the primrose path of dalliance." The unique fea- 
 ture in the martyrdom we have been contemplating 
 was the fact that the martyrs of the frontier cir- 
 cuits were not only cheerful but often jovial men. 
 They delighted in innocent mirth, could tell a good 
 story, and laugh at even their own mishaps. Theirs 
 was courage of the highest order, that could make 
 light of dangers and turn difficulties into a jest. 
 
 There was at one time in the Northwest a sturdy 
 preacher by the name of Jesse Walker, and his ex- 
 ploits have become familiar traditions in the field 
 where he labored. He went in his youth from 
 North Carolina into Tennessee and Kentucky, and 
 for ten years he ranged the forest and kept just 
 ahead of the foremost of his brethren. It was said 
 that he could not be tired out, but would travel 
 without rest or food, with an almost superhuman 
 patience and endurance. He had the woodsman's 
 ability to locate the place he wanted to reach and 
 travel to it in a straight line, as the bee or the 
 pigeon does, without map or guide. He could not 
 get lost either in the mountains or the canebrake, 
 and he traveled with a delightful disregard of such 
 small conveniences as roads or trails. 
 
 Walker's ruling passion was to convert souls, and 
 it was a matter of pride with him to be always first 
 on the ground. In 1806 he was appointed to the 
 Illinois Circuit, and set out in company with I\Ic-
 
 8o Nation Builders 
 
 Kendree, who was presiding elder of the Cumber- 
 land District, of which the Illinois Circuit was a 
 part. They carried all their belongings in their 
 saddlebags, and camped by the way, as the country 
 over which they passed was entirely unsettled and 
 unbroken. It must have been an exciting and pleas- 
 urable journey to two such adventurous pilgrims, 
 for they had rain, river floods, wild beasts, and other 
 untoward tilings to combat. They swam the rivers 
 and climbed the hills with the zest of boys out for 
 a holiday. After forming a new circuit McKendree 
 went toward Missouri, and Walker began to hunt 
 out the scattered members of his appointed parish 
 and see that not one was neglected. A man could 
 not bury himself so deep in the wilderness that 
 Walker did not find him and talk to him about his 
 sins and the way of salvation. To those who did not 
 want to hear him he must have seemed a perfect 
 pest. It is told of him that once a new settler had 
 just selected a site for his cabin and was looking- 
 for timber to build with when the preacher appeared, 
 equipped with his Bible and full of zeal for the new- 
 comer's spiritual welfare. He was greeted emphat- 
 ically, if not cordially, by the latter, who explained, 
 with considerable warmth, that he had moved from 
 his last place to get rid of the Methodist preachers, 
 who were worrying him to death. 
 
 ( )n another occasion a brother preacher made up
 
 Some of the Sowers 8i 
 
 his mind that if it was possible he would steal a 
 march on Walker, as he never visited a new family 
 that he did not find the other had been ahead of him 
 and had already preached to them. Hearing that a 
 new family had located at Root River (Racine), 
 he hurried to visit them. On his way he stopped 
 at Fort Dearborn (now Chicago) and met Walker, 
 who owned to being a little tired, as he had just 
 come back from a call on that nciv family at Root 
 River. Elder John Sinclair told the story, and 
 added that after that experience he owned defeat 
 and left the old pioneer to the unquestioned enjoy- 
 ment of his laurels. 
 
 Preeminent among American Methodists was 
 Francis Asbury. Though an Englishman by birth, 
 he had begun to be accustomed to the New World 
 and its ways when at the Christmas Conference 
 in 1784 he was chosen and consecrated a bishop, 
 and he became the natural leader of the great move- 
 ment that has influenced national life to an extent 
 that few movements have equaled and few historians 
 have recognized. 
 
 It appears that j\Ir. Asbury refused the invest- 
 ment upon authority delegated by Mr. Wesley till 
 the choice had been confirmed and urged by the 
 Conference, when he yielded to what must have 
 seemed, even with such a backing, a very startling 
 innovation. Never had a bishop been so democrat-
 
 82 Nation Builders 
 
 ically indorsed, and it may be said that no conse- 
 cration of a similar character ever met with a 
 greater outburst of disapproval from the Church of 
 England. Charles Wesley was particularly vehement 
 in his protest against a measure which he regarded 
 not only as a dangerous but a wicked innovation. 
 
 One of the first official acts of the new bishop was 
 the signing of a memorial to Washington, setting 
 forth the loyalty of the Methodist clergy to the 
 infant government. The Methodists were the first 
 to offer to Washington congratulations upon his 
 election to the Presidency, and the Methodists were 
 his firm and loyal supporters always. 
 
 What might have been the history of Methodism, 
 and how modified the history of the United States 
 might have been, had it not been for the pronounced 
 Americanism of Francis Asbury, of Staffordshire, 
 it is impossible to say; but it is not too much to 
 affirm that the influence he wielded has seldom been 
 surpassed by that of any single man in America, 
 and that its great weight was always in the balance 
 with whatever measure conserved the union of the 
 American states and the unity of the American 
 people. 
 
 The Englishmen sent as preachers to the Amer- 
 ican colonies before the war by the Wesleyan Con- 
 ference nearly all returned to the mother country 
 when hostilities commenced. The two exceptions
 
 Some of the Sowers 83 
 
 to that exodus from the chosen field were said to 
 be Shadford and Asbury. Bishop Simpson is au- 
 thority for the statement that Asbury alone remained 
 at his post. 
 
 An early evidence of the new bishop's zeal was 
 displayed in his effort to found a much needed col- 
 lege in the neighborhood of Baltimore. This subject 
 was broached during the first meeting between Dr. 
 Coke and Mr. Asbury, and so energetically did they 
 work that when the Conference met they had suc- 
 ceeded in raising about a thousand pounds by 
 subscription. 
 
 Francis Asbury was forty-two years younger than 
 Wesley, to whom alone he has been second in in- 
 fluence in the society they served. The wisdom and 
 humanity of the younger man, his high faith and 
 noble courage, made him a fit leader of men, and 
 his untiring zeal and industry enabled him to im- 
 press upon his generation so deep a mark that there 
 seems to be no immediate danger of its effacement. 
 Asbury commenced his education at an English vil- 
 lage school, but his schooldays were brief, coming to 
 an end when he had reached the age of fourteen 
 years, when he was apprenticed to a trade, as was 
 customary at that day. Two years later he became 
 a local preacher, and was received by Wesley into 
 the itinerant ministry at twenty-two. When twenty- 
 six years of age he came to America as a missionary.
 
 84 Nation Builders 
 
 Unused to woods and woodcraft, to the hardships 
 and makeshifts of pioneer settlements and the perils 
 of the almost unbroken frontier, he made himself 
 master of this new art of semi-savage living, learned 
 to follow a blazed trail, and to camp far from the 
 habitations of men, and, indeed, in all things to con- 
 form to the usages of the people among whom his 
 lut was cast. 
 
 When he came to America there was but one 
 ]\Iethodist society having a stated place of worship 
 — that in New York city — and in all the land the 
 followers of John Wesley numbered not more than 
 six hundred souls, scattered over two states. He 
 lived to see the little handful increase to a multitude. 
 As the first INIethodist bishop to wear that title in 
 America, he was at the head of every movement, 
 cither educational or ecclesiastical. He traveled 
 — at a day when to tra\-cl meant unbroken roads 
 and saddlebags — over two hundred and seventy 
 thousand miles, visiting every part of the country 
 where the foot of a white man had strayed, braving 
 forest, mountain, rmd swamp with dauntless cour- 
 age, preaching abo\'e sixteen thousand sermons, and 
 converting an unnnmbcrcd host. In the ranks of 
 llic workers of all the ages there arc few who can 
 claim a right to stand beside Bishop Asbury. 
 
 We have bnt commenced the story of liis labors. 
 He ordained (hiring the successive years of his min-
 
 Some of the Sowers 85 
 
 istiy four thousand preachers, each one of whom 
 was as a torch Hghted in a dark place. He presided 
 at two hundred and twenty-four Conferences. He 
 laid the foundation of the first Methodist college, 
 and worked with all his great strength for the estab- 
 lishment of a comprehensive educational system, 
 to be extended to every district throughout the land. 
 There was often a Pauline cast to his adventures, 
 and certainly a strong suggestion of the great apostle 
 to the Gentiles in his character. To the end of his 
 long life he remained single, being of the opinion 
 that a wife might distract his attention from his 
 work. He was a mighty organizer, a general, the 
 man most needed for the American branch of 
 Wesley's following. 
 
 While Asbury may have lacked the almost peril- 
 ous sublimation of Wesley's more exalted moods, 
 which were at times too mystical for popular com- 
 prehension, and while he certainly did not follow 
 him into those awful depths of doubt and despond- 
 ency into which the great leader was prone to 
 plunge, yet one may question if his more normally 
 balanced temperament and wisely controlled intel- 
 lect did not make him a better and safer leader for 
 the men of the new country. American IMethodism, 
 that great system, solid to withstand the world and 
 sufficiently elastic to embrace Christendom, fine in 
 its conception and magnificent in its results, was
 
 86 Nation Builders 
 
 largely the work, under Providence, of Bishop 
 Asbury, or at least was planned under the immedi- 
 ate direction of his genius. If success is to be 
 measured by the extent to which a man accomplishes 
 the object that lies nearest to his heart, then Francis 
 Asbury must be accounted one of the most suc- 
 cessful men that America has ever known, though, 
 like his Master, he was poor in purse and often had 
 not where to lay his head. He died at Spottsyl- 
 vania, Virginia, March 31, 1816. 
 
 Bishop Asbury's views on the itinerancy were 
 strong, his expression of them unequivocal. Soon 
 after his landing in America he wrote : "At present 
 I am dissatisfied. My brethren seem unwilling to 
 leave the cities (that is, in the winter season), but 
 I think I shall show them the way. ... I am in 
 trouble, and more trouble is at hand, for I am de- 
 termined to make a stand against all partiality. I 
 have nothing to seek but the glory of God, nothing 
 to fear but his displeasure." 
 
 The bishop's way of making appointments showed 
 that inexorable, soldierly bent of character that was 
 one of his strong qualifications for leadership. lie 
 first studied the characters and temperaments of 
 the men to be appointed. Next, he made as careful 
 a survey of the ground as possible, traveling annu- 
 ally thousands of miles to accomplish this end. 
 I''inally, having fitted the laborer to his field accord-
 
 Some of the Sowers 87 
 
 ing to his own best judgment, he made the matter 
 the subject of earnest prayer for guidance. His 
 resolve once formed, nothing of an ordinary char- 
 acter was suffered to interfere with it. He made 
 his Hst of appointments with ahnost despotic power, 
 but with a conscientious regard for the great work 
 of the church. All recognized that he was but the 
 servant of the work, at one in that regard with the 
 youngest and most obscure man in the ranks. 
 
 He showed the highest confidence in the preachers, 
 his beloved brethren, by treating them exactly as 
 he treated himself — without consideration. At the 
 end of a Conference the bishop read without com- 
 ment or interruption the list of appointments, the 
 preparation of which had cost him labor and 
 thought, tears and prayers without limit or number. 
 Sometimes with trembling voice he read, knowing 
 the hardships and dangers to which his word would 
 commit these dear laborers, but always inexorably. 
 When the last name was read, it has been told, he 
 turned at once to the door, where his horse stood 
 saddled, and rode away to avoid possible discussion 
 or appeal. 
 
 It is a matter of history that Asbury found the 
 itinerant feature of the Wesleyan work in America 
 already disappearing when he arrived, and that he 
 revivified it. Dr. Daniels says: "Beyond all doubt 
 this young Englishman, by his sagacious manage-
 
 88 Nation Builders 
 
 ment of this very question, saved the cause of Meth- 
 odism in America from early and inglorious death. 
 . . . Colonial Alethodism and a settled ministry 
 were entirely incompatible." The Methodist preach- 
 ers got to be known as the saddlebag men. The 
 two requisites to a clerical equipment were a horse 
 and a Bible. Some one has said that after asking 
 if a candidate had the grace of God in his heart, 
 and the ability to preach or exhort, the very next 
 question always was, "Has he a horse?" Without 
 the latter it would have been next to impossible to 
 traverse the wilderness. For half a century after 
 Asbury's advent the gospel was on horseback in 
 America. 
 
 One reads with amazement some of the records 
 of the hardships and dangers of the early circuit 
 riders. Like a page from some old saga comes the 
 account of Burke's ride, from appointment to ap- 
 pointment, through a country swarming with hostile 
 red men, when the settlers gathered in blockhouses 
 or behind palisades, rifle in hand. During the 
 Cherokee War the preacher was near the French 
 Broad River and was warned that it would prob- 
 ably mean death to him to sally forth on his circuit. 
 At his first appointment he found the people gath- 
 ered with direful accounts of a large force of sav- 
 ages within the limits of the settlement. Neverthe- 
 less, having got what hearing he could at the first
 
 Some of the Sowers 89 
 
 and not losing his life, he set out for the second 
 appointment, on the south bank of the Little River. 
 Two men were found who oft'ercd to pilot him 
 through the woods; but the evidences of danger 
 multiplied till they were driven back to protect their 
 families, and the preacher went on alone. 
 
 The next settlement was also alarmed, and Burke 
 \\as met by a crowd of eager men and women en- 
 gaged in strengthening the defenses of their houses. 
 They were too busy to listen to preaching. The 
 tales of Indian atrocities, which are merely literature 
 to most of us, were terrible realities to the people 
 of the frontier of that day. With almost frantic 
 haste they gathered material for defense as long as 
 the light lasted, and when night came sat down in 
 the darkness, not daring to make a light, each man 
 with his rifle in his hand. 
 
 Finding this frightened flock unable to compre- 
 hend the words he spoke to them, Burke set out 
 again, traveling by night so as to avoid the savages, 
 and leading his horse over a great part of the way. 
 Stealing through the forest in the dark, on foot and 
 alone, from danger to danger, this intrepid member 
 of a heroic band followed the path of duty without 
 question, though to say that he was without fear 
 would indicate an almost insensible mind. 
 
 At length, still under cover of the darkness, he 
 succeeded in reaching the settlement he sought, and
 
 90 Nation Builders 
 
 there found himself face to face with a new danger, 
 as the inhabitants thought him an Indian, trying to 
 decoy them, and prepared to "fill him full of lead." 
 Finally a woman recognized the preacher's voice, 
 and he was admitted. After the natural expressions 
 of amazement at the risks that a Methodist preacher 
 would take to fill his appointments, the people lis- 
 tened attentively while he preached and prayed with 
 them. The next day, in spite of their protests, he 
 proceeded upon his circuit. On his next round the 
 brave itinerant found to his deep sorrow that all 
 of the people at that place had been murdered by 
 the savages, though he had escaped, through a coun- 
 try swarming with them, without the slightest 
 injury. 
 
 Bishop Asbury was frequently exposed to the 
 same dangers which at this distance of time add a 
 romantic charm to the story of his colaborers. Upon 
 one occasion, having reason to fear an Indian at- 
 tack while upon his way to a Conference, he and a 
 few companions stretched a rope around their tem- 
 porary stopping place, with the idea of tripping any 
 stealthy foe who might try to approach under cover 
 of darkness. Each man, except those on sentinel 
 duty, slept with the bridle of his horse around his 
 arm, and so a night in the forest was passed, but 
 without attack. Despite the fact that they were dis- 
 turbed and harrassed by the way, the bishop and
 
 Some of the Sowers 91 
 
 his little cortege reached the Conference in safety, 
 though the country was ahve with hostile foes and 
 every week brought its record of atrocities. 
 
 The discouragements that beset the preacher were 
 not always in the way of physical obstacles or dan- 
 gers. It took peculiar force and nerve to compel 
 the attention of an indifferent or even hostile audi- 
 ence. Some of the younger and more diffident 
 preachers must have gone through a purgatorial 
 experience on some of the wilder circuits. It is 
 told of the great McKendree, afterward a bishop, 
 that when upon his first circuit he made so unfavor- 
 able a first impression that a brother who was to be 
 his host openly expressed his disgust. "What will 
 they send us next?" he burst out. The young 
 preacher heard him, and was quite ready to share 
 the unfavorable opinion. He preached in fear and 
 trembling, and without much edification. As he did 
 not afterward appear at the house, his host went to 
 hunt him up, and found him at the scene of his 
 defeat, sitting dejectedly, with his head in his hands. 
 He wanted nothing to eat, he said. He felt that 
 he was a failure, and he could not summon courage 
 to face the people. After some persuasion he fol- 
 lowed his host home, and there agreed with him 
 that he would better make arrangements to leave the 
 field to some better man. However, while going 
 to cancel his appointments he was persuaded, by
 
 92 Nation Builders 
 
 some people who were more hungry for preaching 
 than critical as to its quality, to try again. The re- 
 sult was exactly the reverse of what he anticipated. 
 McKendree stayed in his circuit, and the Methodist 
 Church was fortunate in this preservation of one of 
 her strongest and most useful men. 
 
 Among the preachers whom Asbury ordained, 
 or who were his colaborers at the meeting of the 
 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were not a few 
 who were his very antithesis in personality and 
 method. Among these was one who combined much 
 native shrewdness and a ready if rough eloquence 
 with consuming zeal. 
 
 Benjamin Abbott was a Pennsylvanian, unedu- 
 cated, but zealous, who preached in a sort of phrensy 
 that was comnumicated to his hearers. He carried 
 the sword of fire, and, with the stern demeanor of 
 an avenging spirit, wielded it till he had driven his 
 audience to the smoking edge of the bottomless pit 
 before extending to them the olive branch of divine 
 mercy. He proclaimed that "God without Christ 
 is a consuming fire," and that fire was to him so 
 real and overwhelming that it was no unusual thing 
 for the hearers to be thrown into convulsions or for 
 the preacher to faint from the excess of his emotion. 
 
