The Traveling Life of John Littlejohn: Methodism, Mobility, and Social Exchange from Revolutionary Virginia to Early Republican Kentucky

Word of the preacher’s arrival in Louisville preceded him. To his surprise as he stepped onto the city’s riverside docks, he was greeted by an enslaved woman, who beseeched him to visit her ailing mistress. John Littlejohn was a longtime Methodist preacher, but not in Kentucky. He had lived the last four decades in Virginia’s Northern Neck, but now, in the autumn of 1818, he was migrating with his family to Kentucky. While sojourning in Louisville, waiting to take up a farm in the country, Littlejohn found his talents as a preacher quickly put to use in the local Methodist society. He presided at sickbeds, funerals, prayer gatherings, and class meetings on top of preaching several times per week. In turn, he benefited from the favors of friends in town. A former Virginia houseguest would take no payment for stabling the horses the preacher had sent ahead. Others bestowed gifts of firewood to warm his family against the chill October nights. Rather than relying on kinship, wealth, or elite status, Littlejohn exploited “social exchanges” to ease his migration.¹ He accessed a network of resources to acquire housing, employment, and property—the critical dimensions of settlement in the trans-Appalachian West. Americans have long understood that the westward movement uprooted people from the communities where they had passed most of their lives but might never see again after crossing the Appalachians. But in recent years historians have told an “alternative migration story,” one that describes connection as much as separation. The case of John Littlejohn allows us to detail that narrative’s social mechanisms, which he developed in the Revolutionary Chesapeake and carried to early republican Kentucky. At the center was religion.²

The American Revolution profoundly influenced Americans’ mobility and their religious lives. Littlejohn experienced these changes intimately through the full course of his years.³ He was one of thousands of migrants who traveled the Ohio River to Louisville in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.⁴ Not all white westward settlers achieved prosperity, but those who did relied on social resources. Through religious associations, evangelicals maintained old bonds while creating new ones with strangers in frontier communities. Littlejohn’s social network was Methodist, and it was founded on his work as a circuit rider. Despite the Methodist itinerancy’s importance as a religious institution in early America, historians have only occasionally recognized the important resources it provided individuals.⁵ Instead, scholars describe Methodist itinerancy as a brief but disorienting experience for young men during the years of the early American republic. As this story goes, older preachers recruited poor and middling young men into an ecclesiastical system that demanded much personal sacrifice. The rigors of constant travel wore on circuit riders’ minds and bodies, resulting in fatigue, emotional stress, and frequent early “location” (that is, retirement from the itinerancy). The worst cases ended in debility, insanity, or death.⁶ This depiction, however, ignores important evidence. The Methodist itinerancy indeed presented individual and social challenges, especially when coupled with the disruptions of migration and warfare during the era, but Methodist sources amplify those challenges to the point of distortion. When historians have credited the benefits of itinerancy, it has been in the context of the formal bureaucratic development of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) in the middle and late nineteenth century.⁷ However, the social benefits of itinerancy originated in the personal relationships of evangelical social networks, an organizational development that was far older than the popular evangelical churches that thrived in America during the First and Second Great Awakenings.⁸

John Littlejohn’s journal allows us to construct a different model of the worldly significance of itinerancy.⁹ Several fine works consider Littlejohn’s life, but within the confines of the late eighteenth century.¹⁰ Unlike many other Methodist preachers’ diaries, Littlejohn’s includes material both from his two years as an itinerant and from later periods when he was a local preacher, his status upon leaving the...