VOLUME 4 — BOOK VI — CHAPTER III
METHODISM IN THE SOUTH, 1804 — 1820: CONCLUDED

Asbury's Last Visits to the South — His Episcopal Equipage — John Bond — Rembert Hall — Perry Hall — Last Interview with Otterbein — Asbury in Old Age — Ministerial Celibacy — Prosperity — Asbury's indomitable Persistence — Southern Methodism — Obituary Notices

Asbury spent a portion of every winter of these years in the South. He made it an official visit every year of his episcopal life save one, and, including his prior excursion thither, traveled over more or less of its territory seventy times, including both trips to and from it, which were always on different routes. His journals have more than their wonted brevity during the present period, and are hardly capable of historical use. He was repeatedly accompanied by his colleagues, Whatcoat and McKendree, and habitually by an elder as traveling companion. Snethen, Hutchinson, Morrell, Jesse Lee, and Hitt had, thus far, successively attended him. Crawford, Boehm, French, and Bond were with him through the present journeys. He rode, most of the time, in an unpretentious carriage. On one occasion, accompanied by McKendree, in Georgia, he writes: "We are riding in a poor thirty-dollar chaise, in partnership, two bishops of us; but it must be confessed it tallies well with the weight of our purses. What bishops! But we hear great news, and we have great times, and each Western, Southern, and the Virginia Conference, will have one thousand souls converted to God; and is not this an equivalent for a light purse? and are we not well paid for starving and toil? Yes; glory be to God!" An ax was a necessary accompaniment to clear the roads. "O my excellent son, John Bond!" he exclaims in South Carolina; "a tree had fallen across our way; what was to be done?' Brother Bond sprung to the ax fastened under our carriage, mounted upon the large limbs, hewing and hacking, stroke after stroke, without intermission, until he had cut away five of them, hauling them on one side as he severed them, so that we passed without difficulty. Is there his equal to be found in the United States? He drives me along with the utmost care and tenderness, he fills my appointments by preaching for me when I am disabled, he watches over me at night after the fatigue of driving all day, and if; when he is in bed and asleep, I call, he is awake and up in the instant to give me medicine, or to perform any other service his sick father may require of him, and this is done so readily, and with so much patience, when my constant infirmities and ill health require so many and oft-repeated attentions. The asthma presses sorely upon my panting breast. Lord, sanctify all my afflictions!"

The shadows of the evening of life were falling upon his great career, and his pensive allusions to the passing away of his old friends, and the changes of his old homes, increase in frequency and sadness with every year. "My old Virginia friends have disappeared from the earth!" he exclaims in 1805. He still finds yearly shelter at Rembert Hall, S. C.; but he buries members of the endeared household, and, in 1814, writes there, "How my friends move or waste away! yet I live; let me live every moment." This was his favorite home in the further south; at its north he always paused with delight at Perry Hall; but this, too, now reminds him of the changes of life. In 1805 he says there, "At Perry Hall I spent a night; the house, spacious and splendid, was newly painted, and the little grandchildren were gay and playful; but I and the elders of the house felt that it was evening with us." In 1808 he "came to it as to a home in mourning. His old friend Harry Gough was dead, and he buried him with tears. The old home never ceased to be attractive, but was ever afterward desolate to the veteran traveler. In 1811 he preached to the family in their private chapel, and writes, "All to me seems yet to be in sackcloth here ;" and as late as 1818 he says, "We came to Perry Hall. Alas, how solitary!" [1] His old friend Otterbein still lingers in Baltimore. "I gave," he writes the same year, "an evening to the great Otterbein. I found him placid and happy in God." Boehm was with them, and says "that was an evening I shall never forget. Two noble souls met, and their conversation was rich, and full of instruction. They had met frequently before. This was their last interview on earth." The good German divine was failing fast. The next year the bishop preached the "funeral sermon" of "the holy, the great Otterbein," as he calls him. "Solemnity," he says, "marked the silent meeting in the German Church, where were assembled the members of our Conference, and many of the clergy of the city. Forty years have I known the retiring modesty of this man of God, towering majestic above his fellows in learning, wisdom, and grace, yet seeking to be known only of God and the people of God. He had been sixty years a minister, fifty years a converted one."