 One of the incidents of his preaching has been 
 related somewhat as follows : A young man standing 
 near a blazing wood fire fell in a fit as Abbott de-
 
 Some of the Sowers 93 
 
 picted the torments of the lost, and he narrowly 
 missed being burned, his companions with difficulty 
 rescuing him. A young Quaker girl was singled 
 out for reprobation because she did not show any 
 sign of penitence. At a funeral the preacher took 
 advantage of the awe and fear occasioned by a ter- 
 rific thunderstorm to set before his trembling hearers 
 the awful coming of the Lord. Sudden streams of 
 lightning illuminated the house, and the incessant 
 thunder shook it to its foundations. "Who knows," 
 cried the vehement evangelist, "but that the Lord 
 may descend with the next clap of thunder !" With 
 that, his journal tells us, the people began to cry and 
 scream and fell all around the house. Fourteen 
 years afterward he found in that place twelve active 
 Christians who dated their conversion from that 
 time and occasion. 
 
 Robert Southey says of him: "Abbott seems to 
 have been a sincere and well-meaning enthusiast, 
 on the verge of madness himself," which seems al- 
 most as fanatical as the rough-and-ready methods 
 that he reprobates ; but presently this note is added : 
 "The fermentation of Methodism will cease in 
 America as it has ceased in England, and even dur- 
 ing its effervescence the good which it has produced 
 is greater than the evil." Perhaps It was difficult 
 for Southey to entertain a just view of revival 
 methods as foreign as those of Abbott to his cultl-
 
 94 Nation Builders 
 
 vated, ccsthetic taste, but he testified again and again 
 to the tangible results of the work and the unselfish 
 zeal of the workers in that early awakening. 
 
 Abbott was once rebuked by a broad-brimmed 
 listener, who objected to his realistic portrayal of 
 avenging justice on the ground that the Lord was 
 not in the earthquake nor the whirlwind, but in the 
 still small voice. The preacher retorted: "Do you 
 know that the earthquake is the mighty thunder of 
 God's voice from Mount Sinai ? It is the divine law 
 to drive us to Christ. And the whirlwind is the 
 power of con\-iction, like the rushing of a mighty 
 wind, tearing away every false hope and stripping 
 us of every plea." Commenting on this reply, 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge commends it, but adds 
 that it would have been still better if he had told 
 his Quaker critic that it was by God's ordinance that 
 the earthquake and the whirlwind should go before 
 the still small voice. 
 
 Certain it is that in the early days of Methodism 
 the penitent stood, as he was expected to stand, as 
 in the cave of Horeb, and felt the very foundations 
 of his soul shaken, before receiving the word of 
 peace. The violence of Abbott and his companions 
 had an effect upon untauglit, unreflecting, unregen- 
 erate men that we cannot conceive would have been 
 accomplished by milder methods. The robust, un- 
 compromising insistence that the natural heart is at
 
 Some of the Sowers 95 
 
 enmity with God, and that such enmity is a neces- 
 sarily fatal struggle against just and irresistible 
 wrath, led to results that all the milder preachments 
 of modern pulpits never could have attained. To 
 criticize the primitive methods of Abbott and those 
 like him upon the ground that their treatment was 
 heroic invites the retort that they believed the disease 
 to be violent, and that a church which accepts the 
 sacrifice of the Lamb of God for sin and does not 
 treat sin as the greatest imaginable calamity belittles 
 its own creed. The evangelists reached all classes 
 of people, from the small city or town of the older 
 state to the lonely dwellers in the depths of the 
 forest. We read that "the fine, the gay, threw 
 off their ruffles, their rings, their earrings, their 
 feathers." The first years of civil liberty were 
 marked by an astonishing renaissance of spiritual 
 life, which has produced a marked effect upon the 
 character of the American people and the stability 
 of the American government. 
 
 Among what might now appear the humors of 
 that early day of frontier work and sacrifice, though 
 certainly the actors and narrators saw nothing hu- 
 morous in the situation, was the capture of a Pres- 
 byterian meeting by a couple of Methodist preachers 
 and the conversion of a quiet and reposeful session, 
 "where there had been some show of interest," into a 
 tempestuous revival scene. Not that the Methodist
 
 96 Nation Builders 
 
 preachers were intruders or imagined themselves 
 to be so. On the contrary, the Presbyterian brothers 
 seemed to have insisted upon one of the visitors 
 preaching a sermon. But, once started, they did 
 not stop for a moment to consider the customs or 
 prejudices of the church family whose guests they 
 were. 
 
 William Burke, who was the foremost on that 
 occasion, said afterward: "I took for my text. To 
 you is the word of this salvation sent,' and before 
 I concluded there was a great trembling among the 
 dry bones. Great numbers fell to the ground and 
 cried for mercy, old and young. Brother Lakin 
 followed with one of his then powerful exhorta- 
 tions, and the work increased. The Presbyterian 
 ministers stood astonished, not knowing what to 
 make of such a tumult. Brother Lakin and myself 
 proceeded to exhort and pray with them. Some 
 obtained peace with God before the meeting broke 
 up. This was the first appearance of the revival 
 in the Presbyterian Church." 
 
 The Presbyterian ministers who "stood aston- 
 ished" at such an exhibition of good Methodist 
 fervor and zeal form a picture which the mind con- 
 templates wilh keen enjoy men I. We would gladly 
 know just what they might have said about the 
 event if they had left any record of it. 
 
 Among the strongest and most useful men in
 
 Some of the Sowers 97 
 
 the Methodist connection there seemed at the outset 
 Httle incHnation to take up the cudgels on doctrinal 
 points unless forced to do so by direct attack. In- 
 deed, we may readily understand that men whose 
 preparation for the ministry did not ever include 
 the curriculum of a theological school and seldom 
 got beyond the great fundamental truths of Chris- 
 tian belief were not particularly anxious to meet an- 
 tagonists shotted to the muzzle with the tenets of 
 Geneva and Westminster. For the most part we 
 think there is every evidence that the first genera- 
 tion or two of the Methodist preachers had all that 
 they could attend to ^^•ithout courting theological 
 dissensions. But when the occasion came they 
 could draw the lines close and stand up with grim 
 courage and determination to do battle for their 
 views. 
 
 When some Presbyterians demanded how certain 
 doctrines were held by their Methodist friends, on the 
 eve of a communion service which was to have been 
 a union one, the challenge was accepted with a fine 
 Old Testament emphasis. The cry rang out over 
 the Methodist host: "Every man to his tent, O 
 Israel." And every man was required to give a pub- 
 lic declaration of his belief in certain doctrines. At 
 a later day polemical discourses were in vogue, and 
 bitter denunciations of other members of the family 
 of Christ became the fashion— a fashion which
 
 98 Nation Builders 
 
 nearly all Protestant churches followed in a not 
 very distant past. 
 
 There seemed to be no limit to the activity of 
 some of the sturdy men who built the foundation 
 walls of our social institutions. The specializing 
 tendency of the present day makes it more likely 
 that a man shall know part of one trade or pro- 
 fession than that he shall profess a mastery of sev- 
 eral ; but at the commencement of the century of 
 which we have seen the final years it was not so. 
 We read of men who were farmers, soldiers, legis- 
 lators, and merchants, with what the commercial 
 slang of to-day would designate as a "side line" of 
 teaching, surveying, or preaching. Yet even among 
 his contemporaries William Beauchamp must have 
 passed as a man of unusual activity, if we are to 
 credit the list of his vocations that has been trans- 
 mitted to us. He was, we are told, a physician, law- 
 yer, surveyor, man of letters, schoolmaster, me- 
 chanic, and Methodist preacher — besides incident- 
 ally running a farm. After his first years in the 
 itinerant ranks he retired with broken health to 
 his farm, but afterward recuperated sufiiciently to 
 return to the harness, and after a year in Saint Louis 
 was made presiding elder of the Illinois Circuit. 
 Here he remained till overwork again mastered a 
 feeble constitution, and he sank under his labors. 
 
 Reserved toward strangers, deliberate in manner,
 
 Some of the Sowers 99 
 
 till aroused by the pressure of emotion or the de- 
 mands of his calling, thin, with pleasing though not 
 remarkable features and auburn hair, Beauchamp 
 was not as impressive a figure as some of his associ- 
 ates in the ministry. Cartwright, for example, by his 
 homeliness and brawn attracted attention, as Asbury 
 did by his almost apostolic presence, and Bascom, 
 a little later, by his personal charm. But Beauchamp 
 had two very important physical qualifications for 
 his work : his eyes, hazel in color, became keen and 
 piercing when his mind was aroused by the presence 
 of an audience or an opponent, and his voice was 
 capable of great expression. It trembled in tender- 
 ness and rang in argument or denunciation. Yet 
 with the power of the orator he always exhibited 
 the intellectual control of the scholar. Beauchamp's 
 manner of preaching, we are told, was not ornate, 
 but rather distinguished on ordinary occasions by 
 simplicity. His discourses were not calculated to 
 rouse the transient emotions of an audience so much 
 as to produce a lasting impression. ''There was 
 seldom a shout raised in the assembly under his 
 preaching, but always strict attention paid to his 
 discourses, with every eye fixed upon the speaker 
 and frequently the people all bathed in tears," says 
 one biographer. 
 
 William Beauchamp was the author of several 
 books that had a wide circulation in their day, and
 
 loo Nation Builders 
 
 his scholarly attainments were recognized by a large 
 circle of his contemporaries. He missed an election 
 to the episcopacy by but a few votes, but, as it 
 turned out, he could not have served in that capacity, 
 as the fatigue of attending the Conference brought 
 on an attack of illness from which he died in a few 
 weeks. 
 
 This man, who was accounted an able and suc- 
 cessful jMethodist preacher, presents an antithesis 
 to the popular idea of the uncouth, uneducated, 
 rough-and-ready shouter ^^ ho used to be the stock 
 subject of newspaper and almanac wit. It is a 
 great mistake to suppose that all of the men who 
 spent their lives in this cause were rough timber, 
 fit only for rough purposes. From the first, when 
 the Wesleys and W'hitefield came out of Oxford 
 with the message of the cross, there have ])ecn men 
 of signal ability and liberal culture in the ranks. 
 
 One of the most marked examples of a union 
 of the qualities which attract people of all classes 
 was to be found in Jesse Lee, a Virginian who was 
 ambiti(jus to evangelize the people of Boston. More 
 llian a Imndred years ago, in the spring of 1790, 
 r.islinp .\sl)ury listened to his importunity, and dis- 
 patched him foi- his self-chosen field of labor. Tie 
 was then tliiily-two years old, and was converted 
 when fifteen years old under one of the few evangel- 
 ical Episcopal ministers that his native state could
 
 Some of the Sowers ioi 
 
 boast at that time. Previous to his invasion of Bos- 
 ton young Lee had accompanied Bishop Asbury on a 
 tour in the South, and there won the respect as well 
 as the regard of the great bishop, who realized 
 that there was in his companion a capacity for 
 extraordinary success. 
 
 The idea of a missionary from Virginia to Bos- 
 ton! In the opinion of the men of Boston it was 
 monstrous or absurd ; they were not quite sure 
 whether they should be indignant or amused at such 
 impudence. 
 
 It has been happily said of Lee that his education 
 was not so large as the uses which he made of it. 
 He was a man of much more than the ordinary 
 height, one who towered above other men physically, 
 and his mental stature seemed to correspond with 
 his bodily presence. Li manner he had the polish 
 which was once thought hardly attainable by a man 
 born outside of the Old Dominion, and his ready 
 wit saved him from discomfiture in many a novel 
 situation. An old lady asked him if he had had a 
 liberal education. That was in Connecticut. "Tol- 
 erably liberal," was the reply; "enough, I think, to 
 carry me through the country." A minister of an- 
 other denomination had been applied to by Lee for 
 permission to preach in his church. But was he a 
 man of college training? Of course it would not 
 do for the pulpit of a New England church to open
 
 102 Nation Builders 
 
 its doors to one who lacked the hall-mark of schol- 
 arship. So the resident minister slyly tried the ap- 
 plicant with a question in Greek. Now, it happened 
 that Lee did not know any Greek ; but he was for- 
 tunately acquainted with some North Carolina 
 Dutch that he had picked up while in the South, 
 and he gravely replied in that. His interlocutor 
 was not inclined to press his investigation further, 
 for he concluded that the language he listened to 
 was Hebrew, in which he himself was deficient. 
 
 In Connecticut, according to the historians of the 
 church, Lee was frequently treated with rudeness, 
 sometimes amounting to violence. The clergymen 
 were inimical to him, and he had difficulty in finding 
 any church to receive him ; but he finally managed, 
 in spite of the opposition, to establish a circuit which 
 in the following year he left in the hands of Jacob 
 Brush, George Roberts, and Daniel Smith. 
 
 Before proceeding to Boston he explored Massa- 
 chusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, where to 
 his great delight he fell in with another of the rare 
 spirits of that day, Freeborn Garrettson. Finally 
 arriving in Boston, Lee found it impossible to ob- 
 tain a house to preach in. The pulpits with one 
 accord closed their doors against him, and he had 
 no means with which to procure a place for him- 
 self. In this emergency he availed himself of the 
 liberty alTurdcd by Boston Common, and un that
 
 Some of the Sowers 103 
 
 famous green, under the shade of a hospitable ehn, 
 standing upon a table that he succeeded in borrow- 
 ing, he preached his first sermon to a Boston audi- 
 ence. The audience was there. A few gathered 
 at first, drawn by curiosity to hear this big, hand- 
 some man, whose voice rang like a cornet. Then a 
 crowd assembled. One who was present on the 
 first occasion said afterward that it was a common 
 opinion that no such man had visited New England 
 since the days of Whitefield. Two or three thou- 
 sand people heard him at that commencement of his 
 Boston ministry, and the audiences continued to 
 flock to the old elm throughout the summer. Finally 
 he built in Boston a Methodist meetinghouse with 
 money which came, in part at least, from Virginia. 
 
 Lee preached at Lynn and established there the 
 first regular Methodist society in Massachusetts, 
 which from February to May, 1791, grew to sev- 
 enty members. In 1791 he was appointed elder 
 of the New England District and assigned to Litch- 
 field. With him were eleven circuit preachers, cov- 
 ering one district and six circuits, all established 
 in the short time since Lee had been sent by Asbury 
 into the Eastern states. The following year the 
 first Conference in New England was held at Lynn. 
 Shortly after that extensive revivals were reported 
 throughout the region in which Elder Lee had la- 
 bored. Rainor had a good story to tell of awaken-
 
 104 Nation Builders 
 
 ings on the Hartford Circuit, and the work spread 
 as far as Albany, in New York State. That year 
 showed a gain of about nine hundred souls for the 
 new Conference, the total membership being one 
 thousand three hundred and fifty-eight. 
 
 Let no one pass the preceding- paragraph over as 
 a dry statement of uninteresting figures. To read 
 between the lines of such meager data as Confer- 
 ence reports often give us will show by what un- 
 tiring zeal, what almost superhuman energy, the 
 jMethodist Church pushed forward to occupy the 
 land. The evangelist was a sort of flying wedge, 
 and no sooner had he made the slightest impression 
 upon the district assigned him than the reenforce- 
 ments were flung in to his support with an energy 
 and generalship that were admirable. Had Bishop 
 Asbury been a military leader instead of head shep- 
 herd in the Methodist Church, his genius would 
 have won him a high place among the famous com- 
 manders of history.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 From Cabix to Camp Meeting 
 
 The American pioneer of 1800 was a poorer man 
 in all things that we consider essential to life than 
 is the meanest "tarheel" that drags out his existence 
 in a slab shanty in the Carolina pine belt to-day. 
 The least prosperous American of the twentieth 
 century can sometimes at least command the use 
 of matches, the sight of a newspaper, the care of 
 a physician, the service of the postal system, or 
 the protection of a court of law, not one of 
 which advantages came within the reach or the 
 knowledge of any of those who broke a path into 
 the wilderness toward the Mississippi ten decades 
 ago. The barrenness of the lives of the pioneers 
 can hardly be conceived by the reader of this gen- 
 eration. The home of the frontiersman was a rough 
 shack of logs, daubed with clay, and often roofed 
 with bark till shingles, laboriously made by hand, 
 could be prepared. No cave man's den nor bush- 
 man's hut could be more barren of ornament than 
 such a cabin. The path that led to its door was a 
 trail seldom trodden by other feet than those of its 
 occupants, and the wind that whistled through the
 
 io6 Nation Builders 
 
 chinks of the walls or drove the snow through the 
 imglazed windows commonly brought no other 
 sounds than the howl of the wolves or the wail of 
 the panther. 
 
 Let us imagine a state of society in which each 
 household must depend upon its own members for 
 all the advantages commonly belonging to com- 
 munal life. It is true, as will be noticed elsewhere 
 in these pages, that the frontier settlers were fre- 
 c[uently driven to cluster in small groups of two 
 or three or even half a dozen shanties, which became 
 the nuclei of future settlements, but it is also true 
 that even in these embryo hamlets there was rarely 
 an attempt to infringe upon absolute personal lib- 
 erty of action by any form or pretense of social law. 
 
 The frontiersman expected to defend himself and 
 his family from aggression, to avenge real or imag- 
 ined injuries, and to fight out his own quarrels 
 without recourse to any organized system of social 
 protection. It is not necessary for us to go back 
 a century for illustrations of the evil results of this 
 mode of life. Its survival in the wilder regions of 
 the Southwest is still marked by the blood feud, 
 or vendetta, by which the settlement of fierce ani- 
 mosities is left by popular consent to the members 
 of the families concerned. The pioneer was in all 
 matters that affected his own safety, or even his 
 own convenience, judge, jury, and police in one per-
 
 From Cabin to Camp Meeting 107 
 
 son. If he acted in concert with his neighbors it 
 was under the pressure of some immediate and ex- 
 traordinary emergency, and such associations sel- 
 dom became permanent. If it chanced that several 
 cabins were clustered together for greater protec- 
 tion against Indian foes they were sometimes sur- 
 rounded by a palisade or other defense of logs, and 
 under the stress of a common danger the long rifles 
 cracked side by side. 
 
