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CIRCUIT-RIDER DAYS ALONG THE OHIO
WILLIAM WARREN SWEET
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
ITY
PI
UNI
TSBURGH
1787
LIBRARY
١
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2009 with funding from University of Pittsburgh Library System
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OTHER BOOKS BY SAME AUTHOR
A HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA THE RISE OF METHODISM IN THE WEST
Painted ty J.Paradise.
The Penr James Ti. Finley. Mijinany to the Mandat Indiana.
Methodist Episcopal church. Confere Circuit-Rider Days Along the Ohio
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Being The Journals of the Ohio Conference from its Organization in 1812 to 1826
Edited With Introduction and Notes By WILLIAM WARREN SWEET Professor of History in DePauw University
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THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN NEW YORK CINCINNATI
Dar BX8381 r 3759
Copyright, 1923, by WILLIAM WARREN SWEET
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Printed in the United States of America
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60020-07
Cadres Book Shop
CONTENTS
PART I INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER
PAGE
PREFACE 7
I. THE PEOPLING OF THE OHIO VALLEY.
11
II. WESTERN METHODISM AND THE WAR OF 1812.
27
III. PROGRESS OF OHIO CONFERENCE METHODISM, 1816-1826. 43
IV. THE WYANDOT MISSION. 63
PART II
JOURNALS OF THE OHIO ANNUAL CONFERENCE, 1812-1826
I. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1812.
99
II. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1813.
112
III. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1814.
121
IV. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1815
130
V. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1816
140
VI. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1817. 151
VII. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1818. 162
VIII. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1819.
172
IX. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1820. 185
X. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1821. 197
XI. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1822. 215
XII. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1823. 227
XIII. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1824. 241
XIV. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1825.
261
XV. JOURNAL OF THE OHIO CONFERENCE, 1826 274
BIBLIOGRAPHY
293
INDEX
297
17-91-8
PREFACE
THE Journals of the Ohio Annual Conference, from its first session in 1812 to the fifteenth session in 1826, are found in the same manuscript volume as the Journals of the Western Annual Conference. Circuit-Rider Days Along the Ohio is therefore a companion volume to the Rise of Methodism in the West (1920), in which are found the Journals of the Western Conference. Taken together, these Journals tell the story of the progress of Method- ism in the Ohio Valley, for the first generation of the nine- teenth century (1800-1826)-a story without parallel in the history of American Christianity.
Such documents as the above are not only essential to the proper writing of the history of the church, but they also furnish valuable sidelights for a better understand- ing of the social and economic forces in American history. That this particular document may serve both these pur- poses is the reason for its publication. The interest and generosity of Mr. George H. Maxwell, of Boston, have made this book possible.
Greencastle, Indiana, March 1, 1923.
PART I INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I THE PEOPLING OF THE OHIO VALLEY
MR. BRYCE has said that "the West is the most Ameri- can part of America"; and Professor F. J. Turner, the American historian, who more than any other has shown us the significance of the frontier in American life, has said, "The American spirit-the traits that have come to be recognized as the most characteristic-was devel- oped in the new commonwealths that sprang into life beyond the seaboard."1 To what Mr. Bryce and Mr. Turner have said about the West being the most charac- teristically American part of America, may be added the statement, equally true, that the most Methodist part of America is the region west of the Alleghanies, that great region drained by the Ohio and its tributaries. It might also be truthfully added that to-day the Ohio valley is the numerical center of the Methodist world. It is the beginning of Methodism in the Ohio valley with which we are to deal in this volume, and in this chapter we have set ourselves to trace the peopling of the great valleys between the mountains and the Father of Waters.
This vast region was thrown into the lap of England by the treaty of Paris, which brought to a close the French and Indian War, in the year 1763. The long contest between France and England, which had been in progress for more than a half century, for the valley of the Ohio, was now over, and France had been driven from the New World. In the early half of the eighteenth century, while this territory was in dispute, but few
1 F. J. Turner, Rise of the New West. Henry Holt and Company, Publishers. Selec- tion used by permission of publishers.
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12 CIRCUIT-RIDER DAYS ALONG THE OHIO
Englishmen had made their way over the mountains, and these few were not settlers, but Indian traders and hunters. The French, however, had been far more active and had founded numerous posts and settlements, not only in the region of the Great Lakes, but on the banks of the Mississippi and the tributaries of the Ohio. The English, however, were just beginning to prepare to occupy the country west of the mountains and an Ohio Company had been organized (1748) when the last great intercolonial war began.
