VOLUME 4 — BOOK VI — CHAPTER I
METHODISM IN THE SOUTH

Statistical Strength of the Church — Methodism in Savannah, Ga. — Jesse Lee there — Charleston, S. C. — Richmond, Va. — Character of Lewis Myers — William M. Kennedy — James Russell — He learns to read on his Circuit — His Eloquence — President Olin's Estimate of him — Lovick and Reddick Pierce — Richmond Nolley's Conversion — His Early Ministry — A Camp-meeting Scene — Samuel Dunwody

The period upon which we now enter trenches, in some degree, upon our own times. Some of the itinerants who, at its beginning, and scores who at its close, were active in its scenes, still survive. We approach also events which assumed party aspects, and have left disputed questions and disputed reputations; the task of the writer becomes, therefore, more delicate, and in some of his person references, at least, he must become more reticent, but with no sacrifice of essential truth.

During all these years Methodism was rapidly matured and consolidated throughout the South, now its chief field, possessing nearly half of its numerical strength. It reported at their beginning thirteen districts, eighty-seven circuits, and one hundred and sixty-four itinerant preachers, with more than fifty-five thousand members, including, however, the ultramontane portions of the Baltimore and Virginia Conferences, which I have thus far geographically assigned to the West. At the close of the period it reported 23 districts, 162 circuits, and 272 preachers, with more than 101,500 members. Methodism had taken ecclesiastical possession of the South.

It had been for some time entrenched in the principal southern cities, except Savannah, and now, after long opposition, was established there. We have seen Hope Hull driven from that city in 1790. Jonathan Jackson and Josiah Randle invaded it in 1796, but had to retreat. John Garvin repeated the attempt in 1800, but failed of permanent success. In the South Carolina Conference of 1806 Asbury appealed to the preachers in behalf of the hostile post, and Samuel Dunwody, who had just joined the itinerancy, volunteered to enter it. He hired a small room, taught a school for his living, and began to preach, almost exclusively, however, to the family where he resided, and the alms-house and the hospital. The year closed with but twelve members, seven of whom were Negroes. [1] This little band seems to have been organized by Jesse Lee, who made a preaching excursion southward, as far as Florida, in 1807, [2] and spent a short time in the city. On the nineteenth of April he writes: "At night, at Mr. Myers', I preached on 1 Peter ii, 5. I had a crowded house, and more attended than could get in; many were forced to remain out of doors. I preached to them with some freedom, and they fed on the word with much apparent pleasure. All were solemn, and some were affected. It was a good time to many souls. After I dismissed the congregation I requested all that had been Methodists in other places, and wished again to be in society with us, to remain, and we would form a class. I took four of them into a class. There were others present, but I told them that I did not desire any person to join at that time but such as had been formerly in society with us; and if any others wished to join, they might have an opportunity after a few meetings. This was the first class that was ever formed in Savannah. Who knows but the Lord will multiply his blessings upon us, and make us a great people in this place, as well as in other places?"

Dunwody's successors had severe struggles. The local prejudice seemed, for years, unconquerable; but in 1812, after obtaining pecuniary aid from various parts of the country, a church was erected, bearing the name of Wesley Chapel, and dedicated by Asbury. Thus, about seventy-five years after Wesley's persecutions in this city, his cause permanently erected its standard there, inscribed with his own name, as it had in Baltimore, Norfolk, Richmond, Charleston, and nearly every other large community of the South. In Charleston the struggling Church now advanced effectively; Hammett's schismatic Trinity Church still held out for a part of the period, but at last yielded, and was absorbed by the parent denomination. By the death of Wells, the chief lay pillar of Charleston Methodism had fallen, but McFarland, his friend and partner in business, took his place. The pro-slavery persecutions, in the times of Dougharty, shook the society, and public prejudice seemed long unconquerable, so that when young William Capers was sent there, about the beginning of 1811, it had but 145 white members on its records; but at the close of the present period it reported nearly 350 whites.

