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Chapter 3 Identity through Dissent But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. —2 peter 2:1 John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859 flashed like a meteor in American history, searing the growing alienation between Southerners and Northerners and making the Civil War seemingly inevitable. Brown achieved his purpose in his crusade against slavery by creating conflicting images of himself in the respective minds of the South and the North. Southerners saw only the psychotic executioner at Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, whose intended slave rebellion into the South was reinforced by the discovery in his possession when captured at Harper’s Ferry of crude iron staves, intended to be distributed among slaves so they could attack their masters at night while asleep. Thanks to Brown’s incredible performance after his capture as a gentle, peaceful old man, Christlike in his behavior, his execution on December 2, 1859, caused church bells to be tolled throughout the North in a public display of mourning in honor of his martyrdom. These dual images proved impossible to erase or modify and essentially removed the last degree of mutual trust or respect from what were rapidly becoming two separate American nations, inexorably divided over the issue of slavery.1 Unfortunately, Brown’s raid and subsequent execution so dominated the American mind, North and South, that it had the unintended consequence of erasing from the popular memory another martyr to the antislavery cause, Anthony Bewley, who less than a year later would be brutally and without a shadow of due process hanged by an angry mob at Fort Worth, Identity through Dissent 58 Texas, on September 13, 1860. Bewley’s hanging is even more remarkable because few noted at that time or later that he had begun his career as an itinerating Methodist minister in the Holston Conference, where he was first admitted on trial in 1829. More to the point, Bewley’s antislavery beliefs were typical of most Holston ministers at that time. Although the chronicler of Bewley’s execution, Charles Elliott, argued that the Texas mob made little distinction between antislavery and abolitionism, Bewley was actually conservative, law-abiding, and not in the least inclined to incite slaves to rebel against their masters, murder their owners at night, or burn their houses and barns, as John Brown was supposed to have done. Bewley’s father , John, was a local preacher and, according to a contemporary observer and Methodist local preacher, William Garrett, had been greatly influenced by the earlier antislavery agitation in Greene County, Tennessee, where he lived and raised his large family at the mouth of Lick Creek, on the Nolichucky River. Anthony Bewley married Jane Winton in 1834 and “located,” or became a local preacher. In 1837, the Bewleys moved to Polk County, Missouri , and six years later he resumed his career as an itinerating preacher in the Missouri Conference.2 When the Methodist Episcopal Church split over slavery in 1844 and the Missouri Conference voted to go with the Southern church, however, Bewley rebelled. Exercising the privilege of remaining in the old Methodist Church, a privilege not afforded to his former brethren in Holston, he became part of the new Missouri Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, organized in 1848. From 1852 until his death in 1860, he belonged to the Arkansas Conference of the original Northern Methodist church. In 1858, after having served ten years in northern Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri , Bewley moved his family to Johnson County, Texas, and established a mission of the Northern Methodist church sixteen miles south of Fort Worth. Some Northern Methodists considered Bewley to be weak on the issue of slavery, but in reality he was merely being consistent with what had always been his position. He was firmly and consistently opposed to slavery and never hesitated to tell anyone who asked him his exact views, but he was in no sense of the word an agitator or “ultra abolitionist,” as he was later accused of being. Well respected by his fellow preachers, Bewley never directly or indirectly induced slaves to leave their masters, nor did he “employ any arguments to render them discontented with their position, either in Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, or Texas,” according to his former brethren. The famous preacher and politician Peter...

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