When this last intercolonial war was over and the treaty of Paris signed, suddenly a new land policy in regard to the territory west of the mountains was an- nounced by royal proclamation. American settlers were not to be given patents for lands beyond the bounds of their respective governments, nor were patents to be granted for lands beyond the sources of the rivers which fell into the Atlantic Ocean. The reason for this new policy has never been adequately explained, though the reason given at the time was the necessity of quieting the Indians by keeping out white settlements.2
Methodism might have been planted on the banks of the Ohio much earlier than it was if the following scheme from the fertile brain of Benjamin Franklin had been carried out. In 1756, just as the French and Indian War was beginning, he wrote George Whitefield: "I some- times wish that you and I were jointly employed by the Crown to settle a colony on the Ohio. I imagine that we could do it effectively, and without putting the nation to much expense; but I fear we shall never be called upon for such a service. What a glorious thing it would be to settle in that fine country a large, strong body of religious and industrious people! What a security to the other colonies and advantage to Britain, by increasing her people, territory, strength, and commerce! Might it not
2 Annual Register, 1763, pp. 20, 21.
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THE PEOPLING OF THE OHIO VALLEY
greatly facilitate the introduction of pure religion among the heathen, if we could by such a colony, show them a better sample of Christians than they see in our Indian traders-the most vicious and abandoned wretches of our nation ?"3
The last great wave of immigration to America before the American Revolution was the Scotch-Irish. Landing principally at Philadelphia and Charleston, and pushing back beyond the older settlements, these hardy people took up their claims and established their farms in the parallel mountain valleys of the Alleghanies.4 By 1730 they were swarming across the Atlantic and were soon to be found in considerable numbers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. It is believed that at the outbreak of the Revolution a third part of the popula- tion of Pennsylvania was Scotch-Irish and it has been estimated that perhaps a half million of these people came to America between 1730 and 1770.5 Some of them came to New England, but were treated so coldly by the congregational Puritans that they passed on into the unsettled lands in the Berkshires and into southern New Hampshire, where they settled Londonderry.6 Pennsyl- vania, however, was the center of Scotch-Irish power. Mr. Roosevelt states that the two facts of most impor- tance in attempting to understand our pioneer history are, first that the western portions of Virginia and the Carolinas were settled by an entirely different stock from that which was found in the tidewater regions of these colonies ; and, second, that western Pennsylvania was the great breeding ground for the earliest settlers who pushed their way into the valley of the Ohio."
Numerous Scotch-Irish squatters occupied the lands in
8 Biglow, Works of Benjamin Franklin, vol. ii, p. 467.
4 Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. i, p. 126.
5 Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, vol. ii, p. 394. Boston, 1897.
6 F. J. Turner, The Frontier in American History, pp. 103, 104. New York, 1920. Henry Holt & Company. Selections used by permission of publishers.
7 Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. i, p. 127. See also Turner, "The Ohio Valley in American History," in The Frontier in American History, pp. 164, 165.
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CIRCUIT-RIDER DAYS ALONG THE OHIO
dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland; they en- tered the Cumberland valley, and it was the Scotch-Irish settlements at Pittsburgh at the time of the Revolution which made that an important center. In 1768 they had to be warned off the Redstone country in southwestern Pennsylvania in order to avoid Indian trouble, and it was the Scotch-Irish and German fur traders whose pack trains first entered the Ohio Valley before the French and Indian War.8
By the middle of the eighteenth century a new society had been born in America, as well as a new section created. Geographically this new section lay "between the falls of the rivers of the south Atlantic colonies on the one side and the Alleghany Mountains on the other" -a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsyl- vania, southward.9 This new society differed greatly in all essentials from the colonial society of the seaboard. "It was a democratic, self-sufficing, primitive, agricul- tural society, in which individualism was more pro- nounced than in the community life of the lowlands." These early frontiersmen neither built towns nor did they like to dwell in them. They were at their best in the vast interminable forests, where they carved out scattered communities with ax and rifle, the national weapons of the backwoodsmen. It was a society in which hard work and poverty abounded. Grain and cattle were their chief products, while peltries served as specie.10 Their dress was borrowed from their Indian foemen, and they lived their lives among the charred stumps of their hilly farms, largely cut off from the softening influences of church and school.
