VOLUME 4 — BOOK VI — CHAPTER II
METHODISM IN THE SOUTH, 1804 —1820: CONTINUED

Job Guest — Alfred Griffith — Wilson Lee and Black Charles — John Early — His long Services and Character — Major Capers — Conversion of William Capers — Begins to Preach — Interview with Asbury — A Negro Founds Methodism in Fayetteville — His remarkable story — Capers at Charleston — Colored Preachers — Change of Anti-slavery Policy — Capers' Success and Character — Beverly Waugh — John Davis — Alfred Griffith — Robert R. Roberts

The name of Job Guest has incidentally but repeatedly occurred in our pages. His friend, Alfred Griffith, who entered the itinerancy with him in 1806, says that "as to his toils and sufferings through a long-continued and faithful service, he might justly have adopted the language of the apostle of the Gentiles: 'In labors abundant, in fastings oft, in persecutions, in afflictions,' etc. From the shores of Lake Erie on the north, with all the intermediate territory on the south, to the waters of Chesapeake Bay, together with all Western Maryland, Western Pennsylvania, and Northern and Southwestern Virginia, was formed the field over which, from time to time, his labors were distributed by the proper authorities. And nobly did he fulfill his mission, 'to testify the gospel of the grace of God.' And God gave him great acceptability among the people, and much success in winning souls to Christ. He was a man of more than ordinary talents, and was instrumental in adding many hundreds, not to say thousands, to the fold of the Redeemer during a ministry of nearly fifty years of effective service, in which he filled nearly all the important appointments in the Conference." [1] He died in 1857, aged seventy-two years, a man of the purest, the most faultless character, and of such extended and long-continued labors as deserve a more thorough commemoration than the scanty records of the Church will allow.

Alfred Griffith, himself, beginning his itinerant career at the same time, claims our attention here, though, as he still lives, it will devolve on the future historian of the Church to give a fuller record of a life so long and so replete with usefulness. He was born in 1783, in Montgomery County, Md., and brought into the Church in 1801, in a revival which began on Montgomery Circuit under the exertions of Wilson Lee, who had recently returned, broken in health from his great western labors, but was preaching with his usual zeal as a supernumerary of the circuit. At one of Lee's appointments (in a private house) lived a remarkably devoted colored Methodist by the name of Charles. The preacher having determined to open the campaign at this place, covenanted with the faithful African, that at the next meeting, while he should be preaching in the principal room, Charles should be on his knees, in a shed-room, opening into that in which the service was proceeding, engaged in supplication for the success of the word. "When the time came, and the itinerant, of whom men stood in awe while they admired him, arose in the crowded parlor, true to his engagement, Charles was on his knees in the shed-room. There was present on that day in that place a power more than human. The people fell on every side. They prayed, they wept sore. Into the midst of this scene now came the pious Negro. He had heard the Lord's answer, and, not venturing to rise, he entered the room walking on his knees, while the tears streamed down his black face, now made, if not white, at least intensely bright by the grateful joy which overspread it. Many souls were converted at that single meeting, which was the more glorious because it was only one of a glorious series, only the beginning of a widely-extended, long-continued revival of religion, reaching to Baltimore city and county, to Frederick County, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, to Pennsylvania, and to Virginia, and lasting till 1808." [2]

In 1806 young Griffith was received into the Baltimore Conference, and sent to the Wyoming country, where we have already witnessed his itinerant hardships. In his numerous subsequent appointments he has been an able contributor to the outspread of the Church in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, a leader in the Baltimore Conference, and a venerated counselor in the General Conference. He is small in stature, like Paul of unpretentious personal presence, of simple manners, of few words, but strikingly pertinent in debate, profound and statesmanlike in counsel, and in familiar conversation remarkably entertaining, anecdotal, and humorous. He survives, burdened with the infirmities of age, but cheered by the retrospect of the success of his cause, and the prospect of reunion with the good and great men with whom he has labored and suffered for it.

