Alexander Campbell: Adventurer In Freedom : A Literary Biography (Literary Biography, Volume One)

volume one

a lexande r Adventurer in Freedom s

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ca m p b e l l sA

Literary Biography s

Eva Jean Wrather

Edited by D. Duane Cummins

A lexander C ampbell

(Continued from front flap)

Adventurer in Freedom va Jean Wrather devoted seventy years to writing an 800,000-word biography of Alexander Campbell, the Scots-born founder of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the only Protestant denomination to originate in the United States. Her work, which she was still revising when she died, is a literary biography, without scholarly documentation. Ms. Wrather was periodically drawn from work on the manuscript by the needs of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, of which she was the only female founder. Work was also delayed when publishers at first interested in the project turned it down, at least once because of its enormous length. Believing in the importance and integrity of what she had written, Eva Jean Wrather refused to shorten the work or incorporate modern scholarship, including punctuation and spelling. In the early 1990s, historian and author D. Duane Cummins was asked by the Disciples of Christ Historical Society to assist Ms. Wrather in revising her manuscript. Together, they revised the first seven chapters before the author’s health failed. These chapters comprise Volume One. Publication of future volumes is tentatively scheduled.

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(Continued on back flap)

Volume One traces Campbell’s physical journey from Scotland to America and his spiritual journey, as he left behind the stern Calvinism of his youth and developed his own theology of a loving and kind God.

Duane Cummins is interim director of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University, the past president of Bethany College and of the Division of Higher Education of the Christian Church, and a former DarbethWhitten Professor of American History at Oklahoma City University. He is also the author of Dale Fiers: Twentieth Century Disciple.

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TCU Press Fort Worth Jacket design by Barbara M. Whitehead

A l e xan d e r C a m p b e l l Adventurer in Freedom A Literary Biography volume one

s

Earliest known portrait of Alexander Campbell, aged 30. Portrait is owned by John Encell.

Alexander Adventurer in Freedom

Ca m p b e l l s A Literary Biography volume one

Eva Jean Wrather Edited by D. Duane Cummins

A project of

TCU Press and the

Disciples of Christ Historical Society Fort Worth, Texas

Copyright 2005 © The Disciples of Christ Historical Society Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wrather, Eva Jean. Alexander Campbell: adventurer in freedom: a literary biography / Eva Jean Wrather; edited by D. Duane Cummins.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87565-305-7 (alk. paper) 1. Campbell, Alexander, 1788-1866. I. Cummins, D. Duane. II. Title. BX7343.C2W69 2004 286.6'092--dc22 2004011034 Designed by Barbara M. Wh i t e h e a d Printed in Canada

w And we glanced at the portrait . . . Looking down through the evening gleam With a bit of Andrew Jackson’s air, More of Henry Clay And the statesmen of Thomas Jefferson’s day: With the face of age, And the flush of youth, And that air of going on, forever free.

From “Alexander Campbell,” by Vachel Lindsay

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Inverness

Aberdeen

Scotland

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Dundee

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Helensburgh

Jura Islay

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Glasgow Edinburgh

Tarbet

Greenock

Lough Neagh

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Belfast i r e la n d

e n g la n d

CONTENTS volume one

s Acknowledgment ix Preface x i

b o o k o n e : The Twig is Bent ( 1 7 8 8 - 1 8 0 9 ) 1. Prologue: A “Call” and a Wedding 3 2. A Son is Born 13 3. “One of the Best Scholars in the Kingdom” 37 4. A Shipwreck, Its Suspicious Conclusion and a Voyage Accomplished 61

b o o k t w o : The Way Is Prepared ( 1 8 0 9 - 1 8 2 2 ) 5. “I Like the Bold Christian Hero” 103 6. “A New Peak of the Mountain of God” 147 7. “We Court Discussion” 201 Index 262

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n t

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everal versions of the Campbell manuscript written by Eva Jean Wrather are housed in a filing cabinet at the Disciples of Christ Historical Society. Since her death in 2001, an enormous addition of private papers has been added to the society’s Wrather collection. For the privilege of studying the early draft of her work and for access to her private correspondence as well as selected essays from among her collection, I express enormous gratitude to the historical society. Their extreme patience in photocopying a huge quantity of material for my use is genuinely appreciated. Particular words of appreciation are due David McWhirter and Sara Harwell for their helpful research support, and Peter and Lynne Morgan for their gracious presence during sessions with Eva Jean, and, along with Doug Foster, for pressing this work toward final publication. James and Dudley Seale stand tall among those who should receive acknowledgment. Jim, former president of the historical society, first approached me about the possibility of becoming involved in this project and then helped arrange my early conversations with Eva Jean. Jim and Dudley then provided the needed

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acknowledgment funds through the James and Dudley Seale Publications Fund to support the publication of the manuscript—a philanthropic act for which the entire church is grateful. My trusted colleague in historical research, Jeanne Cobb, archivist at Bethany College, deserves special commendation for her invaluable assistance in accumulating illustrations for this volume and providing appropriate captions. Her thoughtful reading of the manuscript was especially helpful to me. And a dear friend and skilled veteran of more than one editorial venture with me, Judy Alter of TCU Press, is to be acclaimed for reading every word, comma, period and apostrophe in the manuscript to help assure a high level of accuracy. To these great ladies I will be forever grateful. Lester McAllister and Bob Friedly offered steady and insightful guidance along the way, as did Ronald Osborn, Kenneth Teegarden, and Dale Fiers. And most especially, I acknowledge my wife Suzi, who typed two drafts of the re-written manuscript, and, more importantly, gave happy encouragement and abiding good cheer across the whole fourteen-year labor. Finally, I express appreciation to TCU Press for its faith and confidence in this work and the helpful influence it can bring to the life of our beloved church.

p r e fac e

I was once so young that I aspired to know everything to be known about Campbell, to write the so-called “definitive” biography (an elusive goal at best); but now I know---as Robert Frost once remarked in an interview--that the writer at some point faces his or her own incompleteness. . . . My search for Alexander Campbell would become not only an intellectual quest, but also a voyage of discovery of spiritual roots…. In Search of Alexander Campbell: The Making of a Biography Eva Jean Wrather, 1988

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va J e a n W r a t h e r gave seventy of her nearly ninety-three years to the writing of a 3,254 page, eight-hundred-thousand-word literary biography of Alexander Campbell. She offered a glimpse of this Herculean task in a 1962 reflection entitled Some Thoughts on my years with Alexander Campbell and the Disciples of Christ Historical Society: “My every working hour is dedicated to rushing to completion the Campbell manuscript for Harper.” Sadly, the manuscript would never reach completion, but its odyssey would form a saga of its

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p r e fa c e own. Eva Jean shared some of the story in a 1988 reminiscence entitled In Search of Alexander Campbell: The Making of a Biography. “Behind every extended work of biography or history,” she wrote, “stands a possible second book of the writer’s experiences and impressions—a kaleidoscope of discoveries and disappointments, of joys and frustrations, of persons and places.” This preface will attempt to reconstruct the journey of the Campbell manuscript and to do so as much as possible with Eva Jean’s own words as drawn from the two sources noted above, from selections of her correspondence, and from my personal association with her. The beginning, she once ventured to recall, “lies so far back in time that I could not place the date. I only remember that from the day I first began to read books I somehow knew that someday I must write them. By age twelve I had come upon my first subject; I must learn all there was to know about Alexander Campbell; I must write his biography. By my college years (19281932) the task was underway.” About one year later she presented her first lecture on Alexander Campbell to a Vanderbilt American literature class taught by John Donald Wade, himself a biographer of John Wesley. Shortly before her 1932 graduation (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) Edwin Mims, chair of the Vanderbilt English department, offered a teaching fellowship to Eva Jean, the first ever extended by the university to a woman. Given the broadscale research required for a Campbell biography, the department would also allow her to forego the Master’s degree and begin work immediately on her doctorate. Deeply grateful for such a generous package yet financially independent and without the need to teach, Eva Jean graciously declined the offer in order to devote full time to writing the Campbell biography. By 1935 she had developed a formal prospectus for her work, which she titled The Sage of Bethany: Alexander Campbell and upon which she would confer all of her time and energy for the next ten years. According to her desk calendar, she completed the first draft on Thanksgiv-

p r e fa c e ing Day, November 22, 1945. Unknown to her was the fact that she had only just begun. This grand project, which held her so tightly in its grip, would consume another fifty-four years of her life.

w Eva Jean Wrather was born in Nashville, Tennessee, September 21, 1908, during the final months of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. She was the only child of Robert and Aubrey Wrather who, in good southern tradition, home-schooled Eva Jean until she reached the age of nine. A gifted child, she was enrolled at Nashville’s Cockrill School in 1917. There, she received the Cockrill medal for achieving the highest academic average of any student for a decade. The following year she was struck down by scarlet fever, which weakened her body, leaving her fragile and susceptible to ailments throughout her long life. That year she and her parents moved into a beautiful, twelveroom Victorian house where Eva Jean would reside for all of her remaining eighty-three years. At age twelve, Eva Jean was baptized at the Charlotte Avenue Church of Christ. This was a natural choice given her parents active role in the congregation and the fact that Nashville is considered the geographic center of the Churches of Christ. She was never completely comfortable with the theological tone of the congregation, a fact that had delayed her baptism and triggered her search for spiritual roots through the study of Campbell’s life and thought. Although her father continued as an active elder at Charlotte Avenue for the rest of his life, she and her mother transferred their membership to Vine Street Christian Church in 1934, with the full support of Robert Wrather. Vine Street would remain Eva Jean’s congregational home until her death. After Cockrill, she entered Peabody Demonstration School where she became editor of the yearbook and the school paper,

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p r e fa c e The Peabody Volunteer, for which her editorship was nationally recognized with an award for producing the finest school newspaper in the United States. Upon completing her secondary education at Peabody, Eva Jean matriculated at Vanderbilt University. “I was most fortunate,” she would later remark, “in my choice of a college. For I came to Vanderbilt University at the height of a Southern Renaissance of letters centering in the Fugitive-Agrarian movement at Vanderbilt which had drawn together a remarkable company of teachers who were poets and novelists, literary critics, historians and biographers. Six of these men became my professors: Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, John Donald Wade, Walter Clyde Curry and Frank L. Owsley.” One critic wrote of this group that it was “likely the most remarkable group of literary men America has produced.” Not only did Eva Jean study with them, but through them she came into personal association with Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle and Sidney Mitron-Hirsch. During her junior year a distinguished British professor, John Y.T. Greig [novelist, critic and author of the prize winning biography of David Hume] came to Vanderbilt on an exchange. Eva Jean took courses from him. Studying with such an array of major literary figures, Eva Jean concluded, had given her the privilege to be “ tutored in a hard school of excellence.” From 1933 to 1945 she was relentless in her research and first writing of the Campbell manuscript. Her far-reaching research included a 1935 trip to England, Scotland, and the Ulster counties of Down, Antrim, and Armagh in Ireland. “I vividly remember” she later wrote, “the day on my first arrival in London when I presented a startled railway clerk with a list of some fifty cities and towns in England, Scotland and Ireland—and requested a ticket covering them all—the places connected with Campbell’s youth and those he visited in 1847.” Some of her experiences have become legend, such as her first meeting with T.G.F. Paterson, the curator of the Museum of County Armagh. When she

p r e fa c e inquired if he was familiar with Markethill where Campbell had stayed in 1847, he responded that he knew the house and would show her. “Show it to me he did,” she happily recalled, “from a seat on the rear of his motorcycle, my first and last experience of research by this mode of travel.” She visited Thomas Campbell’s Ahorey Church, the Campbell Academy at Rich Hill, Shane’s Castle, the shores of Lough Neagh where he hunted and fished, the hamlets where he lived and taught, the old stone manse at Whitburn where Thomas Campbell as a student sat before the fire with his professor Archibald Bruce—and scores of other places associated with the Campbells. She was the first Campbell researcher to do so on such a scale. In the United States she met with many Campbell grandchildren. Some welcomed her and spent hours sharing the pages of family scrapbooks. Others refused to see her. Sometimes there were disappointments. She read in Selina Campbell’s Home Life and Reminiscences of Alexander Campbell that Selina was “preparing for posterity the relics and papers of her husband and placing them in a trunk to be deposited at Bethany College.” When Eva Jean arrived at Bethany she found no trunk. “Instead,” she lamented, “I listened in anguish to an eye-witness account of a bonfire lighted on the grounds of Bethany Mansion, years after Selina’s death, to which were consigned reams of papers and such relics as Campbell’s top hat and favorite walking stick.” But just as often came remarkable discoveries such as in the village of Inveraray in the Scottish Highlands. There in the castle library she found the largest repository in existence of the history and genealogical records of the Clan Campbell. Among those records she discovered a manuscript, “Geneologie of the Campbells,” which contained the names of three brothers who emigrated to County Down and are thought to be the ancestors of Thomas and Alexander. The rich and remarkable journey of her massive research in dozens of repositories and with hundreds of persons brought her a thousand experiences and more—comprising that

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p r e fa c e “kaleidoscope of discoveries and disappointments” which would easily fill the “second book” of which she spoke. By letter, Vanderbilt professor Donald Davidson introduced Eva Jean to the publishing house of Scribner. On a Christmas break during 1949, John Greig returned from Europe for a brief visit to Nashville where he stayed as Eva Jean’s houseguest. While at her home he read every chapter of the manuscript. She later recorded that he advised her to reduce the length of the manuscript, recommending that the “clearest portrait of a man may emerge from judicious selection rather than from amassing detail.” And it was from Greig she also learned that “the first duty of a historian is not to be true and impartial; but to understand.” On her behalf he stopped in New York City, before sailing home, to visit with William Savage at Scribner. According to Eva Jean the two worked out a plan of revision which they persuaded her to accept—a plan calling for a two-volume work but revised so that the two volumes would be released separately, one strictly biographical, the other a detailed study of Campbell’s ideas and theology. So she began reworking the manuscript, sending chapters overseas to John Greig for editing by his “critical and uncompromising standards.” During this same period (1940s}, many highly regarded Disciples scholars also read her manuscript offering thoughts and suggestions. The names of William E. Garrison, Edward Scribner Ames, Charles Clayton Morrison, William Barnett Blakemore, Claude Spencer, J. Edward Moseley, Howard Short, and Ronald Osborn represent a few of the prominent Disciples historians who reviewed and critiqued her manuscript and encouraged her toward publication. Things were moving on schedule toward that goal. Ten chapters had been completed. Then came a major interruption. Eva Jean was compelled by two great aspirations in her life—the Campbell biography and the Disciples of Christ Historical Society—two intense interests that persistently competed for her creative energy. Peter Morgan expressed it best: “The fertile mind and heart of Eva Jean Wrather

p r e fa c e bore two children—the biography of Alexander Campbell, the child of her love and joy—and the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, the less well-behaved child, also a child of her love but one who needed constant attention for sixty years. Sometimes the favored child, Campbell, was neglected because of the more needful child, the Society.” For Eva Jean’s favorite child, the years between 1952 and 1958 were lost years. It was a time, she said, “when the Campbell manuscript was locked away in a safe so that I might help translate another form of history into reality.” That other form of history, of course, was the Disciples of Christ Historical Society. She was the only woman among the twenty original founders and had rejoiced in 1939 when the International Convention in Richmond, Virginia, established a historical commission; she rejoiced again in 1941 when the St. Louis convention renamed the commission the Disciples of Christ Historical Society. It was first housed at Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri, but discussions were ceaseless on the subject of relocation—St. Louis, Indianapolis, or Nashville. From the beginning, Eva Jean wanted the society in Nashville, and she described her persistence as “one lone voice of dissent asking ‘Why not Nashville?’—a voice generally met with genial toleration for local pride, natural prejudice and perhaps female perversity.” But then, she added, “came an ally of proper authority (and gender).” Claude Spencer visited Nashville in 1950 and proclaimed it “the place” for the society. Accordi n g l y, a campaign was launched to relocate in Nashville. It succeeded and was quickly followed with a major effort to build a building. The Thomas W. Phillips family of Butler, Pennsylvania, who had supplied one of the moderators for the Church at the 1909 Pittsburgh convention and who were generous philanthropic supporters of Bethany College and Phillips University—provided a significant major gift to construct a facility to house the historical society. Eva Jean immersed herself in all phases of this project, lobbying for Nashville, raising money for

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p r e fa c e the building; she was particularly involved in the design and creation of the eighty-three stained-glass medallions (5,865 pieces)for the new building. The project was finally completed in 1958. By that time, however, John Greig was no longer available to assist with editing the Campbell manuscript, and Scribner was preparing to drop the project. To test the market, the publisher, William Savage, did send a large number of letters of inquiry to the Stone-Campbell leadership throughout the country, but due to changing times interest in the project had waned and the responses were cautious and unsupportive. Ultimately, a letter came from Scribner informing Eva Jean that the project was being dropped. In that moment she dispiritedly recorded, “I can only count the definitive publication of my manuscript as one of the intangibles that lies buried beneath the cornerstone of the [historical society.]” Disheartened after receiving the final rejection letter, Eva Jean embarked on a trip to the Gulf Coast where, she recalled, “I walked the lonely reaches by the sea—in consciousness that such battles with ourselves are always battles which must, in essence, be fought alone.” But one conviction remained firm in her mind, “that Disciples as well as herself had been the losers in this abandonment of publication.” Meanwhile William Savage at Scribner had communicated with Eugene Exman at Harper & Brothers about the Campbell manuscript. The effort by Savage was augmented by letters from Forrest Reed, W.E. Garrison, and Vanderbilt professor Donald Davidson as well as a visit to New York by Ed Moseley. And in 1960 Harper offered a contract to Eva Jean for a Campbell biography to be completed by January 1, 1962. The contract, she remembered, came as “healing balm,” but it also set restrictions that she would never be able to abide. The publication was reduced to a single volume not to exceed 235,000 words. This was far removed from her original vision and a good distance from the Scribner concept as well. Harper did add a provision, however, that if the first volume (a printing of ten thousand copies) sold

p r e fa c e well, they would explore publication of the remaining Campbell materials. Eva Jean found herself “haunted by the constant spectre of the word limit,” a limit she pronounced “harsh” and plaintively noted, “Three-fourths of twenty-years work will lie on the cutting room floor.” In vain, she once again began work on the manuscript, which she soon began to call “that great pile . . . . a hard, unyielding mass, defying every attempt of chisel and mallet to mold into the trim, svelte form we agreed it must assume.” The book had to be “replanned, rethought and rewritten” she said. To Eva Jean, it was a whole new book. Illnesses and ultimately the death of her parents during the 1960s and early 1970s brought repeated periods of disruption to her work, all carefully cataloged in her correspondence with the editors. An unmentioned and more likely reason for not completing the manuscript appears to have been a psychological block against the enormous reduction in size and scope of her vision for the biography. She was being asked to do something that violated her own creative insights, and she simply could not and would not do it. In her letters to the Harper editors, Melvin Arnold and John Shopp, she conveyed feelings of “melancholy and despair,” once admitting she had “traveled every stage of the road from discouragement to despondency,” and then inquired if there was “some elixir in your editor’s desk with which to revive the spirits of discouraged writers.” The Campbell manuscript would never be completed for Harper. The 1970s and 1980s found Eva Jean writing the sesquicentennial history for Vine Street Christian Church, lecturing on Alexander Campbell during the nation’s bicentennial, and delivering a brilliant lecture in 1988 at Bethany College on Alexander Campbell to mark the bicentennial of his birth at my inauguration as the sixteenth president of Bethany. Then eighty years old and enjoying celebrity status as Campbell’s biographer, she was moved once more to take up her pen and gamely put it to the task of completing the long delayed Campbell biography.

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p r e fa c e At some point in 1992, I was invited by James Seale to assist Eva Jean in the preparation of her manuscript for publication. Intimidated by a general but vague knowledge of multiple existing versions of her work, of so many highly talented, almost legendary Disciples historians who had critiqued the manuscript, of the famous fugitive poets with whom she had partnered on the writing coupled with the value judgments and editorial contributions of numerous highly-skilled publishing house editors, my initial reaction was to turn away from the project. But then, by chance, I spoke with an old and trusted friend, Perry Epler Gresham, about the matter. He shared a story with me. At one time, he had arranged for the renowned historian of early American religion and culture, Perry Miller, to write a scholarly biography of Alexander Campbell. Just before his initial trip to Bethany, Miller unexpectedly died, depriving the church and the world of a landmark scholarly study that would undoubtedly have raised Alexander Campbell to a new religious prominence. Gresham considered this a great loss, both to Disciples and to the intellectual history of the nation. In Gresham’s words was the echo of an article written by William Barnett Blakemore and quoted in 1988 by Eva Jean, “The Disciples movement would not realize its full potential as a contributor to contemporary ecumenical development until a grand, full-scale portrait and interpretation of Alexander Campbell has come to fruition.” Eva Jean's work could help serve a great need in our church with its predominantly transfer membership, coming without historical memory and serviced by a weakened teaching ministry. It became clear to me that anything contributing to the publication of a Campbell biography for both a broad scholarly and lay audience, especially those in the Stone-Campbell tradition, should be attempted. I decided to give it a try. Eva Jean met me at her door with the most gracious of southern greetings and ushered me into the quaintness of her lovely, Queen Anne-style home at 4700 Elkins Avenue. Twilight, her

p r e fa c e beloved feline, stalked atop the furniture keeping a skeptical eye trained on my presence while the conversation between Eva Jean and me roamed over the long life and times of Alexander Campbell as she sized up my worthiness to be of any help with her dream. It is doubtful that Twilight ever approved of my presence, but at eventide Eva Jean considerately agreed to have a twenty-nine-chapter manuscript photocopied for me to study. Although uncertain at the time which of the several versions she had allowed to be copied, I was later to determine that it was the first revised version she had prepared for Scribner. Courteously, she also agreed that we would meet again. Soon the parcel arrived and I began leafing through the endless pages imagining her typing this enormous work on her old Olympia upright and her slightly newer Remington noiseless. Her engrossing narrative was graceful, exquisite—a flowing eloquence—making it difficult to stop reading long enough to develop analysis. I was struck first by its length. It had concerned Eva Jean as well. Back in 1962 during her travail with Harper she had written down something her professor, Frank Owsley, had cautioned her about: “It’s a truism of scholarship, but one never to be forgotten, that we must always seek to know a hundred—or perhaps twice a hundred—times more about our subject than will ever appear in the final product of our published books.” But then she added “There can never be such a thing as ‘enough’ materials. . . . The writer’s own imperative is to know everything attainable about his subject. Herein, I would say, lies the inner compulsion furnishing the motive-power which constantly drives the historian or biographer forward.” Eva Jean found it difficult to close her research and then even more difficult to edit away any of the riches she had discovered. The manuscript had become long, very long. The early chapters of Eva Jean's work show a pattern of reliance on Robert Richardson's Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, a nineteenth-century baseline used by nearly every Campbell historian and researcher. Eva Jean looked to Richardson to provide