If these earliest pioneers had any religion at all, they were Presbyterians, for they were kinsfolk of the Cove-
8 Winsor, The Mississippi Basin, pp. 238-243. Boston, 1895.
9 F. J. Turner, "The Ohio Valley in American History," as above.
10 Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. i, pp. 127, 128; Turner, The Frontier in American History, pp. 107, 108.
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THE PEOPLING OF THE OHIO VALLEY
nanters, a people who deemed it a religious duty to inter- pret their own Bible and whose "ecclesiastic and scholas- tic systems" were fundamentally democratic. It is true that in their fight for life and livelihood they lost much of their religion, "but what few meetinghouses and schoolhouses there were on the border were theirs."11 The religious atmosphere among them was very different from that of Puritan New England and still more differ- ent from the conservative Anglicans of the southern sea- board. "By 1760 a zone of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian churches extended from the frontiers of New England to the frontiers of South Carolina." There were some serious- minded Germans among them also, most of them devoted to one or another of their sects, while French Huguenots and English, Welsh, and Irish Quakers added some variety to the predominating Presbyterianism. In spite of the natural tendencies of frontier life, the frontier presented a distinctly serious and religious atmosphere. At least they displayed an emotional responsiveness to religion "and a readiness to find a new heaven and a new earth in politics as well as in religion," and this new society was soon to prove a fertile field for such demo- cratic churches as the Baptist and Methodist as well as the Presbyterian. Mr. Bryce has characterized the South as a region of "high religious voltage," and Mr. Turner says that this characterization is especially appli- cable to the upland South and its colonies in the Ohio Valley.12
Such were the people, who, regardless of the decree of an English king, found their way over the mountains and founded the first English-speaking settlements on the
11 Mr. Roosevelt states (Note, p. 128, The Winning of the West) that the Irish school- master was everywhere a feature of early Western society.
In the new and moving mass of people on the edge of the frontier were Daniel Boone, John Sevier, James Robertson, and the ancestors of John C. Calhoun, Stonewall Jack- son, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, James K. Polk, Sam Houston, and Davy Crockett, while a number of these families were originally from Pennsylvania, as Boone, Crockett, and Houston (Roosevelt, vol. i, p. 127; Turner, p. 107).
12 F. J. Turner, "The Old West," in The Frontier in American History, pp. 106, 108.
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CIRCUIT-RIDER DAYS ALONG THE OHIO
headwaters of the rivers which find their way into the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. By 1763 they had pushed their settlements to the crest of the mountains, and in the years immediately following they began the descent of the western slopes.
First came the hunters, of whom Daniel Boone is a type. Boone, a native of Pennsylvania, but largely reared in western North Carolina, made his first journey over the mountains into Kentucky in 1769. He was not, however, the first of the hunters, but he is significant because he was able to turn his daring woodcraft to the advantage of others. By 1771 many hunters were coming into Kentucky, for the country was teeming with game, and what hunter would not journey that far for the advantages it presented? The hunters soon were sound- ing the praises of beautiful "Kentuckie" east of the mountains, and it was not long before hardy surveyors were laying out vast tracts of land, in Boone's hunters' paradise. In 1774 a numerous party of surveyors located two thousand acres of land for Colonel Washington, and the same group staked out another claim of equal size for Patrick Henry.