A young man, by the name of John Early, was admitted to the Virginia Conference in 1807. His family belonged to the most influential class of society in Bedford County, Va., where he was born in 1786, became a Methodist in 1804, and was licensed to preach two years later, in his twenty-first year. He had begun his public labors among Mr. Jefferson's slaves at Poplar Forest, in Bedford County, and, notwithstanding his adherence to the policy of the Church, South, respecting the slavery controversy, he has been noted, from the beginning, for his interest in the religious welfare of the colored race. His strong characteristics quickly marked him as a superior man. Possessing an iron constitution, a practical but ardent mind, a notably resolute will, and habits rigorously systematic and laborious, he became a favorite coadjutor, a confidential counselor of Asbury, McKendree, Bruce, Jesse Lee, and their associate leaders of the denomination. He was a renowned, if not indeed, a dreaded, disciplinarian. His preaching was simple, direct, and powerful, and few, if any, of his early fellow-itinerants gathered more recruits into the Church in Virginia. In 1811 he received about five hundred probationers on his circuit, Grenville, Va. When only about twenty-seven years old, Asbury, against his remonstrance, made him presiding elder on the Mehenen Distinct, Va., an office in which his extraordinary business talents, as well as his energetic preaching, had full scope, and were crowned with memorable success. He held many camp-meetings, at one of which, in Prince Edward County, more than eight hundred souls were converted in a single week. Every interest of the Church received his devoted and persistent attention. He was a chief founder of Randolph Macon College, Va., and has continued to be its rector down to our day. In the General Conference of 1832 he received a large vote for the episcopate, and would probably have been elected had it not been for his connection with slavery.

Possessing surpassing capacity for business, he was often called upon for important services by both Church and State. Bangs nominated him for the Cincinnati Book Agency, and others for that of New York in 1836. His fellow-citizens repeatedly nominated him for Congress; but he declined the honor as a detraction from his ministerial office. The general government offered him the governorship of Illinois when it was a territory. President Adams solicited him to accept the same office in the territory of Arkansas, and President Tyler that of Comptroller of the Treasury; but his answer was that "he could not come down" to such positions. He took an active part in the measures that resulted in the division of the Church in 1844, and the organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; shared in its convention at Louisville, Ky., in 1845; was the president pro tempore of its first General Conference at Petersburgh, Va.; and was there elected its first Book Agent. In 1854 he was made one of its bishops at Columbus, Georgia.