Methodism had struggled with hardly any success in Richmond, Va., and could show but sixty-three members at the beginning of the period; at its close there were more than two hundred and fifty. In no city in the United States had it, nor had indeed any form of real piety, slower advances than there. Richmond is first mentioned among the appointments of the Minutes, in 1793, as connected with Manchester; but it immediately disappears for six years. It is probable, however, that a class was organized in the city as early as 1793, and that the itinerants of. Adjacent circuits often preached for the little band. An English Methodist family, by the name of Barratt, and also a local preacher by name of Lacey, located there before 1793, and are supposed to have been its first Methodists. They procured the occasional ministrations of the itinerants of Williamsburgh Circuit, and meetings were held in the court-house; but from this they were expelled by the magistrates as soon as a "revival" began to break out. They were compelled now to resort to a "common," west of the capitol; but Mrs. Barratt soon opened and fitted for their accommodation a large barn which stood on her premises. Asbury, McKendree, and other great men "preached in this stable-church." The congregation obtained again the use of the court-house. In 1799 Thomas Lyell, a very popular preacher, was sent to them. Only two houses of worship could then be found in the city; one of these was St. John's Church, whose resident clergyman preached there but three times a year, in order to save the glebe [Oxford Dict. glebe n. a piece of land serving as part of a clergyman's benefice and providing income — DVM] lands from forfeiture; the other was a small Baptist chapel. Lyell immediately began the erection of a Methodist church. Another was built in 1812, and now the Methodists had become the strongest religious body in the city. The memorable burning of the theater and loss of life, in the previous year, had aroused some religious thought in the public mind. The first session of a Methodist Conference took place there at the beginning of 1812, and Jesse Lee was appointed to the station. He labored with his usual energy, preaching four times on Sunday, in the open air as well as in the churches, and holding meetings every night.

Methodism was therefore now not only founded, but fortified, in all the principal communities of the South. Meanwhile it spread prevailingly through the interior towns and settlements. It had long been tending toward the southwest. Early in the period it penetrated into Alabama, where it was destined to become the predominant religious power. The noted Lorenzo Dow had wandered into this wilderness in 1803, and was there also in 1804. [3] The historian of the state a knowledge that he preached the first Protestant sermon delivered on its soil. [4] Louisiana, ceded to the United States under Jefferson's administration, reached as far eastward as the Perdido River. The Indian title to some of the eastern lands was extinguished, and we early hear of white settlements on Tensas, Tombigbee, Buckatano, and Chickasaw. It was to these frontier and semi-barbarous pioneers that Dow heralded Methodism. In 1807 Asbury called, in the South Carolina Conference, at Charleston, for missionaries to this then far western field, and among the appointments to the Oconee District, traveled by Josiah Randle, is Tombigbee Circuit, with Matthew P. Sturdevant as preacher. Randle District must have been immense and perilous, for between the Oconee, from which it took its name and the Tombigbee Circuit, lay an Indian country of four hundred miles extent. [5] The next year Tombigbee still appears in the Minutes, with Michael Burdge and Sturdevant as preachers, but the latter bears the title of "missionary," implying, probably, that he was to push to "regions beyond." At the end of this second year they report eighty-six Church-members, the germ of all the subsequent growth of Alabama Methodism. In 1809 John W. Kennon and Burdge were the whole itinerant force of the field. Their labor was hard and their success slow; but they returned to the Conference in 1811, reporting one hundred and sixteen members.