While Boone and the other hunters were making their first journeys into Kentucky, other frontiersmen from Virginia and the Carolinas were founding settlements in what was later to become Tennessee. By the treaty of Fort Stanwix, in 1768, the Six Nations surrendered to the English all lands lying between the Ohio and the Tennessee. This was debatable ground, and the Iroquois had no more claim to it than had scores of other tribes ; but nevertheless the treaty was interpreted by the back- woodsmen as giving them a right to move into the terri- tory. In 1769 the first settlers came to the banks of the Wautauga, one of those beautiful rivers which, rising in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, and combining its waters with the Holston, the French Broad, and the
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THE PEOPLING OF THE OHIO VALLEY
Clinch, forms the broad Tennessee River. These settlers were from Virginia, and they thought their new colony was in territory belonging to Virginia; but two years later it was discovered by surveyors that they were actually located in North Carolina territory; and as North Carolina had always been a turbulent colony, badly governed, and with little respect for law, these sturdy settlers from Virginia concluded to organize a government of their own. Mostly Scotch-Irish in their origin and Presbyterian in their religion, and with their pastors among them, these hardy pioneers soon had nu- merous well-organized and law-respecting communities es- tablished in the beautiful valley of the Wautauga.
By 1775 stout-hearted men, with their wives and fam- ilies, were moving into Kentucky, and by the following year-the year of the Declaration of Independence-there were settled communities at Harrodsburgh and Boones- borough. Homes were established, marriages performed, and children born. In 1777 these Kentucky communities asked to be set apart as a separate county, which request was granted by Virginia, with boundaries corresponding to those of the present State of Kentucky, while Har- rodsburgh became the county seat.
Between 1700 and 1750, while the vast territory be- tween the mountains and the Mississippi was disputed by England and France, a number of French posts had been established. Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Natchez on the Mississippi, Vincennes on the Wabash, and Detroit and Fort Saint Louis in the vicinity of the great lakes, were among the most important. Although England had conquered the valleys, in the French and Indian War, and the French inhabitants had transferred their alle- giance to her, yet there was little enthusiasm among them for Britain. The Indians also resented the transfer of the territory to England, for the English had never been favorites with the Delawares and the Miamias. The
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CIRCUIT-RIDER DAYS ALONG THE OHIO
English fur-trader was just the type of man to arouse the hatred and resentment of the Indian, for he cared nothing for the Indian except to rob and plunder him. Resentment against the transfer of the territory to the English was one of the causes for the greatest of all Indian uprisings, Pontiac's rebellion, which broke out the very year the French and Indian War closed. Nor were the Indians reconciled to the frontiersmen crossing the mountains and forming settlements in their hunting grounds, and when the Revolutionary War broke out Eng- land found the Indians willing allies to attack the fron- tier settlements.
When the Revolutionary War began, the settlements of Americans in the territory west of the mountains were numerous enough to make it important to hold that vast region for the new nation. The campaign of George Rogers Clark and his capture of the French posts, Caho- kia, Kaskaskia, and Vincennes, and the securing of the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio for the American Union is an event of immense significance, just beginning to be adequately understood.13 It is not only probable but practically certain that the British would have held this territory, following the American War, had it not been for Clark and his brave backwoodsmen.
While George Rogers Clark and his associates were playing their brave part in winning the American Revo- lution, settlers were continuing their journeys across the mountains and new settlements were forming even while the Revolution was in progress. By the time the treaty of Paris was signed, which incorporated the ter- ritory west of the mountains into the new nation, there was a considerable white, English-speaking population on the frontier. Just how many people were living in these new and fertile valleys, west of the mountains at
13 The most recent account of George Rogers Clark is found in James Alton James, George Rogers Clark Papers, 1771-1781 (vol. iii, Virginia Series, Illinois Historical Collections, vol. viii). Springfield, 1912.
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THE PEOPLING OF THE OHIO VALLEY
the close of the war is not known, but the stream of population was steadily moving westward. Pittsburgh contained a hundred cabins; Cincinnati, then known as Losantiville, boasted a few huts; while Louisville, with its three streets and a cluster of cabins, was renowned through all the lower valley as the only hamlet possess- ing a store. Kentucky in 1779 had but one hundred and seventy-six white men, but by 1784 the population had gone far up into the thousands, and each month brought hundreds of new settlers, over the mountains from the Carolinas or down the Ohio from Pennsylvania and Virginia. "Cornfields and wheatfields and orchards began to spring up in every direction, and already the wagons that brought out merchandise from Phila- delphia went back laden with grain."14 Likewise population was moving rapidly into the valleys of east- ern Tennessee, between the Holston and the Cumberland, estimated in 1784 of at least ten thousand souls.15
When the Constitution was adopted in 1789 it called for an enumeration of the population every ten years, in order to get a basis for representation in the lower house of Congress. The first census was taken in 1790. It revealed the fact that not only were there in round num- bers 4,000,000 of people in the country, but it also re- vealed that the population was on the move westward in four distinct streams. One stream was pushing out through the Mohawk valley; a second passed through southern Pennsylvania and western Maryland; a third went out through the valley of Virginia and the passes of Kentucky and Tennessee; while the fourth passed around the end of the mountain chain in Georgia and Alabama. The census revealed that five per cent of the population in 1790 was distributed among several little