John Early still lives, after one of the most laborious careers in the history of the American Methodist itinerancy. One who has well known him says that "he has probably received more persons into the Methodist Church than any man in it. The accounts he can give of scenes in Conferences, in churches, on the road, in social circles, or around the sick bed, are 'telling beyond description' As a presiding officer we seldom see his equal for precision, dispatch, and business. His preaching is always dignified, simple, and impressive, and often perfectly irresistible; thousands of souls, on earth and in heaven, are the seals of his ministry. He still retains this power; his large blue eye yet flashes with a tranquil and holy zeal; his powerful voice, though affected by age, yet, like the blast of a trumpet, peals forth the invincible truth, and his erect and vigorous form is yet capable of much labor. His knowledge of character is intuitive, his friendship inviolable, his firmness inflexible, his house the home of hospitality and social happiness; and if there be in his well-balanced character one feature more prominent than the rest, it is, that in the functions of the episcopal office, he never sacrifices the interests of the Church to his prejudices or his friendships; if one must suffer, it is always his friend or himself."[3] At the Southern General Conference in New Orleans, 1866, he obtained a release from his episcopal duties on account of his advanced age; but he still sojourns among the Conferences and Churches, a welcome guest, venerated for his long services, and laboring according to his strength. The next year after Early's admission to the itinerancy another young man, who was to attain episcopal dignity and national reputation, entered the ministry in the South Carolina Conference. Major William Capers was of Huguenotic ancestry, and a brave officer of the Revolution, fighting in the battles of Fort Moultrie and Eutaw, suffering in the siege of Charleston, and famous in the band of Marion's men. After the war he became a devoted Methodist, under the ministry of Henry Willis, in Charleston. At his winter residence, a plantation in St. Thomas' Parish, S. C., was born, in 1790, his son, William Capers, one of the most representative men of American Methodism for nearly half a century. He was early sent to a boarding-school, was entered as a sophomore in the South Carolina College in his sixteenth year, and subsequently studied law in Charleston. The fairest prospect of professional success and political distinction appealed to his youthful ambition. His temperament was vivid, brilliant, and generous. He loved society, and was gayest of the gay; but his Methodistic domestic training had touched the deeper susceptibilities of his soul. It had preserved him from youthful vices, and, in 1806, at a camp-meeting on the estate of Rembert, of Rembert Hall, (so historical in early Methodism,) his conscience was thoroughly awakened. After a short period of healthful religious progress he became the victim of a morbid delusion, (sanctioned by the current Calvinistic theology, but denied by Methodism,) under which he suffered for about two years, and which deterred him from an open profession of his faith. Meanwhile his father had also been led astray by the schism of Hammett in Charleston, and had lost the life, if not the form, of his piety. In 1808 his sister was converted at a camp-meeting in the Rembert neighborhood, and returned home exemplifying the power and peace of the gospel. An affecting scene soon followed, which he describes: [4] "It grew night; supper was over; it was warm, and we were sitting in a piazza open to the southwest breeze which fans our summer evenings. My sister was singing with a soft, clear voice some of the songs of the camp-meeting, and as she paused, my father touched my shoulder with his hand, and slowly walked away. I followed him till he had reached the furthest end of the piazza on another side of the house, when, turning to me, he expressed himself in a few brief words, to the effect that he felt himself to have been for a long time in a backslidden state, and that he must forthwith acknowledge the grace of God in his children or perish. His words were few, but they were enough, and strong enough. I sank to my knees and burst into tears at the utterance of them, while for a moment he stood trembling by me, and then bade me get the books. The Bible was put on the table; the family came together. He read the hundred and third psalm, and then he kneeled down and prayed as if he felt indeed that life or death, heaven or hell, depended on the issue. That was the hour of grace and mercy, grace restored to my father as in times of my infancy, and mercy to me in breaking the snare of the fowler that my soul might escape."

His law books were laid aside for the Bible. We have already seen William Gassaway summoning him out to accompany him around a circuit. He went to Camden to meet Gassaway for the purpose, and diffidently took refuge in an inn, at the door of which the venerable Rembert, who was passing, met him, and exhorted him to go with Gassaway. He found Kennedy with the latter, and accompanied them to the church. Kennedy preached, and afterward beckoned him to the pulpit, where Gassaway, who sat in the desk, cried out to him, "Exhort!" he did so, and thus began his distinguished ministerial career.

He continued to go round the circuit, laboring energetically, and at a camp-meeting at Rembert's met Asbury, and was licensed to preach, though he was not yet through his probation in the Church. His interview there with the bishop was a characteristic scene. His father had long been alienated from Asbury (formerly his honored guest) by the Hammett schism. "I was introduced," he writes, "to Bishop Asbury immediately on his first coming to the camp-meeting, as I happened to be in the preachers' tent at the time of his arrival. I approached him timidly, you may be sure, and with a feeling of profound veneration; but 'Ah,' said he, 'this is the baby; come and let me hug you;' meaning that I was the baby when he was last at my father's house. On my father's entering the tent, he rose hastily from his seat and met him with his arms extended, and they embraced each other with mutual emotion. It had been some seventeen years since they had seen each other, and yet the bishop asked after Sally and Gabriel as if it had been but a few months, and repeated gleefully, 'I have got the baby.' It was evident that no common friendship had subsisted between them; and how much happier had those years of estrangement been to my honored father if they had been passed in the fellowship which he had been seduced to leave. I hate schism; I abhor it as the very track and trail of him who 'as a roaring lion walketh about seeking whom he may devour.'"