Meanwhile itinerants from Tennessee were entering the northeastern portions of the country. About the year 1807 the Indian title to the region north of the Tennessee River, bounded on the east by Flint River, on the west by Indian Creek, and reaching to the Tennessee boundary line, was extinguished, and in 1808 Madison County was organized. It was reached by the Elk (Tenn.) Circuit, and the next year we read the title of "Flint Circuit," with no less than one hundred and seventy Methodists, to whom the Conference, assembled in Cincinnati, sent Jedediah McMinn as preacher. Thus the itinerants of the Southeast and the far West met on the new field of Alabama. In 1811 the western preachers at the North, and those of South Carolina at the South, returned an aggregate of about four hundred communicants in the country. The labors and sufferings of the earliest evangelist were as severe as any endured in the history of the Church, but they are unrecorded, and known now only by fragmentary traditions. John S. Ford, who was sent with Kennon to Tombigbee Circuit in 1810, relates that from the time they set out from the settlements in Georgia till they reached Fort Claiborne, on the Alabama River, they had to sleep under the trees thirteen nights. They carried their own provisions, except what they could occasionally obtain from the Indians, till they arrived among the whites on Bassett's Creek, now in Clark County. Here their circuit began, and crossing the Tombigbee at old Fort St. Stevens, continued thence up the Buckatano over to Chickasakay, and back through the Tensas, settlements to Bassett's Creek. In the South Carolina Conference of 1810 Asbury called for volunteers for regions far beyond what was then called "the wilderness." The latter, for that day, was the country from the Ocmulgee River to near the Alabama. Beyond this lay still another "wilderness" of the Chickasaw and Choctaw Indians, and still beyond the latter lay the field to which the itinerants now began to move.

In 1811 the Western Conference, at Cincinnati, sent Thomas Stilwell and David Goodner to Richland and Flint, and at the close of the ecclesiastical year three hundred and forty-eight members are reported from Flint Circuit. The South Carolina Conference of 1811 ceases to report Tombigbee Circuit; but it reappears, in the Mississippi District, with one hundred and forty members, under the jurisdiction of the Western Conference. Alabama thus passes definitively into the ecclesiastical geography of the West, but with it went a company of strong South Carolina preachers, at whose head, as presiding elder, was Dunwody. His Mississippi District was to become, in the Minutes of 1817, the Mississippi Conference. Gibson, as we have seen, had reached the still remoter Southwest by the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and in 1812 a band of four young evangelists departed from South Carolina, on horseback, for the distant fields of Mississippi and Louisiana. They were Richmond Nolley, Lewis Hobbs, Drury Powell, and Thomas Griffin. We shall have occasion to notice after their adventures in the far southwest.

Of the host of able men whom we have heretofore seen in the southern itinerancy, most were yet abroad, and still in their prime vigor; others, who have not yet come under our notice, were now mighty in labors, and still others, of later historical prominence, were about to appear.

Lewis Myers was rising into notice by his character if not his talents; a small but sturdy Dutchman, of Herculean energy, of habitual humor, mixed with Spartan severity; a man of few words, but those always directly to the point; a considerable reader, a pupil of Hope Hull's academy, and a close student of the Bible; eccentric and rough and formidable, yet of such real tenderness of heart that he seldom preached without tears. Through a ministry of a quarter of a century he had a hand in almost all the hardest work of the Church in the low country of Georgia and South Carolina. No man was more resolute to confront labor or suffering in the common cause; he therefore became a leader in his Conference, and, on the floor of the General Conference, he was respected for his strong practical sense, and admired for his loyal devotion to the Church. "He belonged," says a bishop of Southern Methodism, "to a class of men of heroic mold, who could take the saddle, face a day's hard rain, swim swollen creeks, live in the cabins of the poor, eat bear-meat, if necessary, and preach without manuscript every day of the week; who went girded into the great battlefield where ignorance, vice, and semi-barbarism were to be confronted, and fought a good, honest fight, very different from the sham-battles of holiday heroes. He was a man of weight in the Conference, well versed in affairs, of sound judgment, and looked up to with universal respect." [6] He died in 1851, a patriarch of the South, having been connected with the ministry a full half century, though about half the time in a superannuated relation, a sufferer from spasmodic asthma, brought on by his itinerant exposures and labors.