His journals begin to show the decay of old age, though he is more cheerful than heretofore. The goodly fellowship of his episcopal colleagues and "traveling companions," and the increasingly eager welcomes of the Churches, which are almost everywhere crowded to hear him, can hardly fail to exhilarate him; but he becomes more punctilious and anxious about the great cause which has risen up under his labors. He fears its " temporal" prosperity; he criticizes severely slight deviations from traditional usage; he is alarmed at the sound of a bell in the cupola of a Methodist Church, and hopes "it will be the last one;" he dreads, above all, the marriage of the itinerants; it seems to him to menace almost fatally the whole ministry of Methodism in the new world. He is pleased to observe in the extreme South a prejudice in families against the marriage of their daughters with Methodist preachers, and says: "Thus involuntary celibacy is imposed upon us. All the better: care and anxiety about worldly possessions do not stop us in our course, and we are saved from the pollution of Negro slavery and oppression." He rejoices to get into the Virginia Conference, where they are nearly all inveterate celibates. At one of its sessions, (in 1809,) among eighty-four preachers present, only three had wives. "It was called," says Boehm, who was there, "the 'Bachelor Conference.' We had also bachelor bishops." McKendree was with Asbury. The latter "was delighted," adds Boehm, "with the appearance of the men. He said 'many of them are the most elegant young men I have ever seen in features, body, and mind; they are manly, and yet meet.' He rejoices in the great prosperity of the Church. He averages its congregations at a thousand hearers each, for many in the South and West comprised the people for miles around the "appointments." He estimated the Methodist hearers in Georgia, in 1806, at one hundred and thirty thousand. "It is quite probable," he says, "we congregate two hundred thousand in each state on an average, and if to these we add those who hear us in the two Canadian provinces, and in the Mississippi and Indiana territories, it will perhaps be found that we preach to four millions of people. What a charge!"

Asbury's maladies are still inveterate, and he moves on only by the indomitable force of his will. In 1805 he writes: "My eyes fail. I must keep them for the Bible and the Conferences." Boehm, with him in the far South in 1812, says: "Never was he more feeble, never less able to travel, and yet he would go on. There was only one thing that could stop him — the pale horse and his rider. Having lost the use of one of his feet by rheumatism, I had to carry him in my arms and place him in his sulky, and then take him out and carry him into a church or private dwelling, and he would sit and preach. At Fayetteville I carried him into the church, and he preached from Zech. ix, 12, 'the stronghold.' After the sermon he ordained three persons. He had one blister on him, and I carried him to our host, who put on three more. He traveled in great misery. At Wilmington I carried him into church, and he preached in the morning, and then met the society; and, that not being enough for a sick old infirm bishop, he would preach again in the evening. After this he was in such misery that a poultice was applied to mitigate his pain. The next day we rode twenty-four miles. The bishop's feet were so swollen he could not wear a shoe. Almost any other man would have been in bed; but he loved his work better than his life. His record on that day is, 'I have a fever and swelled feet.' The next day, 'I suffer violent pain in my right foot, and yet he says, 'I have filled all my appointments, and answered the letters received.' Who else would have thus persevered amid pain and anguish, dying by inches, to accomplish so much work?" His unparalleled career was drawing toward its close; but we shall follow him yet through many journeys in the North, the East, the West, though with but indistinct glimpses.

These were years of rife religious excitement through most of the South. The camp-meeting, of the West, was generally introduced, and from Bassett's Wood, in Delaware, to Rembert's, in South Carolina, and far beyond, in Georgia, these great occasions were of almost continual occurrence, attended sometimes, says Asbury, by ten thousand people, and three hundred traveling and local preachers. A thousand conversions in a week are sometimes recorded of a single meeting. A pervasive influence went forth from them through the circuits and districts, and Methodism spread into almost every city, town, and settlement of the South. The annual Conferences were often held at or near the camps, and the arrival of Asbury, sometimes with McKendree or Whatcoat, always with an able "traveling companion," and usually with a retinue of other preachers gathered on his route, became a sort of spiritual ovation, a triumph march of the great leader, which put in motion the Methodist host all along his progress. The great man had become now wonder to the nation, a hoary captain, with such a prestige as no other clergyman of the western hemisphere could claim. He had led his people to victory in all the land. His whole American life had been heroic, and now, tottering with years, he was as invincible in the field as ever. There was no faltering in his course. His character and example were a marvelous power. The people felt that a cause thus providentially conducted could not fail, but would probably take the whole country. The itinerant especially could not but grow strong in the presence of such a man. His continual passages among them inspirited them to emulate his wondrous energy. They almost universally took a chivalric character, a military "esprit de corp," which kept them compactly united, exultant in labor, and defiant of persecution and peril. It may be doubted whether the Christian world ever saw a more laborious, more powerful, more heroic, or more, successful band of evangelists than the Methodist itinerants who were now traversing the South from Chesapeake Bay to the Mexican Gulf. We are not therefore surprised that their communicants numbered, at the close of these years, more than ninety thousand; that they had gained rapidly, not only through the rural districts, but in all the cities, nearly trebling their numbers in Baltimore, nearly doubling them in Washington, more than doubling them in Richmond and Charleston, and gathering all they yet had in Savannah. Baltimore Conference now enrolled 33,289, Virginia 23,756, South Carolina 32,969.