 Education under those circumstances meant at 
 best the barest rudiments of book knowledge, im- 
 parted at the mother's knee. Schools were abso- 
 lutely unknown upon the frontier, and even the 
 larger settlements were frequently innocent of any 
 attempt to instruct the young. What material things 
 a man possessed were the products of his own or his 
 wife's skill in manufacture. The house, furniture, 
 utensils, clothing, food — all they had or used were 
 of their own making, raising, or killing. If a man 
 wanted clothing he killed a beast and prepared its 
 fur or its hide for his use. To realize what such 
 clothing meant let anyone take even the softest 
 buckskin, dressed without mechanical appliances, 
 and wear it next the skin after it has once or twice 
 been wet by rain or snow and dried in hard creases 
 and ridges. Such garments could only be used by 
 people whose bodies were inured to the hardening 
 processes of a life of constant exposure. As in the
 
 io8 Nation Builders 
 
 case of savage tribes, the weak died young, and the 
 survivors were the progenitors of a race of uncom- 
 mon stature and physical hardness. The women 
 spun and wove wool or flax into coarse fabrics to 
 fashion their rude garments, and when occasion 
 required they could aid their husbands or brothers 
 with ax and rifle. The pioneer settlers fought with 
 savages for a foothold on their land ; fought the 
 forest and the soil for a bare subsistence; fought 
 their fellows for such advantages as they could 
 hope to gain ; and, generally, did not know 
 enough to comprehend that they were ignorant and 
 poor. 
 
 The cotton gin was not introduced; the butcher 
 and the grocer had not arrived upon the scene ; the 
 art of lighting a fire had not passed the elementary 
 stage of flint and steel, and if a man lacked these 
 necessary adjuncts to cabin life he toiled for a potful 
 of fire to his nearest neighbor, or, lacking- a neigh- 
 bor, he shivered and starved. Sometimes faint 
 echoes reached the frontiersman of a world some- 
 where beyond his mountains and forests. He knew 
 that there were in the world larger affairs than 
 those that employed him. something greater than 
 his meager and soul-starving routine of border life, 
 and that there were larger men who managed those 
 more important matters ; but it did not occur to him 
 that he had anv interests in common with those far-
 
 From Cabin to Camp Meeting 109 
 
 distant men or that their rise or fall could matter 
 to him. 
 
 The pioneer settlers formed the raw material for 
 the making of new states, but they were not in 
 any true sense state builders till an influence came 
 to them and an idea was planted and cultivated 
 among them by men whose thought, whose stand- 
 ards of conscience, whose conceptions of duty and 
 responsibility, of law and morality, of life in all 
 its wonderful meaning, were absolutely new to 
 them. It was this new influence that moved from 
 cabin to cabin, that was carried like an endless cord 
 through all the intricate ways of forest and moun- 
 tain, of valley and river, till it bound into one sym- 
 pathetic body the widely segregated units of that 
 strangely hidden population. 
 
 A quarter of a century earlier the settler had 
 himself perhaps seen something of the conflict that 
 at its close had left thirteen worn and impoverished 
 colonies free from British control, but not yet con- 
 scious of the meaning or the potentiality of the 
 liberty they had achieved. Through the anteroom of 
 a loose and imperfect confederation the people of the 
 land were to go forward, like wondering, irresolute 
 children, into a union of sovereign states. The con- 
 cept of a federal government had not become habit- 
 ual to more than a respectable minority of the 
 people, even in the larger cities and towns. The
 
 I TO Nation Builders 
 
 settlements, far removed from the seaboard and 
 from one another, were without means of commu- 
 nication, were out of touch with the world and its 
 thought; and the pioneer, fighting his lonely battle 
 for existence at the very borders of Christendom, 
 stood much nearer in knowledge to his savage 
 vis-a-vis than to the associates of Hamilton and 
 Jefferson. 
 
 It was just at that point that the great though 
 unrealized danger to the future of the Southern and 
 Western states lay. Not the men of tlie seaboard 
 cities, where law and order were recognized, where 
 education was fostered and religion had won its 
 converts, but the untaught, lawless, primitive men 
 of the settlements were to leave their impress upon 
 western Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and the vast 
 continent beyond. 
 
 Never was isolation more complete. By the year 
 1800 a population of over three hundred thousand 
 souls had drifted with the tributaries of the Ohio 
 or sifted through the ravines of the Cumberland 
 Mountains .on the trail of Boone into the forests and 
 the fertile valleys of Tennessee and Kentucky, and 
 had dropped out of sight for the most part as com- 
 |)letely as though they had marched into the sea. 
 To the majority of them no post rider ever brought 
 tidings of the outer world or carried their messages. 
 No news sheet ever reached them. No public
 
 From Cauin to Camp Meeting hi 
 
 speaker ever drew them together except for the rare 
 occasions of worship. 
 
 It is so necessary to understand the completeness 
 of that isolation from the world's great interests 
 and the growing sentiment of national life in order 
 to appreciate the vast service performed by any in- 
 telligent agent who should at more or less regular 
 intervals visit and instruct those outlying units of 
 population, that we have been somewhat particular 
 and minute in our description of earlier frontier 
 life. A committee of Congress, reporting in 1800 
 upon the Northwest Territory, which it was then 
 proposed to divide into three prospective states, 
 made the astounding statement that "in the three 
 Western countries there has been but one court hav- 
 ing cognizance of crimes for five years, and the 
 immunity which oiTenders experience attracts, as to 
 an asylum, the most vile and abandoned criminals, 
 and at the same time deters useful and virtuous 
 citizens from making settlement in such a society." 
 
 Peter Cartwright, from whom we quote more at 
 length in another place, described his father's home 
 in Logan County, Kentucky, as a haunt for refugees 
 from justice, so that the place was called "Rogues' 
 Harbor." He enumerates a delightful society of 
 "murderers, horse thieves, highway robbers, and 
 counterfeiters." Two missionaries, traveling the 
 country from western Pennsylvania westward to the
 
 112 Nation Builders 
 
 Mississippi and southward to New Orleans, in 1813, 
 reported groups of population scattered over large 
 areas of land, but no church nor any preacher. 
 
 Elsewhere we have discussed the sources of popu- 
 lation that led to the building of the country that 
 up to 1830 was the West. For many years before 
 the great areas under consideration were of the 
 slightest importance as states the people — such peo- 
 ple as we have described — were pouring into them. 
 It is not necessary to point out that the population 
 of a country does not of itself affect its political or 
 social standing. The then frontier settlements of 
 America were merely unworked lumps of humanity, 
 waiting for the leaven that was in an incredibly 
 short time to permeate them with life. 
 
 In many sections of the Western country, as 
 already noticed, a number of pioneers built near 
 together, for protection against the attacks of sav- 
 age foes. Sometimes a common fort, palisade, or 
 blockhouse added to the security of such a com- 
 munity. The Indian was certainly the most active 
 agent in forcing the solitary pioneers into comn'iuni- 
 ties, but there his services as a benefactor ceased. 
 The community simply multiplied the vice and the 
 ignorance of the individuals that composed it, if 
 they chanced to be vicious and ignorant. Drunken- 
 ness increased under the influence of conviviality, 
 and crimes followed drunkenness.
 
 From Cabin to Camp Meeting 113 
 
 That is not a pleasing picture of the early settler 
 of the American frontier, but it is the only kind of 
 a picture that observant men have left of him. His 
 manners were as uncouth as his morals were un- 
 wholesome, and altogether, divested of the softening 
 tints of time and distance, he must have been as 
 unattractive as the average squatter on the outskirts 
 of civilization. Nevertheless there was good seed 
 in that planting; good qualities that lay dormant 
 under the weight of untoward circumstances, good 
 faculties that belonged with the splendid physique 
 of the men and the robust health of the women, 
 waited only for an awakening touch. 
 
 Into some such typical exposition of squalor and 
 poverty a lone rider on a jaded nag rode one day. 
 His dress was that of any other frontiersman, 
 partly homespun and partly leather or fur; his hair 
 hung long from the edge of a coonskin cap, and 
 his flapping saddlebags carried all his worldly pos- 
 sessions. In the place of a rifle he carried a Bible, 
 and he came singing a song. 
 
 Never in any page of history was there a more 
 complete antithesis than that between the circuit 
 rider, on fire with zeal, alive with a new, unfathom- 
 able life, and jubilant in the possession of a great 
 secret that it was his mission to impart, and the 
 ignorant, brawny, inquisitive people that mingled 
 with their often suspicious greeting a furtive sus-
 
 114 Nation Builders 
 
 picion of his errand,, and were not infrequently eager 
 to try physical conclusions with him before they 
 would listen to the message he brought. There 
 were three things that the Methodist circuit rider 
 never omitted. He prayed with his host or hostess, 
 sang a hymn, and, if possible, added a word of 
 exhortation; he unfolded his little stock of tracts 
 and hymn books and tried to dispose of some of 
 them; and he carefully inquired about the nearest 
 neighbors and acquainted himself with all there was 
 to know concerning them. Added to these essential 
 features of the programme were the always welcome 
 news of the outside world. 
 
 Seated by the open hearth with the family uf his 
 host gathered around him and eagerly drinking in 
 his words, he told of the marvelous things he had 
 seen with his own eyes in that great city of Phil- 
 adelphia where he had attended a General Confer- 
 ence. He described the leaders of the church — 
 l^^rancis Asbury foremost — and spoke re\-crcnlly of 
 the work they were doing, unconsciously, perhaps, 
 bringing the far-distant bounds of the country to- 
 gether within such a comprehensive circle as his 
 hearers had never before imagined. Vvom such 
 themes he probably drifted to more secular ones, 
 telling who knows what startling items of recent 
 intelligence. They knew tlic name of Washington 
 c\cn in the remotest cabin in the (leei)est wilderness,
 
 From Cabin to Camp Meeting 115 
 
 and they were moved by something- hke grief to 
 learn that he had breathed his last at his beautiful 
 Mount Vernon ; nor did they lose a word of the tale 
 of his obsequies. 
 
 The differences of Hamilton and Adams with 
 Jefferson and his party opened another world of 
 ideas, brought the lands over-seas nearer, and de- 
 fined America as a land with individual life, as 
 opposed or contrasted with the life of other lands. 
 The common interests of the people of America 
 was a new and absorbing story. 
 
 When the budget of strange tidings disclosed 
 such marvels as the voyage of Fulton's Clermont 
 down the Hudson, breathing fire and smoke, or the 
 sad tragedy at Weehawken, when the great federal 
 leader fell before the pistol of Aaron Burr, who can 
 picture the deep absorption of listeners to whom the 
 horizon of life was being widened for perhaps the 
 first time. What the men of Philadelphia, Balti- 
 more, Boston, or New York were, what they strove 
 for and stood for, was novel refreshment for starved 
 minds. What the men of the nearest settlement, 
 fifty miles away, were doing was almost as strange. 
 
 Candles were an unknown luxury, the place of 
 which was filled by a light-wood knot stuck in the 
 chimney flank ; and such a torch must have lighted 
 many a strange group, of which the traveling 
 preacher was the center.
 
 ii6 Nation Builders 
 
 In imagination we go back six centuries to pic- 
 ture amid different surroundings and under differ- 
 ent skies a similarly ignorant company. Lord and 
 lady, thrall and franklin, gathering close to hear the 
 marvelous tales of some palmer who had seen 
 strange countries, or a minstrel who could recount 
 strange tales in rhythm, to the accompaniment of 
 a harp. The itinerant preacher was the palmer and 
 the minstrel in one. He was the teacher, the news- 
 monger, the living epistle calling men to a higher 
 and more satisfying life, the link between scattered 
 settlements and isolated cabins, and the bringer and 
 singer of songs that were learned and remembered 
 and sung long after the recollection of spoken words 
 was indistinct. The songs learned in Cane Ridge 
 were the same that were repeated in Boone; they 
 swelled from the clearings on the Licking and rolled 
 along the bluffs of the Cumberland, ^^'hen the peo- 
 ple assembled, under the influence and the impetus 
 of a new faith, to praise God for the hope of sal- 
 vation they all sang the same songs. In another 
 chapter we will speak somewhat more fully of those 
 songs of Zion, that had an incalculable influence 
 in shaping the destinies of a people. 
 
 The great camp meetings that early became a 
 part of the religious life of the backwoods were 
 a necessary outgrowth of the itinerancy. To a 
 congregation co\-cring twenty-five hundred square
 
 From Cabin to Camp Meeting 117 
 
 miles, and possessing no church building-, the open 
 aisles of the forest were the only recourse. Every 
 family in which an itinerant Methodist preacher 
 gained a foothold became at once an important part 
 of his flock, never afterward to be neglected or 
 forgotten, and never suffered to be neglectful or to 
 forget. When, having made the rounds and the 
 acquaintance of every settler within his circuit, the 
 preacher announced meetings at the most central 
 points, he insisted that every member of his flock 
 within a specified radius should be present, and he 
 made it clear to them from the outset that the society 
 was theirs and claimed their support. There was 
 never a hint that any brother or sister was to be 
 carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease. No 
 drone was encouraged in those hives. 
 
 Leaving aside for the moment the spiritual aspect 
 of meetings at central places and camp meetings to 
 which a larger neighborhood was summoned, we 
 are brought face to face with the only less important 
 social side of such gatherings. For the first time 
 in their lives the backwoodsmen met a congregation 
 of strangers, and met them upon a common ground, 
 that induced sympathy and interest in their lives, 
 their ideas, and their prospects. 
 
 As strangers they came from long distances to 
 clasp one another's hands and depart as brothers, 
 and ever afterward to follow with interest the un-
 
 ii8 Nation Builders 
 
 folding of fortunes, the happiness or the grief of 
 men and women who had till then been alien to 
 them. 
 
 The camp meeting, which in some sections of the 
 country, in a scarcely modified form, has lasted to the 
 present day, bore about the same relation to a stated 
 appointment to preach that the mobilization of a state 
 militia used to hold to a village train band. After 
 families had been visited and societies formed and 
 meetings held to clinch the work of private exhorta- 
 tion, a great concourse of people from an area often 
 covering parts of several states were summoned by 
 word of mouth to attend a general muster. The 
 place chosen for such a meeting was often in the 
 great level wood spaces, clear from underbrush or 
 obstruction, which were once a feature of the South- 
 western land. Toward such a rendezvous, as the 
 advertised day drew near, the settlers approached 
 by twos and threes, by companies, by platoons and 
 regiments. Like rivulets in the mountains that flow 
 into brooks and these again form rivers, so the drops 
 of those great floods of population came together. 
 Concentrating toward one point, it sometimes hap- 
 pened lliat wliolc counties in Kentucky, Tennessee, 
 and Ohio w eic depopulated, llic inhabitants moving 
 steadily toward the center, where, up(jn arrival, 
 tach man should buikl wlial shelter he could for 
 his family, and .>3\\ell a uiullilude such as few had
 
 From Cabin to Camp Meeting itq 
 
 ever seen or imagined. Out of the woods, across 
 the clearings, by tens, b}'' hundreds, by thousands, 
 on foot, on horseback, or in rude carts, singing as 
 they came, the newly enlisted cohorts of Methodism 
 brought their individual experiences to cast them 
 into the treasury of a great common faith. Never 
 before in the history of the world had such congre- 
 gations been gathered. Never before had they been 
 possible. It is not safe to say that no other agency 
 could have brought them together, but it is a his- 
 toric fact that no other cause ever did. Not one 
 of the great political demonstrations for which 
 America has been famous, not even the great meet- 
 ings that marked the controversial triumphs of Lin- 
 coln and Douglas, ever did in this one respect what 
 many of the great camp meetings of a century ago 
 accomplished. Twenty thousand men and women 
 of the frontier gathered in some of those assemblies. 
 Some of them had taken days or even weeks to reach 
 the ground. They had traveled over lands that were 
 strange to them, had slipped down rivers that were 
 new, had journeyed in company with chance com- 
 panions whose faces and ways were alike unfamiliar. 
 They gathered as settlers from the Kanawha or 
 the Muskingum ; they returned home citizens of the 
 Union. 
 
 Among the formative influences which students 
 of national history must measure there has been
 
 120 Nation Builders 
 
 none more prompt and far-reaching in its effect 
 upon the character of the repubHc than the Meth- 
 odist camp meeting. 
 
 James McGready, whose name should receive 
 perpetual honor among Christians of all denomina- 
 tions, was a devoted Presbyterian minister, who had 
 come out from the East with a little handful of 
 Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from Pennsylvania and 
 settled in Logan County, Kentucky. To his zeal 
 has been attributed the first signs of the religious 
 awakening in Kentucky. In 1799 the brothers Mc- 
 Gee, William and John, one a Methodist and the 
 other a Presbyterian, came together preaching the 
 gospel in that countr3\ and soon were followed by 
 great congregations who gathered from far and 
 near to listen to their preaching. The camp meet- 
 ings that thus began in Logan County and in that 
 part of the state were soon talked of throughout 
 the border whercx'er men came together. The best 
 account of the Logan County revival is that given 
 l)y Barton Warren Stone, preacher at Cane Ridge, 
 who was moved by the astonishing news to go and 
 see for himself what was transpiring. Ilis account 
 is in part as follows : 
 
 "There on the edge of a prairie in Logan County. 
 Kentucky, the multitudes came together, and con- 
 tinued for a num1)cr of days and nights encamped 
 on the ground, during which time worship was car-
 
 From Cabin to Camp Meeting 121 
 
 ried on in some part of the encampment. The scene 
 was new to me and passing strange. It baffled de- 
 scription. Many, very many, fell down as men slain 
 in battle, and continued for hours together in an 
 apparently breathless and motionless state, some- 
 times for a few minutes reviving and exhibiting 
 symptoms of life by a deep groan or a piercing 
 shriek or a prayer for mercy fervently uttered. 
 After lying there for hours they obtained deliver- 
 ance. The gloomy cloud that had covered their 
 faces seemed gradually and visibly to disappear, and 
 hope, in smiles, brightened into joy. They would 
 rise, shouting deliverance, and would then address 
 the surrounding multitude in language truly elo- 
 quent and impressive. With astonishment did I 
 hear men, women, and children declaring the won- 
 derful works of God and the glorious mysteries of 
 the gospel." 
 
