Ohio History Journal

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NOTES

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.