14 McMaster, History of the People of the United States, vol. i, pp. 147, 149. D. Apple- ton & Company, publishers.
15 Ibid., vol. i, p. 155. (Selections quoted from McMaster, History of the People of the United States, used by permission of publishers.)
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CIRCUIT-RIDER DAYS ALONG THE OHIO
islands, almost lost in the western wilderness. The first of these islands of population was in southwestern Penn- sylvania and contained 62,218 people; a second and third containing 55,873 were in western Virginia, clustered about Wheeling and at the mouth of the Kanawha, while a fourth was in Kentucky below the Licking River and contained 73,677 souls. A census taken in Tennessee in 1795 showed 66,549 freemen and 10,713 slaves. The Tennessee settlements were in two widely separated areas, the oldest in eastern Tennessee along the Holston, while the other was along the Cumberland, with Nash- ville as the chief town. Between the two areas lay three hundred miles of complete wilderness.16
When Andrew Jackson first beheld Nashville, in 1788, it consisted of a courthouse, a jail, and some eighty cabins of the rudest sort. The village was an outpost of civilization, for there was not a house to be met with between it and Natchez. Knoxville was the nearest town to the eastward, and was fifteen days' journey over an Indian-infested country, through which immigrants dare not pass without a guard. From Nashville northward to the Kentucky settlements was a trackless wilderness.17
Following the Revolution hard times came to the people living along the Atlantic seaboard, which was an inducement for people to move westward, where rich land could be had for little or nothing and where there were no taxes. The westward movement of population thus continued throughout the years immediately fol- lowing independence. This movement, however, from the Northern and Middle States was soon checked by the return of credit and the opening up of the West Indian trade. The seaboard sections then became very prosper- ous, with plenty of work at good wages, and thus there was little inducement for people in these regions to seek
16 McMaster, History of the People of the United States, vol. ii, pp. 184, 185.
17 Ibid., pp. 34, 35.
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THE PEOPLING OF THE OHIO VALLEY
the West. Hard times, however, continued in the South, for the Southern people were not ship owners or ship builders, nor did the products of the South find an outlet in the West Indian trade, since the West Indies and the Southern States produced similar crops. Accordingly, population from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia continued to move westward into Kentucky and Ten- nessee, and this continued movement soon brought a population to these territories sufficient for their ad- mission into the Union-Kentucky in 1792, Tennessee in 1796.
North of the Ohio there were few English-speaking settlers at the close of the Revolution. The British, in spite of treaty agreements, still held possession of the forts about the Great Lakes, while the Indians, con- trolled by the English, remained hostile toward Ameri- can settlers. Their raids on white settlements, through- out the West, continued at frequent intervals for ten years following the Treaty of Paris.
With the adoption of the Ordinance of 1787, creating a government for the region north of the Ohio, a new tide of immigration began to pour into the region. It was on March 1, 1786, in one of the taverns of Boston, that the Ohio Company was organized. Through Manasseh Cut- ler a large section of land was purchased in southeastern Ohio; shares were distributed to the proprietors accord- ing to the amount each paid in, while one section of land was set aside for schools, another section for religious institutions, and two townships for a college.18 The same year which saw the organization of the Ohio Com- pany saw their first settlement formed at Marietta, at the mouth of the Muskingum. These first comers to Ohio were from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut and are typical representatives of the
18 Selections quoted from Mathews, The Expansion of New England, p. 175. Bos- ton, 1909. Houghton Mifflin Company. Used by permission of the publishers.
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