 The recital of the scenes in Logan County deeply 
 affected all of the Western people who heard of it, 
 but the course of the emotional storm center, cyclonic 
 as it was in swiftness and power, moved eastward, 
 toward Cane Ridge, in Bourbon County. The peo- 
 ple who listened to Mr. Stone with rapt and some- 
 times tearful interest soon found themselves in the 
 midst of a scene even more thrilling and remember- 
 able. The greatest religious revival of modern 
 times, greatest not only in its immediate religious
 
 122 Nation Builders 
 
 effect, but in the scope and vitality of its after influ- 
 ence, had fairly commenced and was daily gaining 
 headway. Stone again has left us a graphic record 
 of the occurrences at Cane Ridge: 
 
 "The roads were crowded with wagons, carriages, 
 horses, and footmen, moving to the solemn camp. 
 It was judged by military men on the ground that 
 between twenty and thirty thousand persons were 
 assembled. Four or five preachers spoke at the 
 same time in different parts of the encampment 
 without confusion. . . . \Vq all engaged in singing 
 the same songs, all united in prayer, all preached 
 the same things. . . . The numbers converted will 
 be known only in eternity. Many things transpired 
 at the meeting which were so much like miracles 
 that they had the same effect as miracles upon un- 
 believers. By them many were convinced that Jesus 
 was the Christ and were persuaded to submit to him. 
 This meeting continued six or seven days and nights, 
 and would have continued longer, but food for the 
 sustenance of such a multitude failed. To this meet- 
 ing had come many from Ohio and other distant 
 parts. They returned home and diffused the same 
 spirit in their respective neighborhoods." 
 
 We see by this account, through llio controlled 
 and measured terms of which the enthusiasm of 
 the narrator l^rcaks in spite of himself, the impres- 
 sion made l)y the Logan County and the Bourljon
 
 From Cabin to Camp Meeting 123 
 
 County gatherings upon the mind of a Presbyterian. 
 Kentucky has been from its early days a stronghold 
 of the Presbyterians in America, and no clearer 
 proof is needed of the vigor and fervor of their 
 ministry than the evidence we have of their agency 
 in commencing the revival of 1800 and contributing 
 to the establishment of camp meetings. It is a fact 
 that the Presbyterian and other ministers, with 
 the exception of the Methodists, soon withdrew 
 from any active part in the great open-air gather- 
 ings that have since become so closely associated 
 with Methodism and were for years one of the 
 principal agencies in its upbuilding. William Burke's 
 narrative of the great Cane Ridge revival gives still 
 another point of view and must not be omitted : 
 
 "Our next quarterly meeting was for Lexington 
 Circuit, at Jesse Griffiths, Scott County. On Sat- 
 urday we had some indications of a good work. 
 On Saturday night we had preaching in different 
 parts of the circuit, which at that time was the 
 custom. . . . On Sunday morning they came in 
 companies, singing and shouting on the road. . . . 
 The work spread now into the several circuits. 
 Salt River and Shelby were visited, and Danville 
 shared the blessing. The Presbyterian Church 
 caught the fire. Congregations were universally 
 wakened up: McNamer's congregation on Cabin 
 Creek, Barton Stone's at Cane Ridge, Reynolds's
 
 124 Nation Builders 
 
 near Ruddells Station and Paris, Rev. Mr. Lisle's 
 at Salem, Mr. Rankin's at Walnut Hill," etc. 
 
 He tells how the work extended into other coun- 
 ties, to Ohio, to remote posts on the frontier. A 
 meeting was "published" at Cane Ridge, and a whole 
 population turned out to attend : 
 
 "On Sunday morning, when I came on the 
 ground, ... I fixed my stand in the open sun, with 
 an umbrella affixed to a long pole and held over my 
 head by Brother Hugh Barnes. I commenced read- 
 ing a hymn with an audible voice, and by the time 
 we concluded we had around us, by a fair calcula- 
 tion, ten thousand people. . . . Toward evening I 
 pitched the only tent on the ground. Having been 
 accustomed to travel in the wilderness, I soon had 
 a tent constructed out of poles and pawpaw bushes. 
 Here I remained Sunday night and Monday night, 
 and during the time there was not a single moment's 
 cessation, but the work went on, and old and young, 
 men, women, and children, were converted to God. 
 It was estimated that on Sunday and Sunday night 
 there were twenty thousand people on the ground. 
 They had come from far and near, from all parts 
 of Kentucky, some from Tennessee and from north 
 of the Ohio River, so that tidings of the Cane Ridge 
 meeting were carried to almost every corner of the 
 country, and the holy fire spread in nil directions." 
 
 Even William Burke seems not to have seen the
 
 From Cabin to Camp Meeting 125 
 
 great significance of this work in any other than 
 a reHgious light. Was he obHvious to the fact that 
 he was recording a process of state building? or 
 did that fact to his zealous mind seem small beside 
 the other? Twenty thousand people gathered from 
 the four quarters of the compass at the call of the 
 voice. Twenty thousand people went again to their 
 wilderness homes with a new conception of their 
 relationship to other men. Twenty thousand units 
 of population had mastered the idea of Union, 
 
 This work, repeated again and again, \vas as un- 
 exampled in its effect as it has been unrecognized. 
 Even if the labor of the preachers had achieved no 
 higher result than, this it would not have been 
 wasted. Viewed from a purely political standpoint, 
 it would have been a tremendous success; but, as 
 we have had occasion to point out, the conversion 
 of lawless people into law-abiding citizens was a 
 constant corollary of the camp meeting and the re- 
 vival service. 
 
 To the making of the Union the men in whose 
 piety, zeal, and discretion Francis Asbury trusted, 
 who followed Burke into Ohio and penetrated the 
 wilderness with Kobler and Poythress, Axley and 
 Blackman and Cummins, contributed very largely 
 — as broadly and effectually as any single agency, 
 because their influence alone in their day could draw 
 or did draw the people to a common center in a
 
 126 Nation Builders 
 
 common interest. If we seem to reiterate this truth 
 unnecessarily let it be said in reply that we con- 
 ceive it to be one of the most important historical 
 facts of which American annals afford us any 
 knowledge. The Methodist itinerants went among 
 the people with a bond that drew strangers together 
 into a close fellowship, and created sympathy be- 
 tween individuals remote from each other in a geo- 
 graphical sense; they also afforded a reason why 
 people of different neighborhoods, counties, or even 
 states, should meet with a common purpose and 
 depart fired by a common enthusiasm. We have not 
 found that any other agency in the early days of the 
 republic performed this or any similar service.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 Frontier Women and Preachers' Wives 
 
 When the saga of the old Methodist circuits is 
 fully written, which is not likely to be possible till 
 "the leaves of the judgment book unfold," perhaps 
 the tenderest and finest pages of that record will 
 be devoted to the women who lived their unob- 
 trusive lives and performed their unrecognized 
 labors on the raw edge of the world. 
 
 Leaving aside the obvious suggestion that with- 
 out the pioneer women no frontier state could have 
 been permanently established, aside from the nec- 
 essary consideration of maternity, the wives of the 
 woodsmen of the border states were the ready and 
 efficient coadjutors of the saddlebag preachers, and, 
 indeed, made their success possible. It was gener- 
 ally a woman who bade the itinerant welcome, who 
 prepared a meal and a bed for him, who first lis- 
 tened to his preaching, and who most readily learned 
 the songs that he sang. The women, then as now, 
 were the great auxiliary force without whose aid 
 the preacher would often fmd the accomplishment 
 of his task impossible. 
 
 How can we picture the woman of the backwoods 
 more than a century ago? We know that even in
 
 128 Nation Builders 
 
 the larger towns and cities — even in Philadelphia, 
 New York, Baltimore, or Boston — the richest dames 
 in the most fashionable social circles could not com- 
 mand many of the luxuries that have grown to be 
 necessaries of life to people of the poorer sort in 
 our day. The wife of the President or the ladies of 
 her republican court knew nothing of a thousand 
 little appliances for comfort that seem essential to 
 people of very moderate means nowadays. Such 
 matters of luxury as stationary bathtubs, hot and 
 cold water, evenly heated houses, proper sanitary 
 appliances, effectual lighting apparatus, and vari- 
 ous labor-saving devices were undreamed of by 
 Martha Washington or Dolly Madison, to say 
 nothing of the less fortunate hosts of their fellow 
 countrywomen. Candles lighted — or failed to light 
 — the great echoing rooms ; warming pans made the 
 stately four-poster a less dangerous and more com- 
 fortable place to repose than the lee side of a barn 
 in January ; a portable tin tub did duty at the usual 
 Saturday night ablutions; and the spit in the kitchen 
 turned before a fire of crackling and smoking wood. 
 The loom and the distaff were still domestic prop- 
 erties, and the best-born damsel in the land would 
 have thought it shame if she could not have at 
 least lent a hand in the preparation of her own store 
 of li(nisehold linen and wedding finery. A wealthy 
 woman of to-day will not uncommonly spend more
 
 Frontier Women 129 
 
 in a single hour than her prototype of Washington's 
 time dared to squander in a whole season. It is 
 safe to say that the wives and daughters of Boston's 
 richest merchants and Philadelphia's most eminent 
 lawgivers could never command as much of actual 
 comfort in living as is now within the reach of the 
 wife and daughter of any mechanic in those cities. 
 Books were so rare that dame or damsel who had 
 read half a hundred might be looked upon as a 
 prodigious scholar. Our circulating libraries, our 
 multiplying presses and ubiquitous publishing houses 
 have changed all that. A century ago the printers 
 and the editors clamored for rags with which the 
 paper mills might be fed, and women were appealed 
 to to save the rags for that purpose. The entire 
 product of the paper mills in New England would 
 not now print a single day's output of the Methodist 
 Book Concern. 
 
 If the great dames lived under conditions that 
 none of their granddaughters would consider luxu- 
 rious, what a lot of deprivations must have fallen 
 to the women of less fortunate families, and what 
 absolute barrenness of softness and comfort with- 
 out question confronted the woman of the frontier ! 
 To such meagerness the great emotional uplift that 
 attended the preaching of the message of salvation 
 must have resembled translation into a more benefi- 
 cent world. Day by day the old grinding routine
 
 130 Nation Builders 
 
 of life: the piling of logs, the hauling of water, 
 the preparation of new-killed meat, the grinding of 
 corn between rough stones, and the droning of the 
 spinning wheel — only these few things, over and 
 over, daily, monthly, yearly, without cessation. Over 
 the cabin the same woods that sheltered hundreds 
 of bloodthirsty foes. Sometimes an arrow quiv- 
 ered between the chinks of the logs; sometimes the 
 rifle was taken from its pegs over the fireplace for 
 instant service ; sometimes the flame of a neighbor's 
 burning house could be seen through the trees, or 
 a band of fugitives, survivors from some dreadful 
 massacre, would stop to recruit their ranks. 
 
 In this life, if the husband and the sons were 
 brutal or recreant, the desolateness must have been 
 unspeakable. At the best it was bad. When the 
 preachers found such women, starved mentally, 
 starved spiritually, possessing only that physical en- 
 durance for which they have been famous, they un- 
 folded to them the greatest of all stories, delighted 
 their ears with songs the like of which they had 
 never heard in all their secluded, hopeless lives, and 
 pictured for them a heaven to whose joys and tri- 
 umphs immediate possession was assured. 
 
 A man, whose soul hunger was less keen, whose 
 nature had not yet refused the daily diet of husks, 
 might reject the kingdom of heaven, with its inesti- 
 mable riches; but few women could hold out against
 
 Frontier Women 131 
 
 the wonder, the beauty, and the glory of the alhir- 
 ing prospect. Yesterday one might have stood 
 dumb and weary by her cabin door, looking off into 
 that never-changing prospect of somber trunks and 
 inevitable shadows, listless and hopeless ; but to-day 
 she has learned a new song and lives in a new world. 
 Her eyes are lifted above the treetops; her mind is 
 lifted above the weary round of petty duties. She 
 hears the soughing of the wind above the cabin as a 
 challenge, and lilts back the major refrain : 
 
 " My soul mounteth higher 
 In a chariot of fire, 
 And the moon it is under my feet." 
 
 Everywhere, from the days of Dorcas, women 
 have been the helpers of those who have had a mis- 
 sion to preach, and they have been the efficient co- 
 workers of the minister and the missionary. The 
 more sluggish or more wary intelligence of the 
 average man follows the initiative of the woman in 
 most religious movements. 
 
 It needs no argument to show the value of the 
 position occupied by the pioneer women of the Meth- 
 odist societies, nor will anyone who knows them or 
 their work venture to suggest that they have sur- 
 rendered aught of that initiative or that influence in 
 a hundred years. 
 
 The first rank of the preachers were frequently 
 single men, though before long not a few of those
 
 132 Nation Builders 
 
 who were in the field added to their personal re- 
 sponsibilities and cares by taking to themselves 
 wives. The example set by Francis Asbury was one 
 of celibacy, though whether he ever intended to 
 make his own position in this respect a model for 
 the younger men under his leadership is very doubt- 
 ful. Certain it is that the tendency toward a mar- 
 ried ministry increased greatly even during the great 
 bishop's lifetime, and it has long been the rule in 
 the Methodist Church. 
 
 "The noble army of martyrs!" — was there ever 
 a body of human beings who better deserved that 
 name than the wives of numberless itinerant 
 preachers who have moved, moved, moved up and 
 down the land, from post to post, yearning for an 
 abiding place and never finding one, longing vainly 
 for the home security so dear to every woman's 
 heart, and forever pulled away from the circle of 
 friends to whom her heart was beginning to cling 
 with the attachment of love? 
 
 "The noble army of martyrs praise Thee." From 
 every quarter of the land, East, West, North, and 
 South, their lives are a sweet sacrifice, accompanied 
 by the gratitude and the love of thousands to whom 
 they have ministered. In estimating the influence 
 of Methodism upon the religious thought and the 
 moral advancement of the world the story of the 
 wives of the preachers forms an important equation.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 Another Company of the Sowers 
 
 A LITTLE later than Abbott, one of Asbury's most 
 reliable and valued assistants and afterward himself 
 a leader among American Methodists, Nathan 
 Bangs challenges attention. It is possible that he 
 should rank next to the pioneer bishop as a molding 
 influence, closely identified as he was with the his- 
 tory of his church for half a century. 
 
 Nathan Bangs was born in Stratford, Connecti- 
 cut, on the second of May, 1778. While still a boy 
 he removed to Stamford, New York, in company 
 with an older brother. As he grew to manhood he 
 became a surveyor and schoolmaster, but hardly had 
 he reached maturity when the appeal of an itinerant 
 Methodist preacher, whose name Is unfortunately 
 lost to us, roused his dormant religious nature and 
 disturbed his satisfaction with himself and his life. 
 He was not converted at this time, though greatly 
 troubled in conscience. His impulse seems to have 
 been to escape from all reminders of a subject he 
 would willingly have forgotten. Stamford was then 
 almost upon the frontier. He resolved to go farther 
 away, into still more uncivilized regions, where he
 
 134 Nation Builders 
 
 believed the traveling preacher would be unlikely to 
 penetrate. He removed to Canada, and lived for 
 a while in one of the lawless settlements that so often 
 mark the outposts of civilization. Unsatisfied, rest- 
 less, troubled at heart, we may believe that he did 
 not hold aloof from the rude life around him. 
 
 One day the inevitable itinerant preacher arrived. 
 The Rev. Joseph Sawyer got hold of young Bangs, 
 and the result was a new and powerful convert to 
 Christianity and Methodism. There had evidently 
 been strong opposition to the preacher and his mes- 
 sage, for while we do not know the details of Mr. 
 Sawyer's adventures, there is credible information to 
 the effect that a bitter spirit of persecution assailed 
 young Bangs at the very outset. He was an object 
 of dislike to those among whom he had lived on 
 terms of good feeling if not of good fellowship. 
 He was boycotted, his means of earning a livelihood 
 withdrawn, and violent opposition met all his efforts. 
 Finally he was threatened with expulsion from the 
 settlement. Under these conditions Nathan Bangs 
 joined the ranks of the Methodist itinerants, and 
 within a year received a license to exhort. Taking- 
 little provision and less anxiety for the perils of the 
 way, he rode into the wilderness to carry the torch 
 that he felt had been committed to him. 
 
 Tlicro was something finer, deeper, and more 
 abiding than i)iclurcsque knight-errantry in such
 
 I^NOTiiER Company of the Sowers 135 
 
 a life, enlisted for such a quest. No one who loved 
 a soft life or valued ease and safety could join the 
 brotherhood of the itinerants. To its dangers and 
 privations Bangs devoted himself with an enthusi- 
 asm that outlived all deprivation and suffering. For 
 many years he was part of that voice in the wilder- 
 ness that proclaimed the kingdom of heaven at hand. 
 
 ]\Iore than once mobs of enraged men, whose 
 practices he sternly rebuked, sought his life. His 
 enemies laid wait for him in the woods to murder 
 him, but he escaped from them. Frequently he 
 went hungering to his sleep upon the moss under 
 the trees in the forest. He fairly fought his way 
 through icy storms from one settlement to another, 
 consumed by a desire to deliver his message. Like 
 many another of his brethren, before he had been 
 a dozen years in the harness he could have equaled 
 Saint Paul's list of casualties. He was a member 
 of the New York Conference, which at the time 
 of his admission included most of the settled portion 
 of New York State, western Connecticut, Vermont, 
 and Canada from Quebec to the settlements oppo- 
 site Detroit. 
 
 Ordained by Francis Asbury In 1804, three years 
 after the great Cane Ridge revival. Bangs was ap- 
 pointed to a Canadian circuit, at Thames River. 
 The region was sparsely settled, infested with In- 
 dians, and a stamping ground for fur traders, trap-
 
 136 Nation Builders 
 
 pers, half-breeds, and all the semicivilized classes 
 that add so much to the pages of romance and de- 
 tract in an equal ratio from the pleasures and safety 
 of real life. In 1808 he returned to the states, be- 
 ing appointed to the Delaware Circuit. From there 
 he was ordered to the Albany Circuit, then to New 
 York city, and in 181 2 to Montreal, but was pre- 
 vented from filling the latter appointment by the war 
 that was then in progress. In 1813 Bangs was made 
 presiding elder of the Rhinebeck District, which ex- 
 tended from Rhinebeck, on the Hudson River, to 
 Pittsfield, Vermont, and through Connecticut to 
 Long Island Sound. That district is now divided 
 into six. At that time there were three chapels in 
 the whole territory. 
 
