The Holy “Knock-’Em-Down”Methodism Remodels for the Ohio Valley, 1790s–1820s

When the Methodist bishop Francis Asbury sent John Kobler to be his church’s first itinerant preacher in Ohio in 1798, he made a logical choice. Asbury was a pragmatist with the unwavering resolve to evangelize as widely and quickly as possible. Kobler had already proven that he could win Methodist converts in Virginia. His services there had alarmed religious traditionalists who were accustomed to sedate worship because his agitated converts would scream and throw themselves against the ground. In his diary, he lampooned the “very rich” Virginians who came to his services with “rings round their fingers and tail strings hanging about them” because he knew they would be offended by his sermons, which berated conspicuous consumption and slavery. He confided, “I [am] awfully made to fear [the slaveholders] will be sick of hot irons in a coming day.” However, young people, slaves, and even genteel women welcomed his egalitarian spirituality. Kobler’s services’ divisiveness and intense emotionality drew curiosity-seekers and critics, but their shockingness also jolted audiences from their cultural moorings. At a typical meeting in Virginia, one woman “set the whole house aflame” with her fervent prayer, while others “fell to the floor and appeared as in the agonies of death.” Kobler wrote, “The wicked broke the door open and all came inside laughing,” but others began crying after they entered the room’s vortex of emotion. In Kobler’s words, “Some called it wild fire, but…better wild fire than no fire.”¹

Despite Kobler’s success in seaboard Virginia, he seemed ill-equipped for winning Ohio Valley converts. The weeping, clapping, and strange bodily agitations of Methodist worshippers seemed unbecoming when viewed through the West’s honor culture. Backwoods men earned their peers’ respect and commanded their subordinates’ deference through assertiveness, self-sacrifice, and unflappability. They valued rugged individualism and competitiveness over humility and consequently demanded that the clergy defend these standards. In this sense, western men’s expectations foreshadowed the late nineteenth century’s “muscular Christianity.” Kobler noted that in Ohio “every man is his own Jack and Tom.” Another Methodist preacher, James Finley, stressed the frontier’s honor code when he noted, “If such a disastrous thing as a quarrel should break out, the only way to settle the difficulty was by a strong dish of fisticuffs.” Measured by these ideals, Kobler seemed effeminate when he encouraged his congregants to cry out. He was also unnerved by the western sectaries’ fierce competition for converts, prompting him to jot uneasily in his diary that Kentucky was the “most peculiar…place I was ever in [because] professors from all parts of America have crowded into its narrow bounds and [are] possessed of anxiety and disunion.” When other ministers dared him to theological debates, he upheld an ecumenical calm. While touring Tennessee, he noted that a crowd came after rumors circulated that he would debate a Baptist on infant baptism, but the “devil and spectators were disappointed.” Westerners found this dourness uninspiring. Susannah Johnson, an eventual convert, recalled that as a young Kentuckian, she thought her village’s Methodist preacher was “fearfully solemn” and a “cool chicken.”²

John Kobler’s experience was typical. Many Methodist preachers initially struggled to adapt their message to the Ohio Valley, but they succeeded. More than one in ten Americans became Methodist converts between 1776 and 1820, as Methodism grew from an upstart sect with fewer than a thousand members into the nation’s largest Christian body. By 1820, Methodist adherence topped 10 percent of the population in every Ohio Valley state. By 1841, Kobler could proclaim, “The Methodist has carried almost all before them up and down this [Ohio] river.”³

Historian John Wigger argues that the Methodists succeeded because they were cultural middlemen, who made the evangelical message relevant to post-Revolutionary America. Wigger contends that the Methodists’ pragmatism enabled them to market their faith to both easterners and westerners. Both he and historian Nathan Hatch argue that their egalitarian inclusiveness embodied the Revolutionary era’s democratic fervor. Historians Dee Andrews and Mark Noll complicate these assertions by...