In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C h a p t e r f i v e Reform and the Missionary Drive Methodists in the Ohio Country In an 1802 letter to his brother, Philip Gatch sounded the trumpet call for Ohio. “The Countrey is beautiful in its situation and promices every advantage,” he began. “I am settled about Ten miles distance from the Ohio [River] and about Fifteen from Cincinnatta a Flourishing Town. . . . I believe we shall not want for trade in this Countrey.” The land was rich and the water supply was superb for both milling and farming. But Ohio’s greatest virtue, in Gatch’s view, was its labor system. “We have no Slavery as yet among us. Some whish for it but I hope God will never permit it. I Pray against it, and talk against it.”1 Gatch’s crusade against slavery had begun years earlier, in the 1780s, when he was living in Virginia. He manumitted his nine slaves and urged his neighbors in Buckingham County to follow his example. Most did not, and Gatch and thirty-five others decided to migrate to the Ohio Country in 1798. Their departure signaled the start of a small but telling migration that saw several hundred Virginia Methodists move to Ohio to escape the stain of slavery and to establish Methodist societies on a free-soil frontier. These migrants believed, as Virginian John Sale put it, that the Ohio Country was a “Garden of God,” a place where pilgrims could cultivate the Lord’s ways, free from the soul-wrecking phenomenon known as slavery. Conversely, they viewed Virginia as “a land of oppression” and scolded those who stayed behind for “tarry[ing] in Sodom.” For Gatch, the move represented a chance to save his children. He loved Virginia, he confessed to his brother, “but I felt unwilling to lay my Bones there, and leave my Children whom I tenderly loved in a land of slavery.”2 As this band of Virginians was making its way to the midwestern frontier , Ohio was attracting another kind of Methodist migrant exemplified by Alfred Brunson. In 1808, he set out alone for the Ohio Country to escape his sinful life in Connecticut. Like Devereux Jarratt, the Anglican itinerant in 136 The Protestant Sojourner mid-eighteenth-century Virginia, Brunson was young and a bit naive when he departed for the western frontier. He was only fifteen and had no money saved for the six-hundred-mile journey, and he had no firm plans about what he would do once he arrived in the Northwest Territory. However, he did possess a desire to change his life. Methodist itinerants had convinced him that he was a sinner badly in need of reform. By migrating to Ohio, Brunson concluded, he could get a fresh start and a chance to turn his life around. He would quite literally embark on a new path that he hoped would carry him to a new birth and to a career as a Methodist itinerant. James Finley could have identified with Brunson’s travails. But Finley was not a New Englander; rather, he was a child of the western frontier who, from an early age, ranged between Kentucky, where he was born in 1780, and Ohio, where he escorted his father’s freed slaves, drove cattle, and hunted bears. Finley was the offspring of a strict Presbyterian minister who put the fear of God into his questioning, sometimes rebellious son. From a tender age, Finley asked probing questions about God, faith, and salvation but found no easy answers. Instead, his search resulted in a peripatetic existence that carried him to Ohio, to Methodism, and, like Brunson, to a new life as an itinerant. These migrations involved Methodists from different states and entailed journeys undertaken for different and quite personal reasons. Yet varied as they were, the migrations arose out of a common impulse: a reforming spirit that sought to transform antebellum society in some way. Itinerants such as Brunson and Finley sought religious fulfillment on a personal and societal level—they wanted to save themselves and the people around them. Itinerants lived on the road in a relentless effort to convert people, to spread the Methodist faith, and to lead a reformation of behavior. At the same time, Methodist reformers were tackling a host of causes, including temperance and slavery. The Virginia migration was part of this effort; when Methodist abolitionists failed to change the slave system in their native state, they moved. The experiences of...

Share