In the last month of 1808 young Capers was received by the Conference, and appointed to the Wateree Circuit, on which he had to fill twenty-four appointments every four weeks. He had formidable labors and trials, and was well initiated. In 1809 he traveled Pee-Dee Circuit, where he was especially devoted to the religious welfare of the colored people. He found many of them eminently pious, and some as eminently useful. One of his churches, at Fayetteville, had been founded by a faithful Negro, whose name has thereby become historic in the annals of the Conference. "The most remarkable man," he says, "in Fayetteville when I went there, and who died during my stay, was a Negro by the name of Henry Evans, who was confessedly the father of the Methodist Church, white and black, in Fayetteville, and the best preacher of his time in that quarter, and who was so remarkable as to have become the greatest curiosity of the town, insomuch that distinguished visitors hardly felt that they might pass a Sunday in Fayetteville without hearing him preach. Evans was from Virginia; a shoemaker by trade, and, I think, was born free. He became a Christian and a Methodist quite young, and was licensed to preach in Virginia. While yet a young man he determined to remove to Charleston, S. C., thinking he might succeed best there at his trade. But having reached Fayetteville on his way to Charleston, his spirit was stirred at perceiving that the people of his race in that town were wholly given to profanity and lewdness, never hearing preaching of any denomination. This determined him to stop in Fayetteville, and he began to preach to the Negroes with great effect. The town council interfered, and nothing in his power could prevail with them to permit him to preach. He then withdrew to the sand-hills, out of town, and held meetings in the woods, changing his appointments from place to place. No law was violated, while the council was effectually eluded, and so the opposition passed into the hands of the mob. These he worried out by changing his appointments, so that when they went to work their will upon him, he was preaching somewhere else. Meanwhile, whatever the most honest purpose of a simple heart could do to reconcile his enemies, was employed by him for that end. He eluded no one in private, but sought opportunities to explain himself; avowed the purity of his intentions, and even begged to be subjected to the scrutiny of any surveillance that might be thought proper to prove his inoffensiveness; anything, so that he might but be allowed to preach. Happily for him and the cause of religion, his honest countenance and earnest pleading were soon powerfully seconded by the fruits of his labors. One after another began to suspect their servants of attending his preaching, not because they were made worse, but wonderfully better. The effect on the public morals of the Negroes, too, began to be seen, particularly as regarded their habits on Sunday, and drunkenness, and it was not long before the mob was called off by a change in the current of opinion, and Evans was allowed to preach in town. At that time there was not a single church edifice in town, and but one congregation, (Presbyterian,) which worshipped in what was called the State-house, under which was the market, and it was plainly Evans or nobody to preach to the Negroes. Now, too, of the mistresses there were not a few, and some masters, who were brought to think that the preaching which had proved so beneficial to their servants might be good for them also, and the famous Negro preacher had some whites as well as blacks to hear him. From these the gracious influence spread to others, and a meeting-house was built. It was a frame of wood, weather-boarded only on the outside, without plastering, about fifty feet long by thirty wide. Seats, distinctly separated, were at first appropriated to the whites, near the pulpit. But Evans had already become famous, and these seats were insufficient. Indeed, the Negroes seemed likely to lose their preacher, Negro though he was; while the whites, crowded out of their seats, took possession of those in the rear. Meanwhile Evans had represented to the preacher of Bladen Circuit how things were going, and induced him to take his meeting-house into the circuit, and constitute a Church there. And now there was no longer room for the Negroes in the house when Evans preached; and, for the accommodation of both classes, the weather-boards were knocked off; and sheds were added to the house on either side; the whites occupying the whole of the original building, and the Negroes these sheds as a part of the same house, Evans' dwelling was a shed at the pulpit end of the church. And that was the identical state of the case when I was pastor. Often was I in that shed, and much to my edification, I have not known many preachers who appeared more conversant with Scripture than Evans, or whose conversation was more instructive as to the things of God. He was a Boanerges, and in his duty feared not the face of man. He died during my stay in Fayetteville in 1810. The death of such a man could not but be triumphant, and his was distinguishingly so. I was with him just before he died. His last breath was drawn in the act of pronouncing, 1 Cor. xv, 57, 'Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.' On the Sunday before his death the little door between his humble shed and the chancel where I stood was opened, and the dying man entered for a last farewell to his people. He was almost too feeble to stand at all, but, supporting himself by the railing of the chancel, he said, 'I have come to say my last word to you. It is this: None but Christ. Three times I have had my life in jeopardy for preaching the gospel to you, Three times I have broken the ice on the edge of the water and swum across the Cape Fear to preach the gospel to you, and now, if in my last hour I could trust to that, or to anything else but Christ crucified, for my salvation, all should be lost, and my soul perish forever.' A noble testimony! worthy, not of Evans only, but St. Paul. His funeral at the church was attended by a greater concourse of persons than had been seen on any funeral occasion before. The whole community appeared to mourn his death, and the universal feeling seemed to be that in honoring the memory of Henry Evans we were paying a tribute to virtue and religion. He was buried under the chancel of the church of which he had been in so remarkable a manner the founder."

