History of the M.E. Church, Vol. IV - Media Sabda Org

Capers' ministry in Charleston made a profound impression, and abated the public prejudice; for
his social rank, as well as his superior culture and talents, commanded respect. He continued his
itinerant labors, with increasing success, till the Conference of 1814, when, being now a married
man, he deemed it expedient to locate. He procured a farm, cultivated it diligently on week-days, and
preached on Sundays; but it was not long before his wife, of whom he was passionately fond,
suddenly died in her new home. He felt that he had erred, that he must return to the itinerancy to
suffer, whatever might be his lot. In 1818 he was readmitted to the Conference, and thenceforward
never swerved from his work. His influence throughout the South, an throughout the denomination,
became commanding. He was sent to the General Conference, and to England as representative of
the American Church, appointed collegiate professor, and president, editor, missionary secretary, and
at last, after the division of the denomination, elected bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church,
South, which office he maintained with unremitted labor till his death in 1855.
He was five feet nine inches in stature, with delicately molded features, expressive of uncommon
refinement, intelligence, and benevolence. His eyes were black and lustrous, his voice musical; his
manners marked by perfect amenity. In the pulpit he was usually mild, suasive, and instructive,
occasionally exceedingly impressive and powerful. He seldom or never used formal "divisions" in
his sermons, but maintained a central thought, which he thoroughly elaborated, but not without the
freest digressions. He was a restless worker, and spent "a handsome patrimony for the Church," was
often in want, and died without other resources than his ministerial salary. He was perhaps the most
important, if not the most responsible, man in the division of the Church in 1844, an event which
will hereafter require a further estimate of his historic relations to American Methodism.
Still another youth, destined to the episcopal office was given to the itinerancy by the South the
next year after that in which Capers entered the ministry. Beverly Waugh was born in Fairfax
County, Va., in 1789, became a Methodist under the ministry of Dr. Thomas F. Sargent, in
Alexandria, Va., in his fifteenth year, and joined the Baltimore Conference in 1809, when hardly
twenty years old. His first two years in the ministry were spent on Virginia circuits, one of the among
the mountains of the Greenbrier region, where he had the severest training of the itinerancy. In 1811
he was appointed to Washington, D. C., and thenceforward his solid abilities and high character
secured him the most important position of his Conference. He was repeatedly appointed to
Washington, Baltimore, Georgetown, Frederick, etc., down to 1828, when the General Conference
elected him Book Agent at New York, where he conducted, with ability and energy, the momentous
publishing business of the Church for eight years. He had now become one of the prominent men
of the denomination, not so much by brilliant or popular qualities, as by his well-balanced faculties,
his consummate prudence, his exalted character, his devout temper, Christian amenity, and effective
preaching. The Cincinnati General Conference of 1886 elected him to the episcopate, and for
twenty-two years he sustained that most onerous office with extraordinary diligence, notwithstanding
his precarious health, impaired by his labors in the Book Concern. He never failed, in a single
instance, to attend his Conferences. These were years of stormy controversies in the Church, and he
was worn and wan with care and fatigue. It has been estimated that the average number of ministerial
appointments made by him per annum was five hundred and fifty. The yearly redistribution of such
a number of preachers and their families (for much of the time from Maine to Texas, from Michigan
to Georgia) involved an amount of anxiety known only to the incumbents of the episcopate, and
hardly known to them since that day. Meanwhile he was incessantly laboring in the pulpit, in