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p r e fa c e chronological structure, a basic sequence of events against which she could assure herself that nothing within her purpose was omitted. Often, Eva Jean would exclude much of Richardson's detail when citing the same event, but, just as frequently, she inserted information not found in Richardson. Although built on Richardson, Eva Jean’s masterful storytelling surpasses Richardson’s memoir in the beauty of its prose, the richness of her descriptions of background and context, as well as the simple clarity she brings to Campbell’s thought. Initially, being a trained historian, I thought a full accounting of sources would be one of the most valuable aspects of her work as well as lending scholarly credibility. But footnotes and bibliography did not accompany the shipment of the copied manuscript and from her perspective were not critical to her work. She was, of course, correct and had earlier responded to the same request from Harper with great reluctance, bordering on disgust. Still, seeking footnotes and bibliography became an early personal objective of mine, because I had, as yet, not fully understood the style and technique of the fugitive poets or Eva Jean’s true purpose. Following a few telephone conversations with me on the subject, she explained she would ask David McWhirter to prepare a bibliography of sources for her work. Soon it became clear to me that for the type biography she was writing, a bibliography and footnotes were unnecessary. Ultimately, she did provide a photocopy of selected footnotes for chapters five, six, and seven with a small note attached, “Looking forward to our next session with A.C.” A review of the two hundred footnotes for those three chapters revealed forty-three citations from Robert Richardson, thirty-three from the Millennial Harbinger, seventeen from the Christian Baptist, and ten from the Declaration and Address—more than half the total. William Herbert Hanna's 1935 biography of Thomas Campbell was cited ten times and William Baxter's 1874 biography of Walter Scott five times. The most current references were Dwight Stevenson's 1946 biography of Walter Scott cited

p r e fa c e three times, and Garrison and DeGroot’s The Disciples of Christ: A History, published in 1948, merited a single entry. Some of Campbell's correspondence located in the historical society was also cited. Another influential work, referenced about once per chapter, was Vernon Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (1926), a model of writing style and structure much admired by the fugitive poets and by Eva Jean. The sources used by Eva Jean were vintage, reflecting a Richardson framework and the era in which the chapters were initially written—all quite acceptable for a literary biography. Trips to Nashville were interspersed among numerous telephone calls and mailings. Our objective was to find common ground on the structure, length, use of modern scholarship and title for the Wrather manuscript with an eye toward publication. Out of these rich conversations grew agreement that the manuscript would be published in multiple volumes and the title would be Alexander Campbell: Adventurer in Freedom. The intended audience, in her judgment, was to be “broad based, a broad scholarly and lay community including Disciples.” On the question of balance between biography and the evolution of Campbell's thought and theology, Eva Jean was firm in saying, "Biography is the spine on which the work is built." It was agreed that the early chapters were well balanced in this respect but more personal biography was needed to improve the balance in the remaining chapters, although "the portion on theology and thought," she advised, "should not be reduced beyond modest condensation." His life, she declared, “evolved from his theology and thought.” Eva Jean had not forgotten the advice from her professors of the fugitive-agrarian school, who said to her “never turn down an informed critical reading of your manuscript—and then suit yourself; be true to your convictions.” They taught her well. A steel magnolia, she remained firmly fixed in her convictions. We talked at great length about incorporating more contemporary scholarship along with historical interpretation of

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p r e fa c e Alexander Campbell and his era into the manuscript. It was Eva Jean's strong opinion that “writers should not superimpose themselves on Alexander Campbell! Writers should not intrude ‘self’ into the story of Campbell. The story of his life is an unfolding drama, a continuing growth, and writers should not anticipate when he will change.” Her work, she said, was “biography as literature; biography as discovery.” Alexander Campbell, she claimed, “was a perfect example of the wedding of culture, religion and politics in America” (a la Parrington.). Questions regarding out-of-use words, punctuation, and archaic spellings were also discussed. For example, should we use the modern spelling of “buffalo” in place of the nineteenth-century “buffaloe”? Eva Jean much preferred the archaic spelling but with a sentence in the preface stating the writer has used the spellings of Alexander Campbell's day. On the issue of punctuation she was well aware of changing practices but disagreed with some of them. From her point of view they “marred the literary character of the work.” It was agreed, however, that punctuation editing would be guided by her acceptance or rejection of the proposed changes. It became clear that my role as an editor did not include extensive modification of what Eva Jean had written, adding any historical trappings or including modern scholarship, but was to be directed rather toward sanding off a few rough edges in the manuscript, correcting a stray error here and there, enhancing some words or phrases, checking punctuation, producing an index, and preparing a copy of the manuscript for submission to a publisher. This book was not destined to be the scholarly biography Perry Miller might have written. In its pure form, it is an uncommonly fine literary biography—neither historical fiction nor historical novel—but a literary biography, a creative and skillful blend of history and superb literary writing skill, covering the whole sweep of Campbell’s life.

p r e fa c e Together, we coursed our way through the early chapters, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, integrating the unfolding of his life and thought. Those days of working with Eva Jean, editing "Mr. Campbell's life,” will remain forever among my cherished memories. Alas, we were only allowed to complete seven of the twenty-nine chapters. Our final exchanges were related to her desire to rewrite chapter eight. She had devoted chapters eight, nine, and ten to Campbell's “Christian-Baptist” years. Eva Jean saw this three-chapter segment as the most important part of the whole manuscript. She believed the ChristianBaptist years had caused Campbell to be misunderstood and that he was ignored after 1890 because scholars took the side of his detractors and obscured the “real” Alexander Campbell. It was her intent to set the record straight with these three seminal chapters. Although gallant to the end, illness and weakened eyesight overtook her, and she was never able to complete the rewriting. Death came on September 13, 2001. But the enormous work she did complete stands as an immortal tribute to her rare and wondrous talent as a writer and literary historian. The publication of this first volume of her prodigious biography of Campbell is offered as a loving memorial to Eva Jean Wrather. Future volumes of her manuscript may appear, but Eva Jean will not have had the final word of approval on their content. But for this publication I can attest absolutely that she approved every word in these chapters that comprise Volume I. As you read this volume think of Eva Jean's abiding passion for her subject, the exacting care and personal grace with which her words were chosen, and of the seventy years of her life and talent given to its writing. Some ask: Why would she devote so much time to such a project? Eva Jean offered an answer. “Stephen MacKenna,” she said, “was once asked why he had spent so many years of his life on the Roman philosopher, Plotinus, and MacKenna replied, ‘Plotinus is worth a lifetime.’” She reinforced her answer by quot-

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p r e fa c e ing Carl Sandburg, who after completing his six-volume biography of Lincoln, was asked by Edward R. Murrow, “Why did you spend so much time with Abraham Lincoln?” Sandburg responded, “Because he was such good company.” Eva Jean applied these criteria to Alexander Campbell, concluding with the words: “He was and is good company; good enough to warrant at least half a lifetime of exploration and writing.”

Book One

s The Twig Is Bent (1788-1809)

“There are some men’s constitution of body and mind so vigorous, and well framed by nature, that they need not much assistance from others; but, by the strength of their natural genius, they are, from their cradles, carried toward what is excellent; and by the privilege of their happy constitutions, are able to do wonders.” John Locke

.1. s Prologue: A “Call” and a Wedding

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t was time for eveni n g prayer at the home of Archibald Campbell of County Down. They gathered in the parlor: Archibald, his wife, and their four sons—Thomas, James, Archibald and Enos. Archibald, Sr. would not conduct family worship tonight as was his custom. His rheumatism was bothering him again. Ireland’s heavy rainfall might make the shamrocks grow green, but it was hard on aching bones. Nor was the state of Archibald’s health calculated to improve his naturally irascible temper. He might well consider it a shame

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prologue when a man who had sailed across the seas with General Wolfe and climbed the rocky heights to the plains of Abraham to give the Frenchmen a memorable thrashing at the battle of Quebec had to be laid up with aches and pains like an ailing old woman. Strong and fearless and free, with a hand ever ready upon the sword to defend his rights and his home and his clan—that was the way for a man to live! That was the way his kinsmen across the channel, fierce Highlanders of western Scotland, had always lived since the golden age of thirteenth-century Scotland when “Clan Campbel”—Clan O’Duibne was the Gaelic name—received its first grant of land from the crown. And Archibald could proudly wear his name for many were the Archibald Campbells, warriors and clan chieftains, who had written their deeds in Scottish history. The first Campbell to appear by name in an historical record was, in fact, a Gillespic (Gaelic for Archibald) Cambel (the spelling retained until well into the fifteenth century), who is listed on the Exchequer Rolls of 1266. In 1368 a Sir Archibald Campbell, Knight of Lochow, was granted a charter for lands in Argyllshire by King David II. In 1513 an Archibald Campbell, second Earl of Argyll and Lieutenant-General of the Isles under James IV, fell with his king on the field of Flodden. Another Archibald Campbell, the fifth earl, was one of the influential nobles forming the first “godly band” of Protestant reformers who joined Lord James Stuart to break the power of the ruling Catholic house of Guise; having married a natural sister of James Stuart and Mary, Queen of Scots, he enjoyed intermittent high favor with the queen and ended his career as Lord High Chancellor of Scotland. Archibald Campbell, first Marquess and eighth earl of Argyll and “by far the most powerful subject in the kingdom,” sided with Parliament and became the chief opponent of the Earl of Montrose in the Civil War during the reign of Charles I; after the Restoration, he ended his life on the execution block by order of Charles II, his head being exposed on a spike upon the west end of the Tolbooth. His son and namesake, the ninth earl, suffered

prologue exactly the same fate at the hands of James II and his son, yet another Archibald, choosing the winning side in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, was one of the lords deputed to present the crown and tender the coronation oath to William III and in reward was named the first Duke of Argyll. His second son, Archibald, Earl of Islay and third Duke of Argyll, was entrusted with such extensive management of Scottish affairs in the United Kingdom that he was called the uncrowned king of Scotland and maintained the office of Keeper of the Great Seal until his sudden death in 1761—about the time that an obscure clansman across the channel was returning home from the wars in Canada to marry and rear a family of sons at their home near the village of Sheepbridge, a few miles north of Newry. If this Archibald Campbell was to teach his sons pride in the great but rather remote house of Argyll, he could teach them pride also in their own lineage through those Ulster Campbells who had left their kinsmen in Scotland to find new homes across the Irish Channel. Because of scant or lost family records, Archibald’s direct lineage is traced back only to his father, Thomas, said to have been “born in the county of Down.” But according to widely accepted local tradition their family history was connected to that of a Robert Campbell and his three brothers, “of the house of Strachur and family of Sasnach,” who had emigrated from Argyllshire to County Down early in the seventeenth century at the time of the Plantation of Ulster under James I. This Robert’s only son, also named Robert, married a Jane Wallace of Ravana, near Belfast; and they settled with their seven children in the town of Newry. He died in 1684, his tombstone being the first erected in the churchyard at Newry, and left his wife, Jane, to rear their seven children—four boys and three girls. Jane had been equal to the task, having, so it was said, a “strength of mind superior to difficulties.” She lived to the age of nearly one hundred and saw the fifth generation of her descendents before her death in 1727. So numerous and so worthy of respect were

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prologue these descendents—landowners, men of commerce, clergymen, teachers, soldiers—that the family connection became widely known as the “Grand Alliance.” But doubtless it was on present pain rather than on ancestral pride that Archibald Campbell, soldier of Quebec and loyal subject of George III, was thinking as his household gathered in the parlor for evening prayer. The eldest son Thomas was to conduct the family worship tonight in his father’s stead. Young though he might be, Thomas already possessed great piety, which was as it should be. He also possessed great determination to exercise that piety in the Presbyterian ministry, which was not so fortunate. Archibald was a strict adherent to the Church of England and an equally strict believer in the Fifth Commandment; and he had informed his sons that they, like himself, should “serve God according to act of Parliament.” Thomas, however, simply could not and would not. The ritual of episcopacy was to him a vain and lifeless ceremony, and its communicants far too proud and worldly for his simple tastes. It was in the meeting houses of the plain and devout Calvinists—among the Covenanters or, preferably, the seceders—that Thomas found his God. And though his gray eyes bespoke a nature gentle and peace loving, one who crossed Thomas in a matter of conscience was likely to be reminded that if gray is a color of the dove, it is also the color of steel. Moreover, Thomas had been assured of the rightness of his course by an express revelation of Divine will, in the manner best approved by Calvinistic orthodoxy. This assurance had seemed long in coming. He spent many weary months in fear and misgiving, praying, seeking some token of Divine favor, of Divine forgiveness for his sins. The sins were venial, it was true, and God was merciful; but God was also selective, and those God chose were not left in doubt. Finally, one day when Thomas was near despair and ready to sink under the weight of his own unworthiness, he went alone for a walk in the woods. Suddenly, he felt the black cloud of fear and anxiety dispersing. An unearthly peace seemed

prologue to flow around him until mystically, wholly, he was at one with God. Thomas’s “call” had come. He was of the elect, especially chosen to labor in the vineyard. The details remained to be worked out, and those details could prove very troublesome. Such matters could be determined only between Thomas and his God. So, on this evening, Thomas gladly took Archibald’s place and, as the household fell to its knees, he reverently started to pray. At first, his thoughts and his words were of mother, father, brothers, and his four sisters who died in infancy. Soon externals were forgotten, and Thomas’s spirit began to soar. Perhaps he considered it a good time to bring his soul’s dilemma before the Throne of Grace: O Lord! shall men seek to do Thee honor with rich robes and elaborate processionals, or shall they come to Thee humbly, laying on Thy altar the gifts of pious lives and contrite hearts? Is Thy church to be found where the proud aristocrat rears a stately structure at the command of a king, or is Thy dwelling the gathering-place of those devout ones who nourish without fear or hesitation the stern logic of the man of Geneva? Whatever the theme, Thomas’s prayer flowed on—endlessly. Time was forgotten. Unfortunately, his father was not so heedless of the fleeting moments. Archibald was a godly man, and his intentions were reverent. He was also a practical man who found no virtue in overdoing things, even praying. The pain in his legs was sharp, and long kneeling did them no good. Would the boy never cease his prayer? At length, the pain settled into a dull persistent ache. Archibald doubted if he would ever be able to stand again. Finally, there came Thomas’ reverent “Amen”! The household rose to its feet. Archibald, with a racking tear in his reluctant muscles, managed to stand. He looked at Thomas—calm, serene,

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prologue oblivious to his father’s pains. It was too much. With face flushed and eyes snapping, Archibald grabbed his walking stick and began to cane Thomas about the shoulders, making his reason clear in quick, angry sentences. Stunned, his family looked on. Once his wrath was vented, Archibald became conscious of his outburst, but apology would not come easily to the quick-tempered, stubborn old soldier.

w Sad and aching, Thomas left the room. Life could be very trying to a young man with a call, even though he considered that call to be divine. His father’s refusal or inability to understand his antipathy to the Church of England and his sympathy with the Presbyterian seceders was a great vexation to Thomas. And likely something of an enigma as well. It was not as if he were wanting to do anything unusual. Since the days of John Knox, Scotland and Presbyterianism had been almost synonymous and, in spite of generations in Ireland, a Campbell was a Scotsman still. Indeed, those very military ancestors of whom his father was so proud had more often tested their valor in wars religious than in wars merely political. Almost without exception, they were found fighting on the side of the dissenting Protestants. Archibald himself could scarcely deny that the Campbells had been among the first to rally to the standard of John Knox, and their chieftain had been one of the original Lords of the Congregation who, in 1557, bound itself “to manteane, sett fordward and establish the most blessed word of God and his Congregations.” In the civil war, a century later, the chieftain of the Campbells had been so influential a Covenanter that Cromwell could discover in him and his friends “nothing but what becomes Christians and men of honour.” His monument in St. Giles bore the proud inscription, “A leader in council and field for the reformed religion.” Furthermore, the Scots who had come

prologue to settle Ulster at the invitation of James I brought with them their belief in Presbyterian discipline and looked with small favor upon the Irish Reformed Church. When they set up their homes and their pulpits in the new country, the dogma expounded from fireside and pulpit was the dogma of Knox and Calvin. For this reason, Archibald’s religious dictum was likely to seem to Thomas only another evidence of his father’s eccentricity and not to be taken seriously by a young man of conscience. Indeed, Archibald Campbell as a youth had professed an ardent faith in the Roman Catholic Church. It was not until after his return from the wars in Canada that he acquired an equally ardent faith in the Church of England. Perhaps he thought a government that had proven so victorious in matters military must also have the right perspective in matters ecclesiastical. Or perhaps a more practical consideration influenced his views. Only members of the established church could hold public office and receive preferments. The Protestant Dissenters were scarcely more privileged than the despised and oppressed Roman Catholics. So both paternal solicitude and expediency may have dictated Archibald’s command that his sons “serve God according to act of Parliament.” But conscience, not expediency, would always determine Thomas Campbell in his course. Since Archibald loved his sons and his anger was as quickly appeased as it was easily aroused, Thomas had hope that the parental opposition to his wishes would someday be removed. Meanwhile, he considered it the better part of wisdom to retire from the home scene. Also, the desire was strong within him to be about the Lord’s work. As he had completed “an excellent English education” at a nearby military regimental school— which his brothers, as became the sons of a soldier, were also attending—Thomas decided that if he could not yet bring solace to human souls in the role of minister, he could at least carry enlightenment to their minds in the role of teacher. So he set out

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prologue for a benighted part of western Ireland, the province of Connaught, where he had heard that the people’s minds were ill fed and their souls undernourished. There he established an English academy and began the dispensing of food—intellectual, moral and spiritual. His students grew apace, and their benefactor was well loved. Abruptly, his labors were cut short by a peremptory summons from his father. Unyielding in matters of conscience though he might be, in matters of conduct, Thomas was still the obedient son. As quickly as possible he closed his little academy, bade his sorrowing friends good-by, and turned his face homeward. But he continued to teach school, this time at Sheepbridge, located some five miles from Newry. Sheepbridge was scarcely more than a hamlet. It was the seat of the Gordon family, and the school must have been a small one consisting in part of children from the scattered homes that had sprung up about the manor house. One of the residents of Sheepbridge, John Kinley (or M’Kinley), a friend of Archibald’s, secured the position for Thomas. The change, after all, did not prove unpleasant. There was some connection, of which he may have availed himself, between his family and that of the Gordons, as the eldest daughter of Robert and Jane Wallace Campbell had married James Gordon of Sheepbridge and her grandson, Samuel, now occupied the manor house. More important to Thomas, his brothers James and Archibald also came to teach near Sheepbridge; and a common interest in religious questions drew them into frequent discourse until they began to share his preference for the seceder church. Converts, no matter how few, were a matter of pride. So Thomas could feel that in some small way, he was beginning to answer the call of the Lord.

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prologue Another call was now ringing in his ears—a call exceedingly imperious for a young man of twenty-four. Thomas Campbell had not spent his days and nights meditating exclusively on things spiritual. In June 1787, he was married to Jane, only child of the widow Corneigle of County Antrim. Jane Corneigle was of French descent. Her ancestors were Huguenots who had fled from France and taken refuge in Ireland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685. The Corneigles (doubtless a rough, Irish corruption of the name Corneille) along with the Bonners, pleased by the fertile and gently undulating land in County Antrim, purchased an entire township on the shores of Lough Neagh. There they devoted themselves to farming, building schools in which the Bible was “a daily theme,” and rearing their children as God-fearing Presbyterians. None was more pious than the widow Corneigle, and her daughter Jane who, in her twenty-fourth year, saw fit to marry the young man whom she had first met, perhaps, as he spent his summer vacations teaching in the schools of the Huguenots. The Corneigle farm was about a mile from Shane’s Castle, the seat of the O’Neills; and it was there with the bride’s mother that the young couple set up their first home. They made a fine couple, Thomas and Jane. Thomas was a handsome young man of medium height, compactly built, regular in feature, fair and somewhat ruddy in complexion. His gray eyes bespoke quick intelligence, firmness and a kindly humor, while his quiet manner and soft voice revealed the gentleness of his disposition. Jane was a beautiful woman, erect and dignified in carriage, with strongly marked features and “an extremely clear and fine” complexion, contrasting agreeably with abundant dark brown hair. In manner, she seemed modest and retiring, as became a female. She was possessed of that intrepid spirit and mental independence which was her Huguenot heritage and which, transmitted to the next generation, was to chart a new course of religious thought in the world across the Atlantic.

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Above: Shane’s Castle (circa 1580) on North shore of Lough Neagh. Alexander Campbell was born one mile from the castle. The Huguenot family of Jane Corneigle settled here after fleeing France following the revo cation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

Left: Thomas Campbell [1763-1854]. He and Jane Corneigle [17631835] met while Thomas was teaching at Sheepbridge, Ireland. They were married in June 1787, and their first child, Alexander, was born September 12, 1788

.2. s A Son is Born

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n September 12, 1788, a son was born to Jane and Thomas Campbell. They named him Alexander. Pleasant as the advent of a son might be, it undoubtedly entailed fresh responsibilities. So it was fortunate that at last all obstacles to Thomas’ pursuit of his chosen and divinely appointed career were removed. Archibald withdrew his disapproval. Thomas’ example of calm tenacity of purpose could not but have been secretly pleasing to the old soldier. He had always found it difficult to oppose this eldest and favorite son

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a son is born whose mild and thoughtful disposition was in such contrast to his own quick and passionate nature. Then Mr. M’Kinley, himself a devout seceder, removed any practical objections by offering to defray the expense of Thomas’ training. He may also have helped Thomas by again securing for him a position as schoolmaster. At any rate, soon after the birth of Alexander, Thomas moved his wife and son from their first home on the Corneigle land in County Antrim to the neighborhood of Sheepbridge, in County Armagh to resume his old job of teaching while he prepared for the ministry. As a first step, he sailed across the North Channel to enter the University of Glasgow. He did not concern himself with the formality of matriculating since he did not intend to take a regular degree or to don the scarlet gown, or toga, worn by the students of humanity, Greek, and philosophy. Furthermore, non-togaed students were not required to matriculate. Apparently, too, he did not concern himself with striving for honors and prizes—unlike another Thomas Campbell who was his classmate and, it appears, his cousin and who was giving promise of future fame by carrying off most of the university honors for composition in poetry. Rather, he simply entered those classes pre-requisite for students of divinity, including the medical lectures required in order that he might care for parishioners too poor to pay a regular physician. Methodically and assiduously, he applied himself to these studies for some three years. In 1792, having finished his course at the university and passed examinations in Latin, Greek, philosophy and personal religion before his associate presbytery in Ireland, he entered Divinity Hall at Whitburn to become proficient in the theology approved by the anti-burghers, that branch of the secession church in which he had become a communicant. As the number of students enrolled was usually not more than twenty or thirty, the divinity school was under the charge of a single professor appointed by the synod, and its classes were held wherever this

a son is born professor happened to be living. Beginning in 1786, the professor was Dr. Archibald Bruce, a man highly esteemed among the seceders as author, teacher and minister to a congregation at Whitburn, a town about midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh. So annually for five years Thomas Campbell returned to Scotland for an eight-week term with Dr. Bruce at Divinity Hall in Whitburn. There he studied a Latin treatise on systematic theology, attended lectures on the confession of faith, and engaged in debates with other students. At the end of the course, he passed another examination before his associate presbytery in Ireland and became a probationer, whose duty it was to preach to any congregation lacking a fixed ministry. At last, at age twenty-eight, Thomas Campbell was prepared to answer the call. On becoming a probationer, Thomas moved his family from Sheepbridge to Markethill in County Armagh, a thriving village boasting a good inn, as it was the principal stage stop between Newry and the town of Armagh. To augment the meager stipend he received as a probationer, Thomas found it necessary to teach, this time as a private tutor. The extra money was increasingly needed; for the Campbells were growing in number. A daughter, whom they called Dorothea—a “gift of God”—was born on July 27, 1793; and a second daughter named Nancy, on September 18, 1795. They lost a second son, James, and two later children, all three of whom died in infancy. In 1798 Thomas was called to a regular pastorate by the Ahorey congregation, a newly established preaching station located about four miles from Armagh. He moved his family to a house, with a farm adjoining, in the “good-sized and well-built village” of Hamilton’s Bawn, situated some three miles from his church. After having been installed as pastor, he settled into a routine of farming and preaching.