The obituary roll of the South for this period includes many names which, though obscured by time, should not be allowed to die. Among them is that of Benjamin Jones, who, in 1804, fell dead in a swamp on the Waccamaw Lake, a man "of solemnity of countenance and manners, deeply serious, of a gentle mind, and Christian spirit." In the same year Nicholas Watters, worthy of his historic family, a laborer from Pennsylvania to Georgia, "a man of courage," "ready in conversation," of "gracious temper" and "simple manners," who died in Charleston, S. C., exclaiming, "I am not afraid to die, thanks be to God!" In 1805 John Durbin, of Maryland, who expired shouting, "Jesus! Jesus! angels! angels! I'll go." In 1807 George Dougharty, the persecuted hero, whose death we have heretofore recorded. The same year Bennet Kendrick, of whom the Minutes say, "What pen can write his worth? Worthy to supply the place of Dougharty; but, alas! we are deprived of them both, not in one year only, but within thirteen days of each other. The poor Africans repeat his name, and speak of his death with tears. He was a willing servant to slaves for the sake of Christ." He was "studious and skillful in the word," and "ended in triumph." The next year Henry Willis, who has been often noticed as one of the greatest men of the itinerancy, an evangelist from New York to Charleston and the West, and who died in Maryland, "with triumphant faith in Christ." Also Edmund Henley, a native of North Carolina, a laborer in the western mountains and southern low country. Expecting death, he hastened from his circuit to his father's house, erected a stand at the graveyard, preached from it his own funeral sermon to his old neighbors and friends, and was soon after buried there. "Several years he professed sanctification and the full assurance of hope," and was "very circumspect in his walk." The ruling passion was strong with him in death. He became delirious, "but would shout and pray, exhort and praise God to the last." The same year Leonard Cassell, of German parentage, born in the neighborhood of Strawbridge's Chapel, on Pipe Creek, the Summerfield of his times; of "astonishing genius," a "happy model of pulpit simplicity, eloquence, and piety, which shone with astonishing luster." The "loss of no young man in the connection," say his brethren, "could be more deservedly lamented." Like Nicholas Watters, and many other itinerants, he fell a victim to the epidemic yellow fever, which he bravely confronted at his last post. In Baltimore, and died "with unbroken confidence in God." In 1809 the veteran Joseph Everett, in Maryland, shouting; "Glory! glory! glory!" In 1810 Moses Black, of South Carolina, who, dying, requested his attendants to open his chamber windows, and, looking out, said, "Behold, how beautiful everything looks; I shall soon go now," and immediately closed his eyes forever, in "great peace and tranquillity." In 1811 Samuel Mills, "grave," "plain in dress and diet, a strict disciplinarian, visiting from house to house," "a witness of sanctification," of "strong confidence in God, and frequently shouting his praise." Also Nathan Whedon, of Virginia, a man of "peculiarities," of great afflictions, suffering by agonies in the head, and at last by blindness, but persisting in his labors till he fell declaring, "I am not afraid to die." In 1812 Jesse Pinnell, of Virginia, "of blameless and harmless character," dying of consumption, he testified, as long as "he could whisper, that he was happy, happy." Jacob Rumph, of South Carolina, "abstemious, steady, studious;" a strict "disciplinarian," "dead to the world;" "difficult to persuade to receive any pecuniary aid from the Church;" distinguished by his devotion to the religious welfare of children, with whom he was greatly successful. On his last sacramental occasion he said: "This day the Lord hath enabled me to be perfectly willing to die in Charleston," where he soon after expired with "the smiles of peace and confidence on his countenance." Jesse Brown, of Virginia, "a witness of perfect love," and " praising God while he had breath." In 1813 Leroy Merritt, also a Virginian, of great "zeal and simplicity, studious and successful;" attacked with fever on his circuit, he hastened to a Methodist family in Portsmouth, Va., saying that he had "come to die with them;" they took him in, ministered to him to the last, and witnessed his triumphant departure, as he exclaimed, "I have gained the victory! Come, Lord, come! I am ready to go! Glory, glory, glory! Roll on eternity, eternity! Roll on ages, ages, ages!" In 1815 Joel Arrington, a North Carolinian, who died "with strong confidence and full assurance of the promises." Nathan Lodge, a Virginian, a man of great purity and fidelity, who died speechless, but tranquil and safe. Zecharia Witten, testifying, "I leave the world without trouble or sorrow." In 1816 Ewen Johnson, a North Carolinian, a faithful and useful laborer, of "a humble and timid spirit," "nevertheless persevering, zealous, studious," "wholly given up to the ministry;" he lost his speech before death, but retained his senses; "he arose, fell upon his knees, clasped his hands," and, though without utterance, appeared to be rapt with "the divine presence." James Quail, of Maryland, "eminent for piety and diligence," and dying "with great peace of mind." In 1817 Samuel Waggoner, of North Carolina, who, sinking under consumption, returned to his father's house, and died "in full assurance of faith." Peter Wyatt, of Virginia, who, worn out by labor and disease at Norfolk, died on a journey for health, in a Methodist family of Nansemond County, where he had found himself too weak to proceed further; in a swoon his attendants wept around him, supposing him to be dead; but he revived, and said, "Weep not for me;" spoke of the blessedness of the righteous, and, "laying his hands upon his breast, died without struggle." William Patridge, of Virginia, who died in Georgia, exclaiming, "for me to die is gain;" an eminently holy man, "who," say the old Minutes, "respected the rights of man with a nicety never surpassed," and "though surrounded by those who held slaves, would have none." Anthony Senter, of North Carolina, "as a Christian, without offense," when early unable to speak, by consumption, he still traveled from circuit to circuit as presiding elder, and assembled the official members of his charge to instruct them in their duties; unable at last to go on, he lay down and died in the full peace of the gospel. Henry Padgett, of Maryland, who departed, shouting, "O death, welcome death! Farewell. I bid you all farewell. I shall not be dead, but living. O yes; living in heaven!" In 1818, Fletcher Harris, of North Carolina, a young man of eminent promise and holiness, who died "shouting aloud the praises of God." A few days before his death, being supported in his bed, he preached his farewell sermon to his friends, "shook hands with all around, bidding them an affectionate farewell," and then said, "Glory to God! victory! victory! This is not dying, it is living forever. Tell the preachers at Conference that I died in the triumphs of faith; that my last doctrine is free salvation." Joseph Stone, an Englishman, who, "in the midst of excruciating pains, praised the Lord aloud, and clapped his hands, exclaiming, 'Glory! glory! glory!'" the last words he was heard to utter distinctly. In 1819 Thomas Lucas, of Maryland, a great sufferer, who died in peace. John Wesley Bond, of Baltimore, the faithful traveling companion of Asbury, who had "great affliction and distress of mind" when near death; but "the conflict soon closed in peace and triumph." John T. Brame, of Virginia, "thrust sorely at by the enemy of souls" on his deathbed, being delirious with fever, but "the voice of prayer" from his brethren "never failed to call him to his right mind;" at last, while some of them were on their knees around him, "light broke into his soul," and "he continued in ecstasy and triumph" till death. George Burnett, of Virginia, "in full assurance of a blessed immortality." In 1820 Charles Dickinson, of North Carolina, a humble but useful laborer, who, bidding farewell to his friends, said, "Surely the Lord is here!" and, "without a groan or a sigh, closed his own eyes, folded his hands," and died. Also Archibald Robinson, of North Carolina, who expired after a sickness in which "he was so filled with divine love, that his cup ran over, and he continued praising God till his strength was almost exhausted." And