William M. Kennedy began his career at the beginning of this period. Born in 1783, in that part of South Carolina which was ceded to Tennessee in 1790, he had the early hardy training of the western mountains. He lived some years in South Carolina, and at last in Georgia, where, in 1803, he was brought into the Church under the ministry of Hope Hull. Joining the South Carolina Conference of 1805, he filled its most important appointments for more than thirty years, half of the time as presiding elder. In 1839 he was struck with apoplexy; his Conference placed him on its superannuated list, but he continued to labor. "I wish," he exclaimed, "the messenger of death to find me at my Master's work." Traveling in the service of the Church, he was suddenly struck down by another attack of his malady at the foot of a large oak in Newburgh District, S. C., and died in 1840, lamented as one of the noblest men of Southern Methodism. He was nearly six feet high, robust, with a large head, an intellectual front, an expressive eye, dark complexion, features radiant with benevolence and intelligence, and a voice of singular melody, which procured for him the title of "the sweet singer of the South Carolina Conference." He was an instructive and, sometimes, a powerful preacher; especially at camp-meetings, where the charm of his voice and the ardor of his temperament gave him an extraordinary control of the largest congregations. He was singularly gifted and effective in prayer. "Prayer was his vital breath," says one of his intimate friends. [7] His deep piety impressed all who knew him. He had also "a rich fund of choice humor." He was greatly successful as a presiding elder, by the prudence of his counsel, and the quickening influence of his preaching and example over his vast district. In fine, William M. Kennedy was one of the most effective founders of Methodism in the further south at this early and critical period.

One of the most memorable evangelists of the southern itinerancy, a man of real and rare genius, appeared in the same year with Kennedy. James Russell was born in Mecklenburgh County, N. C., about 1786. Early left an orphan, poor and untrained, he had to learn to read after he joined the South Carolina Conference in 1805. He had been refused license to exhort because of his ignorance, but his surpassing natural powers at last bore him above all opposition. He carried his spelling-book with him along his circuit, seeking assistance in its lessons even from the children of the families where he lodged. If the state of society in the far south at this early time would allow such a fact to detract from the ministerial character of ordinary men, it could not with him, for his extraordinary power in the pulpit armed him with a supreme authority. He was capable of the highest natural oratory, striking with awe or melting with pathos his crowded auditories. His self-culture advanced rapidly. He became a good English scholar, and a man of refined taste, commanding the admiration of the most intelligent as well as the most illiterate among his hearers, and "standing," says a bishop of his Church, "prominent among such men as Hope Hull, George Dougharty, John Collinsworth, and Lewis Myers. He was one of the. Fathers of the Southern Methodist Church, and famous in three states as among the most eloquent and powerful preachers of his time. Of medium height, thin, his face seamed with wrinkles, his lips compressed and colorless, and his brow overhung apparently with care, (the latter years of his life having been unfortunate through pecuniary embarrassment,) when he rose in the pulpit the enthusiasm of youth seemed to awake, and the flash of his eye and the ring of his percussive voice, and the animation and ease of his manner, all told you that no ordinary man was before you. In addition to a deep personal piety, he possessed the genius of the pulpit orator. He could move a multitude of five thousand hearers at a camp-meeting with the ease of one born to command, and with the momentum of a landslide." [8]