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a son is born It was time that the Campbells were finding a settled manner of living. The past ten years had been difficult almost beyond endurance. Though Thomas’s task of supporting a growing family while preparing for the ministry and serving as a probationer had been hard enough, the political unrest in which he had been forced to live—the plottings and counter-plottings, the almost continual outrages and armed encounters that made this decade one of the most troubled in all of Ireland’s troubled history—had added immeasurably to his cares. His eldest son was ten years old before the culmination of the Rebellion of 1798 brought even a semblance of peace to Ulster. Perhaps there was symbolic fitness in the fact that Alexander Campbell, who one day in a new land would be dubbed a revolutionary come to turn “the world upside down,” should have been born to revolution and have lived out his childhood in a period of Ireland’s history certain to awaken a spirited, adventurous boy to his own dreams of rebellion and liberty. Some three years before his birth, the long-festering unrest had begun to break out in open violence. The poorer Scots settlers of predominantly Protestant Ulster, finding themselves displaced from the land by Catholic peasants, had in 1785 organized themselves into bands called “Peep O’Day Boys.” The Catholics formed the rival “Defenders.” Pitched battles between the two became frequent. Then in 1795 a “new and sinister” force appeared. The Orange Society, a secret, oath-bound organization named to honor “the glorious and immortal memory” of William of Orange, was established with the avowed purpose of driving the Catholic peasantry entirely from Ulster. July 12, the anniversary of William’s decisive 1690 Battle of the Boyne, in which the Catholic armies of James II were finally routed, became their sacred day. As the society grew, the anniversary gave them excuse for an annual display of strength, Orangemen marching thousands strong through the streets of Belfast to the martial music of fife and drum playing “Boyne Water.” County Armagh was a center of strife. A “regular reign of terror” set in, and Lord Gosford,

a son is born governor of Armagh, delivered a terrible indictment: “Of late, no night passes that houses are not destroyed, and scarce a week that dreadful murders are not committed.” Meanwhile, in 1791, the year before Thomas Campbell entered the divinity school at Whitburn, still another secret organization was formed. It was far stronger, because it united the efforts of both Roman Catholics and dissenting Protestants, and was harder to combat because its ideals were more noble. Called the Society of United Irishmen, it was organized at Belfast by Theobald Wolfe Tone for the purpose of freeing Ireland from the yoke of England and setting up an independent Irish republic. It was an ideal that no longer seemed impossible to achieve since so recently across the Atlantic to the west, a small group of colonies had defeated the armies of George III; and across the Channel to the east, the people of France had taken the government into their own hands. Crystallizing Ireland’s will to liberty, societies of United Irishmen, busy with preparations for a secret insurrection, soon honeycombed the country. The third anniversary of the French Revolution was celebrated in an open display, with speeches and processionals of citizens wearing green cockades; in Belfast, Tone and his associates, including a deputation from the Roman Catholic Committee of Dublin, sat down to a dinner at the Donegal Arms in a room decorated with flags of four nations—America, France, Poland and Ireland, the last bearing the motto, “Unite and Be Free.” A newspaper, Northern Star, was established in Belfast to carry their message. And speakers were appointed to “tell the French news to everybody and dispute with all who dare to contradict them.” A mechanic near Kilrea fashioned a guillotine ten feet high, testing its efficiency on dogs and cats, as patriots flavored their ale with a new toast: “May the skin of old Geordy (meaning the king) be a drum-head to rouse the republicans to arms.” Others resurrected ancient manuscripts said to prophesy the success of the imminent civil war or reported visions of an angel beheld from time to time in old churches at

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a son is born midnight, reading from a green book the order for abolishing English domination in Ireland. After short hair became the proof of a good Jacobin in Paris, United Irishmen took to cutting their hair in the manner of Cromwell’s Ironsides and so won the nickname of “croppy.” The most zealous of these “croppies”—as Thomas Campbell knew full well—were to be found among his own churchmen. Though Roman Catholic and Dissenter alike were fighting for freedom in the United Irishmen, the real impetus for the movement came from the Ulster Scots. Among the Roman Catholics of the South and West a hundred years’ suppression had left the masses virtually incapable of political ideas, while the Scots Presbyterians of the North, carrying on the high tradition of education brought from Scotland, were a thinking, politically-minded stock, eager to translate to Ireland the republican theories being tested in America and France. Hence it was among the Presbyterian clergy that the staunchest enemies of monarchy were frequently found. It was in the Presbyterian meetinghouses that the most secret plans were matured and magazines of arms were often stored. Thomas Campbell, however, was not among the clergy who felt impelled “to preach sedition and the Word,” and no meetinghouse where he ministered would become a storehouse for arms. The republican sentiments of the United Irishmen, it was true, found a ready response in his democratic heart. Their desire to abolish religious disqualifications appealed to his hatred of sectarian animosity, and his poverty was a daily reminder of the underprivileged condition of the non-conforming clergy. Nevertheless, he opposed the organization. A secret society plotting armed insurrection, he was convinced, had little in common with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. And Thomas Campbell still was not one to compromise with conscience. Though his ancestors might have enforced and defended their religious faith by the sword, he took literally the commandment to turn the other cheek. But anyone who took his pacific conviction for cowardice

a son is born was sure to be quickly disillusioned. When he became a probationer, preaching to congregations in strife-ridden Armagh, he made no attempt to conceal his attitude. His intransigence threatened at times to have grave consequence. Wherever men assembled, the principles of the United Irishmen were likely to be the subject of debate. On one occasion, a group asked Thomas to discuss the lawfulness of oaths and secret societies. Though he knew well the temper and sympathies of his audience, he frankly denounced their secret activities. So excited and exasperated became the audience that a member, fearing even his clerical coat would not save Thomas from insult, persuaded him to leave the assembly. On another occasion, however, Thomas Campbell’s churchmen had excellent reason to be thankful for his convictions. The attempt of the French to land troops in Ireland in December 1796, though a failure, gave the government an excuse for a literal dragooning of the country directed especially against the Protestant Dissenters, who were suspected of being at the bottom of the plot. The soldiers, ordered to confiscate all arms and, given a free hand, brutally tortured the peasants with “picketings, halfhangings, and the pitch-cap” to make them reveal the hidden stores of arms, not bothering to distinguish the innocent from the guilty. The most notorious and pitiless of these troops was a Welsh mounted regiment called the “Ancient Britons,” which, operating about Newry, “burnt the houses wholesale and killed old and young.” The troops’ horses were even more feared than their riders. Well trained for rebel fighting, at the word “croppy,” the horses would rear up and throw their feet forward in a furious and terrifying charge toward their victims. One day when Thomas was preaching to a rural congregation not far from Newry a frightened peasant rushed into the church crying: “The Welsh horses are coming!” Almost immediately, the troops dashed up and surrounded the house in battle array, ready to make an assault the moment the congregation should rush out. The captain, certain

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a son is born he had come upon a meeting of rebels in this out-of-the-way place, dismounted and marched threateningly into the church. The congregation, many of whom doubtless were members of the United Irishmen, were near panic. The captain stalked down the aisle, scowling to right and left. At this moment of crisis, a venerable elder sitting near the pulpit called out, “Pray, Sir!” Thomas, in a deep and unfaltering voice, began: “Thou, O God, art our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.” As he continued, the sure knowledge of his own innocence carried conviction even to the suspicious captain, who, at the first verse, paused and after a moment, bent his head and listened reverently to the close of the psalm. Then, he bowed to the minister, quietly retraced his steps, and, mounting his horse, rode away with his dreaded troops. But Thomas Campbell’s neighbors were a hardy lot, and not even such dragooning of the country could abate their zeal for liberty. By 1798, the United Irishmen, counting their membership at more than one hundred thousand in Ulster and treble that number in the kingdom, began to prepare the minds of the people by distribution of a handbill entitled “A Zebra Foal,” which alleged that a beautifully striped animal was foaled and immediately repeated audibly the distich: A wet winter, a dry spring, A bloody summer, and no king. Though the government was alert, having posted the names of occupants on all houses and forbidding anyone to leave between 9:00 p. m . and 5:00 a.m., the society issued a call to arms to the “Army of Ulster,” dated the “first year of liberty, 6th day of June, 1798.” The next day, the green flag was raised at the hamlet of Roughfort, and the rebellion was underway. But the government, notified by informers, completely destroyed the machinery of the

a son is born organization, arresting its leaders and raiding the depots of arms. The insurrection amounted to little more than isolated local risings, foredoomed to failure. Theobald Wolfe Tone, sentenced to be hanged, died by his own hand. Unsuccessful in their attempt to secure temporal blessings, Thomas Campbell’s churchmen were ready to give heed again to the voice of the Lord. And a minister whose conscience had proved to be on the winning side was in especial favor.

w An evidence of this favor took concrete form, Thomas found himself “importuned” by Lord Gosford, governor of Armagh, to become the tutor of his family with a “splendid residence” on his estate and a salary far larger than any minister in the presbytery could command. The governor, no doubt, was moved to make the offer chiefly because of Thomas’ loyalty and firmness in the late crisis. At the same time, he could be assured that the presence of the dissenting parson and his family would properly grace the halls of Gosford Castle. Thomas Campbell was distinguished for his “courtly manners,” his friends thinking it worthy of comment that he seemed able naturally and convincingly to combine a “naive and gentle carriage” with “grace and elegance” of a “lordly and commanding address” and that he was rearing his children in the firm conviction that good manners and good morals were virtually synonymous attributes. It was a flattering and tempting offer. The Earl of Gosford was an Acheson, and theirs was one of the most important families in North Ireland. They reaped a rich harvest from the town of Markethill, which had sprung up around their castle on lands granted them in 1610 during the Plantation. What would be of more importance to Thomas was the Acheson reputation as patrons of learning. Jonathan Swift had frequently been a guest in rambling Gosford Castle. Here he had written his poems on Markethill, and

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a son is born every part of the estate was associated with memories of the dean and his verse—the “Basins,” the celebrated thorn tree, the courtyard where poor Lady Acheson was “teased day and night by a Dean and a Knight.” In the castle, too, was a library famous throughout Armagh, which would be a blessed retreat to a book-loving parson too poor to add frequently to his own collection. But Thomas was not to be so easily caught in the toils of temptation; perhaps he was scarcely aware of any temptation. Certainly, he was not a man to be moved from his chosen path of duty by the flattery of a nobleman any more than he had been by the frowns of angered United Irishmen. He had not prepared himself for eight long years to serve the poor, the sick and the soulhungry, only to forsake them at the first offer of an easy post in the house of an earl. Moreover, though he might enjoy and profit from the cultivated society of the Achesons, he could not be sure that his young children would be able to distinguish between the virtuous attractions of elegant manners and the snares of luxurious habits and worldly fashions. So he declined Lord Gosford’s offer, accepting instead the call from the Ahorey church and settling his family in the simple farm cottage at Hamilton’s Bawn, celebrated in some of the best of Jonathan Swift’s verse.

w In the midst of all the political and religious strife and the economic distress of this decade, Jane and Thomas Campbell also were having their domestic worries. Their beloved firstborn and as yet only son was proving a sore trial. They were determined that Alexander should grow rich in knowledge and wisdom. Almost from the boy’s infancy, Thomas began the careful tutoring of his son. While he was completing his own studies at Glasgow and at Whitburn, he kept the boy long hours at his books—a di s cipline which Alexander all too evidently accepted with reluctance. After Thomas started on his new

a son is born duties as a probation preacher and moved his family into Markethill, Alex, then about seven years old, was sent to the elementary school there. When they settled at Hamilton’s Bawn, some two or three years later, he continued in this school for a time, boarding with the family of Mr. Gillis, a merchant, whose house faced on the town’s one long street. Before Alex was ten years old the study of French—of course, he must be proficient in his mother’s tongue—was added to his already heavy schedule. An amusing incident occurred which he related in after years with great glee. Having been told one day to prepare his French lesson in Fenelon’s Telemaque, he decided that the shade of a tree was an ideal place to study. But the day was warm and French was difficult, so he promptly went to sleep. Unfortunately a cow grazing nearby was more alert. Picking up the book from the grass, she partially devoured it before Alex could wake. When he had to report the incident to his father, Thomas gave him a thrashing, adding the taunt that “the cow had got more French in her stomach than he had in his head.” It may have been this incident that helped Jane and Thomas decide on a change of school for Alex. Thomas’s brothers Enos and Archibald had opened an academy in Newry which rapidly became one of the “most popular” in the city. Alex, at age ten or eleven, was sent off to try the discipline of his uncles. Without doubt, he found the change exciting. Newry was a commercial center with a trade rivaled only by that of Belfast. Here a boy would not lack adventure when the wharves were constantly crowded with ships, some carrying inland traffic northward by the great Newry Canal to Lough Neagh and others, laden with foreign cargo, plying the tidal river Newry Waters to the “noble harbor” of Carlingford and on to the Irish Sea. Indeed, so exciting were the distractions of Newry that when Thomas decided, some two or three years later, to resume the private tutoring of his son, he found the result disturbing. The boy seemed to have made very little progress in his studies.

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Top: Whitburn Seceder Seminary. The old associate college was the theological school of the anti-burgher branch of the seceder church. Thomas Campbell enrolled in the seminary in 1792. Below: Thomas Campbell studied to become a seceder Presbyterian minister under the tutelage of Archibald Bruce, who held the Doctor of Divinity degree. The photo is of the home of Dr. Bruce where Thomas Campbell studied.

Top: Hamilton’s Bawn: The home of Mr. Gillis. A probationer preacher, Thomas moved his family to Markethill where seven-year-old Alexander was sent to ele mentary school. When the family settled at the town of Hamilton’s Bawn some two or three years later (1798), young Campbell continued in the same school, boarding at the home of Mr. Gillis, a merchant. Below: Church of Ahorey, County Armagh, Ireland. Thomas Campbell was pas tor of the church from 1798-1807.

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a son is born The trouble was not hard to analyze. Alexander, age twelve or so, simply did not like to study. His anxious parents expected far too much of the child—especially when that child was a selfwilled boy of such active, restless temperament that, by his own account, he “could never walk leisurely along, like other boys, but always felt like running, leaping or jumping.” He might be destined for a career in the church, but no suggestion of piety or sedateness dampened his high spirits or detracted from his popularity with his companions. Wherever games were the roughest and mischief most rampant, there the son of the village pastor was likely to be found, the ringleader of the fun; and if the fun called for being truant from school and cheating a little on his lessons to fool the teacher, he did not hesitate. Nor would Alexander Campbell, the man, ever assume any hypocritical regret for his boyhood deficiencies or escapades. On the contrary, he once animated a magazine preface with nostalgic recollection of his youthful reluctance to study, frankly acknowledging: “I then regarded . . . (my father) as a severe and strict master, and rather envied my schoolmates who had more indulgent parents.” He once enlivened a theological discourse by recalling: “When I was a boy I sometimes played truant, and fearing the ferula, I would sometimes write off my lessons on a slip of paper, cut according to the dimensions of my book, and with this before me, I was enabled to translate with some degree of fluency.” Time did not dim “the recollection of the double portion of the rod which I used to receive for such a trick, (for I was whipped when detected—first for not having my lesson, and second for striving to cheat my preceptor).” Despite the teacher’s rod and his father’s taunts, Alex somehow could not worry much about his intellectual shortcomings. Any study was dull when the streams abounded with fish and the fields with rabbits. No book could possibly be as fascinating as the towers and battlements of Shane’s Castle and the wondrous waters of Lough Neagh. Though only an infant when his family moved

a son is born away from his birthplace adjoining the castle lands on the lough, Alex doubtless spent many a vacation with his grandmother Corneigle and other Huguenot relatives in the County Antrim. With all his parents’ various moves from place to place, Shane’s Castle was to stand throughout his life as the most cherished and fixed landmark of his boyhood. Certainly, it was a place to capture a boy’s imagination, this castle named for Shane MacBrian O’Neill, a great prince of Ulster descended from ancient Irish kings. Seated in a broad park of oak, fir and larch, it was protected on the lough side by a fortified esplanade mounting a battery of guns and boasting a secret underground entrance. A boy who looked sharply could see the famed “black head of the O’Neills” sculptured in the stone of the south wall of its square tower. The fall or injury of the head, so the legend went, would mark the doom of the clan O’Neill. Whatever the black head’s efficacy, the power and glory of the house had waned sharply by the end of the eighteenth century; but a boy would not be too disappointed in the Viscount O’Neill of Alex’s childhood. Many tales were told of his lavish hospitality, Mrs. Siddons having been so regally feted by him that she declared: “The luxury of the establishment [is] beyond words, really an Arabian Night’s entertainment.” The viscount died as became a fighting O’Neill, in defense of the town of Antrim during the Rebellion of 1798. The lough itself, so vast that to a boy’s fancy it must have seemed a virtual sea, was equally rich in fascinating stories and properties. Some said it had been formed when the giant Finn MacCool, in a fit of anger, scooped out a great handful of the prehistoric Plain of the Grey Copse and threw it into the Irish Sea to become the Isle of Man, while the depression in the plain filled with water to become the lough. Others said that it had first sprung up as a small spring under the prancing hooves of a magic horse carelessly left standing by Ecca, son of a King of Munster, who, forced to flee northward, had been given the horse with the warning that it must never stand still. He covered the spring and

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a son is born left a woman to guard it; but one day she forgot to close the door, and the waters rushed forth to drown all her neighbors and spread over the whole plain. All were agreed that these waters possessed the healing powers that became a lake of wondrous origin. The majority was certain that they possessed petrifying powers as well, a familiar sight in the village streets being the peddlers crying: Lough Neagh Hones! Lough Neagh Hones! You put ’em in sticks and you take ’em out stones! Even the shores of the lough were celebrated for their beautiful pebbles, which a boy might gather to his heart’s delight—some milky-white, some carnelian, others dark and shining with the rich colors of the jasper agate. Best of all, the lake abounded with salmon, trout, eel and bream; and there was no finer spot for hunting the heron, wild ducks and geese, swans and the sea plover. Comparing his books with such pleasant things, Alexander could not find it in his heart to consume long hours in study. That intense love of freedom, which in later years would cause his words to sound a challenge across a continent, now exhibited itself as a physical restlessness that made of all indoors a prison.

w Perplexed as they were, Jane and Thomas Campbell made a decision that proved to be wise. They took Alex away from his studies and put him to work on the farm with the laborers, hoping by this means to satisfy his desire for activity and so eventually “to break him in to his books.” Alex was delighted. For generations, his mother’s people had made their living from the land. Love of the soil he would count as a part of his rich heritage. To turn the warm, soft earth beneath the plow, to watch the tender, young shoots spring up in the furrows and nourish them to full growth—those were tasks to still the

a son is born restlessness in one’s bones and bring a song to one’s lips. Indeed, he abandoned his books so cavalierly and took to farm work so energetically that Jane and Thomas began to fear their plan had miscarried. Had God blessed them, in their first-born, with a robust peasant instead of the gentleman and scholar whom they desired and whom, to do credit to their own endowments, they had just reason to expect? Surely not. When they looked at Alexander’s broad brow and noted the quick light in his eyes, they knew not that the intellect was merely lying dormant, awaiting the day in which it would awaken with a vigor equal to that of the boy’s lithe body. They were right. A year, more or less, of labor on the farm, and Alexander was getting his growth. He was also becoming conscious of a vague unrest. The old sports no longer satisfied. Questions, endless questions, began to arise and demand answers. The books so carelessly thrown aside were taken up again. What had been sheer drudgery now became exciting adventure. What had been lifeless words became messages of fire to inflame a young mind. He, too, would write books, he decided; some day he would be a distinguished author. To his father he announced his firm intention of becoming “one of the best scholars in the kingdom.”

w It was Thomas’ turn to be delighted. At last, the boy was proving his father’s son; and every hour that Thomas could spare, they began to spend together in study. Latin and Greek and other work in preparation for college now became a part of the schedule of instruction. It was understood, of course, that eventually Alexander would follow in his father’s footsteps to the University of Glasgow. Thomas, as an educator convinced that it was a badge of the true scholar to have a ready command of the great passages of lit-

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a son is born erature, both poetry and prose, placed a great emphasis on training the memory. Once Alexander had considered this the most hated of his chores but now that he applied himself, he found that his memory was astonishingly quick. He could memorize sixty lines of blank verse in fifty-two minutes and quote them without error. He also found that he easily retained what he learned, and so gradually he began to fulfill his father’s desire and make his mind a storehouse of the classics—not the English classics alone, but the Greek, Latin and French as well. He learned the poets from Homer and Horace to Shakespeare, Milton, Young, Pope, and Cowper. Gray’s “Elegy” became a favorite, as did the essays of Addison, Steele, and Dr. Johnson. By the time he was fourteen, he could quote the whole of Paradise Lost and knew by heart most of Aesop’s Fables in French. Had his training stopped here, his life might have told the story of a young man led by ambition to some world capital where his industry won him praise and position and his spirits and cleverness caused him to be sought after by the wits. But fame would never come in such a manner to a child of Jane and Thomas Campbell. The daughter of zealous Huguenots and the son who had defied his father’s faith to embrace stern Scots P r e s b y t e r i a nism held other ambitions for their children. Whatever the classics studied and enjoyed in the Campbell household, Alexander knew that, to both his parents, one book was the classic of all classics, and knowledge of its teachings and its riches of poetry and literature was to them the center and heart of all education. If, in his rebellion against a too-rigid regimen of study, young Alex did not rebel also against his parents’ whole concept of religious training—if, as a man, he retained grateful rather than resentful memories of this training—the fact was itself a significant compliment and credit to the character of Jane and Thomas Campbell. Alexander, perhaps, gave the best clue to the secret of his father’s strength of character when, in later years, he wrote:

a son is born In the Christian ministry, or out of it, I knew no man that so uniformly, so undeviatingly, practiced what he taught . . . That which he reprobated in others, he never . . . yielded to himself; and whatsoever he commended in others . . . he exhibited in all his (own) deportment . . . His family discipline was the most perfect I ever witnessed. He always honored his own word. What he promised, he performed; and what he threatened, he fulfilled . . . to the letter. This remarkable sincerity and consistency in action was as widely noted and commended in the parish as in his home. Thomas Campbell might be a minister by profession, but no one ever observed his conduct to betray a mite of professional piety. Though intellectually he professed the hard and harsh dogma of a rigid Calvinistic orthodoxy, this dogma could never prevail against the loving gentleness of his heart. Simple, just, and kindly, as pastor and as father, he was genuinely concerned with the cares and genuinely amused by the pleasures of his dependents. His communion with God appeared “constant, free and familiar.” A favorite theme he often preached was the “infinite goodness of God.” One dream he cherished above all others: that the schism and strife which for centuries had disgraced and disrupted the earthly kingdom of the Lord might be ended and that professing Christians honor their profession by answering the prayer of Jesus for “one church,” united in love and in action. “Superlatively averse to evil-speaking” and to the “party spirit” in any form, he made hospitality to strangers—whether of high or low degree and without regard to their differences of opinion in politics or religion—a ruling maxim of his house. He so feared the evils of vainglory and pride that he coined a standing maxim for his children: “If it be a pleasure to you to excel others, it will, by degrees, be a pleasure to you not to see others as good and as respectable as yourselves.”