———————————————————————

ENDNOTE

1 A few months ago, accompanied by the Rev. G. Haven, of the New England Conference, the writer visited the sites, only a few miles apart, of Cokesbury College and Perry Hall, both of which stately edifices, with their chapels and 'church-going bells,' were burned to the ground, the former seventy, the latter seventeen years ago. Perry Hall has been rebuilt, but without the addition of the chapel and its former elegance; yet, like its predecessor, it can still be seen afar off. The estate has been divided and sold, and now contains scarcely one third of its original acres, and the 'hall' is occupied by a 'stranger.' Many of its tall sentinels, like those whom they once guarded, have disappeared, either from decay or design, and those that remain resemble the straggling remnant of a decimated regiment. We entered its spacious apartments, some of which were entirely empty, others used merely for granaries or store-rooms. The prestige of the past, except by the power of association, was scarcely realized. No voice of thanksgiving or praise greeted our ear." — D. Creamer, Esq., in Ladies' Repository, p. 170. March, 1862.

Text scanned and proofread by Rev. & Mrs. Duane V. Maxey
Holiness Data Ministry
P. O. Box 482
Coeur D' Alene, WA 99208

HTML conversion by Paul Leclerc and George Lyons
Copyright 2000 by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology
of Northwest Nazarene University,
Nampa, Idaho 83686.

Text may be freely used for personal or scholarly purposes, provided this notice is left intact.
This text may not be redistributed in any for-profit form or mirrored at any other website without the expressed, written consent of the Wesley Center.

If you have any questions regarding these files, please contact the Wesley Center for Applied Theology.