At the Conference in the latter part of 1810, Capers was sent to Charleston. At this time there were seventy-four preachers belonging to the Conference, employed on thirty-nine circuits and stations, of which twenty-four belonged to South Carolina, and that part of North Carolina lying south of Cape Fear and the head-waters of Yadkin; fourteen belonged to Georgia, and there were two preachers employed as missionaries in Alabama. The returns gave seventeen thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight whites, and eight thousand two hundred and two colored members. Charleston had yet but two churches, Cumberland Street and Bethel; Hammett's "Trinity Church" having not yet been ceded to the denomination. The antislavery measures of Methodism had arrayed the community against it. Even native preachers, belonging to slave-holding families, like Capers, were hardly allowed to preach to the colored people for miles around the city; but there were some "extraordinary colored men," who were "raised up for the exigencies of these times in the city Churches, such as Castile Selby, Amos Baxter, Thomas Smith, Peter Simpson, Smart Simpson, Harry Bull, Richard Halloway, Alek Harlston, and others, men of deep piety and natural talents, who were made preachers, and were sent out by Capers and his colleagues to minister to the slaves on the plantations in all directions. It was thus that Methodism got its powerful hold on the black population of South Carolina. They labored successfully on Goose Creek, Cooper River, Wanda, in St. Paul's parish, St. James, St. John, and Wadmalaw Islands, even as far as Pon-Pon River. The opposition of masters to the labors of white preachers among the slaves led to a compromise of the stringent policy of the Church against slavery. About this time we perceive the tendency to a more moderate course in even Asbury's resolute mind. In 1809 he writes, in the South, "We are defrauded of great numbers by the pains that are taken to keep the blacks from us; their masters are afraid of the influence of our principles. Would not an amelioration in the condition and treatment of slaves have produced more practical good to the poor Africans than any attempt at their emancipation? The state of society, unhappily, does not admit of this; besides, the blacks are deprived of the means of instruction; who will take the pains to lead them into the way of salvation, and watch over them, that they may not stray, but the Methodists? Well, now their masters will not let them come to hear us. What is the personal liberty of the African, which he may abuse to the salvation of his soul! How may it be compared?"[5] This was an honest but fatal expediency. Asbury took his bias from the preachers and planters of the South. It was the crisis of Methodist anti-slavery opinion. Steadily hereafter compromise and retrogression mark the policy of the Church, followed at last by fierce reaction controversy, schism, rebellion, and devastating war.

Capers' ministry in Charleston made a profound impression, and abated the public prejudice; for his social rank, as well as his superior culture and talents, commanded respect. He continued his itinerant labors, with increasing success, till the Conference of 1814, when, being now a married man, he deemed it expedient to locate. He procured a farm, cultivated it diligently on week-days, and preached on Sundays; but it was not long before his wife, of whom he was passionately fond, suddenly died in her new home. He felt that he had erred, that he must return to the itinerancy to suffer, whatever might be his lot. In 1818 he was readmitted to the Conference, and thenceforward never swerved from his work. His influence throughout the South, an throughout the denomination, became commanding. He was sent to the General Conference, and to England as representative of the American Church, appointed collegiate professor, and president, editor, missionary secretary, and at last, after the division of the denomination, elected bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which office he maintained with unremitted labor till his death in 1855.