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a son is born Certainly these children could not doubt that their father was, in truth, “peculiarly unambitious of worldly honors and distinctions” for himself or his family, when he had refused a fine position in the household of the Earl of Gosford. They and all the parish had proof of his true “deadness to the world” and “wholly apathetic” attitude toward the problems and concerns of political agitation, when he refused to take sides in any of the struggles for Irish independence. Another evidence of his absorption in the divine, of his quiet submission to any trial of earth that the divine might decree for him, came in striking fashion one Lord’s Day in 1804. Just as he was entering the Ahorey meetinghouse to conduct the morning service, a messenger arrived to tell him that his youngest brother, Enos, had fallen through an open excavation in the street of Newry and been instantly killed. Thomas passed on into the church and delivered his sermon, with only a slight tremor in his voice betraying his emotion. The Lord’s work done, he then went to Newry to comfort his father. While the Campbell children were much impressed with their father’s example, they were probably impressed even more by the strictures and requirements of his home discipline. The synod explicitly required the minister to observe morning and evening prayers with all his family and to instruct and examine them in religion at least once a week. For every household in his parish, including its children and servants, Thomas Campbell added the daily teaching of the Scriptures and the daily memorizing of Bible verses to be recited at the hour of evening prayer. On every Lord’s Day evening, the entire family was required to rehearse the week’s verses and also to show a proper understanding of the week’s lessons. Some four times a year, accompanied by one or two of his ruling elders, he made parochial visits during which every family in his charge was examined and catechized and admonished. With such discipline, it was not to be wondered that in time the Ahorey congregation became generally known as the best educated and “most intelligent” in the entire presbytery

a son is born of Markethill. And, of course, the minister’s own family was supposed to set a model for the parish. Not only were the Bible and Brown’s Catechism daily studies and the daily Scripture recitations strictly observed, churchgoing was made a serious and reverent matter not to be confused with any ceremony of cold and formal worship. On returning from service, Thomas expected every member of his household—not exempting his children or servants—to be able to recall the “topic” or text and give a synopsis of the “lecture.” Fortunately for domestic harmony, the independent and spirited Jane saw eye-to-eye with her husband in matters of worship and discipline. A splendid wife for a village pastor, she took from his burdened shoulders much of the care for the needy, the friendless, and the orphaned. When his work as preacher or as physician to the poor kept him from home, she did not allow family instruction to lag. Indeed, being blessed with a “peculiarly ready and retentive” memory in which she had treasured many a Bible passage in her own youth, she could make a game of vying with her children in their daily stint of Scripture quoting. She carried off all these duties with an amiable and cheerful air that had a way of making them seem a privilege rather than a chore. Thomas Campbell, for all his gentle humor, had a deep strain of melancholy, which his Calvinism did nothing to dispel. Some fragments of his diary for 1800 revealed him as often “exercised with an awful apprehension of extreme guilt and vileness before God,” lamenting his “deadness, inactivity, and dreary barrenness of . . . mind in spiritual things,” longing to be humbled for his “abominable self-conceit and sacrilegious self-seeking,” and ardently praying: “O that I had wings like a dove, then would I flee away and be at rest. Then would I rise above this debasing carnality . . . to the contemplation of this glorious Lord . . . I desire to lie in the dust at his feet, and even to feel his precious mercy as lifting me up.” With Jane, on the other hand, the dark strains of Calvinism, nurtured in her Huguenot ancestry, appeared light-

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a son is born ened and enlivened by something of the wit, the vivacity, and the love of life and good living that were also part of her French heritage. Tall, commanding, and stately she escaped any suggestion of severity by her gifts of warmth, laughter, and courage which made little of the trials and privations that were a dissenting pastor’s lot and which kept his parsonage both a house of prayer and a house of hope and happiness. Alexander was proving every inch his mother’s son in appearance and also in temperament. He loved and admired his father, but he was a trifle awed by his saintly otherworldliness. He could not and perhaps he did not try to emulate Thomas’s self-abnegation, his uncomplaining submissiveness, or his apathy toward earthly concerns. He both adored and emulated his mother. She was his “beau ideal,” affectionate and exemplary, devoted to the training of her children alike “for public usefulness and for their own individual and social enjoyment.” She also possessed, as he would appreciate more and more with the passing years, “a mental independence” which was seldom equaled by any woman of his acquaintance. As befitted that character in both mother and son, not a trace of dependence or possessiveness was ever to mar the long course of their mutual love. In such a household, even as he took up the study of Latin and Greek in preparation for the university and stored his mind with Homer and Milton and Pope, Alexander found himself acquiring so familiar and natural a knowledge of Proverbs , Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, and the Epistles that, as he later wrote, “They have not only been written on the tablet of my memory, but incorporated with my modes of thinking and speaking.” Moreover, he began to observe that his father was becoming increasingly devoted to study of the Scriptures to the exclusion of church creeds or disciplines. In time, as Thomas discovered the children of the parish confounding the language of the catechism with that of the Bible, he gradually dispensed with the catechism. Whenever Alex now entered the study, where “a large and well-assorted” library lined

a son is born the walls, he would rarely find any books but the Bible and a concordance on his father’s table. He recorded: “Whether he had read all these volumes, and cared nothing more for them, or whether he regarded them as wholly useless, I presumed not to inquire, and dared not to decide”—a comment that was in itself evidence of a respect for his father amounting to awe, since Alex was not naturally given to any such hesitancy in making inquiry or decision. Indeed, even as he acknowledged this reluctance to question his father, he was, in fact, making his first excursion into a bit of independent religious thinking of his own, and an eventful excursion it was. Perhaps it may have been inspired, in part, by reflection on the state of those three younger siblings who had died in infancy and who, if they had died unbaptized or without the pale of election, would, as every child reared in seceder orthodoxy knew, have been buried only to awaken to the terrors of eternal hellfire. In any event, at a time when, outwardly, he was still engrossed in youthful sports and escapades, he was already, in secret, beginning to debate with himself the tenet of elect and non-elect infants and its terrible but inescapable corollary, the doctrine of infant damnation. At first, as he later recorded these trials of his “boyish reasonings,” he “dared not say” that this doctrine was “absolutely false, seeing my creed and my ancestors recognized it.” But he kept questioning, how can it be that helpless infants “should be forced into existence, and forced out of it,” only to “go down to everlasting agonies!” His soul “sickened at the thought”—and rebelled. “And yet,” he concluded, “I had lived full fourteen years, before I presumed to utter to any mortal what my heart felt.” Even then, quite apparently, he did not unburden himself to his father. Nor could he at that time have understood that he was driving the entering wedge to undermine a whole structure of belief. Nevertheless, at age fourteen, he had registered his first revolt against an article of his Calvinistic faith. He knew that,

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Alexander Campbell: Adventurer in Fr e e d o m somehow, one item of his creed did not comport with the loving God and the merciful son whom he heard preached from his father’s pulpit. Still, despite a command of Paradise Lost and a judgment on the dogma of infant damnation, the boy was not yet lost in the scholar or the incipient religious thinker. To come off victorious in a battle of snowballs, to win from the farmers themselves the championship in sowing grain—such things remained pleasant indeed. After a long spell over his books, it was good to find a quiet pool for an hour’s fishing, or a swim—and he became an excellent swimmer. Or, with his dog at his heels and gun in hand, it was good to go for a ramble through the countryside, past the whitewashed thatched cottages with their gaily painted doors and sills, past the enclosed vegetable gardens and the neat fields sown in wheat, potatoes, and carrots, or the grazing flocks of Cannough and Berkshire sheep and herds of hardy Scots ponies; and, if a rabbit should start up from a white thorn hedgerow, or a covey of birds from the grass—so much the better. There was an added attraction to the latter sport, as ammunition was costly and money scarce. Alex, enjoying any challenge to his wit and ingenuity, decided to overcome the difficulty in a very simple manner. He manufactured his own gunpowder and succeeded all too well. Having learned the formula and mixed the ingredients, he no sooner set about drying the mass when the whole thing exploded with such violence that he barely escaped being seriously injured. The time Alex spent at such sports and exploits was far from wasted. He was learning early to confront his opponents with vigor in attack and skill in using whatever weapons were at hand. This experience would serve him well one day, to help him win his place in a strange frontier civilization. Jane and Thomas Campbell were carefully guiding young Alexander’s feet in religious paths. And at last, it appeared, the boy was not finding the way tedious.

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“One of the Best Scholars in the Kingdom”

I

n 1804 Thomas Campbell again saw fit to move his family. There were now three more mouths to feed—another daughter, Jane, having been born on June 25, 1800, and two sons—Thomas, Jr., born May 1, 1802, and Archibald, born April 4, 1804. Thomas had proved to be no farmer. A mind attuned to whisperings of the Holy Spirit and engrossed with the beauties of Latin and Greek could not bring itself to a proper consideration of the time to plant potatoes and sow grain. Once Alexander’s hand was removed from the plow, the farm had become an even more unprofitable business.

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“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ”

Thomas Campbell ultimately moved his family to Rich Hill, where they occupied the whitewashed village house in which Thomas also conducted an academy from 1804-1807.

Thomas’ income—the small stipend paid by his congregation and the thirty pounds per year granted by the government to seceder preachers—being insufficient for the needs of a family of eight and a large part of his time already employed as tutor to his own children, Thomas decided to take up his old occupation of schoolmaster. This time, he would open his own academy. The prospect was especially inviting since Alexander, now age sixteen, was proficient enough in the ordinary branches of learning to act as his assistant. The Campbells accordingly moved into Rich Hill, where Thomas had secured a three-story house large enough for both home and academy. It was a pleasant place to live, this town on a hill. Richardson’s Hill it really was, though there was a more ancient and more musical name, Legacorry or Log-a-choire, meaning “hollow of the caldron.” The antique, castellated mansion of the Richardsons, with its heavy topped gables and towering chimneystacks, formed one side of the town square on the summit of the hill. From the summit the waters of Lough Neagh could be

“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ”

The house faced the gates of Rich Hill Manor, home of William Richardson, who asked Alexander to serve as a tutor to his daughters.

glimpsed in the distance—overlooking the village of tradesmen, craftsmen, mechanics, cattlemen, foresters, and ploughmen, who had grown up under its protection. The Campbells now occupied one of the whitewashed village houses of stone and mortar that formed the other three sides of the square, and their home faced the castle gates. Wonderful gates they were too, some eighteen or twenty feet high with the Richardson coat of arms in the upper portion, wrought by the master craftsman, Thornberry, and famed as one of the finest pieces of ironwork in Ireland. Rich Hill was, moreover, an excellent place to start an academy. It was a prosperous town, an important part of Armagh’s linen industry—there being, some said, more looms than houses in the county—and the farmer who raised his own flax and marketed his own webs could make as much as five shillings a day, with the result that even the meanest cottage of the region “had something of neatness to recommend it.” The poverty and filth seen all too often in other parts of Ireland were almost unknown there. This prosperity, in turn, had developed in the people of Armagh, even

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“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” in the children, “a degree of independence” not to be found elsewhere in all Ireland and encouraged among them an interest in education rooted in a centuries-old tradition. As everyone knew, the little city of Armagh, four miles southwest of Rich Hill, had been a “center of illumination” when the rest of Europe was shrouded “in the darkness of idolatry and ignorance.” St. Patrick, according to legend, established there a school whose students, as recorded in the annals of Ulster, once exceeded seven thousand. Such a community would welcome an academy conducted by Thomas Campbell whose ability as a teacher was already well known. According to the prospectus announcing the opening of Rich Hill Academy, the new school conducted by “Rev. Thomas Campbell and son” proposed to receive both boarders and day scholars and “fit them either for the Compting house or the University in little more than half the time that is usually spent for that purpose.” In the mercantile department the subjects offered were reading, writing, bookkeeping, English grammar, and French, while the preparatory course for the university was to cover, in addition, the study of “Latin, Greek, Mathematicks, Geography, Maps, Use of Globes, Sacred and Political History, Rhetorick and the Belle Lettres.” Evidently Rich Hill Academy lived up to its prospectus for soon enough students were enrolled to increase the family income to some two hundred pounds a year, an increase all the more welcome when in April 1806, Jane Campbell gave birth to her tenth and last child, a daughter whom they named Alicia. Meanwhile, Alexander was establishing his own reputation for learning. William Richardson, lord of Rich Hill Castle and high sheriff as well as a member of parliament for county Armagh, asked him to become the private tutor of his three young daughters. Mr. Richardson was apparently not thought to be a man given to worldly fashions and pleasures like Lord Gosford, for Thomas Campbell made no objection and Alexander became tutor to the Misses Elizabeth, Isabella, and Louisa Richardson.

“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” With his new duties, he spent many hours in the dignified, oakpaneled rooms of the old mansion. He doubtless learned something of the romantic legends properly attached to its ancient walls—stories of the fatal duel over a love affair fought between two brothers in the capacious salon, of the human remains buried in cavities between the thick walls, and of the “rustling lady” who haunted the long flagged passages. New legends, too, were growing up around the memory of its late mistress, the vivacious Dolly Monroe, first wife of William Richardson, whose beauty had been the toast of Dublin society until, with viceroys and provosts at her feet, she had chosen the comparative obscurity of marriage with a quiet, country gentleman. Many another hour, Alexander spent walking with his sisters in the old manor garden, to enjoy its profusion of gillyflowers, rosemary, and lavender, its wide beds of tulips, borders of roses, and clumps of carnations, its shrubberies of evergreens and dusky ilex, and its peach, cherry, pear, plum, and apple trees trained against the garden walls. Surely it was a pleasant place in which to dream of the day when he himself would be master of a house and a garden.

w For all his new duties as assistant in his father’s academy and private tutor to the castle children, Alexander still was not forgetting his pledge to make himself “one of the best scholars in the kingdom.” He virtually abandoned his hopes of entering the University of Glasgow, that prospect having receded with every new addition to the Campbell family. But he consoled himself with the reflection that “all distinguished scholars are essentially self-educated men,” and thanked the good fortune that had already given him such a thorough grounding in the essentials. He was learning to pity rather than envy those schoolmates whose parents he once thought more generous and less exacting. In later years, after he was acquainted with distinguished educators in

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“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” both the Old World and the New, he would declare his father “the best educator of young men I ever knew.” Given his first watch when he was sixteen, Alexander now became so aware of every passing hour that the value of time became almost an obsession with him. He often arose at four in the morning to study and remained at his books until late in the night. More and more his appetite for reading was drawn to authors of philosophical, moral, and religious cast. Then Thomas Campbell directed his son’s attention to the writings of John Locke—and immediately Alexander was started upon his most exciting intellectual adventure. He read Locke’s “Letters on Toleration” and “Second Treatise of Government.” There, the young seeker—already heir to both his mother’s spirited independence and his father’s love of peace and religious concord— began to find the philosophical argument and justification for those ideas of religious liberty with which he would startle the ecclesiastical heads of the New World as much as the reddest Jacobin’s ideas of civil liberty had startled the political heads of the Old World. He read “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” There, in Locke’s empirical psychology, bound by observation and freed from theological trappings and supernatural assumptions, the young thinker began to find his method. The method soon bore fruit in his own experience. For some time, his father had been concerned over the state of Alexander’s soul. Thomas’ concern heightened when Alexander passed his sixteenth birthday without having received any divine assurance that he was among the “elect.” Intellectually, he might be competent to teach in his father’s academy. Spiritually, he was not worthy to be accepted as a communicant in his father’s church. So, impelled by this awareness of Thomas’ “affectionate solicitude,” he began an agonized “seeking” for conversion. Characteristically, he turned first to his books. He bought Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted and Allen’s Alarm, hearing them “highly recommended by the pious.” He sought out Thomas Boston’s The

“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” Fourfold State and the memoirs of Bunyan, Hallyburton, and John Newton. All these and other “converting books” he read “with avidity.” Upon them, as well as upon his Bible, he prayed long and ardently for “the accompanying influences of the Holy Spirit.” But the Holy Spirit paid him no heed. His usual vivacity deserted him. Like his father before him, he took to lonely walks in the fields and to prayer in secluded spots. While concealing his “pains and conflicts” from “all the living,” he became oppressed with the “fearful apprehension” that his “sorrows for sin” were not deep enough, that he had not “sufficiently found the depravity” of his heart. He envied Newton “his long agony” and Bunyan “his despair.” He even longed for the spirit of God to bring him down to “the very verge of suffering the pains of the damned” that he might be raised to share the joys of “genuine converts.” Sometimes he felt that he had gone “just as far as human nature could go without supernatural aid,” and that one step more would place him among “the regenerated of the Lord.” And yet, “Heaven refused its aid.” Thomas Campbell may have had a proper “experience,” but the supernatural seemed loath to make itself manifest to his son. At length, the natural reasserted itself. The human body could not forever support such agony of spirit. Furthermore, the logic of John Locke was having its effect upon this new disciple. Looking at the situation rationally and in the light of his own robust common sense, Alexander decided that a simple trust in Christ’s promise to save penitent sinners should be an all-sufficient saving grace. As soon as he was able “to feel this reliance” on the word of Christ, he “obtained and enjoyed peace of mind.” When, in after years, he matter-of-factly recorded his “experience,” he concluded: “It never entered into my head (then) to investigate the subject of baptism or the doctrines of the creed.” It was well, at this time, that he did not. Once such investigation was started, he was to obtain no peace of mind again until he broke the moorings of his past and set his own independent course.

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Portrait of John Locke (1632-1704) by Sir Godfrey Kneller and photo of “Essay on Human Understanding.” Alexander Campbell was seventeen years of age when he first read Locke’s essay. The philosopher was a great influence on Campbell.

In truth, he had already come further than he knew. At fourteen, he had rebelled against the doctrine of infant damnation. Now, two or three years later, he had decided that a miraculous outpouring of the Holy Spirit was not necessary for conversion— a second rejection of a cardinal tenet of his creed. But as yet he was scarcely aware of the radical implications of his attitude and evidently said nothing of his perplexities to his father. For Thomas happily accepted his son’s testimony and received him as a communicant in his Ahorey congregation. Thomas was also happy for another reason. He had only one ambition for his eldest son—that he would follow his own example and make the ministry his career. The boy’s conversion gave him hope that this ambition would be fulfilled. But much as he wished to please his father, Alexander was not yet so sure about his

“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” future. He still felt a desire to become a man of letters, and the law also had begun to have some attractions for him. Furthermore, his religious interests were partly due to the rearing of pious parents, while his knowledge of religion was largely restricted to the Bible and the Presbyterian catechism. This was not a sufficient basis on which to settle so important a question. A son of Jane Campbell would make his own decision, only after the broadest examination. So Alexander launched upon a wider reading in theology and ecclesiastical history. It was a memorable launching and uncertain in destination. Gibbon, on such a voyage, put into the port of atheism. Luther discovered the new territory of Protestantism, and Newman would return to the haven of Roman Catholicism. With Alexander Campbell, only one thing was sure: his inquisitive, critical mind must find some system of truth agreeable to its own nature.

w First of all, he began a study of the Roman Catholic Church. The conclusion, of course, was foregone. The son of a plain, Scots seceder and an independent Huguenot could find no response in his heart to Catholicism’s elaborate structure and ritual, while his mind looked with abhorrence upon its laity’s unquestioning obedience to the authority of their priesthood. Furthermore, the Ireland of the early nineteenth century was surely the worst of all possible worlds in which to observe the workings of the Roman Catholic religion. Confiscation of their lands and denial of civil rights had long since driven most of the Irish gentry into exile, and the Catholic peasantry, reduced to serfdom and dependent for education on the outlawed Catholic “hedge schools” conducted by teachers with a price on their heads, had grown more and more lazy and lawless, as well as cringing, shifty, and untruthful. It was not surprising that young Alexander, reared in a tradition of scholarship and learning, should have stood aghast before the ignorance and superstition of the Irish Catholics.

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“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” When he turned his attention to the Church of England, the picture of the oppressor pleased him little more than that of the oppressed. He was as repelled by the arrogance and assumption of the king’s church toward its dissenting subjects as he was by the docile submissiveness that the Roman Catholic Church required from its priest-ridden peasantry. Also, their church rituals were almost equally elaborate and formal. Like his father, he considered the Anglican adherents far too lordly and worldly. It might be true that for centuries barons of Lochow and earls and dukes of Argyll bearing the name Campbell had been the virtual uncrowned rulers of Scotland, and their clansmen shared in their pride. But this pride held little pretension, for the Scottish Highlanders lived in a frugal and challenging land, which helped breed in them a fierce spirit of self-reliance and an uncompromising love of freedom and independence. Alexander, both by training and heritage, was inclined to feel that sloth was the sinful parent of abject poverty, greed the sinful parent of vast wealth, and the road to Heaven surest for the middle class. The Presbyterian Church was certainly middle class enough. Yet when he came to study the history of his own church, he would discover there far too little evidence of liberty, tolerance, or the Christian virtues of humility and forbearance. Politically it was true the Presbyterians had always been found in the vanguard of the dissenting sects fighting for liberty, whether composing “the flower of Washington’s army” or leading the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Counting themselves predestined sons and daughters of God, they were no mean foe to be awed by the rustlings of a cavalier or an archbishop, a king, or a prelate. But they appeared in the anomalous position of espousing republicanism in politics and absolutism in religion. The Church of Scotland was no less a state church than the Church of England, and the fact that its discipline was Presbyterian rather than Anglican made it no less prone to exercise complete authority and demand absolute conformity in its own jurisdi c t i o n .

“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” Insisting on liberty from without, for free exercise of Presbyterian conscience, would allow little freedom of opinion from within the church itself. The more Alexander read history, the more he agreed with those who, like the Puritan independents, John Owen and John Milton, saw little to choose between “new presbyter” and “old priest.” It was a Presbyterian divine who had provoked Cromwell to that most revealing of reprimands: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.” It was a Presbyterian member of the Long Parliament who had denounced Sir Henry Vane’s plea of toleration, for at least all Protestant sects in the Puritan Commonwealth with the revealing castigation: “Toleration will make the kingdom a chaos, a Babel, another Amsterdam . . . toleration is the grand work of the devil, his masterpiece, and . . . sure way to destroy all religion.” These were words in strange contrast to the reasoned argument of John Locke: The mutual toleration of Christians in their different professions of religion . . . I esteem . . . to be the chief characteristical mark of the true church . . . (for) liberty of conscience is every man’s natural right . . . and . . . it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one man over another, as to compel anyone to his religion. This logic of Locke and the pleas of the Puritan Independents all the more easily impressed themselves on Alexander as he observed the fruits of the denial of toleration and the demand for uniformity. To describe fully his own religious affiliation, he had to say that he belonged to the Old-Light Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterian Church, and every word in the title represented a schism in the mother church of Scotland which had crossed the channel to separate the churches in Ireland.

