The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism

1. Holston Methodism

Chapter 1 Holston Methodism The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. —isaiah 35:1 Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God. —ephesians 2:19 In the late fall of 1787, Thomas Ware, an itinerant Methodist preacher originally from New Jersey, made a slow and danger-filled journey to new settlements of American pioneers living near the Holston and French Broad Rivers , in what today is East Tennessee. He was traveling to this new Holston country, as it was called, at the urgent request of some settlers there who deplored “their entire destitution of the gospel.” Although this new territory was as large as eastern New Jersey geographically, so few Americans were scattered in such small settlements that Ware quickly realized he was in the midst of a hostile primordial wilderness.1 Ware’s experiences on this momentous initial trip offer an excellent index of the problems and difficulties that made early settlement in East Tennessee precarious. Scarce log cabins were so cold and dirty that he was constantly ill. The path he followed was so poorly marked that he often became lost and had to depend on his horse to choose the most promising route. Earlier “false prophets” pretending to be ministers had so outraged the population by their gross immorality and cupidity that all religion and proponents of religion had been discredited. Ware actually became caught up in a political dispute over abortive efforts to establish a new government, the state of Franklin, in the area and narrowly escaped angry partisans with his life!2 Holston Methodism 2 The greatest danger, however, came from the Indians. Cherokees, justifiably furious over “the wrongs inflicted upon them by the whites,” seized every opportunity to attack and kill stragglers from the sparse settlements. Ware himself narrowly escaped capture or death by these “subtle and terrible enemies.” Traveling through a fine bottom covered with a grove of crabapple trees, his horse suddenly wheeled around, affording him a glimpse of an Indian menacingly following him at a distance. Later, while preaching at the home of the man who had written urging the Methodists to send a minister , he learned that Mrs. Carter had been killed by an Indian hiding in the canebrake while she made sugar in a kettle. Preaching her funeral sermon the next day, Ware could not forbear pointing out to her grieving family and neighbors that Mrs. Carter’s absence from church was undeniably a contributing factor in her death.3 If Thomas Ware’s funeral sermon contains theology objectionable to all the denominations competing for supremacy in the religious free market of post-Revolutionary America—Anglicans, Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, and New England Calvinists—it nevertheless embodies quintessential features of early American Methodism. Speaking plainly, using examples from Thomas Ware, one of the earliest pioneer Methodist itinerants preaching in the Holston country. From Price, Holston Methodism, vol. 1, 165. Holston Methodism 3 their immediate experience and emphasizing not abstract theological points but rather practical godliness, Ware asked his audience why they thought he was there, despite the dangers and hardships, preaching in their midst. Methodist local preachers had indeed been present in the Holston country from its earliest settlement, paving the way for later itinerant or traveling preachers such as Ware. Before any actual community existed on the frontier of southwestern Virginia and East Tennessee, Methodist laypeople and local preachers were present, enduring all the hardships of wilderness life while ministering to their family and neighbors.4 Methodism was a comparatively new religious movement in the decades of initial settlement in the Holston country, the 1770s and 1780s. Founded by John Wesley in England in the 1730s, Methodism came to the American colonies in the 1760s, only ten years earlier. Whether one credits its earliest beginnings to Robert Strawbridge, a failed and persecuted Irish farmer who settled on a farm near Baltimore, or to Barbara Heck, a bold, pious woman arriving in New York the same year, 1760, Methodism quickly spread to other colonies. By 1769, when Wesley sent two missionaries to America, Richard Boardman and Joseph Pilmore, local Methodist societies were thriving as small, loosely organized lay organizations.5 When John Wesley felt his “heart strangely warmed” at Aldersgate Street in 1738, he established a paradigm placing religious feeling, or...