He was five feet nine inches in stature, with delicately molded features, expressive of uncommon refinement, intelligence, and benevolence. His eyes were black and lustrous, his voice musical; his manners marked by perfect amenity. In the pulpit he was usually mild, suasive, and instructive, occasionally exceedingly impressive and powerful. He seldom or never used formal "divisions" in his sermons, but maintained a central thought, which he thoroughly elaborated, but not without the freest digressions. He was a restless worker, and spent "a handsome patrimony for the Church," was often in want, and died without other resources than his ministerial salary. He was perhaps the most important, if not the most responsible, man in the division of the Church in 1844, an event which will hereafter require a further estimate of his historic relations to American Methodism.

Still another youth, destined to the episcopal office was given to the itinerancy by the South the next year after that in which Capers entered the ministry. Beverly Waugh was born in Fairfax County, Va., in 1789, became a Methodist under the ministry of Dr. Thomas F. Sargent, in Alexandria, Va., in his fifteenth year, and joined the Baltimore Conference in 1809, when hardly twenty years old. His first two years in the ministry were spent on Virginia circuits, one of the among the mountains of the Greenbrier region, where he had the severest training of the itinerancy. In 1811 he was appointed to Washington, D. C., and thenceforward his solid abilities and high character secured him the most important position of his Conference. He was repeatedly appointed to Washington, Baltimore, Georgetown, Frederick, etc., down to 1828, when the General Conference elected him Book Agent at New York, where he conducted, with ability and energy, the momentous publishing business of the Church for eight years. He had now become one of the prominent men of the denomination, not so much by brilliant or popular qualities, as by his well-balanced faculties, his consummate prudence, his exalted character, his devout temper, Christian amenity, and effective preaching. The Cincinnati General Conference of 1886 elected him to the episcopate, and for twenty-two years he sustained that most onerous office with extraordinary diligence, notwithstanding his precarious health, impaired by his labors in the Book Concern. He never failed, in a single instance, to attend his Conferences. These were years of stormy controversies in the Church, and he was worn and wan with care and fatigue. It has been estimated that the average number of ministerial appointments made by him per annum was five hundred and fifty. The yearly redistribution of such a number of preachers and their families (for much of the time from Maine to Texas, from Michigan to Georgia) involved an amount of anxiety known only to the incumbents of the episcopate, and hardly known to them since that day. Meanwhile he was incessantly laboring in the pulpit, in class-meetings, and to no small extent in pastoral visitation, for wherever he stopped, for temporary rest, in his episcopal travels, he gave himself with devout earnestness to such opportunities. He suddenly died in his work, by disease of the heart, at Baltimore in 1858.

Beverly Waugh was both a good and an able man, and the Church suffers loss by the lack hitherto of any biographical record of his useful life, by which his historic services might be adequately appreciated. He was dignified in person, with calm, benign, though care-worn features, brilliant eyes, shaded by heavy eyebrows, a voice of sonorous distinctness, and manners grave, but endearingly cordial and affectionate. He retained to the last the original plain costume of the ministry. In the pulpit he was often exceedingly powerful; in the episcopal chair prompt, without hurry; cautious, though firm. He was staunchly "conservative" in his opinions, not only of Methodistic principles and traditions, but of the public questions which kept the Church agitated with controversies during his episcopal administration, a fact which will give him prominence in the historical record of those memorable times.