 To relate the successive steps of Nathan Bangs's 
 promotion can only serve to indicate his growing 
 strength in the church and the confidence reposed in 
 him by his colaborers. He was successively ap- 
 pointed ])y the General Conference as Book Agent, 
 editor of the Christian Advocate, and editor of the 
 Methodist Quarterly, among his associates being the 
 learned and eminent Bishop Emory. In 1836 he 
 was appointed missionary secretary. In 1841 the 
 presidency of the Wesleyan University was tendered 
 to him and accepted. And when, in 1852, he retired, 
 after fifty-one years of continuous service, he was 
 regarded as one of the wisest and purest nf the many
 
 Another Company of the Sowers 137 
 
 men whose lives have been spent in the same high 
 service. 
 
 James Axley was one of the prominent men of 
 the second generation of Methodist preachers, who 
 dated their conversion from the great spiritual re- 
 generation at the beginning of the century. Peter 
 Cartwright and Samuel Parker were among those 
 who, with Axley, presented themselves before the 
 1804 Conference. A natural genius, eccentric and 
 earnest, self-sacrificing and brusque, loved and 
 feared, Axley made a notable place for himself in 
 the Methodist van. Bishop Morris tells of his first 
 meeting with him : 
 
 "The following salutations were exchanged : 
 
 " 'How are you. Brother Axley ?' 
 
 "'Who are you?' 
 
 " 'My name is Thomas Morris.' 
 
 "Then, surveying me from head to foot, he re- 
 plied, 'Upon my word, I think they were hard pushed 
 for bishop timber when they got hold of you.' " 
 
 Yet those two became fast friends, and the bishop 
 records that "every hour that I could redeem from 
 Conference and council business was enlivened by 
 his quaint but thrilling narratives of his early travels, 
 labors, and difficulties. Unaccustomed to the free 
 use of the pen, he kept all his records in his tena- 
 cious memory, much strengthened by use, and nar- 
 rated with uncommon precision as to names, dates,
 
 138 Nation Builders 
 
 and the order in which facts transpired. This he 
 did leisurely and with perfect self-possession, but 
 spiced the whole with such apt remarks and con- 
 summate good humor that the attention of the com- 
 pany never faltered. Ne\'er was I better entertained 
 or more instructed with the conversation of a fellow 
 sojourner in one week than with his. It was decid- 
 edly rich." 
 
 As a singer James Axley was peculiarly accept- 
 able to people who had neither choirs nor organs 
 and to whom a good leading voice was a great boon. 
 On at least one occasion his voice gained him a 
 much-desired night's lodging after one had been re- 
 fused. The preacher had ridden a long distance, 
 and near nightfall came to a house in which were 
 two women, a mother and daughter, and their serv- 
 ants. Beyond the plantation he must plunge again 
 into the woods and spend the night under the trees 
 if he failed to find a welcome at the house. He rode 
 up and made known his request, which was no 
 strange one in that part of the country at that day. 
 The women, either misjudging Axley's exterior, 
 which was rough and uncouth, or lacking the com- 
 mon hospitality of their region, refused his request. 
 He was allowed to rest himself for a little while 
 and warm himself before the fire, for it was cold 
 weather. As he stood there, thinking of the pros- 
 pect before him :\\y\ somewhat downcast in conse-
 
 Another Company of the Sowers 139 
 
 quence, he began to sing one of the Methodist hymns 
 that seemed to fit so naturally into all the experi- 
 ences of life, and before he had finished his hostess 
 ordered the servant to take the stranger's horse 
 around to the barn and feed him well. 
 
 A sermon which Axley preached in Baltimore in 
 1820 was remembered and spoken of up to the time 
 of the civil war; but the effort which was noted 
 as the greatest triumph of his career was a sermon 
 preached to peach-brandy distillers in East Tennes- 
 see, from the text, "Alexander the coppersmith did 
 me much evil : the Lord reward him according to 
 his works" (2 Tim. 4. 14). It was a temperance 
 discourse, and ran something as follows : 
 
 "Paul was a traveling preacher and a bishop, T 
 presume, or a presiding elder at least, for he trav- 
 eled extensively and had much to do not only in 
 organizing the societies but in sending preachers 
 here, there, and all over. He would not build on 
 another man's foundations, but formed new circuits 
 where Christ was not named, so that from Jerusalem 
 round about unto Illyricum he had fully preached the 
 gospel of Christ. One new place that he visited was 
 very wicked — Sabbath-breaking, dancing, drinking, 
 quarreling, fighting, swearing, etc., abounded; but 
 the word of the Lord took effect, there was a pow- 
 erful stir among the people, and many were con- 
 verted. Among the subjects of that work there was
 
 140 Nation Builders 
 
 a certain noted character named Alexander, a still- 
 maker by trade ; also one Hymenaeus, who was his 
 partner in that business. Paul formed a new society 
 and appointed Brother Alexander class leader. 
 There was a great change in the place: the people 
 left off their drinking, fighting, swearing, horse rac- 
 ing, and all their wicked practices. The stills were 
 worked up into bells and stew kettles, and thus ap- 
 plied to useful purposes. The settlement was orderly, 
 the meetings were prosperous, and things went well 
 with them for some time. But one year they had a 
 pleasant spring; there was no late frost, and the 
 peach crop hit exactly. I do suppose, my brethren, 
 that such a crop of peaches was never known before. 
 The old folks ate all they could eat, the children 
 ate all they could eat, the pigs ate all they could 
 eat, and the sisters preserved all they could preserve, 
 and still the limbs were bending and breaking. One 
 Sunday, when the brethren met for worship, they 
 gathered round outside of the meetinghouse and got 
 to talking about their worldly business — as you 
 know people sometimes do, and it is a mighty bad 
 practice — and one said to another, 'Brother, how's 
 the peach crop with you this year?' 
 
 " *0,' said he, T never saw the like; they are rot- 
 ting on the grnnnd under the trees. T don't know 
 what to do with them.' 
 
 'TTow would it do to still them? The peaches 
 
 <( n
 
 Another Company of the Sowers 141 
 
 will go to waste, but the brandy will keep, and it is 
 very good in certain cases if not used to excess.' 
 
 " 'I should like to know,' asked a cute brother, 
 *how you can make brandy without stills?' 
 
 " That's nothing,' replied one, 'for our class 
 leader, Brother Alexander, is as good a stillmaker 
 as can be, and Brother Hymenasus is another, and 
 rather than see the fruit wasted they, no doubt, 
 would make us a few.' 
 
 "The next thing heard on the subject was a ham- 
 mering in the class leader's shop, and soon the stills 
 in every brother's orchard were smoking and the 
 liquid poison streaming. When one called on an- 
 other the bottle was brought out with the remark, 
 'I want you to taste my new peach brandy ; I think 
 it is pretty good.' The guest, after tasting it once, 
 was urged to repeat, when, smacking his lips, he 
 would reply, 'Well, it's tolerable; but I wish you 
 would come over and taste mine.' So they tasted 
 and tasted, till many of them got about half drunk 
 and I don't know but three quarters. Then the very 
 devil was raised among them ; the society was in 
 an uproar, and Paul was sent for to come and try 
 and settle the difficulty. At first it was difficult to 
 find sober, disinterested ones enough to try the 
 guilty; but finally he got his committee formed, and 
 the first one he brought to account was Alexander 
 the coppersmith, who pleaded not guilty. He de-
 
 142 Nation Builders 
 
 clared that he had not tasted, bought, sold, or dis- 
 tilled a drop of brandy. 'But/ said Paul, 'you made 
 the stills, and if you hadn't made the stills there 
 could have been no liquor made, and if no liquor 
 no one could have been intoxicated.' So they ex- 
 pelled him first and Hymenseus next, and went on 
 for complement, till the society was relieved of all 
 stillmakers, distillers, dram sellers, and dram drink- 
 ers, and peace was once more restored. Paul says : 
 Tlolding faith, and a good conscience; which some 
 having put away concerning faith have made ship- 
 wreck : of whom is Hynien<TUs and Alexander : 
 whom I have delivered unto Satan, that they may 
 learn not to blaspheme.' Of course, they flew off 
 the handle and joined the schismatics." 
 
 To fully appreciate the force of the foregoing 
 discourse it is necessary, of course, that one should 
 put himself in the place of a peach-growing, still- 
 making, brandy-selling community and try to read 
 into the cold lines of type as presented here the 
 splendid voice and vehement delivery of the ec- 
 centric preacher. 
 
 On one occasion it is told of him that, having 
 preached upon the necessity of nonconformity to 
 worldly fashions if people would be sincere Chris- 
 tians, he affected to hold a dialogue with some imag- 
 inary disputant in the audience, skillfully changing 
 his voice as he took the alternate characters in the
 
 Another Company of the Sowers 143 
 
 debate, and walked up and down the platform, upon 
 which, behind him, several other, preachers were 
 seated. After appearing to demolish his opponent 
 at every point in the argument the latter was 
 made to say: "But, sir, some of your Methodist 
 preachers themselves dress fashionably and play the 
 dandy." 
 
 "O no, my friend; that cannot be. Methodist 
 ministers know better. They are men of more sense 
 than that, and would not stoop so low as to disgrace 
 themselves and the sacred office they hold by such 
 gross inconsistency of character." 
 
 "Well, sir, if you won't take my word for it just 
 look at those young preachers on the platform be- 
 hind you." 
 
 Mr. Axley at this swung around, looked his 
 shrinking colaborers over for a moment in seeming 
 astonishment, and then said, in a dejected tone, fac- 
 ing the audience again, "If you please zve will drop 
 that subject." 
 
 William Henry Milburn, the blind preacher, has 
 left a description of Peter Cartwright that is so 
 graphic and at the same time so picturesque that we 
 are tempted to quote it at length. It was during 
 Milburn's boyhood, just after the removal of his 
 parents from their Philadelphia home to the West, 
 that he first saw the famous backwoods preacher. 
 It was the first Sunday in an unfamiliar church,
 
 144 Nation Builders 
 
 among strange people, a bright June day, but clouded 
 to the stranger's eye by homesickness. 
 
 "Our attention was arrested by a strange appari- 
 tion striding up the aisle. All seemed whispering 
 to their neighbors, 'There he goes,' and all eyes were 
 riveted upon a man of medium height, thickset, with 
 enormous bone and muscle, and although his iron- 
 o-rav hair and wrinkled brow told of the advance of 
 years his step was still vigorous and firm. His face 
 was bronzed by exposure to the weather; he car- 
 ried a white Quaker hat in his hand, and his upper 
 garment was a furniture-calico dressing gown with- 
 out wadding. The truant breeze seemed to seize 
 this garment by its skirt, and, lifting it to a level 
 with his armpits, disclosed to the gazing congrega- 
 tion a full view of the copperas-colored pantaloons 
 and shirt of the divine — for he was a divine, and one 
 worth a day's journey to see and hear. 
 
 "He had then been a backwoods preacher for 
 nearly forty years, ranging the country from the 
 Lakes to the Gulf and from the Alleghanies to the 
 Mississippi. He was inured to every form of hard- 
 slii]) and had looked calmly at peril of every kind — 
 ihc tomaliawk of llu- Indian, the spring of the pan- 
 ther, the hug oi the bear, the sweep of the tornado, 
 the rush of swollen torrents, ruid the fearful chasm 
 of (lie earthf|nnkc. He luul Iain in the canebrake 
 aii'l made his bed upon the snow of llie prairie and
 
 Another Company of the Sowers 145 
 
 oil the oozy soil of the swamp, and had wandered, 
 hunger-bitten, among the solitudes of the mountains. 
 He had been in jeopardy among robbers and in dan- 
 ger from desperadoes who had sworn to take his life. 
 He had preached in the cabin of the slave and the 
 mansion of the master, to the Indians and to the 
 men of the border. He had taken his life in his 
 hand and had ridden in the path of whizzing bullets, 
 that he might proclaim peace. He had stood on the 
 outskirts of civilization and welcomed the first 
 comers to the woods and prairies. At the command 
 of Him who said, 'Go into all the world,' he had 
 roamed through the wilderness ; as a disciple of the 
 man who said, 'The world is my parish,' his travels 
 had equaled the limits of an empire. 
 
 "Many a son of Anak has been leveled in the dust 
 by his sledgelike fist, and when the blind fury of his 
 assailants urged them headlong into personal con- 
 flict with him his agility, strength, and resolution 
 gave them cause for bitter repentance. Another 
 Gideon, more than once has he led a handful of the 
 faithful against the armies of the aliens who were 
 desecrating the place of worship and threatening to 
 abolish religious services, and put them to inglorious 
 flight. But he only girded on his strength thus and 
 used the weapons that nature gave him when neces- 
 sity and the law of self-defense seemed to admit of 
 no escape. To breathe the word of hope into the
 
 146 Nation Builders 
 
 ear of the dying and to minister solace to the sur- 
 vivors, to take little children in his arms and bless 
 them, to lead the flock over which God had made him 
 overseer, and to warn the ungodly of the error of 
 their ways, entreating them to be reconciled to God 
 by the cross of Christ, was the business of his life. 
 Learning he had none, but the keenest perception 
 and the truest instincts enabled him to read human 
 nature as men read a book ... a workman that 
 needed not to be ashamed. 
 
 "A voice which, in his prime, was capable of 
 almost every modulation, the earnest force and 
 homely directness of his speech, and his power over 
 the passions of the human heart made him an orator 
 to win and command the suffrages of a Western 
 audience. And ever through the discourse came and 
 went and came again a humor that was resistless, 
 now broadening the features into a merry smile, and 
 then softening the heart until tears stood in the eyes 
 of all. His figures and illustrations were often 
 grand, sometimes fantastical. Like all natives of 
 a new country, he spoke in metaphors, and his were 
 borrowed from the magnificent realm in which he 
 lived. All forms of nature were familiar to him. 
 . . . You might hear, in a single discourse, the thun- 
 der tread of a frightened herd of buffaloes as they 
 rushed wildly across the prairie, the crash of the 
 windrow as it fell smitten by^ the breath of the tcin-
 
 Another Company of the Sowers 147 
 
 pest, the piercing scream of the wildcat as it scared 
 the midnight forest, the majestic rhythm of the Mis- 
 sissippi as it harmonized the distant East and West 
 and, united, bore their tributes to the far-off ocean, 
 the silvery flow of a mountain rivulet, the whisper 
 of groves, and the jocund laughter of unnumbered 
 prairie flowers as they toyed in dalliance with the 
 evening breeze. . . . Another of the poet's attri- 
 butes was his — the impulse and power to create 
 his own language, and he was the best lexicon of 
 Western words, phrases, and idioms that I have 
 ever heard. 
 
 "Such was the man that now stood before us in 
 the desk, the famous presiding elder of Illinois — 
 the renowned Peter Cartwright." 
 
 The anecdotes of Cartwright's eccentric humor 
 were almost numberless. They were as familiar at 
 the firesides of an older generation of Methodists 
 as the tales of the Cid were to the people of Spain in 
 the olden times. Not Mr. Travers or David Crockett 
 nor hardly even President Lincoln was the subject 
 of more anecdotes than this much-beloved itinerant 
 preacher. 
 
 With great gusto an appreciative parishioner on 
 the frontier would recount how Cartwright first 
 licked and then converted the bully who attempted 
 to bar his way to a preaching appointment. He was 
 said to have been the original of the story told by
 
 148 Nation Builders 
 
 Edward Eggleston in The Circuit Rider, of the min- 
 ister who worked a turbulent audience to a pitch of 
 fury by his fearless denunciations of their wicked- 
 ness, and then, just at the moment when they \vere 
 making a rush toward him, extinguished the candles 
 in the desk and made his exit unhurt. 
 
 On one occasion, at a Conference presided over 
 by a bishop whose physical infirmity made him a foe 
 to mirth, the bubbling humor of Cartwright was 
 regarded with marked disfavor. The superior officer 
 called him sternly to account, and something like the 
 following dialogue took place : 
 
 "I read in my Bible, 'Be angry and sin not,' but 
 I nowhere read, 'Laugh and sin not.' We will ask 
 divine pardon for this levity. Brother Cartwright 
 will lead in prayer." 
 
 Cartwright led in repeating the Lord's Prayer, 
 and then jumped to his feet to take up the cudgels : 
 "Look here, Mr. Bishop, when I dig potatoes I 
 dig potatoes, when I hoe corn I hoe corn, when 
 I pray I pray, and when I attend to business I want 
 to attend to business. I wish you did, too, and I 
 don't want you to take such a snap judgment on me 
 again." 
 
 "Brother, do you think you arc growing in 
 grace ?" 
 
 "Yes, bishop, I think I am — in spots." 
 
 The bishop did not pursue the subject any further.
 
 Another Company of the Sowers 149 
 
 Another anecdote of the Ilh'nois preacher relates 
 to his first visit to New York, where he put up at 
 the Astor House and was given a room as near the 
 roof as could be found. A sleepy night clerk, not 
 greatly prepossessed with the appearance of the 
 backwoodsman, whom he took for a regular hayseed, 
 was not a little bothered when the bell began to ring 
 from the distant apartment, and the servant who 
 had conducted the guest to his eyrie commenced a 
 series of journeys up the interminable stairs. It was 
 ages before the day of elevators, and the waiter was 
 getting tired. He reported that the guest was crazy. 
 "The first time he called me up to ask how we were 
 all getting on down here," he told the clerk. "And 
 the next time he was bothered by the bell on the 
 City Hall and wanted to know where the fire was, 
 and the last time he asked for an ax." 
 
 "An ax?" 
 
 "Yes, sir, an ax." 
 
 "What in creation does he want with an ax." 
 
 "I don't know, sir. He insisted that he must have 
 one." 
 
 Then the clerk climbed to the distant room and 
 ■ asked somewhat impatiently what an ax was wanted 
 for. 
 
 "Well," said the guest, "in my state when a man 
 has a distance to go in a strange country he blazes 
 his way with an ax, so that he may know how to get
 
 150 Nation Builders 
 
 back. I want to leave my room, and I want to blaze 
 my way so that I can find it again." 
 