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“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” Each party of Presbyterians opposed the others almost as violently as they opposed the Roman Catholic or the Anglican. Though Thomas Campbell was loyal to the Presbyterian discipline and doctrine he had espoused, Alexander knew that his father considered these divisions in his church the greatest personal trial of his ministry and that he was constantly seeking ways to reconcile the bitter factions. Encouraging the Campbells to further comparison of independents and Presbyterians, there was a congregation of Scots Independents in Rich Hill. The seceder synod rather reluctantly granted the privilege of “occasional hearing” to its clergy, and Thomas sometimes attended their meetings in the evening after he had discharged his duties to his own flock. He found a cordial welcome, for the Rich Hill independents recognized him as one of the most godly and learned of the seceders, though they received his visits with a hint of tolerant amusement, comparing him with Nicodemus, “who came to Jesus by night.” Alexander often accompanied his father on these nocturnal visits. He might reflect that it was not a new thing for Campbells to mingle with independents, since horsemen of Clan Campbell had ridden by the score with Cromwell’s Ironsides. His readings in history were giving him an ever-increasing respect for the iron souls and vigorous natures which had sprung from the loins of English separatism. Indeed, when he began theological study in earnest right after his conversion, he first turned to the writings of John Owen, Cromwell’s chaplain in Ireland and head of Christ Church. The Puritan divine became “a great favorite” with him, and he began to add Owen’s twenty-one octavo volumes to his bookshelves. More far reaching was the influence of the lord protector’s Latin secretary, as Alexander turned from the poetry to the prose of the man who had joined his pen to Cromwell’s sword to lead the independents to victory. In Milton, he found all those freethinking, intellectual audacities most certain to excite his imagination. The Areopagitica—with its denun-

“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” ciation of the “fantastic terrors of sect and schism,” of the “prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men”—seemed to him the great trumpet voice for the tolerance and liberty which his father, in more muted tones, was daily trying to sound in the little pastorate of Ahorey. And thereafter, in his hall of immortals, he would place John Milton in a niche only a little lower than that reserved for John Locke. These three belonged together in his thinking, of course— Owen, Milton, and John Locke, who had entered Christ Church, Oxford, while Owen was dean and vice-chancellor of the university. Alexander began to realize that the study of independency was proving equally stimulating in both religious and political fields of thought. The party of Owen, Milton, Vane, and Cromwell had proved too small a minority to leaven the subject masses, and the Stuart Restoration had ushered in a new era of absolutism. In debates around campfires and in taverns, independency had clarified its new political philosophy based on the principle that the individual, as both Christian and citizen, derives from nature certain inalienable rights which the church and the state alike are bound to respect. When William III ended the rule of the second Stuarts in 1688, it was John Locke, the apologist for this “Glorious Revolution,” who, writing just thirty years after Cromwell’s death, gave classic form to Puritanism’s far-reaching doctrine of natural rights. Thus, Alexander was learning that the threads of religion and of politics are inextricably interwoven into the fabric of society. He was learning also that liberty in church and state alike is both a priceless and precarious heritage, to be safeguarded by ceaseless vigilance. By the time Locke’s treatises on civil and religious liberty were beginning to direct Campbell’s thoughts, absolutism was again in the ascendancy in Great Britain. The despotic George III was on the throne. In Parliament, the Whigs, successors to Cromwell’s Roundheads, were being overreached on every hand by the Anglicans and

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“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” Tories; and Ireland was desolate in its failures to win independence both in 1798 and in a second rebellion which Robert Emmett had fomented in 1803. Still, the picture was far from bleak. Recent events in America and in France had proved how hardy was the plant that had been nurtured by English independency. In the little stone meetinghouse of the independents at Rich Hill, Alexander could hear and observe firsthand some of the practices and beliefs that had brought this plant to flower. With characteristic liberality, the Rich Hill independents opened their doors to preachers of various persuasions and points of view. Alexander later recalled he heard “almost all the men of note that were conspicuous from 1800 to 1809.” He heard John Walker of Dublin, a fellow and teacher at Trinity College until, in 1804, he announced extreme separatist views, laid aside his Anglican cleric’s garb, sold his carriage, and started a preaching tour on foot through Ireland and England. This singular and learned man made quite an impression on young Alexander, who, after the sermon, accompanied his father and an Ahorey elder to Walker’s lodgings and listened with great curiosity to their religious conversation. He also “listened with pleasure” to the sermons of two English evangelists named Cooper and Richards, who belonged to a sect of Calvinistic Methodists known as the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion. He heard as well Alexander Carson of Tubbermore, a “devout and excellent” teacher and a “laborious critic” well-versed in Greek, who had left the Presbyterians to join the independents in 1803, later explaining his new position in a book that Alexander was to read with some profit. Exciting considerable flurry was the visit to Rich Hill of “the celebrated” Rowland Hill, an English cleric generally regarded as the most spectacular preacher of his generation. The son of a baronet, Hill had shocked his rich and aristocratic family by his warm advocacy of the American Revolution. A cleric in the Church of England, in his student days he had scandalized the Cambridge authorities by emulating George Whitefield and in

“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” later years outraged some of his strict Anglican communicants by touring Scotland at the invitation of the non-conforming Haldane brothers. Hill was the master of an eccentric, satirical wit and of a pulpit style that caused Southey to declare him “a performer as great in his own line as Kean or Kemble.” Of far more importance in Rich Hill was the preaching of Rowland Hill’s nonconforming friend, James Alexander Haldane. He was a famous Scottish divine and reformer, who in 1790 had been ordained pastor of a large independent church in Edinburgh, the first Congregational Church to be known by that name in Scotland. Along with his brother Robert, he set in motion a great spiritual awakening throughout Scotland. Many of the Scots Congregationalists were of the Glasite persuasion, owing their origin to John Glas, who in 1728 had forsworn the national kirk because of independent views derived chiefly from reading John Owen. Glas established strong churches throughout Scotland which were ably maintained by his son-in-law and associate, Robert Sandeman. The Rich Hill church, however, disavowed some of the views of Glas and Sandeman and leaned strongly in sentiment toward the new reformatory movement of the Haldanes, so that the visit of James Alexander Haldane to their little stone meetinghouse was a great day in the history of Rich Hill independents. This was a provocative group of preachers, certain to start a ferment of new ideas in the mind of a young seeker searching for his true church and seriously considering the ministry as his own career. At this time, it is true, he did not concern himself with the minutia of the doctrinal differences between the various groups of Scots independents and English Congregationalists. In some respects, his Calvinistic orthodoxy was not threatened in their company. Walker, Carson, and the Haldanes, he perceived, were as strict hyper-Calvinists as were any of his father’s elders at Ahorey. Among these independents he did observe, with growing admiration, two practices that he knew were in direct opposition

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“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” to the dictates of the seceder synod. In the first place, contrary to the Acts of Assembly of his own church which forbade any communicant to interpret the Scriptures “but he that is duly called thereto by God and his kirk,” he found that a fundamental principle of independency was the right of private judgment, each communicant being encouraged to read and interpret the Bible for him- or herself. In the second place, he realized that the tyranny of a papacy, prelacy, or presbytery could never be exercised under a Congregational system of church government, since each congregation was independent and supreme in its own jurisdiction. Here he was observing the principles of republicanism made operative in the Kingdom of the Lord. If he were discovering that the three grand divisions of the church into the Episcopal, the Presbyterian, and the independent systems could be said to have their rough equivalents in the three political divisions of Tory, Whig, and democrat, then he was beginning to suspect that he himself belonged among the Independents and the democrats.

w Nevertheless, he did not yet feel tempted to make a grand decision and renounce the faith of his father—as Thomas had once renounced the faith of his father, Archibald. For one thing, as he later wrote, having learned all of Solomon’s proverbs when a child, he was well warned against “being wise too soon.” No youth, he was certain, had ever been more thoroughly imbued with orthodoxy—Presbyterian orthodoxy—than he had been from his infancy. For another thing, it was not a good time to trouble his father with a new worry or perplexity. By 1806, Thomas Campbell had become a sick man, and his doctors were advising a voyage to America as the best hope of restoring his health. He had been overburdened a long time, not only by his regular duties as pastor and teacher. From the begin-

“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” ning of his ministry, he worked constantly and assiduously at his self-imposed tasks of trying to arouse a more Christian spirit of unity and cooperation in a divided, sectarian church. The repeated rebuffs and failures he met in these attempts had proved far harder on him than any of his physical labors. In October of 1798, the very year he ended his term as probationer with the call to the Ahorey pastorate, he was one of thirteen ministers representing four denominations who met at Armagh and organized “The Evangelical Society of Ulster.” It was a nonsectarian movement created to employ evangelists for a “more extensive usefulness in spreading the glorious Gospel” to those outside the churches. The secession church was not pleased. At its annual meeting in Belfast in July 1799, the Associate Synod of Ireland recognized the ordination of the new pastor at Ahorey and seated him in the assembly. It also declared the Evangelical S o ciety “constituted on principles not consistent with the Secession Testimony” and appointed “a Comtee . . . to converse with Rev. Thos. Campbell on his connection with the Evangl. Socy.” Thomas evidently felt that it did not become so young a minister to appear refractory. Two days later, a paper “drawn up and subscribed” by him was read before the assembly, in which he promised “to endeavor to see eye to eye with the Revd. Synod . . . and in the meantime to desist from any official intercourse with sd. socy. only remaining a simple subscriber.” The synod kept close watch on its suspect ministers and at the next annual session reported: “Re Rev. Thos. Campbell and the Evangl. Socy . . . that Mr. C. had given full satisfaction, and had not even paid last year’s subscription.” Nevertheless, he managed to continue some participation in the work until 1803, when the synod finally banned the society altogether. The seceder pastors at Rich Hill and Armagh, along with part of their congregations, withdrew to form independent churches. Thomas Campbell may have been tempted to join them. Convinced, however, that unity began at home, he was, at

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“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” this time, busily engaged in a concrete plan for healing one of the schisms in his own church, a work he would have had to abandon unless he accepted the ruling of the synod. So, stating his position in a spirit long remembered as “befitting the character of the organization” and the high principles “which he would fain see translated into action,” he took reluctant leave of the Evangelical Society. Though his first attempt at interdenominational cooperation and fraternity had failed, he renewed his efforts in his own congregation. A few months later, he was serving on a committee of consultation that met at Rich Hill in October 1803 to draw up proposals for union between the burgher and anti-burgher branches of the secession church. Chosen to speak for the committee before the annual synod meeting at Belfast in 1804, he made an impassioned argument against the “lamentable evils” of “our unhappy division,” which moved the synod to approve the propositions for union. This assembly might not understand Thomas Campbell’s penchant for unorthodox movements like the Evangelical Society, but it understood very well his argument that it made little sense for seceder churches in Ireland to be divided over a burgher oath required only in Scotland. It was even ready to go so far as to suggest that the mother church might leave the Irish synod free to act on its own judgment in this matter. The mother church thought otherwise, and as its displeasure was quietly made known, the incipient plans for union were shelved for the time. The question of union with the burghers was again before the Associate Synod of Ireland when it met at Belfast on July 8, 1805. Thomas Campbell was in such high favor that he was named moderator of the assembly. Evidently, however, he was still given to expression of liberal ideas disquieting to the more orthodox of his churchmen; for the following day “the late modr” was “called upon to explain some sentiments” delivered in his opening sermon. Once more, Thomas thought it best to bow to the “Revd.

“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” Synod,” doubtless this time because of the larger question of union before the body. In any event, the next day, he gave “satisfactory explanations” of his remarks and was accordingly appointed one of the commissioners to take the union plea of the Irish churches before the General Associate Synod of Scotland meeting at Glasgow in August. He crossed the channel with high hope and presented the pleas with moving eloquence. A man who heard him there summed up the situation in a succinct phrase when he met Alexander on the streets of Glasgow some two years later: “While, in my opinion, he clearly out-argued them, they outvoted him.” This failure was a final blow to Thomas’ already uncertain health. Daily, he saw the Christ being crucified anew by these bickerings and divisions among His professed followers. Daily, he heard his own voice as that of one crying in the wilderness. At last, he grew so thin, pale, and afflicted with “a nervous dyspepsia” that his physicians actually despaired of his life unless he took a long sea voyage. He refused, until Alexander settled the matter by revealing that he himself, as soon as he reached the age of twenty-one, intended to exchange the oppressions of Ireland for the freedoms of the New World. The prospect was made the more pleasant by Thomas’ knowledge that he would not go among strangers. For more than a hundred years, discontent with conditions at home—Test Acts, famine, high rents, restrictions on home industry—had been sending successive waves of Ulster Scots to America; and the failure of the rebellions of 1798 and 1803 was resulting in a new wave of emigration. Thomas made his preparation to depart with a group of friends and neighbors. This departure took on an added significance to Alexander when he learned that a certain Miss Hannah Acheson was also preparing for the voyage to America. Three Acheson brothers— Thomas, David, and John—had long since left Ireland to start a prosperous mercantile business in Pennsylvania. John, Hannah’s father, had died while crossing the Allegheny Mountains in 1799.

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“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” The recent death of her mother now leaving her an orphan, she decided to accept her uncles’ invitation to make her home with them in America. The Achesons, being old friends of the Campbells, were especially glad for the opportunity to place Hannah in her pastor’s care for the journey. The news brought Alexander no elation. To him, Miss Acheson’s eyes had long seemed bright indeed, and Ireland would be the darker for her going. On April l, 1807, Thomas Campbell took leave of his family and his church. He left behind him a sincerely grieving congregation, some of whom may have felt an added pang of regret for admonitions unheeded and opportunities unrealized as he read them the text of his last sermon: “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!” Though their limitation of vision might constantly be defeating the purposes of his idealistic philosophy, the people of Ahorey loved this gentle, kindly man who talked to them so earnestly in the language of Christ’s Apostles. His name would go down in their parish register as that of “the celebrated Thomas Campbell.” Traveling to Londonderry, Thomas embarked on the ship Brutus and, while awaiting a favorable wind for sailing, he addressed some final words of advice to his children—words of spiritual import only, since he would leave the mere physical to care for itself. He wrote: “Come out, my dear son from the wicked of the world and be separate, and ‘touch not the unclean thing,” saith the Lord, “and I will receive you and will be a father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters.” . . . My dear children, look to this divine direction and promise, and the Lord will be with you and be your God; and “if God be for us, who can be against us?” . . . Live to God . . . Be

“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” a sincere Christian. . .i.e., embrace (the Gospel) as your heritage, your portion . . . Live by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ . . . Above all things, attend to this, for without him you can do nothing, either to the glory of God or your own good. On April 8, a favorable wind arose; the Brutus passed out of Lough Foyle and rounded Malin-Head. Thomas Campbell, age forty-four, looked on Ireland for the last time and then set his face toward Philadelphia. Alexander, in his nineteenth year, thus found himself a man with responsibilities. He was head of the house, the mainstay of his mother in the care of his six younger brothers and sisters, and he was in charge of his father’s academy. His energy, buoyancy, and optimism proved equal to the tasks. Fortunately, all anxiety concerning Thomas was relieved in about three months by the receipt of a letter. After a pleasant and quick voyage of only thirtyfive days, he was the guest of his friend, David Acheson, in Philadelphia, and had been kindly received by the Associate Synod of North America. God had been good, and Thomas’s letter throbbed with thankfulness: What a debtor am I to the grace of God! and what a debtor are you, my dear Jane, and you, my dear little ones . . . for these kindnesses conferred upon me are also for your sakes, that, through his mercy, we may yet praise him together in the congregation of his people . . . And you, dear Alexander, upon whom the burden lies at present . . . make it your chief duty to do all to please and nothing to offend that great God who has raised such friends. Alexander had begun the practice of keeping a notebook of favorite passages of literature. He now lovingly copied this letter of his father’s, as well as the Londonderry letter, into the notebook,

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“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” already well filled with quotations from Dr. Johnson, the philosophical poetry of Young, the Scottish poet and writer, James Beattie, the French naturalist Buffon, and other “esteemed authors.” Alexander managed the Rich Hill Academy successfully to the close of the term. Having received no instructions from his father, he went to Newry to teach some classes for his Uncle Archibald, who was carrying on the school there alone after the death of his brother Enos. There was now another vacancy in the Campbell family circle that Alexander would feel keenly at Newry—that of eccentric, high-tempered, but genial and kindly Grandfather Archibald, who loved to enthrall the grandchildren with tales of his exploits during the wars in Canada. Best of all, the old soldier liked to retell the story of the death of General Wolfe. He had been near the general that day, in the thick of battle on the Plains of Abraham, when Wolfe had fallen, thrice wounded, with a fatal bullet in his lung. Rushing forward, he had caught the general in his arms and carried him to the rear to die. But Wolfe had died in his arms for the last time. Sometime in 1807, at the age of eighty-seven, Archibald Campbell, soldier of Quebec, died in his bed and was buried in a quiet parish churchyard. As the year 1807 wore on, grief over the death of Grandfather Archibald began to mingle with a new concern over the safety of Thomas. The late summer passed, and the fall, and then the winter; and no further word came from America. Alexander continued to teach at Newry, with frequent visits home to Rich Hill. All his high spirits and his mother’s “mental independence” were needed to carry the family through the months of anxious waiting. Finally, in March 1808, a letter arrived. It brought good news and the knowledge that earlier letters written by Thomas had been lost in passage. “I perceive myself in the arms of Almighty Goodness, and am greatly comforted,” he wrote. Having found America a “land of peace, liberty, and prosperity,” he prepared a home in western Pennsylvania and awaited his family’s coming.

“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” Jane and the children lost no time in starting preparations for departure. Then, suddenly, all else was forgotten with the cry that struck terror to all who heard it: smallpox had invaded the village! Before they could be inoculated, several of the younger Campbell children were stricken. They all recovered; but pretty, flaxenhaired little Jane would always wear the ugly scars. It was not until August 20 that Alexander could set out on the two-day horseback journey to Londonderry to make arrangements for their passage with the captain of the Hibernia. He lingered awhile to see the sights of Londonderry, a city famous for the great siege of 1689 when its people, loyal to the cause of William and Mary, endured famine and bombardment for 105 days rather than submit to James II. As the Hibernia did not sail for several weeks, he was delighted, on his return home, to find some friends wanting him to accompany them on a trip to Dublin. He stayed a week in Dublin, keeping a careful journal. There, he recorded his pleasure in the fine harbor, the Four Courts on Inno-Quay, the Linen-Hall, Royal Exchange, botanical gardens, and the museum. He walked around Trinity College Green and conversed with one of the students. As befitted the son of a clergyman, he paid due attention to the city’s “numerous and elegantly conducted” poorhouses and infirmaries, being especially impressed by a foundling hospital, where he observed the “happy effects of economy, regularity, and good discipline” as he saw a thousand children gathered in a di ning hall and heard a child of twelve give thanks “in a small pulpit before and after dinner.” Soon after his return to Rich Hill, on September 20, the entire family set out for Londonderry. By the 28th, they had made themselves comfortable on board the Hibernia, having managed to secure quarters somewhat apart from the other passengers. Surrounded by their books and household goods, Jane was plying her usual tasks. Alexander conducted family worship m o r ning and evening, much as if they were still at home in Rich

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“ o ne of th e b e st sc h olar s ” Hill. Jane had no intention of letting the children’s usual routine be disturbed any more than was necessary; for, even with the best of luck, they could not hope to reach New York in less than five weeks. And they were beginning to wonder if the best of luck was likely to attend their voyage. Though the Hibernia was a strongly built craft, it appeared that it was poorly manned and managed. The twelve men in the crew seemed, for the most part, young and inexperienced, while the captain, Jacob Jumer, so the rumor went, was more given to his cups than to good seamanship. Placing her trust in God and trying not to long too ardently for the reassuring presence of Thomas, Jane Campbell gathered her brood about her and prepared to make the best of things. The younger children, of course, would prove an especial care—baby Alicia, age two; Archibald, age four; Thomas, Jr., an active boy of six; and eight-year-old Jane, only recently recovered from the smallpox. Nancy, age thirteen, was a quiet and retiring child, much like her father. On the two oldest children, Jane knew she could depend for any assistance. Alexander, just past his twentieth birthday, was a young man with an unmistakable air of decision and self-reliance. His sister Dorothea, an intelligent and thoughtful young lady of fifteen, much resembled him. Finally, on Saturday, October l, 1808, wind and tide proved favorable. The Hibernia weighed anchor, proudly fired a salute from her ten cannons, and sailed up Lough Foyle toward the sea.

.4. s

A Shipwreck, Its Suspicious Conclusion and a Voyage Accomplished

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r o m t h e f i r s t the Hibernia seemed ill starred. Becalmed at the mouth of the lough all Saturday night, she was favored with a breeze on Sunday morning and sailed out into the Atlantic. Soon after Captain Jumer took on a supply of whiskey at Inishowen Head, the wind rose to a gale that swept the ship back from Malin-Head toward the rocky coast of the Isle of Islay. The sailors hastened to take refuge in Lock Indaal where the Hibernia rode at anchor for three days while the passengers, all unaware that pilots from shore had warned the captain that the inlet was unsafe for vessels, felt no concern and amused themselves as best they could.

