NOTES
THE FORTUNES OF A
CIRCUIT RIDER
1 Minutes of the Annual Conferences
of the Methodist Episcopal Church, for the Years 1773-
1828 (New York, 1840), 119. This is Volume I. Subsequent
volumes cover the years after 1828.
They will be cited hereafter as Minutes,
by volume number. Young was apparently sent to, Illinois
for disciplinary reasons. Careless with
the truth, he was given a "plain talke" and appointed
"Mitionary to the Illinoies."
The following year the Western Conference expelled him from the
church, quite unfairly thought his
brother Jacob, one of the venerable "Fathers" of the Western
Conference and later the Ohio
Conference. Journal of the Western Conference, October 1803.
All conference journals cited are at
Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio. See also Jacob
Young, Autobiography of a Pioneer (Cincinnati,
1857), 141-142. I have followed the original
spelling and punctuation in all
quotations from manuscript sources.
2 A frequent change of teachers, Wesley
felt, was vital to Christian nurture. "No one whom I
ever yet knew," he wrote, "has
all the talents which are needful for beginning, continuing, and
perfecting the work of grace in an whole
congregation." John Telford, ed., The Letters of the
Rev. John Wesley (London, 1931), III, 195.
3 Asbury doubted the "call" of
any itinerant unconvinced of "his duty to travel for life." In a
letter to John Sale he wrote, "I
feel, upon rest from riding one hundred and fifty or two hundred
miles a week. . . like another or new
man; but, 0, perpetual motion!" Asbury to Sale, September
18, 1813, in Western Christian
Advocate (Cincinnati), July 26, 1848.
4 The late Hoosier senator James E.
Watson, when asked where he learned his political theory, is
reported to have said, "In the
Methodist Church at Winchester, Indiana."
5 J. D. B. De Bow, Statistical View
of the United States (Washington, 1854), 133-138. Statistics
taken from the Baptist Almanac for
1850, including eight Baptist sects and four Methodist branches
(M. E. North: M. E. South; Methodist
Protestant; Wesleyan) indicate: Methodist membership
1,179,526: Baptist, 982,693.
6 Minutes, I, 216. By 1844, when the Methodists split over the
slavery issue, thirty-four confer-
ences had spread across the nation and
to Liberia. Ohio contained four annual conferences, partly
or wholly within the state's boundaries,
namely, the Ohio, North Ohio, Erie, and Pittsburgh con-
ferences. Minutes, III, 477.
7 John Stewart, Highways and Hedges:
or, Fifty Years of Western Methodism (Cincinnati,
1872), 127. See also Minutes, I,
419-420.
Stewart was not elected to the general
conference until 1848, probably as an alternate. See
Journals of the General Conference of
the Methodist Episcopal Church, Volume
III, 1848-1856
(New York, 1856), 4. Cited hereafter by
volume as General Conference Journals.
9 For over thirty years Williams served
in the office of the surveyor general in Chillicothe and
Cincinnati. As an extremely active and
zealous layman, he was sometimes addressed as Reverend
by high church officials. In one letter
to the Methodist book agents Nathan Bangs and John
Emory, Williams wrote, "In Advocate
No. 70, I observe an extract of a letter from 'the Revd.
S. Williams of Chillicothe O.' I advert
to this merely to remind you (as I have done once or
twice before) that my 'post of honour is
the private station'-that of a layman." Williams to
Bangs and Emory, January 24, 1828.
Samuel Williams Collection, Ohio Historical Society. His
fertile mind also contributed the ideas
for publication of the Methodist Almanac and the Ladies
Repository. See General Conference Journals, I, 376. His
"Leaves from an Autobiography,"
appears in the Ladies Repository, XI
(1851), 54-56, 97-100, 211-213, 261-264, 335-338, 408-409.
10John Collins to Samuel Williams, March
21, 1819. Williams Collection.
11 Samuel W. Williams, Pictures of
Early Methodism in Ohio (Cincinnati, 1909), 97-98.
12 Theophilus Armenius IT. S. Hinde],
"Rise and Progress of Methodism in the North Western
Territory," Methodist Magazine, V
(1822), 266.
13 Engelhardt Riemenschneider, Mein
Lebensgang: Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen wahrend 40
jahringer Arbeit im Dienste des Herrn in Amerika,
Deutschland und der Schweiz (Bremen,
1862),
100-101. A copy of this rare volume is
in the archives of the Methodist Historical Society at
Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio.
14 Journal
of the Ohio Conference, September 1828.
15John F. Wright, Sketches of the Life and Labors of
James Quinn (Cincinnati, 1851), 151.
16 Minutes, III, 649. Joseph Newson to James B. Finley, December 2,
1845. James B. Finley
Papers, Ohio Wesleyan University,
Delaware.