 "Who are you, anyway?" gasped the astonished 
 clerk. 
 
 "My name is Peter Cartwright," answered the 
 old man, amiably. 
 
 Apologies were instantly forthcoming; the clerk 
 did not know, had not been able to read the name 
 on the register, etc. Certainly he had reserved a 
 room on the second floor, the very best in the house, 
 for the distinguished guest, and the satisfied preacher 
 descended to more agreeable quarters. 
 
 "How is it," once asked a New Englander of an- 
 other church, "that your denomination has no Doc- 
 tors of Divinity?" 
 
 Peter's answer was instant : "Our divinity has 
 never been sick, and, consequently, doesn't need 
 doctoring." 
 
 Now, when Cartwright was in company with 
 General Jackson (for he once preached on a circuit 
 that included the Hermitage) he abated nothing of 
 his sturdy independence of speech and character, and 
 the Democratic leader admired him greatly. One 
 of their first encounters was upon an occasion when 
 Cartwright was preaching and tlie general entered 
 the meetinghouse. Some one whispered, "Brother 
 Cartwright, you must be careful how you preach 
 to-night; General Jiickson has just come in."
 
 Another Company of the Sowers 151 
 
 In an instant the preacher's uncompromising an- 
 swer was heard in every corner of the building: 
 "What do you suppose I care for General Jackson? 
 If he don't repent of his sins and ask pardon and 
 believe on the Lord Jesus Christ he will be damned 
 as quick as any other sinner." 
 
 Jackson met him the next morning, shook hands 
 cordially, and said: "Sir, you are a preacher after 
 my own heart. If I had a regiment of such men as 
 you I'd conquer the earth." 
 
 A flippant youth, a guest at General Jackson's 
 table, thought that it would be noble sport to bait the 
 preacher, who was also present. "Mr. Cartwright," 
 he began, "do you really believe in hell ? Of course 
 you preach about it, but I want your private opin- 
 ion. Can any intelligent man believe any nonsense 
 of that sort?" 
 
 Before the preacher had time to answer the gen- 
 eral had taken up the cudgels for him : "Mr. Jones, 
 I believe in hell!" 
 
 "You, General Jackson ?" stammered the confused 
 guest. "Why, wdiat possible use can there be for 
 such a place?" 
 
 "To put infernal fools like you in, sir," vociferated 
 the general, whose practice w^as not at that time quite 
 on a par with his theology, but who did not propose 
 to countenance any disrespect to religion at his 
 board.
 
 152 Nation Builders 
 
 Cartwright was not a stickler for social observ- 
 ances, but he did demand and insist upon deference 
 to religious forms and a certain respect to the min- 
 isters of the gospel. He more than once refused to 
 eat at a table where he was not permitted to first 
 ask a blessing on the food. Though hungry and 
 weary after a long journey, he would shake the dust 
 from his feet and prolong his fast indefinitely rather 
 than give way in such a matter. 
 
 One of the most characteristic stories told of Cart- 
 wright (on his own authority) is that once when 
 in the mountains he was the means of turning a 
 dance into a prayer meeting. The people were good- 
 natured pioneers, not used to ministers and their 
 ways, but ready to give the stranger their best and 
 a welcome. After the dance commenced the belle 
 of the occasion, thinking it a pity that so stalwart a 
 young man should be left to sit out the festivities 
 alone, and no doubt attributing his inactivity to 
 bashfulness, held out her hand to him. and invited 
 him to dance with her. On the spur of the moment 
 Cartwright rose, took the girl's hand, and led her 
 into the middle of the room ; then, to the astonish- 
 ment of all, he announced that he never did anything 
 without asking God's blessing upon it, and pro- 
 ceeded to kneel and pray, still holding the hand of 
 his somewhat frightened partner. TTe prayed with 
 "great liberty." as the old-fashioned Methodist
 
 Another Company of the Sowers 153 
 
 phrase was, and in a little while he had a revival in 
 full swing. 
 
 Cartwright went to Boston in later life for a visit, 
 and the crowds who flocked to hear him were disap- 
 pointed. They had heard much about the wild elo- 
 quence of this backwoodsman, and failed to find it. 
 The fact seems to be that Cartwright was trying his 
 best to adapt himself to the cultivated people of the 
 Hub, and, as a consequence, they did not hear the 
 real Cartwright at all at first. But after the second 
 or third sermon he abandoned the attempt to be 
 anything other than his natural self, and the 
 result was that the favor of his hearers increased 
 mightily. 
 
 One of the men of Cartwright's generation, accus- 
 tomed to the sights and sounds and signs of the 
 woods and the waters, used to note of bird and cry 
 of beast, well versed in woodlore and cabin customs, 
 heard the music of a piano for the first time with 
 rapture. At last his musical soul was satisfied with 
 something approaching the heavenly strains he had 
 dreamed of, but there was nothing in his experience 
 with which to compare it except — could imagination 
 build upon a slighter foundation? — sheep bells! 
 "Did anyone ever hear such a set of sheep bells?" 
 he cried. 
 
 A pendant to the above is an incident narrated of 
 another preacher who knocked loudly on a door
 
 154 Nation Builders 
 
 beside which was a silver-plated bell handle, of the 
 use of which he had not the slightest idea. 
 
 Mr. Milburn tells how he went into the work of 
 the ministry with a very small musical equipment. 
 He had three tunes, learned with great pains : a long- 
 meter, short meter, and common meter, that should 
 have fitted any ordinary occasion. But he records 
 with considerable naivete that he frequently met with 
 disaster by trying to fit long-meter words to his 
 common-meter tune. One of the preachers, with a 
 capacity for music about equal to Milburn's — that 
 is to say, far below the average — used to ask if some 
 brother would "raise" the tune, averring that he 
 could "tote" it afterward. But the plan did not 
 always work well. 
 
 We once asked a preacher who was familiar with 
 frontier work what he considered the most necessary 
 accomplishment for the Methodist itinerant, and he 
 promptly replied : "The ability to sing. Music, next 
 to the Bible, is the thing to be relied upon. If not 
 one of the questions formally asked when a candi- 
 date comes up before Conference, it is at least put 
 to him in some form : 'Can you sing?' The ability to 
 sing means the ability to gather a congregation 
 almost anywhere. I find it of the utmost impor- 
 tance, and since I learned to strum a few chords on a 
 guitar I can always get a crowd to listen to me in an 
 Indian village, a logging camp, or a mining town."
 
 Another Company of the Sowers 155 
 
 Nearly all of the older preachers could at least 
 "raise the tune." Many could "tote it" with con- 
 siderable power and energy, if not with the finished 
 grace of a De Reszke, and not a few were famous 
 for the possession of rich, flexible, sweet voices 
 which, like their hearts, were "tuned to praise." 
 
 Another man of Cartwright's day, an abler man 
 as a theologian, though not readier in defense of the 
 things he was persuaded were true, was Elder Peter 
 Ackers. He was so rapt in his subject that he fre- 
 quently forgot time and place, and is said to have 
 preached on occasions sermons four or five hours 
 long. To the praise of his earnestness be it said that 
 his audience would not have had the discourse a 
 minute shorter. Perhaps something should be said 
 to the praise of the audience, too, for it took certain 
 sturdiness of physique as well as spiritual hunger 
 to stand such an outpouring of eloquence. 
 
 Henry Biddleman Bascom was born in May, 
 1796, and died at Louisville, Kentucky, on Septem- 
 ber 8, 1850. He was elected a bishop of the Meth- 
 odist Episcopal Church, South, in May, 1850, hav- 
 ing for eight years previously been president of 
 the Transylvania University. By a comparison of 
 dates it will be seen that \\hen his work was 
 finished he was not an old man, yet he was one of 
 those who served to connect the earlier and later 
 periods of Methodist history in America. At the
 
 156 Nation Builders 
 
 time of the great revival which distinguished the 
 opening years of the nineteenth century he was but 
 a child, yet he was an important factor in the work 
 of building and developing the superstructure placed 
 upon the foundations he helped to lay. 
 
 A gentleman whose recollections go back to the 
 early middle period of Methodist history told how 
 Bascom took the people of New York by storm. 
 In the old Greene Street Church he drew such 
 crowds that people climbed up to the windows and 
 stood outside the doors in breathless attention, while 
 the congregation within were swayed by his words 
 as ripe grain is moved by the wind that passes over 
 it. Men sat with mouths agape, or with tears run- 
 ning over their cheeks, utterly oblivious of their 
 surroundings, intent only upon the persuasive, elo- 
 quent, mastering voice and keen eyes and vehement 
 gestures of the greatest of American pulpit orators. 
 
 Those who tell of his preaching recollect always 
 the effect and forget the sermon. They relate their 
 impressions as one would describe a picture. There 
 was the tall, spare, eagle-eyed, magnetic man on his 
 feet ; the graceful swing and sweep of his arms ; the 
 fierce, passionate denunciation, and the musical, con- 
 vincing sweetness of his voice. There were the rows 
 upon rows of crowded humanity in the pews, the 
 packed aisles, the faces of self-forgetful, entranced 
 listeners convulsed with emotion. But the words?
 
 Another Company of the Sowers 157 
 
 They were not reported. Like the tones of sweet 
 singers and the skill of bygone players upon instru- 
 ments, the music of that voice and the skill of that 
 performer upon the human heart must remain for- 
 ever a matter of tradition. The few bits and snatches 
 that are attributed to him are denuded and cold.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 A Recollection of Bascom 
 
 [This narrative of a Sabbath morning's journey 
 to see and hear Henry Bascom, and the following 
 estimate of the great orator's relation to the reli- 
 gious life of the people of his generation, are a per- 
 sonal note, written by the late Andrew C. Wheeler. 
 His associate in the authorship of this book has not 
 abridged nor in any way changed this most graphic 
 and valuable record:] 
 
 A Dream of Childhood's Dream 
 
 One of the earliest and deepest of impressions was 
 made upon my child mind when I was about six 
 years old. It was in Indiana, where my father had 
 tlien been li\'ing for several years. He set out early 
 one Sabbath morning in summer with my mother 
 and myself in a buggy to go fifteen miles to church. 
 This in itself was an extraordinary proceeding even 
 to me, for we had our own church convenient, and 
 my father, as I well knew, being a rigid member of 
 it, was opposed in principle to what was then called 
 "buggy riding" on Sunday. A journey of fifteen 
 miles at that time in a wild country was a much more
 
 A Recollection of Bascom 159 
 
 arduous undertaking than we can conceive of at this 
 day. The roads were uncertain and frequently im- 
 passable. They led through primeval forests and 
 across treacherous fords and skirted uncertain 
 sloughs, and they were beset with other perils of man 
 and beast in a wilderness. But to the quickened sen- 
 sibilities of the child the journey wore the ineradi- 
 cable delight of a new experience. It was the first 
 time that I had seen the external world lit with the 
 benison of sunrise, and to me the majesty of nature 
 in all her unkempt glory wore the sparkle and sang 
 the song of a new existence. 
 
 We must have toiled laboriously over that pri- 
 meval track, beset with difficulties and obstructions 
 of which I took no heed. I was sensible of an eager- 
 ness and a zest in the undertaking that invested it 
 with some kind of inscrutable interest, but mainly 
 I exulted in the glory of the way. The precious 
 alchemy of a child mind transmuted those rude ele- 
 ments into the sharp ecstasy of surprises. The 
 musky scents of the forest were strangely acute 
 and delightful, and the morning tumult of the 
 birds choired us on our journey with ineffable 
 joyousness. 
 
 As we neared the end of our journey we encoun- 
 tered at the crossroads other mire-bespattered vehi- 
 cles, evidently upon the same errand as ourselves. 
 From the salutations that passed I understood only
 
 i6o Nation Builders 
 
 that some common purpose was animating our little 
 community, and that not only our neighbors but the 
 inhabitants of other and to me unknown communi- 
 ties were converging upon some central destination 
 with eagerness and with determination. As this 
 consciousness of some important and common pur- 
 pose lying at the end of our journey gradually 
 displaced the child's enjoyment of the senses I 
 must have made inquiries of my mother, for she 
 informed me, with a solemnity that was meant to 
 be comprehensive, that we were going "to hear 
 Bascom." 
 
 I repeated it over in my mind with a mimetic echo 
 of her seriousness : "We are going to hear Bascom." 
 To go and hear Bascom was then one of the most 
 important events in one's life. All that I knew of 
 life was hurrying forward to the accomplishment of 
 that great feat. To go and hear him was at least for 
 me to pass through a strangely beautiful and exult- 
 ant experience. 
 
 Presently we approached a village, and as we did 
 so the broader roadway became choked with vehicles 
 of all kinds carrying heavy freights of human be- 
 ings, some of them devout and sensible of the weight 
 of the occasion, others vociferous and reckless — as 
 if to hear Bascom were as much of an event as 
 going to the circus. Finally we came to a green area 
 with the old-fashioned white "meetinghouse" in the
 
 A Recollection of Bascom i6i 
 
 center, and then we were swallowed up In a great 
 multitude. 
 
 All the particulars of that unusual spectacle were 
 deeply impressed upon my plastic mind. The vast 
 concourse of people, crowding up at the church 
 entrance, the great circles of wagons, and some- 
 where the faint, protesting clang of a distant bell, 
 sharp and melodious to my ear, that must have 
 been urgently reminding many of these people that 
 their own church should not be neglected to hear 
 Bascom. 
 
 I remember the exclamation of disappointment 
 made by my father when, standing up in the buggy, 
 he saw that he had arrived too late to get into the 
 church. I recall as from a dream an effort of his 
 to find the home of an acquaintance, where my 
 mother could rest before starting back, and how 
 when it was found it was deserted — everybody had 
 gone to hear Bascom. Then it was that in wan- 
 dering back to the central point of attraction, and 
 working his way up to one of the open church win- 
 dows he lifted me up in his arms to look in. It 
 was that momentary glimpse, caught by a child's 
 sensitive eye and photographed forever on his brain, 
 that I now try to reproduce. T saw a dense and 
 eager assemblage held spellbound by a majestic 
 figure in the pulpit, that to me wore an almost super- 
 natural air of authority and grandeur. In that
 
 1 62 Nation Builders 
 
 transient glimpse were all the ingredients of an after 
 speculation and wonder. The wet faces, the strained 
 and still attention — broken only by the meas- 
 ured cadences of one voice — the contrast of the 
 homespun assemblage with the inspired air of the 
 speaker, and, above all, the strange words that my 
 ear caught and retained without knowing their 
 meaning — "that ye might have life and have it 
 more abundantly" — all these things in one flash, as 
 it were, made a revelation of power wholly inex- 
 plicable that got hold of my imagination. In the 
 Bible stories that my mother told me afterward, of 
 the prophets and warriors, my infantile fancy filled 
 in the descriptive outlines with that majestic figure, 
 as I had seen it with arm uplifted and head erect, 
 uttering mysterious words at which men were ap- 
 palled. David, Moses, Elisha, and Saint Paul for 
 a long time afterward took on the dimensions and 
 authority of that form and face thus shot in an 
 instant across the vision of a child. 
 
 That was the only glimpse I ever caught of 
 Henry B. Bascom, the great preacher. But after- 
 ward my mother told me that my father had held 
 nic up lo that church window so that I could say 
 in after life that I had seen the greatest preacher in 
 the world. In her dear old scale of values that was 
 nil inestimable privilege. And now, after all these 
 years, I am trying to make good her words, and if
 
 A Recollection or BxVscom 163 
 
 I go a little beyond them and try to see the great 
 preacher as others saw him it is the best one can do 
 who had the misfortune to be born a few years too 
 late to enter fully into the popular enthusiasm that 
 attended his career.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 The Songs of Zion 
 
 We have spoken of the ability to sing as part of 
 the Methodist preacher's equipment. It would 
 hardly be possible to overestimate the power of 
 music in drawing and holding audiences of the 
 plain people, to use Mr. Lincoln's descriptive 
 phrase for the large majority of his fellow coun- 
 trymen. 
 
 Nowadays great organs, responding to the touch 
 of skillful players, trained choirs and star singers 
 that make a profession of "tuneful words of praise," 
 take the place in many Methodist churches of the 
 simple, sincere, swelling outburst of congregational 
 song. The times have changed, and the preacher no 
 longer is obliged to be chorister and precentor. But 
 in the earlier days he sang almost as many souls to 
 everlasting bliss as he preached into the ways of 
 righteousness. 
 
 In the woods, across some forlorn clearing, 
 through the rich river bottoms, and on the mountain 
 side the clarion notes of sacred song sounded like 
 the bugle that announces the advance of a squadron. 
 The woodsman, the Indian, the river boatman drew
 
 The Songs of Zion 165 
 
 near to hear who this vociferous entertainer was 
 and what his outburst signified. 
 
 In a country where one old fiddle to a dozen clear- 
 ings was a liberal allowance in the matter of musical 
 entertainment and new songs were as scarce as new 
 dollars, where the people, physically strong and 
 active, were mentally starved, the coming of a man 
 whose repertoire contained a dozen or twenty of 
 Charles Wesley's hymns meant more than an opera 
 company that should promise everything from 
 Tannhauser to Carmen would mean to us. 
 
 We, who are satiated with entertainment, can 
 scarcely realize what that one voice uplifted in song 
 meant to the frontiersman. If you have seen a band 
 in the streets of a small country town you have 
 something of the impression produced. That was 
 the first important function of the spiritual songs 
 — they drew the people together. 
 
 Then they made the worship general when other- 
 wise it would have been individual. The first req- 
 uisite of a good song is that it shall flow from the 
 lips without effort— "words that sing themselves," 
 we are wont to talk about. When the preacher led 
 the whole congregation joined in, learned the words, 
 caught the tune in a jiffy, and immediately became 
 participators in the service of praise or supplication. 
 The value of such gentle craft as that, well under- 
 stood as it used to be, is almost forgotten and often
 
 1 66 Nation Builders 
 
 entirely disregarded now. Wherever you can get 
 a whole congregation heartly singing songs that are 
 not too difficult, and not too inane, you may be sure 
 that they are in a frame of mind to make the most 
 of the sermon. 
 