John Davis joined the Baltimore Conference the year following Waugh's admission, and became, as his brethren testify, "a prince in Israel."[6] He was born in Northumberland County, Va., in 1787. His parents were Methodists of the primitive type, and trained him carefully in the doctrines of the Church. He attributed his conversion, in his nineteenth year, to the ineffaceable impression of a lesson of the Holy Scriptures, heard while sitting upon his father's knee while yet a child. "Ye must be born again," was a truth in that lesson which perpetually sounded in his conscience. It drew him, at last, to seek peace of mind in prayer, in a wood, where, after much anguish, he found it. He had never seen any one converted, nor witnessed an example of religious ecstasy; yet his new experience compelled him to "make the wood echo with the shout of 'Glory! glory! glory to God!'" He soon after began to "exhort," and in 1809 was called out by Hamilton Jefferson, presiding elder, to Berkeley Circuit. The next year he was received into the Conference. His earliest appointments were on rugged circuits of the western mountains; but he soon became eminent among his brethren, and occupied the most conspicuous stations in Baltimore, Washington, and elsewhere. He was presiding elder during many years; a delegate to the General Conference at every session, save two, after 1816, till his death, and a chief counselor there, though never given to speechmaking. He was a practical and effective preacher, and gathered into the Church hosts of members. In 1818 his labors in Baltimore were attended by an extraordinary religious impression, which resulted in the conversion of about a thousand souls in a few months. He was devoted to all the interests of his denomination, and especially labored for the endowment of Carlisle College. He persisted steadily in his itinerant career till his infirmities compelled him to retreat to the honored ranks of his "superannuated" brethren in 1846, and died in 1858, in the sixty-sixth year of his age and the forty-fourth of his ministry, exclaiming, "Happy! Happy! peaceful! Tell the Conference all is peace!"

In stature he was tall, slight, but vigorous; he was energetic in his movements, always appearing to have something to do. In familiar life he was exceedingly agreeable, a good converser, and given to anecdote, especially respecting the adventurous life of the primitive itinerancy. With his friend, Alfred Griffith, he was recognized by the Baltimore Conference as one of its chief sages and leaders. So sound was his judgment, that his clearly expressed opinion was usually deemed decisive of questions without further argument. He loved Methodism with an enthusiastic affection. In reviewing his long and self-sacrificing career late in life, he said to his family, "I would rather be a Methodist preacher, with the means of doing the little good I have done, than be the President of the United States."

Robert R. Roberts, whom we have heretofore found in the ultramontane woods of Pennsylvania, became prominent laborer among these evangelists in 1808. He made his way this year to the General Conference at Baltimore, traveling on horseback, with but one dollar in his pocket for the journey, and carrying with him oats for his horse, and bread and cheese for himself. He had but five cents when he arrived at the session. His clothes were so worn out that an unknown Methodist of the city, after hearing him preach, sent a tailor to his lodgings, and had him reclothed from head to foot. His preaching produced such an impression that he was appointed to the Light Street Church immediately after the Conference, and remained there, and at Alexandria and Georgetown, till 1813, a powerful and successful laborer. After three more years, spent in Philadelphia, and on its district, his superior character and capacity commanded such general regard that he was elected to the episcopate, and commenced his travels over all the United States. As the period draws to its close, names familiar and dear to us all nearly half a century later, begin to multiply, such as Tucker, Beard, Hamilton, Tippett, and others; within our present chronological limits they were graduating toward the orders of elders — modest young evangelists, trying their strength on hard circuits, but full of promise, and destined to afford the historian hereafter some of his choicest examples of events and characters.

Such are a few, and but a few, of the itinerants of the South in our present period — the second generation of Methodist itinerants worthy recruits of the elder corps, which was still mighty in the field, led by Lee, Bruce, Roberts, Wells, Everett, Daniel Asbury, George, Reed, Snethen, Shinn, Henry Smith, Roszell, Christopher Sprye, Gassoway, Douglass, Mills, and similar men. Many others of equal note, but of scantier record, might be mentioned, some of whom will be noticed at more apposite points of our narrative.

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ENDNOTES

1 Minutes, 1858.

2 Rev. Dr. Nadal, In Ladies' Repository, Jan. 1860.

3 Letter of Rev. George Rosser to the author.

4 In his very interesting autobiography, given in Bishop Wightman's Life of Capers. Nashville, 1858.

5 Asbury's Journals, iii, p. 98. The italics are his own.

6 Minutes of 1854.

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