In person he was interesting; his form was perfectly symmetrical, his head well developed, his eyes blue but keen, hair black, nose Roman, mouth finely chiseled, voice wonderfully musical. Hard necessity compelled him to locate in 1815; he entered into business, and was overwhelmed by misfortunes, under which he suffered till his death in 1825. His Christian character remained unimpeached through all his troubles, and death was a liberation to him. "Before next Sabbath," he exclaimed, "I shall be in paradise;" and his hope was not disappointed. President Olin, who heard him with delight, says: "He was the prey of fatal disease; and a weight of misfortune, such as rarely falls to the lot of mortals, had bowed down his spirit. Whenever I expressed what I always felt — the highest admiration of his original genius and irresistibly powerful preaching, I could perceive sadness gathering upon the brow of the old Methodists as they exclaimed, 'Ah, poor Brother Russell! he preaches well, very well, and it is long since I heard such a sermon before. But he is no longer what he used to be. You should have heard him fifteen years ago.' It is certain that the preaching of Russell, fallen as he was from the strength of his manhood, made an impression upon me such as has seldom been produced by another. Perhaps he had lost something from the vigor of his action, and the pathos of his exhortation. The vividness and the luxuriance of his imagination might have been withered in the furnace of suffering; but the strong distinguishing features of his original mind, his shrewdness of perception, his urgency of argument, his inimitable aptness of illustration, his powers of rapid and novel combination, were unimpaired. He abounded in metaphors, and no man made a better use of them. Nothing could exceed the efficiency or the simplicity of his rhetorical machinery. The aptness and force of his metaphors always atoned for their occasional meanness. Their effect upon the congregation was often like that of successive shocks of electricity. If he was powerful as a preacher he was mighty as an intercessor. Indeed it was in the closet that the holy flame of his devotion was kindled. The trophies of pardoning love were multiplied around him. God gave to his prayers and his preaching a degree of success seldom witnessed since the time of the apostles. Several thousand souls were given to him, within the South Carolina Conference, as the seals of his ministry, and the crown of his eternal rejoicing."

Lovick Pierce and his brother, Reddick Pierce, entered the itinerancy in the same year with Russell and Kennedy. The former still lives a representative of Southern Methodism after more than sixty years of labors and sufferings for it; a man of the soundest faculties, of unflagging energy, wise in counsel, powerful in the pulpit, and of hardly paralleled public services, which, however, have yet had no such record as would admit of their just historic appreciation. In 1799 Methodist preachers on the old Edisto Circuit extended their travels to the obscure locality (on Tinker's Creek) in South Carolina, where the two brothers were growing up with hardly any opportunities of religious improvement. Their father "despised the Methodists with bitterness," [9] but the itinerants were welcomed by some of his neighbors. The two youths obtained his permission to attend one of their meetings, at which James Jenkins preached. "This," Lovick Pierce writes, was the first time we ever heard the gospel preached with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, and that day we both resolved to lead a new life; then and there we commenced our life of prayer." In 1801 they joined the Church, and within three weeks all the family, who were old enough, were enrolled in it. The next year a Methodist chapel was erected near their house; both brothers began to exhort, and in December of 1804 both were received into the Conference at Charleston. Reddick Pierce was one of the purest of men, and his word was in prevailing power. "In those days, writes his brother, "in all that country around us in which my brother had done all his frolicking, I never knew him to make an ineffectual effort. I myself saw on one occasion, under one of his exhortations, eleven sinners fall from their seat — from one seat — to the ground, crying for mercy. And this was but a remarkable instance of a common occurrence, especially under his overwhelming appeals." Reddick Pierce died in 1860, after faithful services, which contributed greatly to the outspread of Methodism in South Carolina.

Lovick Pierce as pastor, presiding elder, a leader in his Annual Conference, a representative in the General Conference, has hardly been surpassed in the South. He has led many a young hero into the ministerial ranks, and his early labors were honored by the conversion of one of the noblest martyrs of the itinerancy. Richmond Nolley was, by birth, a Virginian, but his parents removed with him early to Georgia, where he was soon left a poor and orphan boy. Captain Lucas, a Methodist of Sparta, Ga., gave him a home and employment. A camp-meeting, still famous in Georgia Methodist traditions, was held, near Sparta, in 1806, and attended by an immense crowd. It was impossible for all the people to hear the preacher, and Lovick Pierce was deputed to hold a separate meeting on adjacent ground. He stood upon a table and proclaimed the word with such power that a hearer, the daughter of Captain Lucas, fell, smitten by it, in the outskirts of the throng. The whole multitude was soon in commotion. A simultaneous movement was made toward the preacher. "The people fell upon their knees, and groans and prayers and praise were mingled. This work continued during the remainder of the day and the night. Over one hundred souls professed conversion around that table." [10] Nolley, and a fellow-clerk in the store of Lucas, were among these converts.