 What melodies they were, those songs of Zion, 
 in which Wesley had crystallized the longing and 
 the hope, the penitence and the aspiration of the 
 human race! Hardly more admirable, perhaps, 
 from a musical standpoint, than the later produc- 
 tions that are commonly associated with Mr. San- 
 key's name, they had a lilt and a swing to them 
 that aroused the sluggish nature and awakened the 
 spiritual longing of many a rough pioneer. 
 
 With what unction the voice in the wilderness 
 was lifted up in words whose admonition and en- 
 couragement were understood to be part of a divine 
 commission ! 
 
 "Ye servants of God, your Master proclaim, 
 And publish abroad his wonderful name; 
 The name all-victorious of Jesus extol ; 
 His kingdom is glorious, and rules over all." 
 
 What an urgent, triumphant major strain ! Fear 
 and doubt and creeping compromise had nothing to 
 do with it. As it rang out under green leaf canopies 
 and between aisles of oak and pine it must luuc at- 
 Iracted all that was highest and best in those that 
 heard it and repelled whatever was base and cow-
 
 The Songs of Zion 167 
 
 ardly. There was a no-compromise quality about 
 Wesley's songs that made them apt auxiliaries to 
 men who preached without reservation that all sin- 
 ners must be damned except by the grace of God 
 they repent and believe in the Lord Christ. 
 
 There was a great old hymn, a favorite in the 
 settlements, that we can hardly see the beauty of 
 till we have put ourselves in the circumstances and 
 amid the surroundings of those who lived on the 
 ragged edge of the world: 
 
 "Come on, my partners in distress, 
 My comrades through the wilderness." 
 
 And the short-meter hymn called "Peace" seemed 
 to take a strong hold on the minds.of people whose 
 suffering and distress were very 'frequent and very 
 real : 
 
 ' ' Thou very-present Aid 
 
 In suffering and distress, 
 The mind which still on thee is stayed. 
 Is kept in perfect peace." 
 
 But chief among all the songs that roused the 
 spirits and taxed the lungs of the oldest believer and 
 the newest convert, that one which satisfied the de- 
 sire for expression of hearts overburdened with love 
 and longing, that was sung to all the accompani- 
 ments of amens and tears and the various expres- 
 sions of rapture that an honest but unsophisticated 
 being may give way to, was:
 
 1 68 Nation Builders 
 
 "O for a thousand tongues, to sing 
 
 My great Redeemer's praise; 
 
 The glories of my God and King, 
 
 The triumphs of his grace ! ' ' 
 
 It was a great hymn for sacramental seasons, when 
 those who spread the Lord's table in the wilderness 
 looked with lively faith for a pentecostal outpouring 
 of the Spirit. 
 
 Then there was one that was suited to sterner 
 occasions, that had a dreadfully Calvinistic founda- 
 tion to it despite its Methodist re-creation. Isaac 
 Watts wrote the core of it, and Charles Wesley 
 rewrote or varied it. It is this : 
 
 "Before Jehovah's awful throne, 
 Ye nations bow with sacred joy; 
 Know that the Lord is God alone, 
 He can create, and he destroy." 
 
 Well do we remember the effect of the music to 
 which these words were sung as we heard them for 
 the first time. It had a distinctly martial and clan- 
 gorous quality, as though an orchestra of brass 
 should have accompanied it. 
 
 In marked antithesis the very expression of happy 
 surrender was the hymn commencing: 
 
 "Jesus, thou art my righteousness, 
 For all my sins were thine; 
 Thy death hath bought of God my place, 
 Thy life hath made him mine." 
 
 It was something to be sung at the close of the
 
 The Songs of Zion 169 
 
 day, before candle lighting, or when the logs were 
 crackling on the hearth — a hymn for family worship 
 and the quiet hour. 
 
 The final and lasting advantage of the itinerant's 
 equipment of the songs of Zion was that when the 
 preacher went away the songs did not. Every one 
 of those old sacred ditties preached its sermons over 
 and over to the man who could perhaps get the 
 preacher's words out of his mind, but could not 
 manage to forget the words of song that were in- 
 dissolubly wrapped up with the tunes that he and 
 all his kin and neighbors hummed and whistled 
 as they went about their work. They were not only 
 pertinacious, but they seemed to fit every occasion 
 of joy or sorrow. Instead of coon songs and rag- 
 time inanities, the man of the Kentucky or Ohio or 
 Indiana frontier had for his popular songs the songs 
 of Zion.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 From Small Beginnings 
 
 For many years those who were ignorant of the 
 real activities of the Methodist Church, as well as 
 its active foes, persistently circulated grave mis- 
 statements about its attitude toward education. 
 
 As all men know, the work of preaching the gos- 
 pel was of necessity often committed into the hands 
 of preachers who knew more about the plan of sal- 
 vation than they did about the construction of Eng- 
 lish grammar. The story of the exhorter who got 
 hopelessly involved in the mazes of a sentence that 
 refused to end properly, and who finally gave it up 
 and shouted, "My brethren, my verb and nomina- 
 tive have failed to connect, but I'm bound for the 
 kingdom of heaven," may be apocryphal, but it is 
 not beyond the bounds of possibility. The men who 
 won the wilderness were frequently unlearned; 
 their value to the world lay in the fact that they were 
 never content to remain so. 
 
 The wisest thinkers and investigators in the 
 world have a habit of regarding the scholarship of 
 all time as relative ignorance, the standard being the 
 unattaincd heights of perfect knowledge. Those
 
 From Small Beginnings 171 
 
 who liave just sufficient learning to make them vain 
 and censorious are less enviable than the unlearned 
 man who strives after more knowledge. 
 
 The term "ignorant fanatic" was frequently ap- 
 plied to men who daily risked their lives to impart 
 their little store of knowledge to those less favored 
 than themselves, and who at the same time were 
 using every effort to increase that store. 
 
 It is true that the first generation of Methodist 
 preachers were not, for the most part, men of in- 
 tellectual culture. They were prolDably not greatly 
 superior in that respect to the immediate circle of 
 our Lord's disciples. Let us admit without argu- 
 ment that Dr. Coke and Bishop Asbury could not 
 find a sufficient number of men possessing a high 
 degree of education to carry the gospel message, 
 like a torch, into the wilderness, to fire the con- 
 sciences of a great and scattered congregation. 
 Frankly accepting the statement that the pioneers 
 of Methodism, except in rare instances, had seldom 
 even seen the inside of a college, we ask. What of 
 it? Those men, had they been furnished with ex- 
 haustless stores of Greek and Hebrew, of philoso- 
 phy, science, or hcUcs-lettres, would have found 
 absolutely no use for such wares among the frontier 
 cabins of a primitive people. They carried a full 
 stock of convictions, a plentiful supply of the most 
 refreshing and invigorating moral truths that ever
 
 i'/2 Nation Builders 
 
 revived the perishing souls of men, and they found 
 for this merchandise an astonishing market. 
 
 It appears that the itinerant preachers met the 
 prevalHng condition of ignorance with a persistent 
 effort to dispel it, and they fitly commenced this 
 Herculean labor with elementary methods. They 
 carried a few simple books or tracts, compiled with 
 a direct purpose of moral instruction ; simple stories, 
 not above the comprehension of simple readers, but 
 often composed with a degree of literary skill that 
 has not been generally appreciated by literary critics. 
 Many of these tracts were written by Wesley or his 
 immediate coadjutors, who did a great work at the 
 beginning of the Methodist movement in England 
 by means of such popular literature. We are re- 
 minded in this connection of the popular tales of 
 Maria Edgeworth, which had in their day a great 
 vogue. Born in Oxfordshire in 1767, Miss Edge- 
 worth evidently came under the Wesleyan influence, 
 and the stories wherewith she sought to "point a 
 moral and adorn a tale" were in line with many 
 less famous Methodist tracts. 
 
 In the same category may be classed those aston- 
 ishing short tales that broadened and perpetuated 
 the fame of Hannah More. Encouraged by the 
 Rev. John Newton and others, the already widely 
 popular authoress commenced a series of short 
 stories that were particularly designed to undersell
 
 From Small Beginnings 173 
 
 and supplant the ocean of cheap trash, largely of 
 French inspiration, with which the English market 
 was flooded. The prosecution of this great labor, 
 which was commenced about the year 1793, almost 
 exhausted the vitality of the brave and gifted 
 woman, and obliged her to call to her assistance 
 several of her friends. The first series of tracts, 
 known as the Cheap Repository Tracts, had during 
 the first year the enormous sale of two million cop- 
 ies, and are said to have had an incalculable influ- 
 ence upon the poorer classes in England and Amer- 
 ica. Their literary merit was so great that they 
 overran the field for which they were intended and 
 invaded the parlors and libraries of the more fas- 
 tidious reading public. Such masterpieces as the 
 Shepherd of Salisbury Plain and Parley the Porter, 
 with perhaps half a score others, may be counted 
 as permanent contributions to literature. 
 
 If the question is asked, What have Hannah 
 More's tracts to do with Methodism more than with 
 any other Christian sect? the answer is that the 
 revival of evangelical Christianity in England at 
 the day that they were written was Methodist. The 
 Christian renaissance of the eighteenth century 
 commenced at Oxford in the Pious Club, and John 
 Wesley was its apostle. On this point Miss More 
 herself gives certain testimony in a letter written 
 to the Rev. John Newton in 1794: "My great and
 
 1/4 Nation Builders 
 
 worldly friends are terribly afraid I shall be too 
 iVlethodistical — a term now applied to all vital Chris- 
 ti(niily—mu\ watch me so closely that it will require 
 more prudence than some of my religious friends 
 would think It right to employ." 
 
 It has been claimed, and I believe without refu- 
 tation, that the series of tracts that bear Hannah 
 More's name were an important factor in the estab- 
 lishment of the Religious Tract Society, formed 
 in London in 1799. The parent tract society of all 
 was formed by John AVesley and Thomas Coke in 
 1782, and its publications were largely dependent 
 upon the personal labors of Wesley, \\ho wrote 
 many books and abridged and edited others for the 
 moral culture of the people. 
 
 No greater fallacy has ever been circulated than 
 that which has undervalued the moral tract of a 
 century ago. The names of Edgeworth, More, 
 and Wesley might l)e supplemented by many others 
 of commanding rank in the world of letters, and 
 the result of their most earnest work should afford a 
 subject for serious investigation to the student of 
 literary history. 
 
 The inception of Methodism was one of instruc- 
 tion. Whitefield, whose magnificent campaign for 
 Christ resulted in the establishment in America of 
 more institutions (vf learning than have ever been 
 credited to the initiative of any other one man, was
 
 From Small Beginnings 175 
 
 a Methodist in every essential, drawing his inspira- 
 tion in company with Wesley from the same font, 
 and keeping his Calvinism rigidly in the background 
 in all his American work. The establishment of a 
 number of free schools for the poor in England was 
 directly due to Wesley, and his influence upon the 
 public school system of America is immeasurable. 
 
 We are wont to reverence Robert Raikes as the 
 father of Sunday schools in the world, but the Rev. 
 Warren A. Chandler in his recent book on Great 
 Revivals and the Great Republic has pointed out 
 that "the Sunday school movement, inaugurated by 
 Robert Raikes, w^as suggested to him by a Methodist 
 woman, Sophia Cook, who marched with him at 
 the head of his troop of ragged children the first 
 Sunday they were taken to the parish church. An- 
 other Methodist woman, Hannah Ball, really had at 
 High Wycombe a Sunday school fourteen years in 
 advance of Raikes's first school in Gloucester, and 
 Wesley, in his parish of Christ Church, Savannah, 
 Georgia, had a Sunday school fifty years before the 
 w^ork of Raikes began. Francis Asbury organized 
 a Sunday school in Hanover County, Virginia, in 
 1786." 
 
 We cannot estimate the value of such a distribu- 
 tion of tracts as that which we have been consid- 
 ering unless we can imagine a community almost 
 destitute of books or newspapers, to whom every
 
 1/6 Nation Builders 
 
 scrap of printed matter was a precious boon, to be 
 read and reread, loaned and treasured as long as 
 it held together. Not infrequently an American 
 frontier cabin was without a scrap of a printed page 
 of any sort; sometimes an almanac, brown with 
 smoke, dust-bespecked and thumb-marked, hung for 
 years in a chimney corner, the sole literary treasure 
 of a family. 
 
 At a day that already belongs to the historic past 
 of the nation the boy Lincoln found a neighbor 
 with a little store of books that was a greater affair 
 for that time and place than the Astor Library was 
 in New York. His biographers tell how he bor- 
 rowed the volumes and mastered them, reveling in 
 the prospect they opened to him of a life beyond 
 his familiar horizon of timber and farm land, of 
 rail-splitting and flat-boating. Lincoln's experience 
 with the books was an unusual one. The great 
 majority of American frontier families never owned 
 a book and rarely saw one till the Methodist 
 preachers brought them. 
 
 The traveling preachers were distributers of a 
 wholesome literature of a type admirably suited to 
 the mental capacity of those who received it and 
 tending to perpetuate the impression made upon the 
 minds and consciences of men by the spoken word. 
 With the tracts were often carried hymn books, 
 which were in great demand.
 
 From Small Beginnings 177 
 
 These distributions of reading matter were not 
 free, except in cases where the people were abso- 
 lutely destitute of the means to purchase. Probably 
 they were not often paid for in money, which was a 
 commodity almost as rare as literature ; but lodging, 
 horse gear, provisions, or some other equivalent was 
 readily accepted in exchange. The store of hooks 
 with which a "saddlebag preacher" set out was 
 always contributory to his support and sometimes 
 his only available asset. 
 
 There is no fairness in making a comparison be- 
 tween the newly commissioned member of Asbury's 
 field force and a college-bred New England divine, 
 so far as relative advancement in book knowledge is 
 concerned. Rather measure each man in the field 
 where he worked, and by the value, the breadth, 
 and the permanent results of the work performed. 
 
 Not only did the field force of the Methodist 
 Church act as distributers of the sort of literature 
 best adapted to the comprehension and the needs of 
 the scattered inland population of the new country ; 
 but at the same time the whole church, through its 
 governing bodies, was using every means to increase 
 the efficiency of its preachers and enlarge the capac- 
 ity of its membership by establishing schools and 
 publication offices. 
 
 As previously stated, Dr. Coke's work, com- 
 menced at the very outset of Methodist labor in
 
 178 Nation Builders 
 
 America, was largely educational. Such facilities 
 as the Methodist Church could control were offered 
 to those who were persuaded that they had a call 
 to preach, and with each generation these facilities 
 increased, till at length the denomination that was 
 poorest in material w^ealth and richest in the yearly 
 interest of conversions to Christ became the most 
 important and powerful of Christian sects in Amer- 
 ica, and depends to-day for the bulk of its work 
 upon an educated ministry. 
 
 This high ground, to be sure, was not reached 
 at a step. There were many years — intermediate 
 years between the generation of the founders of 
 Methodism and our modern era — when the feelings 
 and prejudices of a very large proportion of Meth- 
 odist laymen and not a few of its leaders were en- 
 gaged in opposition to a ministry specially edu- 
 cated for their work. The theory that the inspira- 
 tion of the Spirit of God would be in all cases su- 
 perior to a formal course of theological study was 
 based upon certain Scripture texts and perhaps was 
 fostered by the very genius of the Methodist Church. 
 At the outset its teachings were not doctrinal; its 
 appeals were always experiential. It was rather 
 an evangelical society than a church built upon a 
 theological foundation. The experience came first, 
 and around this kernel grew the necessary shell of 
 protective theology. It was hard for an old-line
 
 From Small Beginnings 179 
 
 Methodist to understand why any man who could 
 read the Bible and hope for the inspiration of the 
 Spirit to interpret it should require educational 
 preparation for his work. The ministry were natu- 
 rally the first to appreciate the need for such 
 training. 
 
 In 1833 Dickinson College, at Carlisle, Pennsyl- 
 vania, passed into Methodist control, though orig- 
 inally Presbyterian. It is worthy of note that the 
 revivifying of this almost dead institution by the 
 infusion of Methodist blood occurred during the 
 very period when the reaction noticed in this chap- 
 ter was at its height. It was a protest, by the best 
 and most progressive spirits in the Methodist 
 Church, against that reaction. 
 
 Associated with the history of Dickinson are the 
 imperishable names of McClintock and Crooks and 
 many others who have honored the profession to 
 which they gave their lives. It is especially gratify- 
 ing to the surviving author of this book to pay here 
 a tribute of loving remembrance and reverent admi- 
 ration to the memory of George Richard Crooks, 
 whose maturity may be said to have begun at Dick- 
 inson College, where he graduated in 1840, and 
 whose life of broad usefulness was withdrawn from 
 the sight of men at Drew half a century later. 
 
 It is not possible in a limited space to add to or 
 improve upon Dn William F, Anderson's admirable
 
 i8o Nation Builders 
 
 monograph upon Dr. Crooks. It is a pamphlet that 
 should be read by everyone who would comprehend 
 an important phase of Methodist history. One 
 quotation may be permitted here: 
 
 'The Philadelphia Conference never did itself 
 greater honor nor served the church more truly 
 than when it sent Dr. Crooks as one of its delegates 
 to the General Conference in 1856. He was a mem- 
 ber of the Committee on Education, and through his 
 instrumentality an action was secured that was most 
 vital to the interest of the church. . . . The friends 
 of the higher ministerial qualifications were rallied ; 
 public meetings were held; able advocates of the 
 movement were enlisted. Dr. Crooks was its ardent 
 and successful leader. With the cooperation of Dr. 
 Edward Thomson, Dr. John Dempster, and others 
 he secured the adoption of a resolution sanc- 
 tioning the establishment of theological semina- 
 ries in our church. Thus the sentiment was turned 
 which with the advance of the years has crystallized 
 in a well-nigh universal demand for an educated 
 ministry. ... In 1866, as a member of the special 
 Centennial Committee on Education, he originated 
 a plan to establish a permanent fund for the educa- 
 tion of the youth of Methodism, which fund should 
 receive the offerings of the children of the church 
 and be repeated in all coming years. His associates 
 on the committee were John McClintock, Daniel
 
 From Small Beginnings i8i 
 
 Curry, Oliver Hoyt, James Bishop, and C. C. North. 
 The outcome was Children's Day." 
 