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Newspaper notices of the Hibernia’s departure and shipwreck. The Belfast News Letter gave notice on September 9, 1808, of the proposed departure of the Hibernia from Londonderry to America. The ship set sail on October 1 but encountered numerous difficulties. A notice of the shipwreck appeared in the Belfast News Letter on October 21, 1808.

a sh i pwr e c k Alexander spent the time pleasantly until disturbed by an odd occurrence. It was on Friday evening, October 7, when, after the hour of family worship, he stretched out on a couch and began reading to Dorothea from Thomas Boston’s The Fourfold State. The stimulating writing of the Presbyterian divine was unable to compete with the soothing effect of the gently rocking ship. Dorothea soon became drowsy, and a little later Alexander himself fell asleep. Suddenly it seemed to him the ship gave a great shudder. Someone cried out that it had struck a rock. Water came rushing over the deck and he was making desperate attempts to save his family and their possessions. Then he awoke. So impelling had been the dream that he told his mother and Dorothea “I will not undress tonight. I will lay my shoes within my reach and be ready to rise at a moment’s warning; and I would advise you all to be prepared for an emergency.” At length everyone save the watch was in bed, and no sounds broke the stillness except the pounding of waves, the whistle of wind through the rigging, and the creaking of cables that held the vessel fast. Then about ten o’clock a sudden gale swept into the bay, and within minutes a violent crash shook the vessel. Passengers were hurled from their berths. Alexander was alarmed but not at all surprised to learn that the ship, having dragged her anchors, had struck upon a rock and water was pouring into the hold. All was exactly as in his dream. He managed to get the family safely to the upper deck, no easy task on the sharply heeling vessel, while some of the gentlemen passengers laid to with their broadswords to help the sailors cut away the masts. Soon the Hibernia righted itself somewhat and settled more firmly upon the rock and the captain ordered the minute guns to be fired in the vain hope that they might be heard on shore above the roar of the storm. All through the long night the Campbells huddled on deck with the other passengers, some of whom, Alexander observed, were prostrated with fear, some praying, others confessing their sins and receiving absolution from a priest. Two men, having put

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a sh i pwr e c k on the apron and all the regalia of their masonic order, knelt on the deck with an inch of candle and an open Bible before them, and one young woman sat apart quietly nursing her child. Alexander, once he had made the family as secure as possible, went somewhat apart from the others and sat down upon the stump of a broken mast. He began to sense that an hour of personal decision had come when, whatever the raging elements without, he had need of an inner searching and reflection. The more he reflected the more it appeared to him that the bright promises of the world which once had beckoned him so strongly had become tarnished and tawdry and that, by contrast, the life of his father spent in serving humanity and God shone with greater glory. So he made his decision. If his life were spared it would be spent in service to the Lord. Actually the decision was foregone. The course of his life had been charted long since in a quiet country parish in County Armagh. But it was at this moment, seated on the broken mast of a wrecked ship, that he first admitted to himself his full and irrevocable decision. Though mountainous waves were washing over the deck and the ship threatening to break up on the rocks he did not believe that his decision was motivated by fear or concern for physical safety. Rather the present peril had merely served as a mirror in which he might behold finally and decisively the illusory vanity of the world and the rich realities of a life of the spirit. Nor did he believe, as his father under the same circumstances would have believed, that this “call” to the ministry betokened any special intervention of the Holy Spirit. The actual decision, Alexander did not doubt, came from his own volition and its seat was the intellect, not the emotions. However he was impelled to his decision one thing was certain. He had sailed from Londonderry a boy with conflicting ambitions and plans for the future. Now, a week later, as dawn broke over the Hibernia lying twisted and battered off the coast of Islay, he had become a man with a purpose and a mission.

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w The first gray streaks of dawn also revealed some hope of succor for the passengers and crew of the doomed ship. A small crowd of curious islanders were observed gathered on the shore. Those aboard the Hibernia reserved their joy until they could learn the temper of the onlookers. Only too well they knew that some of the inhabitants of these wild islands were infamous as wreckers who were accustomed to letting all those in foundered ships perish so they could loot the wreckage. Fortunately the present group soon proved of a different mind. They signaled the ship’s crew to secure one end of a rope to the vessel and the other to an empty keg that, on floating ashore, they fastened to a small boat that could then be drawn alongside the Hibernia. Again the gentlemen with broadswords came forward, this time to restrain some panicky male passengers until the women and children could be rescued. As soon as he had watched his mother and brothers and sisters carried to shore Alexander went down into the hold, now half-filled with water, to see about salvaging their possessions. With sure appreciation of the abiding things of life he ignored the casks holding their personal and household goods and searched first for his books. These, with considerable risk to himself, he managed to carry safely to the upper deck before he was forced to leave them and go ashore with the last of the passengers. The Campbells immediately discovered that in the place of their deliverance their name was an “open, Sesame” to hospitali t y. Islay, being one of the Inner Hebrides belonging to Argyllshire, was part of the domain of the Clan Campbell as it had been since early in the seventeenth century when the Campbells had driven out the fierce Macdonalds, hereditary “Lords of the Isles,” whose ruined castles still dotted the cliffs overhanging the sea. The first house where Jane and her family sought shelter belonged to a widow who was a Campbell, and on learning the

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a sh i pwr e c k name of her guests, she redoubled every effort for their comfort until they could secure lodgings in the village some two miles away. There at the head of Loch Indaal was Islay House, ancient seat of the ruling Campbells and its present laird, Campbell of Shawfield, “a distinguished member of the Duke of Argyle’s family.” Observing his shipwrecked young clansman and the many books among his possessions the laird invited him to the mansion and received him more as a relative than as a stranger. Gratifying as were these and other courtesies from the islanders, the family of Thomas Campbell was seriously concerned about its immediate course. Jane and the girls were not eager to attempt a second crossing at so stormy a season; in any event, the Embargo Act still being in effect, it would not be easy to secure another passage very soon. An obvious course soon suggested itself: they would cross to the mainland, spend the winter in Scotland, and there allow Alexander to improve the time by enrolling for a session at the University of Glasgow. The decision, which they were certain Thomas would approve, seemed to Alexander almost too strange and wonderful a twist of fortune and one deepening his conviction that Divine Providence was somehow actively shaping his destiny. A calamity at sea which might easily have taken all their lives had resulted instead in his dedication to the ministry and in fulfillment of his long-cherished but abandoned dream of following in his father’s footsteps to the university. The sense of destiny sharpened when it was later learned that two other vessels were lost in the same storm that wrecked the Hibernia and every soul aboard them perished. Meanwhile, the Campbells had much to do before they could leave Islay. Their possessions had to be salvaged from the wreck, dried and repacked, a task that took them a full two weeks. Alexander, still mainly concerned about his books, stretched a line along the beach so they could be hung up to dry in the sun. He spent many loving hours caring for these treasured volumes that composed his library—classics, English liter-

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Laird Campbell of Shawfield’s home, Islay House (1677), at the head of Lock Indall. The family of Thomas Campbell resided here for two weeks following the shipwreck, and Alexander stretched a line along the beach so his books could be hung to dry in the sun.

ature, writings on theology and ecclesiastical history from the early church fathers to the latest Scottish reformers, and works in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and French. In deference to his recent “call” he also spent some time making the acquaintance of the local pastor, the Reverend Mr. McIntosh, and three successive Sundays found him at the kirk where the morning services were conducted in English and the afternoon in Gaelic. There he found himself “entertained with a specimen of good old Scotch divinity” and “pleased with the aspect, pronu n ciation and gravity” of the “venerable parson.” He later wrote as one “just arrived at the period of reflection, determined to study men as well as things,” that he kept a critical eye on the service and was impressed with one practice which remained a frequent subject of “curious reflection.” On the first Sunday the master of Islay

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a shipwreck House, with his fami l y, “occupied a very ostensible pew in the kirk and a very conspicuous place in the prayers of the good parson.” On the following two Sundays, Laird Campbell, having gone to London to take his seat in the British Parliament, was absent from his pew and equally absent from the parson’s prayers. Pe r c eiving this practice to be customary among Highland ministers in regard to their patrons or visiting di g nitaries, Alexander noted the fact in his “pocket-book of memorandum” in a chapter that, in his “juvenile fancy” was labeled, “Complimentary Prayers, or prayers addressed to human bei n g s not yet deified.” One day it would become the subject of a stern discourse on the “humility and sincerity” becoming the hour of prayer: “Our words, assuredly, should be few and well-ordered— no pomp of language, no compliment to men when we claim the audience of our Almighty Maker.” Finally on Monday, October 24, the Campbells set out for Port Askaig on the narrow sound between Islay and Jura to await the boat that usually sailed twice a week for Tarbert, a town on the small peninsula of Kintyre. It was the first lap of their proposed journey to Glasgow. Finding the boat delayed because of contrary winds, Alexander, with his usual restlessness and curiosity concerning his surroundings, decided on Wednesday morning to cross the sound by himself to seek some adventure in scaling the precipitous cliffs of one of the Paps of Jura. Always preferring the sublime and grand prospects of nature he spent a happy morning among the rugged island highlands, and his pleasure was heightened by literary association. He had long been an admirer of The Poems of Ossian—his admiration of these tales of Gaelic heroes set against a wild landscape of mists, torrents, and rocks and recounted in a cadenced prose often suggestive of the Scriptures, being in no way lessened by the disapprobation of his esteemed Dr. Johnson who had declared that MacPherson’s purported translation was “as gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with.” He knew that he stood where, in the words of Ossian:

a shipwreck “the mountains showed their gray heads” and “the white wave was seen tumbling around the distant rock.” Indeed many a passage from Ossian had found its way into his commonplace book to reveal that the heart of the young man could fall under the spell of an exuberant romanticism even while his mind was professing its allegiance to the stern classicism of the literature of reason and its scorn for the rising literature of sentiment. Twenty-five years later he was to invoke this morning on Jura as he paused in the midst of a religious treatise to recall: When standing. . .at. . .the summit of the. . . mountains, once frequented by Ossian, . . . . .I felt the spirit of the son of Fingal rising within me, and my soul labored for words, to give utterance to the feelings of my heart. It was then that I began to learn why Homer, the contemporary of Elijah, was so familiar with the sublime, and Virgil with the beautiful. It was then I experienced the truth of that philosophy, which assigns to the different scenes of nature, most of the various charms of song. His reveries amid the summits of Jura were by no means confined to poetic legend and scenic charms. The Hebrides were also rich in religious associations which Dr. Johnson, on his own tour of the Islands, had seen fit to extol. Alexander knew that he had to travel in imagination only a few leagues to the north to reach tiny Iona, the doctor’s “illustrious Island . . . whence savage clans . . . derived the benefits of knowledge, and the blessings of religion.” It was evangelized in the sixth century by the Irish Saint Columba, a churchman whom Alexander much admired both for his adventuresome spirit and because of the simple scriptural and apostolic rule of piety and charity which he imposed upon his monks. Inspired by these happy associations, literary and religious, he spent the afternoon in further exploration of Jura and in a visit with its proprietor who like the Laird of Islay was also a Campbell.

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a shipwreck Late in the evening he returned to his inn across the sound. The next morning the packet arrived, and the Campbells embarked for Tarbert. At Ardpatrick, about ten miles short of their destination, they were detained by an adverse wind, but the family of Laird Campbell in residence at their country seat there sent a large rowboat to convey them to Tarbert. Alexander had to row all the way and, though thrown into the water on landing, he waited alone on shore with the luggage while the other passengers were taken by carriage into the town—an hour he always remembered as among the most uncomfortable and dreary of his life. Sunday passed in what he described as “the small, uncouth village of Tarbert.” The next day they embarked for Greenock. Their demon of travel still pursued them. After eighteen hours sailing the packet was becalmed throughout the night with the captain and crew too drunk to concern themselves. The next morning, Alexander, with the other male passengers, lowered a boat, rowed to shore, and walked the five miles to Greenock where he secured lodgings and then returned for the family. On Thursday he set out to walk the twenty-two miles to Glasgow. Carrying letters of introduction from acquaintances on Islay he was kindly received there by one of the city’s most distinguished ministers, the Reverend Greville Ewing, who helped him secure lodgings on Broad Street, Hutchinsontown. On Saturday, November 5, Jane and the children arrived by fly-boat on the Clyde. After a month of trials the eight Campbells were at last settled together in Glasgow.

w Alexander lost no time enrolling in the university. Thomas Campbell may have been heedless of the formalities, but not his son. So in the year 1808 the name Alexander Campbell was duly entered on the matriculation books, with the legend, “Filius Maximus Viri Reverendi Thomae Pastoris in parochia de Ahorey

a shipwreck in comitatu de Armagh.” And proudly he donned the ancient academic robe, the scarlet toga worn by the students of humanity (Latin), Greek, logic, and philosophy since the beginning of the seventeenth century. At last he could enter in scarlet toga through the massive college gates on High Street to walk the “quiet courts within” where his father had walked almost twenty years before. Doubtless he took a little while to admire these outer and inner quadrangles paved with beautiful red flagstones and distinguished by the unique lion-and-unicorn staircase to the fore hall and by the great clock and bell tower rising one hundred and forty feet high and topped with a lightning rod attached soon after Benjamin Franklin’s visit to the university in 1771. He also walked between classes over the pleasant green east of the college buildings that sloped down to Molendinar Burn, and perhaps he paused sometimes by the college gate opening into Blackfriar’s Wynd, near Blackfriars’ Church, to buy peppermint, pennyroyal, or hyssop from the herbalist there. But however fascinating his surroundings he was chiefly interested in his work. He came to the university at an auspicious time. Ever since passage of the Act of Union of 1707, which brought an end to centuries of strife with England, Scotland had been enjoying an intellectual renaissance that was placing the names of her thinkers on the world’s honor roll of arts and letters. It has been said that eighteenth-century Scotland “was in a time of radical intellectual advancement, and a place of such cerebral statues as to rival the Athens of Socrates.” It has been said as well that “no people so few in number have scored so deep a mark in the world’s history.” The University of Glasgow, second oldest of Scotland’s universities, established in 1451, was sharing brilliantly in this awakening. In 1773, Dr. Johnson, after visiting its professors, had written to Mrs. Thrale, “I was not much pleased with any of them.” But by 1808, the fame of the university’s faculty was drawing students from Ireland and England and even from the Continent.

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Left: Portrait of Greville Ewing (1767-1841), one of Glasgow’s most distinguished ministers, who became Alexander Campbell’s good friend. Below: Two tickets used for admis sion to class are for George Jardine’s public logic class and Andrew Ure’s class in natural phi losophy.

Opposite Top: The University of Glasgow, established in 1451, as it looked in the seven teenth century. Thomas Campbell attended the university in the eighteenth century, and Alexander Campbell in the nineteenth cen tury (1808-1809). Opposite: After entering through the massive gates on High Street in the scarlet toga of a student, Alexander would have encountered the inner and outer quadrangles paved in red flagstones and distinguished by the lion-andunicorn staircase leading to the entry hall.

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a shipwreck Furthermore, a young man seriously concerned about the integrity of his religious faith could have chosen no better college. In an age when English deists were fighting a losing battle to preserve the remnants of their faith against the logic of David Hume’s Scottish skepticism and philosophers of the French Enlightenment were boasting of their atheistic materialism, there were men at the University of Glasgow who appeared almost alone for a time in trying to construct a bulwark for Christianity in the midst of a world of naturalism. As a member of the British Parliament expressed it, the university proved that “the Scotch [sic] are not all free-thinkers.” Glasgow’s professor of divinity had written a “Vindication of the Sacred Books from the Various Misrepresentations of M. de Voltaire.” But the real weapons in the war on skepticism were forged by its professor of moral philosophy, Thomas Reid, whose Enquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense was published in 1764, the same year he resigned his post at King’s College, Aberdeen, to succeed Adam Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow. Though Reid’s Enquiry ran through four editions before his death in 1796, the Scottish school was really popularized by James Beattie, with whose writing Alexander was familiar before he left Ireland. Beattie, while professor of moral philosophy at Marischal College in Aberdeen, had become the personal friend of Reid and a charter member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, founded by Reid and commonly called the “Wise Club,” where the most lively and frequent subjects of discussion were drawn from the speculations of Hume. Reid’s Enquiry was largely composed of papers he read before the club, and in 1770 Beattie published his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Skepticism. Making up in rhetorical fascination what it lacked in logical accuracy—indeed it possessed little if any philosophical value—the Essay immediately became so widely read and acclaimed that George III once said to its author, “I never stole a book but one,

a shipwreck and that was yours. I stole it from the Queen to give to Lord Hertford to read.” Sir Joshua Reynolds, in a large allegorical painting, represented Beattie holding the Essay on Truth in his hand and, behind him, the angel of truth thrusting down the figures of sophistry, skepticism, and infidelity, one of which was generally identified with Hume, another with Voltaire. While Beattie’s work was thus reassuring the uncritical, Reid, through both the Enquiry and his later essays, was building up a system of sound philosophical content whose avowed purpose in his own words was “to justify the common sense and reason of mankind against the skeptical subtleties which in this age have endeavored to put them out of mind” and which were causing the people to lose faith in their own judgment, in their power either to know or to believe. By the time Alexander came to the university, Reid’s influence and ideas were being eloquently extended by his disciple and former pupil at Glasgow, Dugald Stewart, who had himself already held the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh for almost a quarter century. Alexander found at Glasgow that Reid’s spirit still haunted the “quiet courts within and the firm substance of his and Dugald Stewart’s philosophy still directed the thought of many a class-room lecture.” In fact, the professor of logic and rhetoric at Glasgow in 1808 was George Jardine, who had lived for many years “in habits of the most confidential intimacy with Dr. Reid and his family,” as Dugald Stewart declared in acknowledging his indebtedness to Jardine’s assistance when he was preparing the memoirs of their “mutual friend.” Many years later Alexander was to record that his two “special friends and favorites” on the faculty were George Jardine and John Young, professor of Greek, both of whom had been among his father’s teachers. Jardine was one of the most respected and influential men at Glasgow, holding administrative posts as well as teaching. To Thomas Campbell, the poet, he was “the benign, the philosophic Jardine,” and Francis Jeffrey considered him “the most revered, the most justly valued” of all his

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a shipwreck instructors. Indeed Alexander could count himself but one in a line of pupils ready to testify that Jardine “sought to stimulate and train the mental faculties to ready, wide and varied exercise”—a purpose for which his class in logic was well designed. As described in the professor’s own “Outlines of Philosophical Education,” the course covered a rather comprehensive study of the tools and functions of human thought from Socrates and Aristotle to the latest theorists, with emphasis on metaphysics, particularly its brand of ontology, comprehending such subjects as “the various doctrines” of “Being, Existence, Essence, Unity, Diversity, the Immateriality and Immortality of Mind, the Liberty or Necessity of human action.” Jardine’s background, moreover, had given him wide experience for his teaching. To balance his “intimacy” with Thomas Reid, he had also enjoyed the friendship of David Hume and sharpened his wits on many occasions in attempted refutation of his friend’s brilliant logic. As a youth in Paris, he had become acquainted with Helvetius and d’Alembert and breathed the bracing air of the Encyclopedists. The reputation of John Young, Alexander’s other favorite professor, had likewise extended to England and to the Continent where he was hailed by Wyttenbach of Leyden as “eximius ille apud Scotos philologus.” (“Outstanding man of letters among Scots.) Alexander was soon qualified to understand the tribute. Having brought to Glasgow a love of Greek already acquired in his father’s study in Armagh, he found that love broadened and intensified in the classroom of his father’s old teacher as he himself fell under the sway of the master of whom another student once wrote, None ever possessed the art of . . . so beautifully and gracefully . . . transfusing the glowing enthusiasm of his own mind into that of his audience. Nothing could be more captivating than the eloquence with which he treated the liberty, the literature, and the glory of ancient Greece.

a shipwreck Moreover, Alexander also brought to Glasgow an intellectual gift which enabled him to get the most from his college curriculum, the gift of commanding his own attention so that he could “recollect the materials of any lecture . . . without the loss of a prominent idea. To command . . . or to will attention,” he wrote from his own later experience in both classroom and pulpit, “is a power which comparatively few ever achieve in superlative degree.” For the development of this power, he was to credit “the most useful series of college lectures” he heard at Glasgow, a series on “the science and art of attention” by Professor Jardine. But he was to acknowledge a far greater debt to his father and the family training that was daily practiced in the household at Ahorey. Besides his classes in logic, rhetoric and Greek he continued his study of Latin and French. Several times a week he also attended the series of popular lectures being conducted by Dr. Andrew Ure and accompanied with experiments in natural science. If he turned to these scientific lectures in relief from the maze of abstractions encountered in Jardine’s metaphysics, it was not that he found Jardine or the Scottish school of philosophy inhospitable to scientific method. Rather both Reid and Stewart had hailed the meeting of the French Estates General in 1789 as the dawn of a new era; and they welcomed alike the spirit of scientific inquiry and the quest for political liberty that characterized their age. The very strength of the philosophy emanating from Glasgow, in the eyes of its admirers, was its affirmation of philosophy, religion, and the new science; all, when rationally and intelligibly considered, were varying manifestations of divine mind. In progressing through his investigation of “the Works of Nature . . . the calculations of the Astronomer, and the Discoveries of the Chemist,” Professor Jardine was accustomed to lecture his classes; “the Student of Natural Science approaches nearer and nearer to the Deity himself.” And he was fond of quoting Dr. Johnson “we are perpetually Moralists, but we are Geometricians only by chance” to

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John Young

Alexander Campbell:

Andrew Ure

Dugald Stewart

George Jardine

Thomas Reid

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Right: “Lectures in Logic Delivered by Professor Jardan [sic] at the University of Glasgow, 1809.” From the note book of Alexander Campbell (in the Bethany College archives).

Opposite: Portraits of Alexander Campbell’s Glasgow mentors: John Young (1774-1820), professor of Greek, ranked with George Jardine as among Alexander’s favorite professors. Both professors had instructed his father years ear lier. Young is portrayed in oil on canvas by Elizabeth Carmichael; Andrew Ure (1778-1857), professor of chemistry and natural philosophy (physics); George Jardine (1774-1827), professor of moral philosophy and logic, for many years closely associated with Thomas Reid and one of the most respected men at the university (this image is after an oil by Henry Raeburn); Dugald Stewart (17531828), metaphysician who admired the work of Thomas Reid); Thomas Reid (1710-1796), professor of moral philosophy who forged the weapons of war on skepticism in his Enquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, published in 1764. When Alexander came to Glasgow, Reid’s influence and ideas were still dominant.

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a shipwreck illustrate his point that even the student who wished to excel in “Natural Philosophy” should first master well “the Philosophy of Mind” since a knowledge of oneself is basic to all other knowledge and the ability to assess and make moral judgments is the first requisite for right conduct of the business of life. With his own bent of mind thus buttressed by the logic of his favorite professor, Alexander attended and freely professed his enjoyment of Dr. Ure’s “splendid lectures,” particularly those on galvanism (electricity), “a new science, fresh from the mind of genius.” Though Dr. Ure himself—professor of chemistry and natural philosophy in Anderson’s institution, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the observer for the newly-formed “Glasgow Society for Promoting Astronomical Observation”—was described in a current satirical sketch as “Dr. Transit . . . a young man high indeed in the estimation of the world, but far higher in his own opinion,” there was no question of his versatility, competence, and charm as a popular lecturer. Alexander reported that “the fabled philosophy stone . . . could hardly have excited more interest or . . . attention than did Professor Ure’s first course of lectures on galvanism, in November and December, A.D. 1808,” which was attended “by an immense assemblage of ladies and gentlemen” and after fifty years was to remain “fresher” in his memory than “any other course of scientific lectures” he heard in the university city. That he might carry as much of this wisdom as possible with him to America, he filled many notebooks with lecture notes and his translations from Homer, Sophocles, and other classics. One notebook entitled, “Juvenile Essays on Various Subjects,” which he distinguished with a lovingly embellished title page, contained his own essays in both poetry and prose. To write essays in verse was popular with the young men of the University where Thomas Campbell’s undergraduate fame as a poet was already a legend. Alexander, who had whiled away many a pleasant hour in County Armagh with verse-making, was happy to try his skill with his classmates.

a shipwreck He had no delusions about his poetic talents, but his prose writing was another matter. Here he had to attain excellence, and he carefully prefixed a note to his prose essays saying they were preserved “for retrospection, that at any future period the author may . . . judge of improvement.” Professor Jardine’s class in rhetoric covered a thorough course in composition and the principles of taste and criticism. One of the essays Alexander transcribed in his notebook was entitled, “On the Purposes Served in our Constitution by the Reflex Sense of Beauty.” It was a subject he doubtless had never been called upon to consider in his father’s study in Armagh. Thomas Campbell, in his almost exclusive concern for things moral and spiritual, seemed unable to apprehend any aesthetics save the aesthetics of the soul—the beauty of virtue, the perfection of the creator. If he were shown a flower, he would inquire if it had any medicinal uses. If his attention were called to a fine view, he would politely acquiesce and then return to his one theme, the goodness of God and the salvation of humanity. Alexander could never look at the world from so purely utilitarian or moralistic a view. So in his essay, after defining taste as “the power of receiving pleasure from the beauties of nature and of art,” he wrote with some fervor, “let us suppose man to have no sensation of beauty, and then . . . his pleasure . . .must be of the most gross kind, sensual, and only pleasing as good or evil.” At the same time Alexander’s views on taste could scarcely escape the religious bent of his training. He found that bent encouraged by Professor Jardine, whose own theory of beauty was modeled after the sternly spiritual aesthetics propounded by his friend, Thomas Reid. “Good Taste,” he always lectured his young gentlemen, “is closely connected with Good Morals and Propriety of Conduct.” Alexander was virtually paraphrasing a part of the lecture when, in describing the primary purpose served by the sense of beauty, he wrote: “That as man is destined for the enjoyment of perfect beauty hereafter, it was wise and kind in the wise Author of nature to give him a taste for it and a sense to feel it.”