He continued under the parental care of his friend Lucas a year longer, preparing himself for the ministry by exhorting in the neighborhood, and in 1807 was received by the Conference, and sent to Edisto Circuit, where he did good service among the slaves. In 1809 he was appointed to Wilmington, N. C., where he rejoiced in a general revival. The next year he was in Charleston, S. C., where he labored sturdily against no little persecution. Fire-crackers were often thrown upon him in the pulpit, and while he was on his knees praying; but he would shut his eyes, that he might not be distracted by menaces, and preach and pray on with overwhelming power, a habit which, it is said, lasted through the remainder of his life. His voice was as a trumpet, and no man of the South proclaimed the Gospel with greater energy than he. It was already manifest that his character was, in the highest sense, heroic, and that the bravest work of the itinerancy befitted him. Accordingly in 1812 we find him wending his way, with three other preachers, toward the Mississippi. Remarkable scenes and a martyr's death awaited him there. But we must part with him at present, to meet him soon again in his new field.

Samuel Dunwody also began his itinerant life in South Carolina early in this period, (in 1808,) though he was a native of Pennsylvania, born in Chester County in 1780. We have already seen him struggling to found the first Methodist Church in Savannah, Ga., in 1807. For forty years he traveled and preached like an apostle through much of Georgia and the Carolinas, greatly extending and fortifying the denomination. In 1846 he was compelled to retire to the superannuated ranks; and "fell asleep," in a most tranquil death, in 1854, a veteran of nearly seventy-four years. He was of Irish blood and energy; rough in features, in voice, in manners; resolute to the uttermost, having a "determined spirit, which would only require the influence of circumstances to render its actings truly heroic." [11] Like many, if not most of his itinerant associates, he was given to humor, "having a vein of keen irony;" but such was his piety that "he appeared dead to the world in a degree rarely witnessed, and alive to everything that involved the salvation of men." "Praying seemed scarcely less natural to his spiritual life than breath to his physical life," says an intelligent member of another denomination, under the roof of whose parsonage he often found shelter." [12] All about him, "dress, horse, saddlebags," were marked by poverty, by disregard of fashion, or even comfort; he seemed totally absorbed in his spiritual life and work; and "his external life," it is said, "so manifestly drew its powers from the spirit within, that there was dignity, it would hardly be too much to say sublimity, in his roughness." It is added, by this personal witness, "that simplicity and plainness in him were widely disconnected from rudeness and vulgarity; they were rather the honorable hardships of the soldier's warfare." He attained commanding influence in his Conference as one of its principal, though one of its least polished representatives, and was charged by Asbury, in 1811, as we have noticed, with the leadership of the whole southwestern field of Methodism, as presiding elder of the Mississippi District.

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ENDNOTES

1 Bangs, ii, 194. Dunwody's appointment does not appear in the Minutes till 1807.

2 Dr. Lee's Life of Lee, p. 426.

3 Dow's Journals.

4 Col. Rickett's History of Alabama.

5 F. G. Furguson, in "The Home Circle," April, 1860, p. 230. Nashville, Tenn.

6 Bishop Wightman's Life of Capers, p. 346. Nashville, 1858.

7 Prof. Martin, of Columbia, S. C. Sprague, p. 419.

8 Bishop Wightman, in Sprague, p. 411.

9 An obituary of his brother, by Dr. L. Pierce, Charleston Chr. Ad., Aug. 13, 1860.

10 Bishop McTyiere in Biog. Sketches of Itinerant Ministers, p. 261. Nashville, 1858.

11 Bishop Morris; Sprague, p. 436.

12 Sprague, p. 437.

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