 Drew Theological Seminary did not come into 
 existence till 1866, and from the outset its aim was 
 to afford the broadest intellectual culture as well as 
 a thorough training for the work of the ministry. 
 It belongs to the immediate past and present, and 
 has only an incidental connection with the subjects 
 of this work. 
 
 It is not enough to say that Methodism has done 
 much for the cause of education in the United 
 States. Let the old stigma, implied in faint praise 
 when not more viciously or ignorantly affirmed, be 
 forever removed. The Methodist Church has done 
 her full share in establishing and supporting edu- 
 cational institutions, has built and conducted schools 
 and colleges, besides upholding with all her giant 
 strength the public school system of America. Her 
 full share has been a mighty proportion of the work 
 accomplished in this continent, a proportion far 
 greater than that of any other one denomination, 
 because she is the strongest of all denominations 
 in America to-day. 
 
 Eighteen per cent of all the colleges and univer- 
 sities reporting to the United States Comm.issioner 
 of Education are under Methodist control, and 
 twelve per cent of all the denominational schools in 
 the country are Methodist establishments, though
 
 1 82 Nation Builders 
 
 the support of the church has ahvays been given 
 by preference to pubhc rather than to parochial 
 schools. 
 
 From Cokesbury College, in Maryland, instituted 
 in 1785, the corner stone being laid by Bishop As- 
 bury, to Drew, the lines both of effort and accom- 
 plishment steadily widened. In the West for many 
 years the only educational influence was that fostered 
 by the Methodist Church. McKendree College, in 
 Illinois, was the first college in the rich country 
 that is now the teeming middle land of the republic. 
 
 Taking the possible adult population of the 
 United States as sixty millions — though that figure 
 is probably somewhat in excess of the reality — we 
 are brought face to face with the astounding reflec- 
 tion that more than one tenth of that number are 
 actually Methodist communicants. No comment 
 can add to the impressiveness of that fact. 
 
 Following the great Methodist Book Concern in 
 New York, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Nashville, Ten- 
 nessee, have each a similar publishing house. From 
 these fountains have gone out a broad and ever- 
 increasing stream of wholesome literature, and no 
 estimate of their influence is ai)t to be commensurate 
 with the fact. 
 
 In a history of the Methodist Church in America 
 (he Methodist Book Concern would naturally fill 
 an important chapter, and even in the discussion of
 
 From Small Beginnings 183 
 
 the influence of the early Methodist preachers upon 
 the genius and growth of the repubUc we must give 
 more than a passing glance to an agency so indis- 
 solubly connected with the very life of the Meth- 
 odist Church. The Book Concern was the first ex- 
 pression of a conviction that the permanence of the 
 work of the pioneers of Methodism must depend 
 largely upon the distribution of wholesome litera- 
 ture. This earliest auxiliary agency of the church 
 came into existence at the famous Christmas Con- 
 ference in 1784. In pursuance of a plan to estab- 
 lish a publishing house, to serve as an adjunct to 
 the church, the Rev. John Dickins was appointed 
 in 1789 to act as book steward, and with six hun- 
 dred dollars of borrowed capital he commenced 
 operations at No. 50 North Second Street, near 
 Arch Street, in Philadelphia. 
 
 In a list of the books published by John Dickins 
 were several biographies, the first volume of Francis 
 Asbury's Journal, several of John Fletcher's works, 
 several sets of sermons, as many more volumes of 
 serious books for the young, the experiences and 
 travels of Mr. Freeborn Garrettson, Thomas a 
 Kempis, and Baxter's Saints' Rest. Some of these 
 books are classical; one or two may still be found 
 upon booksellers' shelves, and all were of a lofty and 
 elevating tone. For general literary character it is 
 probable that John Dickins's book list would bear
 
 184 Nation" Builders 
 
 comparison with most modern publishers' cata- 
 logues. 
 
 From such a small beginning the Methodist Book 
 Concern, the largest and probably the oldest active 
 publishing house in America, has sprung. Dickins's 
 advertisement contained this clause : "As the profits 
 of these books are for the general benefit of the 
 Methodist societies, it is humbly recommended that 
 they will purchase no books which we publish of 
 any other person than the aforesaid John Dickins, 
 or the Methodist ministers and preachers in the sev- 
 eral circuits, or such persons as sell them by their 
 consent." 
 
 The acorn planted by John Dickins has grown 
 into a mighty oak, but the character of the mature 
 plant is the same that was shown in the embryo. 
 The few dollars eked out of the profits of the Phil- 
 adelphia house have grown to more than a hundred 
 thousand annually, and the little book list has 
 stretched into the thousands. Hundreds of worn- 
 out Methodist preachers are passing the evening 
 of consecrated lives in serenity and safety because 
 of the magnificent success of their great publishing 
 house. The contribution of the Book Concern for 
 the support of superannuated ministers carries with 
 it no taint or suspicion of charity. It is part of the 
 great institution to which every Methodist preacher 
 gives his life without question and without reserve,
 
 From Small Beginnings 185 
 
 and its assistance is his right when his hands are 
 feeble and the twiHght of his Hfe is drawing near. 
 
 The number of tracts, pamphlets, leaflets, and 
 periodicals of all sorts that have been issued by the 
 Book Concern in its career of more than a century 
 is almost beyond computation. The value of the 
 distribution of this vast material, in the formation 
 of character and the reclaiming of men from care- 
 lessness and immorality to higher standards of 
 thought and action, can never be expressed in finite 
 terms.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 The Methodist Church and the Union 
 
 The close bond that has always existed between 
 the Methodist Church in America and the Federal 
 Union was not only illustrated, however uncon- 
 sciously, by the ministers and laymen of that church 
 during the formative period of our national life, 
 but at a later day was exemplified by millions of 
 Methodists when the Union was threatened with 
 disruption. 
 
 Greatest of all the momentous questions that have 
 moved both church and state to their foundations, 
 the political differences that in 1861 finally led to 
 civil war roused to enthusiasm the minds of a great 
 host of citizens whose consciences were already 
 trained to obedience to the demands of duty. No- 
 where in the world could be found so large a 
 body of men similarly trained as in the Methodist 
 Church, and it is with no surprise that we discover 
 that no body of men, in the North or in the South, 
 contributed so largely to the strength of their re- 
 spective armies as did the Methodists. 
 
 The casting vote for or against the Union lay at 
 that time in several of the border states with the
 
 Methodist Church and the Union 187 
 
 Methodist societies. Had the membership of this 
 church decided against the Union, they were numer- 
 ically strong enough to have swung their states in 
 Hne with the secession. That they did not do so 
 was due in great part, we beHeve. to the efforts of 
 certain leaders whose words and works embody 
 both the enthusiasm and the conservatism of 
 patriotism. 
 
 We have already spoken in another chapter of 
 Dr. George Richard Crooks. As editor of the 
 Methodist he supported the Union cause with such 
 effect that, to quote again from Dr. William F. 
 Anderson, "the church owes him a large debt of 
 gratitude for the influence he exerted upon the 
 Methodists of the border states. He really saved 
 that portion of the country to the church and to the 
 Union." 
 
 With the unfortunate split between the Methodist 
 Church South and North we have nothing to do. 
 Happily many old differences, born of sectional 
 prejudice, have long since healed, and the matters 
 that a generation ago wxre of preeminent impor- 
 tance to the citizen have now only a historic in- 
 terest. This we know% that the whole body .of 
 Methodists, in all the land, threw their whole 
 strength heartily into whichever cause they es- 
 poused, for conscience' sake. 
 
 The weight of Methodist influence has generally
 
 i88 Nation Builders 
 
 been exerted in opposition to slavery. From a very 
 early time this disposition on the part of the church 
 has been apparent. 
 
 "In 1784," says McMaster, "the cause of the 
 negro for a time was popular. The Methodists 
 took it up and bade every member of the society, 
 where the law would permit, emancipate his slaves 
 wdthin a twelvemonth. Before a decade had gone 
 by abolition societies had sprung up in Rhode Is- 
 land, in Connecticut, in New Jersey, at New York, 
 in Baltimore, in Virginia, at Washington, Pennsyl- 
 vania, and even on Maryland's Eastern Shore." 
 
 "The Methodists took it up." Can any statement 
 be made which will more forcibly indicate the 
 strength of Methodist influence even at that early 
 day? 
 
 John Wesley w^as a firm and consistent opponent 
 of slavery, in marked contrast to the theory and 
 practice of Whitefield. With the views of Wesley 
 the great Methodist leaders of America, with Dr. 
 Coke at their head, heartily agreed. It is worthy 
 of note that Dr. Coke and Bishop Asbury, charged 
 with the presentation of a petition to Congress for 
 the emancipation of all the slaves in America, went 
 to George W^ishlngton, then at Mount Vernon, with 
 the hope of obtaining his signature. Washington 
 did not find it expedient to accede to the request of 
 his reverend visitors, because he believed that such
 
 Methodist Church and the Union 189 
 
 an exertion of his influence upon legislation was 
 not compatible with his official position, but he ex- 
 pressed his sympathy with their object, and told 
 them that if Congress would take their petition into 
 consideration he would then write a letter which 
 would strengthen their hands. That the great ob- 
 ject was not accomplished the country knows to its 
 sorrow; but it is worth while to recollect that the 
 first emancipation agitation began almost as soon as 
 the government did, that it commenced in the South, 
 and that the earliest agitators were the Methodist 
 leaders. 
 
 Marked was the contrast between Wesley and his 
 followers in their ideal of human liberty and that 
 of Whitefield, who argued for slavery in Georgia 
 at a time when that pestilential institution was 
 prohibited by the charter of the colony. Georgia 
 was not originally a slave state, nor did its 
 founders contemplate any such imposition upon its 
 vitality. 
 
 The contrast between Whitefield and Wesley, it 
 may here be said, was the difference between a 
 rocket and an arc light. Whitefield was a Calvinist 
 whose Calvinism did not appear in his pyrotechnic 
 progress through the American colonies. A very 
 youthful, very earnest, and phenomenally eloquent 
 preacher, he set the continent afire, and is univer- 
 sally credited as the source of a mighty revival of
 
 190 Nation Builders 
 
 religion which permeated all churches and led to the 
 establishment of educational and other beneficent 
 institutions. The result of Whitefield's work was 
 far greater and stronger than his personality seemed 
 to promise. He did not leave any new social on 
 religious order as a monument to his genius or his 
 faith. He was, essentially, a voice crying in the 
 wilderness, and the voice, but for its immediate influ- 
 ence, might have been absolutely impersonal. The 
 attitude of Whitefield toward slavery is a blight 
 upon his reputation. 
 
 The persistence of Wesley's character, on the con- 
 trary, is shown in the great society that bears his 
 name and in the force and extension of his princi- 
 ples even down to the present day. 
 
 Dr. Coke preached emancipation till the neigh- 
 boring population was up in arms. He was perse- 
 cuted, forbidden to preach, c\'en put in danger of 
 assassination. Men who listened with indignation 
 to his vehement demands that they should free then- 
 slaves met to waylay him, to put a summary end to 
 such pernicious doctrines. Like all brave men, the 
 ])ioneer abolitionist was never bolder or more de- 
 cided than when he met with opposition. To know 
 that an enemy was following him through the woods 
 with a gun only drove him to more vehement and 
 eloquent outbursts against slavcholding. Incident- 
 ally, it is a pleasure to note that one particularly
 
 Methodist Church and the Union 191 
 
 violent foe was afterward converted and became a 
 good Methodist. 
 
 A woman slave owner offered fifty pounds to any- 
 one who would catch the Methodist leader and give 
 him a hundred lashes. Again he was indicted by 
 the grand jury and chased by several score men, 
 who would have made short work of him if they had 
 found him. 
 
 The personality of Dr. Coke was displayed in 
 many ways, in his long and arduous labors in Ire- 
 land and in his impulsive offer to resign from the 
 Methodist connection and accept the post of mission- 
 ary bishop for Ceylon in the established church, if by 
 so doing he could carry the gospel into India; but 
 in none of the acts of his eventful life were his hu- 
 manity and his heroism more characteristically dis- 
 played than in his efforts for the abolition of slavery 
 in America. 
 
 The strength of the Methodist Church at various 
 times has been vigorously directed against the "pe- 
 culiar institution," and at the outbreak of the civil 
 war the majority of its communicants were opposed 
 to its continuance. 
 
 It is not too much to say that the influence of the 
 Methodist connection has always been among the 
 foremost factors that have worked for the mainte- 
 nance of those ideals and those standards that we 
 call American. In all great movements the attitude
 
 192 Nation Builders 
 
 of a great, conservative, conscientious body such as 
 this is of vital importance to the nation and to 
 mankind. 
 
 Another view of the value of Methodism to the 
 English-speaking nations has been presented by W. 
 T. Stead, who, in regarding American Methodism 
 from an Englishman's standpoint, sees in it the 
 promise of more perfect and continuous unity be- 
 tween Great Britain and the United States. He 
 says : 
 
 "From the standpoint of those who, like our- 
 selves, regard the unity of the English-speaking 
 people as one of the supreme ends of modern pol- 
 itics, it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of 
 John W^'esley and his work. In the most energetic 
 denomination in the United States he created a new 
 tic between the empire and the republic. Millions 
 upon millions of Americans regard Epworth and 
 L^etter Lane, the Foundry and City Road, as the 
 Mecca and Medina of their faith. Carlyle said that 
 Shakespeare, by his genius, had unified the English- 
 speaking world, ^^'c are all united, he said, in 
 allegiance to King Shakespeare. But that which 
 Shakespeare could not do, in that millions never 
 read or sec his plays, John Wesley has done with 
 much effect. Among the influences which create 
 a sense of unity among onr English folk, that of 
 John Wesley stands veiy nearly in the first rank.
 
 Methodist Church and the Union 193 
 
 Neither Knox nor Cromwell affects the lives of so 
 many men and women who are toiling and working 
 all around us to-day as does John Wesley. There 
 are nigh upon thirty millions of English-speaking 
 men who view the next life through Wesley's spec- 
 tacles and whose round of daily duty is directly 
 affected by the rules and regulations of the great 
 Methodist saint— the Ignatius Loyola of the English 
 church." 
 
 This utterance, though somewhat apart from the 
 main argument of this book, is yet in line with it. 
 It points to an influence so great as to take rank 
 with the most stupendous movements of history, an 
 influence transcending that of John Knox and com- 
 mensurate with that of Luther and Paul. These 
 are bold claims, but they need no defense, since the 
 ])roof of them is spread wide upon the pages of his- 
 tory, and he who runs may read.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 The After-Word 
 
 In the foregoing pages we have tried to note the 
 proem of American Methodism. The materials for 
 it have frequently been hidden away in outAVorn and 
 neglected biographies or merely notched in the cal- 
 endars of the Conferences, but the traditions and 
 legends linger yet along the valleys of the Ohio, 
 among the Cumberland hills, beside the banks of the 
 Wabash and the Tennessee, like the fragments of 
 a great epic, and the chronicler who catches the 
 dying echoes is thrilled by the militant sound of 
 the American crusade. 
 
 The saddlebag men of the wilderness were not 
 pastors to lead their flocks beside still waters. They 
 were heroes and witnesses. Without the learning 
 that we commonly associate with the clerical pro- 
 fession, without any academic bias or scholastic 
 bent, they were nevertheless filled with understand- 
 ing and fired by an enthusiasm that fused and 
 illumined. 
 
 We know that in singleness of purpose they strove 
 for the advancement of that faith which (hey be- 
 lieved to be the one essential to true living. If wc
 
 The After-Word 195 
 
 study their records with minds open to the signifi- 
 cance of historic truth we know what they never 
 comprehended, that they were working no less truly 
 and no less effectively in the providence of the Cre- 
 ator for the establishment of the Union which has 
 grown to be the synonym for all that is best in the 
 social and political fabric of their country. 
 
 The life of the Methodist Church as a power in the 
 world has not depended primarily upon its splendid 
 organization nor upon the ability and faithfulness 
 of its great leaders, but upon its vital, unswerv- 
 ing faith in a divine power working for the salva- 
 tion of man. Without this sublime confidence in 
 the miraculous initiative the lives of the Methodist 
 itinerants would have been impossible. It seems 
 as though he who runs must read in their uncon- 
 scious achievement no less than in their conscious 
 labor the guidance of Omnipotent Power. 
 
 We are giving the record of the toilers of the fron- 
 tier Methodist Church — the simple, single-hearted 
 zealous body of primitive Christians who struggled 
 and wept, suffered and sang on their journey to the 
 celestial city — as a suggestion for study in a field 
 of American history that has been little regarded. 
 To Theodore Roosevelt alone among authors of 
 gen.eral works relating to American history we may 
 give the credit for recognition of the work of the 
 Methodist itinerants as pioneers of the republic.
 
 196 Nation Builders 
 
 The record is one of a generation that has passed 
 away. We call the roll of great men, great in hu- 
 manity, courage, zeal, eloquence, and faith. What 
 unfaltering voices answer from the depths of the 
 forest where they laid down their lives ! From cane- 
 brake and mountain and morass they answer: As- 
 bury. Coke, Burke, Bascom, Lee, Bangs, Bigelow, 
 Cartwright, Taylor — by tens, by hundreds, by thou- 
 sands they gather, a great multitude of heroes, who 
 manfully played their part and sacrificed their lives 
 for the sake of the faith that was in them. 
 
 They laid broad the foundations of the social 
 order in regions where without them all would have 
 been anarchy. They stood shoulder to shoulder 
 through long years of privation, danger, fatigue, 
 and suffering, never falling back, never refusing the 
 odds of battle, fighting manfully, like good soldiers 
 of the cross. The roughness, the minor faults, the 
 eccentricities that marked them kin to the humanity 
 around them, have been rounded off and smoothed 
 away by the hand of time, and their virtues stand 
 out resplendent. As Americans, whatever creed we 
 profess, we must honor among our greatest and our 
 best those grand Americans of the earlier day — the 
 pioneer preachers of Methodism.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 Los Angeles 
 
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