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a shipwreck The university classrooms seemed well disposed to a discussion of aesthetics for they were pleasant places, “heated by large and cheery fires which blazed in fireplaces beside the professor’s platforms.” The little class bell in the great college tower rang four minutes for early classes, a half-minute less for later ones, and when it stopped the classroom doors were closed and the roll calls begun. Alexander, covetous of every hour of instruction, was always in his seat promptly to answer “ad sum” to his name. One morning a group of less punctilious students rushed him just as the bell started ringing, determined to spoil his irksomely perfect record by holding him until after roll call. Perhaps they knew only the serious student from Ireland not the young man who had so recently delighted in the climb to the summit of the rugged Paps of Jura. To their amazement Alexander quickly threw them off and dashed up the stairs and into his classroom just as his name was called. Not to be deterred by more fortunate classmates who did not have to crowd their university training into one short year, he kept himself to a strict schedule throughout the session. Allowing only six hours for sleep he rose at four in the morning to study. At six he went to the university for his class in French, a class in the Greek New Testament at seven and classes in Latin from eight to ten. Then he returned home to bathe and breakfast. In the afternoon he attended a more advanced class in Greek along with his classes in logic and rhetoric. In addition he did some teaching. To help pay his expenses Alexander soon had several classes of boys whom he tutored in Latin, mathematics, grammar, composition and reading. He also found some hours for exploration in the university’s two most imposing buildings, the Hunterian Museum, which he described as “rich in many departments of natural history . . . and . . . of the fine arts,” and the college library, which a visitor even in the seventeenth century had complimented because it “is well digested, and the Books so order’d, (not as at Edinburgh, where they are Marshall’d . . . according to the Benefactors, but as the

a shipwreck Sciences direct ’em.” Alexander’s own books were demanding a share of attention, too. Many of them, damaged in the shipwreck, had to be rebound. And as often as he could spare the money he was adding more books to his collection. Even so, he did not spend the winter exclusively at his books. The letters of introduction brought from Islay had opened many hospitable doors to keep the village-bred Campbells from feeling too lonely in the great city. Alexander, being “eminently social” as well as studious, formed several warm friendships among his classmates. Missing the freedom of the fields and loughs of Armagh and Antrim he spent every hour possible ice skating, one onlooker recording that he got “an unco’ fall on the Clyde”; and he joined his new friends in the other favorite college sports of handball, bowls and quoits. Glasgow—a city with “an air of metropolitan dignity,” its broad and well-paved streets always crowded with passengers on foot and horseback and with carriages, donkey carts, and huckster barrows, the busy scene often enlivened by the fiddle or bagpipe of an itinerant musician—held much to interest a young Scotsman, Ireland-bred. When he would return one day, almost forty years later, two haunts of the city of his youth remained particularly fresh in his memory. One was Lord Nelson’s monument on the banks of the Clyde where he “spent many a pleasant hour.” The other was venerable St. Mungo’s Cathedral. In its pews he “sometimes sat in admiration of the living Doctors of that day” and through whose churchyard, amongst its “crumbling memorials of five and twenty generations,” he “sometimes rambled . . . by light of the moon . . . at the dead hour of night, in communion with the dead.”

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Silent communing “at the dead hour of night” became more frequent with Alexander as the winter wore on. The approach of midnight, December 31, found him alone in his room writing and in meditation. With the coming of the New Year, 1809, he made

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a shipwreck a resolution. He would keep a diary in which to record the results of daily self-examination as his father and as Wesley and other members of the “Godly Club” at Oxford had done before him. He wrote the diary partly in English but chiefly in Latin. Religious meditations began to appear, even among the extracts in his college notebooks. Sometimes there were quotations such as a sentence from Luther: “Three things make a minister—faith, meditation, and temptation,” or a comparison that was a favorite with Thomas Campbell: A man may enter a garden for three purposes: First, to learn the art of gardening; second, for pleasure; third, to gather fruit. So may a man read the Bible for three things: First, to learn to read it or dispute about it; second, to read the historical parts for pleasure; third, to gather fruit; this last is the true way. More often there were his own reflections. Sometimes a passage revealed his passionate dedication to “true religion”: Do you think that religion is a mere way of talking or educational art, received by tradition from our forefathers? God forbid! It is a substantial thing, solid as the adamant, lasting as the eternity, bright and glorious as the Divine Author and object of it. Other entries revealed the Calvinism so deeply engrained by his Presbyterian heritage: Thoughts on these words: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?’ . . . That heart, once so perfect as to have communion with God, . . . is now so depraved, . . . as to be the habitation of every unclean thought, . . . the source of every sin-

a shipwreck ful action. . . .It is in its element when in the service of Satan, but out of it when in the service of God. Glasgow, however, was proving intellectually stimulating in things spiritual as well as secular. Alexander found his traditional beliefs undergoing still further change as he continued in Scotland the ecclesiastical studies begun in Ireland. Now availing himself to the fullest of the Seceder privilege of “occasional hearing,” he attended the services of every denomination in Glasgow from high church to low and kept a wary and critical eye on the proceedings, even while his eager interest and inquiring catholic mind was winning him the favor of some of the city’s most eminent clergymen. Forty years later he was to recall with pride and gratitude his friendships with Dr. Balfour of St. Mungo’s Cathedral, “one of the most distinguished of the clergy of Scotland,” and with “the learned and distinguished” Greville Ewing of Carlton Place, recording that through them he “was introduced to one of the most interesting circles of the truly elite and pious of that city.” Greville Ewing, formerly a minister of the established church, was a friend and coadjutant of the Haldanes and pastor of the Haldanian Tabernacle in Glasgow. A keen student of biblical criticism and a skillful expositor of Scripture, he had edited a religious periodical and had been in charge of the first seminary established by the Haldanes. Invited often to the Ewing home for dinner or tea, along with other students, Alexander learned there more of the story of the Haldane brothers who were inspiring throughout Scotland a spiritual awakening unknown since the days of Whitefield and the Wesleys. In hearing that story Alexander began to feel the aw a kening of his own first impulse toward a career of religious reformation. He began to conceive that religion might be best served not by faithfully following the old paths but by venturing on a bold new road guided by signposts he was slowly discerning in the new philosophy and the new science which were daily challenging his mind in the classrooms at Glasgow.

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James Alexander Haldane and a copy of the Haldane brothers’ memoirs. The brothers, James (1768-1851) and Robert (1764-1842), set in motion a great spiri tual awakening in Scotland. They advo cated a return to the Bible, weekly com munion, and the independence of the local church. They were influential on the thinking of both Thomas and Alexander Campbell.

a shipwreck Robert and James Alexander Haldane, the sons of Captain James Haldane of Airthrey House, near Stirling, and nephews of Lord Duncan, an admiral in His Majesty’s Navy, had attended the University of Edinburgh and then followed the sea for a time before hearing the call of religion. Robert served with distinction under his uncle and under Admiral Sir John Jervis in engagements against the French and Spanish, being present at the relief of Gibraltar, until the signing of the peace treaty with France and America in 1783 when, at age nineteen, he retired from the navy to manage his estate of Airthrey. The outbreak of the French Revolution at first excited his deepest sympathy, but, as later excesses dashed his hopes for a new order of society through political change, he turned to a serious study of religion. Meanwhile the younger brother, James Alexander, had entered the East India service as a midshipman and in 1793, after four voyages to India and his marriage to a niece of Sir Robert Abercrombie, was nominated to command of the Melville Castle. While the ship was unexpectedly detained in port for almost six months he began a careful study of the Bible. Before his ship sailed, feeling more and more drawn to a religious life and being urged to a decision by a letter from his brother, he sold his interest in the Melville Castle and returned to Scotland. The two brothers immediately discovered a deep, mutual concern about the apathy that hung everywhere like a pall over the Scottish churches. It was only too apparent that the religious excitement stirred by the Methodist revival in mid-century had long since died away. The skepticism of David Hume and Adam Smith was infecting all ranks, beginning with the university, and penetrating the church itself. Robert, therefore, in 1796 sold his beautiful Airthrey estate to devote his fortune to religious causes. The following year James delivered his first sermon, soon finding that crowds would gather to hear the lay preaching of a former sea captain. In January 1798, the Haldanes established the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home, a non-sectarian organiza-

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a shipwreck tion for tract distribution and the itinerant, open-air evangelizing formerly so successful in the Wesleyan revival. It was in October of the same year that Thomas Campbell and his associates formed The Evangelical Society of Ulster, on the Haldanian model. The clear parallels in purpose and method did not escape Alexander’s attention. Like Thomas Campbell the Haldanes were soon made aware of the displeasure of the established church. Unlike Thomas Campbell they refused to bow to the synod’s censure. With Greville Ewing and others they formally withdrew from the Church of Scotland and in 1799 constituted the first Congregational Church to be known by that name in Scotland. Ewing drew up the plan of government. James Haldane was ordained and became pastor of the first church of the new Congregationalists meeting in a large building called the Circus in Edinburgh. Robert Haldane immediately proceeded to purchase a second building formerly used as a circus in Glasgow, and Ewing was installed there as pastor. While a guest in the Ewing home, Alexander met other leaders of the new reform movement including Dr. Ralph Wardlaw, author of a persuasive book on Congregational Independency in Contradistinction to Episcopacy and Presbyterianism: The Church Polity of the New Testament. He listened to stimulating discussions of other Haldanian tenets on the nature of faith, the substitution of the Bible for all creeds and confessions, and the weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper—of which he knew his Presbytery would not approve. Moreover, his admiration of the Haldanes now led him to a second important resolve to accompany the decisive vow he had made on board the Hibernia. By the time Alexander came to the university, Robert Haldane had already spent in the past decade more than sixty thousand pounds of his fortune establishing seminaries and erecting large buildings for preaching, called tabernacles (after the Whitefield model), supporting evangelists, bringing native children from Africa to be educated and returned as missionaries to their countrymen, and

a shipwreck distributing tracts and Bibles and encouraging a new translation of the Scriptures. James meanwhile, in addition to his regular pastorate, was continuing the successful itinerancy that had brought him to Rich Hill during the Campbell’s residence there. All his preaching was gratuitous. Having no fortune with which to emulate the munificence of the elder brother, Alexander decided that he could follow the example of the second by giving himself. So he made his second vow: when he began his ministry he would never accept “any earthly compensation whatever” for preaching. When he turned from men to books, during this pregnant winter at Glasgow, Alexander apparently found a new favorite in Jonathan Edwards and continued his study of two old friends, John Owen and John Newton. Edwards and Owen, he later recorded, he “read with rapture,” convinced that Edwards was “the greatest theologian ever produced” on American soil, and that Owen “was in England what Edwards was in America—the tallest of the giants.” Since Owen seemed able to reconcile Calvinism in theology with independency in church government, even as he himself was now trying to do, Alexander read “with especial delight” his “Treatise on Evangelical Churches,” regarding church government, and also his “Christo Logia and The Death of Death in the Death of Christ,” which remained “the strongest work against the Arminians” he was ever to read. “Above all,” he “ate up” Owen’s “On the Holy Spirit,” in two large octavos. Indeed, sensitive to the fact that neither his conversion nor his “call” to the ministry had been accompanied by a proper Divine manifestation, the work “On the Holy Spirit” became a “text-book” for him which he made virtually his own by writing “it off in miniature on two quires of paper.” Every passage of Scripture on the Holy Spirit he carefully noted down on the blank pages of his testament. As for the “largest and brightest Star in America,” Jonathan Edwards, he “loved his character, admired his talents, and highly appreciated his eminent powers as a free and genuine Calvinian.” Even at this period Alexander had to confess

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a shipwreck to himself that he admired “the great theological metaphysician” not so much for his Calvinism as for his “intense interest in the prosperity of what he called ‘Christ’s Kingdom.’” Reading not only Edwards’ works but also his biography, Alexander was not ashamed to admit that “the big tear” gathered in his eye when he “heard him say that after his conversion, when he took up a newspaper to read, the first impulse was to glance over its items in hope to see something concerning the progress and triumph of Christ’s cause and kingdom in the world.” He was impressed by the account that Edwards himself “wept copiously” when “the eloquent, soul-stirring Whitefield occupied his pulpit at Princeton.” However enraptured Alexander was by England’s greatest Puritan theologian and America’s pre-eminent Puritan thinker, an even more persuasive influence exerted on his future was the devout, evangelical Anglican, John Newton of Olney, who, in 1779, collaborated with his parishioner, William Cowper, to publish the Olney Hymns. “I greatly loved John Newton in my youth,” Alexander wrote many years later, “and often gratefully remember him.” He would sometimes arouse a conformist opponent by recalling that he had taken one of Newton’s sayings and made it a maxim of his own life: “Whenever I saw a pretty feather in any bird, jackdaw like, I plucked it out, and plumed myself with it, until I became so speckled that not a single species would own me.” Indeed even before the close of this Glasgow winter Alexander had already plucked so many “pretty feathers” that an elder of his father’s congregation at Ahorey would scarcely have recognized him as a proper member of Christ’s flock. Every Lord’s Day morning, it was true, he faithfully occupied his pew in the seceder church. But more and more he found himself displeased by the prosaic sermons of its pastor. More and more he contrasted the “quickening, elevating, and energizing” power of Christ’s word with the “tame, set phrase of a cold, heartless, spiritless speculative orthodoxy” that left its worshippers chilled on “cold, rocky peaks” where lay “an everlasting snow, on which the Son of right-

a shipwreck eousness is never felt, warming the heart . . . or cheering the spirit of man.” In short as he was later to sum up his experience: “a confirmed disgust at the popular schemes . . . I principally imbibed when a student at the University of Glasgow.” Moreover, that disgust finally translated itself into action. The climax came with the approach of the semi-annual communion season of the seceder church. Having brought no letter from Ahorey Alexander appeared before the session for an examination and duly received the metallic token necessary for communion. On Sacrament Day he gathered with some eight hundred other communicants. Still debating his course he held back until the last table was served. When his turn came he had made his decision. Dropping the communion token upon the plate he refused the sacrament. Future writers seeking impressive historic parallels would compare the ring of Alexander Campbell’s metallic token as he threw it onto the communion plate of the Glasgow seceders with the ring of Martin Luther’s hammer as he nailed the Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral. Young Campbell himself certainly saw nothing heroic in his action. He simply knew that privately, at age twenty, he had renounced the restrictions of the Presbytery and its confession and sampled a sweet moment of decisive, independent action that he hoped would release him to explore a new realm of religious freedom and truth. He also knew that he was as yet unsure where that realm lay or just how he was to reach its boundaries or define its terrain. Therefore, when on departure he was offered the usual certificate of good standing from the Seceder Church he accepted it and said nothing of his change of views, keenly aware that he was both too young and too untried to make any heroic public parade of either his “disgust” at the old schemes or his supposed discovery of anything new. Of one thing he was still quite certain: the authenticity of his “call” to the ministry. Indeed in the midst of this period of groping

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a shipwreck and seeking, of confusion and hesitation, he received one day, when alone in his room at Glasgow, a second vivid glimpse into the future. He never attempted to explain the strange occurrence—though he seemed to consider it an actual occurrence rather than a phenomenon of his excited mind. It was scarcely less uncanny than the dream that had forewarned him of peril aboard the Hibernia. A friend later recorded the experience as Alexander described it to him: (He) was alone in his study room, with his cloak on, and just on the eve of leaving to attend his classes in college. Suddenly, and without any one being with her to introduce her, a very small, dark-visaged woman entered his room. His first impression was that she was a mendicant, and he put his hand into his pocket to get a shilling to give her, in order to hurry her off. But she would not accept it, and before he was aware of it she was calling his attention to her writing on the mantle [sic] front before him, the names of his father, and mother, with his brothers and sisters; then turning to him, she showed that she had no tongue, then turning each side of her head, no ears were there, only a small spot showing where the ears should be. Then by some strange power fascinating him, she kept him for a time . . . She made him understand that he was going to a foreign country, and would be shipwrecked but would escape, and blew up her apron like sails. Then by unmistakable signs she made him understand that he was to preach to large audiences. She lifted her hand showing him how he would dismiss the multitude; all of which he fully understood by her emphatic gestures . . . Finally, she gave him to understand that he would be twice married, and left him without a doubt as to the full meaning of all her wonderful predictions . . . Then as suddenly disappeared.

a shipwreck Finally in late April the university year drew to a close. It was time for Alexander to stand for the Blackstone examination conducted orally and publicly in the Blackstone Room of the Tower Building. Following the traditional, formal ceremony prescribed for generations, he entered the room, bowed to the two examining professors, and took his place in front of the ancient Blackstone Chair of dark oak, bearing the elaborately carved arms of Scotland and England, and with its seat formed by a slab of ancient black marble which gave its name to the examination. Behind the chair stood the robed beadle with his mace grounded. Alexander stated, in Latin and Greek, the number of books he “professed” and sat down. The beadle shouldered his mace and turned the sand glass on the back of the chair. When the examination had continued for the running of the sand, from twenty to thirty minutes, he called out, “Fluxit!” and said to the professor, “Ad alium, Domine”; then he grounded the mace. The professor signified that Alexander had proved himself proficient. The annual distribution of prizes, consisting of books and medals, as had been the custom since 1782, took place in the Common Hall on May 1 in the presence, according to the Glasgow Herald, “of many Revered and respectable Gentlemen of this City and neighborhood.” The assembly of distinguished guests did not restrain the traditional display of the students at the closing exercises. According to custom they gathered in the courtyard, rushed to the door, struggled up the stairs and fought for places in the hall until they were seated on their backless benches that were firmly attached to the floor, facing the green-draped pulpit and the benches for the principal, dean of faculty, and professors. About midway through the ceremonies the prizes in logic class were announced: “For the best Specimens of Analysis and Composition on Subjects of Reasoning and Taste, and for distinguished eminence and proficiency in the whole business of the Class.” Sixth on the list of seniors stood the name of “Alexander Campbell, Ireland.” The son of Jane and Thomas could feel that

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a shipwreck he was at last redeeming his pledge to become “one of the best scholars in the kingdom.” Though their one thought as soon as the university year was finished was to get to America with the least possible delay, the Campbells found that no ship was sailing for some time. So Alexander agreed to accompany some of his Glasgow friends early in June to their summer homes at Helensburgh, a beautiful seaside village across the tail of the bank from Greenock, to serve as tutor for their families. Since most of the men were confined by business in Glasgow during the week, he was also much in demand as an escort for the ladies on their evening walks. He found himself delighted by this “highly cultivated and refined society.” The ladies, in turn, were enchanted by the handsome young tutor whose serious mien was so often routed by his naturally lively temperament and who could converse so elegantly on the charms of poetry and the beauties of nature. Both nature and poetry, in fact, counted heavily in his summer’s reading. On a memorandum of books read after May 1, he listed Georges Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, Oliver Goldsmith’s Animated Nature, the entire four volumes of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and James Beattie’s The Minstrel and Life and Poems of James Hay Beattie. He also listed Beattie’s Ethics and Politics and a novel that had made its author famous, Henry MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling, it perhaps being this latter work, a mediocre novel with a weak and futilely sentimental hero, which gave Alexander so poor an opinion of fiction that he was never able to understand how anyone could spend time on a work of pure romance. Of course the flights of invention and fancy allowable to poets were a different matter. When after five too-short weeks at Helensburgh he received word that the Latona was sailing soon for America, a friend requested him to write something as a farewell memento. Alexander complied with a poem entitled, “On a beautiful vale adjacent to the seaport village where I often spent the evening hours.” He recorded that

Drawing of Helensburgh. Young Alexander spent several weeks in Helensburgh tutoring and enjoying the company of friends after the close of classes at the university in May 1809.

the friend was a “Mr. K__g,” and while neither Alexander’s veracity nor his loyalty to the absent Hannah Acheson were to be questioned, his gently melancholy iambic pentameter couplets—the mood if not the meter were reminiscent of Milton’s “Il Penseroso” —would undoubtedly have found favor with many a young lady of Helensburgh: Where, gently pointing to the eastern skies, Grove-clad Camascan hills high-tow’ring rise . . . There the young elm and beech, in shady rows, With other shrubs, entwine their pliant boughs, And form the cool retreat, the sweet alcove, The seats of pleasure and the haunts of love; Fair spot! and wilt thou not like me soon change? And in thy bowers the fair ones cease to range? . . . For me, no more I’ll wander through thy glades, Seek thy close coverts, and thy cooling shades, No more within thy shady bowers

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a shipwreck I’ll spend my lonely evening hours; And now, you groves and vales and lucid well, And all you beauteous seats of mirth, farewell! The Campbells spent two busy weeks in Glasgow making ready for the voyage. Then their ship, with all others in the port at Greenock, was detained for a time by order of the government while a fleet of warships engaged in the war with Napoleon left the coast for a secret destination. Finally on July 31 they took the flyboat to Greenock. On August 3, 1809, the Latona weighed anchor. Again Jane and her brood were headed for Thomas Campbell and the New World. Unlike Thomas who had enjoyed a quick and pleasant voyage of thirty-five days, they did not seem destined for happy sailing. Scarcely three days out of the Firth of Clyde the ship sprung a leak. Captain McCray refused to turn back. When they ran into a gale on August 7 the crew of eight hands, the mate, the cook, and the cabin boy were unable to manage the ship alone, and Alexander and other passengers were routed from their beds at midnight to man the pumps. For days the ship was delayed alternately by calms and by headwinds. Then on August 27 “the wind began to rise in a fearful manner,” Alexander recorded, “and immediately the most terrific squall ever seen by any individual on board ensued.” Sails were torn to shreds, the tiller rope gave way, the fore topmast was carried off, the quarter-railing broken, and the bowsprit was cracked half through. So furious was the storm, so imminent the peril, that when the winds abated Alexander felt he could note in his journal a second deliverance from death at sea and another manifestation that the Lord had singled him out for His service. Yet all the winds were not adverse, nor all the days unpleasant. On September 12 the Campbells must have held a family celebration. It was Alexander’s twenty-first birthday. Some further excitement marked the day when the Latona hailed a British man-

a shipwreck of-war, mounting twenty guns and bound from St. Croix to London. Indeed the monotony of the voyage was broken several times by the passing of other vessels. A week later Alexander’s diary noted that the captain of the Venice bound from New York to Lisbon stopped to inform them that the American Embargo Act had given way to the Non-Intercourse Act, and the British ambassador was in New York preparing to return home. When the sea was calm Alexander often enjoyed a favorite pastime, joining Captain McCray to fish with hook and line or with the harpoon. In more serious hours he continued his studies, held daily family worship, read aloud with Dorothea, and— against the day when he would begin his ministry—tried to clarify his newly forming religious ideas by writing a discourse. He also occupied some hours in composing a long, descriptive poem on the ocean. It was no longer the young man pining for “the seats of pleasure and the haunts of love” who spoke now, but the student of divinity seeking. “The Almighty’s power and goodness to discern” in both the wonders and the terrors of “ocean’s varied face.” Milton, Genesis, and recent experiences of storms at sea all contributed to fashioning the first stanza: Ere yet, in brightness, had the radiant sun In Eastern skies the course of day begun, Ere yet the stars in dazzling beauty shone, Or yet, from Chaos dark, old earth was won; . . . Old Ocean then in silent youth did stray, And countless atoms on its bosom lay. Th’ Almighty spoke; its waters trembling fear’d. They yawned; and straight in haste dry land appear’d. The land he bounds; and to the waters said, Here, Ocean, let thy haughty waves be stayed. They swelled; and angry at their bounds, they . . . roar, And pour their rage against the peaceful shore . . .

