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

ashamed of yourselves?' which only made them 'hurrah' the more boisterously. He was evidently a
man of great native power, was social and pleasant, and always left the impression that he was living
under the influence of the powers of the world to come."
Peter Cartwright was born in Amherst County, Va., in 1785, the son of a soldier of the
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Revolution, who hated Negro as well as white slavery. He early settled in Kentucky, where his son
was trained amid the wildest scenes of frontier life, but taught to fear God by his Methodist mother.
He grew up, therefore, thoroughly seasoned with western hardihood, but saved from many of the
vices prevalent around him. In his ninth year he heard the itinerant, Jacob Lurton, preach in his
father's cabin, and describes him as "a real son of thunder." "My mother," he adds, "shouted aloud
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for joy." A small class was formed at about four miles distance, to which his good mother walked
every week. At last they built a little church, and called it "Ebenezer." Methodism on the old
Cumberland Circuit had thrown its spiritual shelter over the wandering family, and chose their
adventurous boy, their only son, for one of its chief western pioneers. In his sixteenth year, after
dancing at a wedding, he went home with an awakened conscience. Unable to sleep, he spent much
of the night on his knees with his praying mother, and, sometime afterward, was converted at a
camp-meeting. He joined the Church, at "Ebenezer," in 1801, when there were less than twenty-five
hundred Methodists and about fifteen traveling preachers west of the Alleghenies. Striking anomaly
of human life, possible perhaps nowhere else than in this new world, that this young hunter of the
frontier should still, while we trace these lines, be abroad an active apostle of his Church, amid
mighty states then unborn, but now equal to more than half of Europe, an empire of liberty and
Christianity stretching from the Alleghenies to the Pacific.
In 1802 he was licensed to exhort by Jesse Walker, a congenial spirit. He applied himself to study,
conducted public meetings, formed classes, and received "the celebrated James Axley into the
Church." The young exhorter actually thus formed the Lexington Circuit in 1803; and the next year
Walker was its preacher. At last, in his nineteenth year, urged by his pious mother, but opposed by
his father, he went forth as a circuit preacher " under the residing elder." At the Conference of 1804,
held at Mount Gerizim, Ky., he was received on probation. Of all the itinerants of that session he is
the only survivor. The bare enumeration of his subsequent "appointments" would cover pages. In
Tennessee, Kentucky, in almost every portion of the Northwestern Territory, he fought courageously
the battles of his Church; not always with the voice, but sometimes, like Finley and others, he had
to use his stout fist against the onset of semi-barbarous mobs. A frontier man, he knew the perils and
necessities of frontier life; and when his appeals to the conscience of his sometimes half savage
hearers could not prevail, and especially when the decorum of public worship, or the safety of his
congregations has been periled, he could show himself physically formidable, and make the mob
recoil. We need to read the record of such a life as his with somewhat of the moral license of the
early frontier spirit. "My voice," he says, "at that day was strong and clear, and I could sing, exhort,
pray, and preach almost all the time, day and night." Some of his meetings lasted all night. His
circuits were like lines of battle, continually in excitement, if not commotion. Some of his quarterly
meetings were not only scenes of spiritual conflict and victory, but of "hand-to-hand fights" with the
rabble. One of them, on Scioto Circuit, in 1805, was held in the woods. The mob, led on by two
champions, who bore "loaded whips," invaded it. Cartwright called from the stand upon two
magistrates in the assembly to arrest the leaders, but they replied that it was impossible. He came
forward himself; offering to do it for them, but the assailants struck at him. The greatest tumult