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a shipwreck But whatever the distractions he could muster aboard ship, Alexander was finding the long confinement irksome. When at length on September 23 a river bird, the kingfisher, flew around the ship he joyously hailed this evidence of approaching land by comparing the bird to “the soul-reviving return of the dove to Noah’s Ark” and “the cheering sound of liberty to the captive slave.” Two days later the outlines of Block Island and No Man’s Land became visible. Two days later still, off Sandy Hook, a pilot came on board to steer the ship through the narrows to the quarantine ground where a day was spent ashore washing and cleaning up along with the passengers from the Protection, among whom the Campbells recognized several persons shipwrecked with them in the Hibernia the year before. The following morning, Friday, September 29—fifty-eight days out of Greenock—the Latona cleared quarantine, began a pleasant progress up the bay, and in the afternoon cast anchor in the harbor of New York. For young Alexander Campbell, it was a solemn hour of rejoicing, thanksgiving, and renewed dedication. To his back, to the East, now stood the Old World with all of its ancient tyrannies and inequities. Henceforth he faced to the West, to a New World of freedom and challenge.

Opposite: Rendering of the village of Greenock and notice of the Latona sailing. Alexander walked from Greenock to Glasgow to enroll at the university. One year later, August 3, 1809, the Campbell family returned to Greenock, where they set sail for the New World aboard the Latona.

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Book two

s The Way is Prepared 1809-1822

What I am in religion I am from examination, reflection, conviction, not from “ipse dixit,” tradition or human authority; and having halted, and faltered, and stumbled, I have explored every inch of the way hitherto, and I trust, through grace, “I am what I am.” Alexander Campbell

.5. s “I Like the Bold Christian Hero”

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n s a t u r d ay, September 3 0 , 1 8 0 9 , Alexander Campbell set foot for the first time on the American continent. New York, with its more than ninety thousand inhabitants, was just pulling ahead of Philadelphia to become the largest city in America and was an exciting port of entry. He soon found that the bustle and enterprise had a disadvantage. From the new City Hotel, whose size and luxury were the marvel of the country, to old Fraunces’ Tavern, where Washington had taken farewell of his generals at the close of the Revolution, all the hostelries of the city were crowded. He

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“i like the bold christian hero” returned to the Latona without having found suitable lodgings, and Sunday he went ashore only long enough to hear the sermon of Dr. John Mason, a well-known Presbyterian preacher with whose writings he was already familiar. The three succeeding days, he spent in viewing the sights of this city so richly associated with the struggle for American liberty. Before the elegant, new marble city hall on Broadway, he could see the triangular park once called the Commons, where angry Colonials had met to protest the Stamp Act and to celebrate its repeal with a roasted ox and a hogshead of rum punch and where the Sons of Liberty had raised the liberty pole that led to a clash with the royal soldiery and the first bloodshed of the Revolution. One side of the Commons was bounded by the old Boston Post-Road, along which the courier had dashed with the news of Concord and Lexington. On Pearl Street stood the De Peyster mansion where Washington had his first headquarters in New York. His first presidential mansion was on nearby Cherry Street. If Alexander walked the short way to Greenwich Village, he may have passed the little frame house where only a few months before, in June, Thomas Paine had died, neglected and unmourned. On Wall Street, he could see one of the country’s most historic buildings, the old city hall from whose steps the Declaration of Independence was read while angry patriots tore the royal coat-of-arms off its walls. Later, after the old City Hall was enlarged and adorned as the Federal Hall of the new government, Washington drove in coach-and-six to deliver his messages to Congress. More than the city’s monuments, however, Alexander would remember longest a paper he chanced upon containing a message of the new president, James Madison, which, as he revealed years later to a friend, “gave him the first impression of American genius.” Stages left twice a day for Philadelphia from a little town across the Hudson named Jersey. On Thursday morning, October 5, the Campbells resumed their journey. Arriving in Philadelphia

“i like the bold christian hero” on Saturday morning, Alexander was immediately delighted with its fine buildings, regular streets and cleanliness. The Quaker City still surpassed New York in stability and elegance of appearance, while its streets were almost free of the stench and filth that defiled the streets of New York, where pigs often wandered about in droves. There was no public building in America so certain to excite Alexander’s interest as the State House where the Declaration of Independence had been signed. The Campbells were anxious to be on their way to the village of Washington in western Pennsylvania, where Thomas awaited them. While the mail was transported from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in six days, they knew that they might travel far more slowly, sometimes walking, sometimes riding on the wagon which carried their household goods. At four o’clock on Monday they and their wagoner set out on the three-hundred-mile trek. They took the most popular highway to the West, the Pennsylvania State Road, variously known along its route as Forbes’ Road, the Old Glad Road or “Turkey Foot” Road. It was historic ground they traveled. Following an ancient Indian “Trading Path,” the road—started by General Braddock in 1755 and finished three years later by General John Forbes, at the cost of his life—soon became the great military route to the TransAllegheny region. No single road in America had seen so many campaigns, both in the Indian Wars and in the Revolution. By 1809, its string of forts had been replaced by a string of inns and taverns. Squads of militia hastening to western outposts had given way to emigrant trains with farm implements and herds of sheep and oxen heading for new lands across the mountains, to teamsters and packhorses carrying salt and dry goods from the East to exchange for the peltry and ginseng of the West, and to merchants and lawyers traveling more comfortably in coach-and-four. The Campbells found a varied fare, sometimes an imposing blue limestone inn offering clean linens and a hearty breakfast of coffee, buckwheat cakes, eggs, ham, venison, fried chicken, and honey;

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“i like the bold christian hero” sometimes a crude log structure where guests slept on the floor rolled in their own blankets, lucky to get a dish of tea and a hoecake for refreshment. One thing, which all these hostels had in common, amazed Alexander. Every door opened merely with a latch. Locks and bolts were absent. Contrasting this state of affairs with Ireland, where doors were nightly barred fast in fear of nocturnal outrages, he congratulated himself anew on having reached a country where the fabled golden age seemed restored. Such, he happily reasoned, was the fearless security of a land freed from the tyranny of king and priest. This sense of freedom increased with every mile they traveled away from the populous and cultivated seaboard. The first night, having made good time, they stopped at a tavern about thirty miles from Philadelphia, on the edge of the wilderness. After supper, Alexander went for a walk. Alone among mighty trees, such as he had never seen in Ireland, and listening to the call of strange birds, he felt himself lifted up in a rare mood of exaltation. Not on the Commons of New York or before the State House of Philadelphia, but here, in this seemingly limitless forest, he first sensed that he walked the soil of a new world—the land of Washington and Jefferson, the land of liberty and opportunity. The next few days they traveled ever nearer to the peaks of the Blue Ridge. More than half their journey lay through the Appalachians, where the mountain passes were so steep in places that a large log had to be tied to the back of the wagon to check its downward impetus, and in other places so sideling that all hands were required to pull at the ropes attached to the upper side of the wagon to keep it from upsetting. There was compensation for taking this rough and dangerous route. To Alexander, with his love of the rugged grandeur in nature, here was a “wilderness of majesty” exceeding the Paps of Jura. Jane and the girls especially delighted in the brilliant autumn colors of the mountain forests, rich with the orange maple, the golden hickory, the scarlet oak, and the

“i like the bold christian hero” dark green laurel; and the children were often amused by glimpses of raccoons, foxes, deer, pheasant, and bears. About ten days out from Philadelphia, they were amazed to see a familiar figure approaching along the mountain road. It was Thomas! Too eager to await their arrival in Washington, he had come to meet them, bringing a couple of horses “equipped as for females” to break the weariness of the journey. The road over the mountain now seemed short. Many were the experiences that Jane, Alexander and the children shared with Thomas: smallpox, shipwreck, and university days at Glasgow. Thomas, in turn, was anxious to tell of his two years in America, but his was a story little less dramatic than theirs.

w Thomas Campbell had landed with his young charge, Hannah Acheson, at Philadelphia May 12, 1807, and by fortunate coincidence found the Associate Synod of North America in session. Presenting his credentials on May 16, he was immediately seated in the synod and, when the appointments were made, was assigned at his own request to the Presbytery of Chartiers in western Pennsylvania, where he knew he would be at home among former neighbors from North Ireland. After staying a while in Philadelphia as the guest of his old friend, David Acheson, who was eastern purchasing agent for the six Acheson mercantile stores managed by his brother, Thomas, in the western country, he made his way across the Alleghenies to Washington, home of Thomas Acheson, where he left Hannah in the care of her uncle. The Chartiers Presbytery, at its July meeting, assigned him preaching stations in four counties. He began his American ministry in the confident hope that his churchmen in this new world would readily grant the freedoms and prove hospitable to the reforms for which he had labored unsuccessfully in Ireland. He was soon to be disillusioned. Dogmatism had changed its climate

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“i like the bold christian hero” but not its nature in crossing the Atlantic, and its wicked spawn, schism, seemed to increase its ravages in the land of Jefferson and Washington. Within two years, irenic, soft-spoken Thomas Campbell, out of disappointment and protest, was to publish a document that spoke out in flaming words against “this monstrous complex evil” and its “black catalogue of mischiefs.” He roundly denounced its “heinous . . . consequences” to the church, suffering “under her long antichristian and sectarian desolations” which excited “professing Christians [to] bite and devour one another” and caused the weak to stumble, the profane to be hardened, and infidels to blaspheme “the gospel of the blessed Jesus.” He described the particularly “dreary effects of these accursed divisions” on the American frontier where “large settlements, and tracts of country, remain . . . entirely destitute of a gospel ministry . . . in little better than a state of heathenism: the churches being either so weakened with divisions, that they cannot send them ministers; or the people so divided among themselves, that they will not receive them”; while many “who live at the door of a preached gospel, dare not in conscience go to hear it, and, of course . . . seldom . . . enjoy the dispensation of the Lord’s Supper, that great ordinance of unity and love.” He cited the pungent reply of a council of Indian chiefs to a Christian missionary to show how the conversion of the American Indian itself awaited the purification of the church from her “evil and shameful divisions . . . and corruptions.” Thomas became aware of these conditions within two months of his arrival. In late August 1807, he held a sacramental service at Cannamaugh Church in Indiana County, accompanied by another seceder minister, the Rev. William Wilson, who received a literary education at Glasgow before coming to America about 1791. Perceiving that members from other branches of the Presbyterian Church were mingled with the seceders in his audience, Thomas considered this an excellent opportunity to put his ideas of

“i like the bold christian hero” Christian unity into practice by inviting all those present to partake of the sacrament. He defined his reason in a communion sermon that astounded the Rev. Mr. Wilson, who could find no such sentiments in the Handbook of the Associate Church. Wilson evidently did not lose any time reporting these lax opinions to his old schoolmaster, the Rev. John Anderson, D.D., professor of theology for the churches of the Chartiers Presbytery since 1794, when he opened a log seminary with Wilson as his first scholar. This Dr. Anderson, so it was said, being a small man with a little neck, a weak voice, and a temper “somewhat irascible” and “very impatient of contradiction,” had found it difficult to get a hearing before coming to America. Thomas Campbell, on the other hand, with his courtly manners, pleasing address, and loyal group of old friends quick to sing his praises, was fast becoming a popular minister in the presbytery—a situation in itself calculated to arouse Anderson’s jealousy and suspicion. In any event, when Anderson was supposed to assist the new minister “in dispensing the sacrament . . . at Buffaloe,” he refused and, at the next meeting of the Chartiers Presbytery in October, gave as his excuse that “Mr. Campbell had publicly taught” opinions on the nature of saving faith and on the validity of creeds and confessions which were “inconsistent” with seceder testimony. The presbytery heard Wilson in support of Anderson’s charge but refused to hear Thomas Campbell in his own defense. It voted to accept Anderson’s excuse and then voted down a motion by Thomas to reconsider its action. The minutes recorded, “Mr. Campbell gave in a verbal protest” and withdrew from the assembly. The presbytery retaliated by not giving him any appointments and named a committee of five to investigate his alleged “erroneous opinions.” The conclusions of the committee were foregone. Besides one ruling elder, it was composed of the two accusers themselves— Anderson and Wilson—and two other ministers, named Alison and Ramsay, who were also Anderson’s former students. At the January 1808 meeting of the presbytery, they presented their find-

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“i like the bold christian hero” ings in the usual form of a “libel,” in which Anderson’s original two charges were raised to seven. At the next meeting, in February, Thomas was permitted to reply to the charges but was refused permission to call other witnesses on his behalf though numerous witnesses were admitted to accuse him of “not fencing the table” and of persisting in irregular doctrine. The presbytery found him guilty on six of the charges, and their action carried a vote of suspension. At the March meeting, Thomas asked for a reconsideration of his case but was voted down. After adjournment, when Thomas and others had left, a strange proceeding took place. The presbytery reconvened with only Anderson, Wilson, and Alison “sederunt,” and these three voted that the temporary suspension passed on Thomas in February should be declared permanent, “indefinite sine die.” Thomas now appealed his case to the seceder high court, the Associate Synod of North America, which met at Philadelphia in May 1808. Here he received the full, fair, and courteous hearing denied him by the presbytery. For seven successive days the synod patiently examined the issues. Thomas doubtless tried their patience at times, for he had come to Philadelphia understandably smarting under what he was to denounce as the “hasty, unprecedented, and unjustifiable proceedings” of a presbytery which “in its present corrupt state” appeared moved more by jealousy and spite than by concern for the truth. On this point, the synod was rather inclined to agree with Thomas. They roundly rebuked the conduct of Anderson individually and of the presbytery as a whole. Declaring “a desire to support their [own] character as a court of Christ, for justice, honour and impartiality,” they reversed the sentence of suspension and resolved to decide the case themselves rather than refer it back to the presbytery. From this point on, they found the issues not quite so clear-cut as the defendant evidently considered them to be. Actually, Thomas’s thinking had progressed far beyond that day in 1799 when the Synod of North Ireland had censured him

“i like the bold christian hero” for holding a rather vague fraternal attitude toward Christians of other denominations. Now, nine years later, he stood on trial before the Synod of North America, not as a mere sentimental unionist yearning over Christ’s scattered flock but as an independent theological thinker boldly challenging important doctrines of his church. Apparently he did not yet appreciate the full extent and significance of the change. The implications of his attitude did not escape the synod; in the end the committee named to study the issues felt constrained to find “Mr. C’s answers to the two first articles of charge, especially, [concerning faith and creeds] are so evasive, unsatisfactory and highly equivocal upon great and important articles of revealed religion . . . held and professed by this church . . . as to give . . . sufficient ground to infer censure.” Thomas “begged to be heard” again before this report was accepted and, in an address to his “honored brethren” which he obviously meant to be mild and conciliatory, he, after declaring “no confidence” either in his “own infallibility or in that of others,” boldly affirmed his “absolute and entire rejection of human authority in matters of religion”—an assertion of independence hardly in accord with the synod’s concept of authority. The committee’s report was accepted and a motion carried “that Mr. C. be rebuked and admonished.” Out of his disappointment and perhaps his final, unhappy realization that synods in America were no more likely than synods in Ireland or Scotland to permit the individual any license to differ or deviate from seceder testimony, Thomas left the assembly. The next morning, he sent to the moderator a bitter, angry letter stating himself so “greatly aggrieved” by the “reverend court” that he felt “duty bound to refuse submission to their decision as unjust and partial; and finally to decline their authority.” The synod, still unperturbed and patient, summoned him to reappear. Thinking better of his hasty and somewhat petulant action, he returned, retracted the letter, “acknowledging his rashness,” and agreed to submit to “rebuke and admonition.”

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“i like the bold christian hero” Both Thomas and the synod obviously being anxious to believe that their differences were much less radical than, in truth, they were, he was assigned to preaching appointments in Philadelphia for June and July and then sent back to his presbytery with his suspension lifted. But the presbytery, with the recent rebuke from the synod rankling old animosities, refused him any appointments and at their September meeting read a report of the synod action which he considered “partial and even false.” Sharp words followed. Seeing no hope of reconciliation, Thomas then, “in his own name and in the name of all who adhered to him,” formally renounced the authority of presbytery and synod and “all further communion with them.” The date was September 13. The next day he did not appear at the meeting but, to make his action official in writing, sent a letter, the same one he had presented and then retracted at the May synod. This time he did not retract, and he was not urged to do so. The Presbytery of Chartiers suspended him from the ministry from which he had already withdrawn. September 13, 1808, marked his formal separation from the seceder church. But it did not interrupt his preaching. Nor was the presbytery finished with him. He was repeatedly summoned to appear and acknowledge his heresy, and by the court’s authority, spies were sent to his meetings, a check kept on his movements, and slanders circulated. He later related to his family, he was convinced that “nothing but the law of the land had kept his head upon his shoulders.” Though he had ignored all summons from the presbytery, when the synod again met in Philadelphia, in May 1809, he thought the superior court due the courtesy of a formal notice of his withdrawal. So he prepared “a paper entitled ‘Declaration and Address to the Ass. Synod,’” which evidently defined his position and “proposals” and was accompanied by a letter carrying a fifty-dollar note to refund “a like sum” given him by the synod upon his arrival in America two years earlier. The synod, recognizing the finality of his decision, instructed the Chartiers Presbytery that the name of the Rev. Thomas Campbell

“i like the bold christian hero” “should be erased from the roll,” an instruction the presbytery was not to heed for almost a full year. Meanwhile, Thomas continued his preaching, out of doors and in the homes of “adherents.” It was a heterogeneous and independent group unimpressed by the actions of ecclesiastical courts and held together by little more than a vague sentiment of Christian unity and the personality of Thomas Campbell. Wishing to clarify the situation, sometime in the summer of 1809, ten months or so after his withdrawal from the seceders, he proposed “a special meeting . . . in order to confer freely upon the existing state of things, and to give, if possible, more definiteness to the movement in which they had . . . been co-operating,”—a “movement” that was, in truth, still scarcely more than an idea in his own mind. When the meeting assembled at the house of Abraham Altars on the pike between Mt. Pleasant and Washington, Thomas delivered an address in which he elaborated his idea: that all di v ision in the church is evil and that unity could be achieved best by abolishing human creeds as tests of communion and restoring the bonds of primitive apostolic Christiani t y. In conclusion he suggested a slogan: “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.” The slogan was by no means so simple and guileless as it appeared on the surface, and the fact was not lost on the meeting. In the gathering, there were seceders as well as strict Scots Presbyterians like Thomas Acheson to whom any new departure in religion was likely to seem dangerous. There were Irish independents like James Foster—a former presenter in the Rich Hill Church, who had followed Thomas to America by only a few weeks—and others belonging to no church, like Abraham Altars, the son of a deist, who could accept a religious innovation without discomfort. Those willing to accept the challenge of the slogan decided to unite in a more formal organization. On August 17, 1809, they met at Buffaloe and formed “The Christian Association of Washington, Pennsylvania.” This society,

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“i like the bold christian hero” they wanted it clearly understood, “by no means considers itself a Church.” They, who were themselves still members of “different religious denominations,” were organizing “merely as voluntary advocates for Church reformation,” in the hope that other members and churches of various parties would join together in the reform movement. A committee of twenty-one was appointed to confer with Thomas Campbell and determine the best means of carrying out their designs. It having been further decided that a place of meeting other than private homes was needed, a site was selected on the Sinclair farm and a group of members quickly erected a log building, designed to be used also for a common school, which was much needed in the neighborhood. The location of the farm, at the juncture of the Middletown to Canonsburg and the Mt. Pleasant to Washington roads, suggested the name “Crossroads” for the meeting place. Thomas, meanwhile, retired to the nearby house of a Mr. Welch, a farmer friendly to the association who had set aside a quiet little upper chamber for his use, and there spent a week in study and writing to prepare an elaborate formal statement of the Christian Association’s purpose and program. He entitled it “Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington.” A meeting was called on September 7 to hear it read. The reading took quite a while, for the “Declaration” was three pages long and the “Address” eighteen, to which was added an appendix of thirty-one pages. The document was unanimously approved and ordered to be printed at once. While the “Declaration and Address” was still in the hands of the printer, Thomas received word that his family had arrived in America, and he set out across the mountains to meet them.

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As this story slowly unfolded, Alexander listened with ever mounting amazement and joyous relief. For months he had lived in mingled anticipation and dread—anticipation of his father’s certain joy over his dedication to the ministry as a career and

115 First American home of the Campbell family. The new house to which Thomas Campbell brought his family on the outskirts Washington, Pennsylvania, belonged to Thomas and David Acheson. It was a simple one-and-a-half story log house with a basement kitchen, small rooms, and low ceilings. The sloping lot on which it was built was described as a “hole in the ground.”

“Declaration and Address.” On August 17, 1809, the Christian Association of Washington was formed. Thomas Campbell then engaged in the writing of the “Declaration and Address” at the nearby farmstead of a Mr. Welch. The print ing press on which the “Declaration and Address” was printed.

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“i like the bold christian hero” dread lest his father be filled with sorrow over his renunciation of the seceder church. Now, he found, while each had traveled his own separate way, unbeknown to the other, they had come to much the same position. In excited narration and discussion of this providential chain of circumstances, two days passed quickly as the Campbells crossed Chestnut Ridge, the westernmost range of the Appalachians, and descended into the great Ohio Valley, “those vast savannas through which flow ‘the Western waters,’” which was to be their home. At Williamsport, “a growing settlement” on the road from Philadelphia to Wheeling, they were ferried across the Monongahela to find themselves in Washington County. To a young man newly arrived to establish his career, the teeming river traffic on the Monongahela and the rich farmlands in the valley must have seemed a good portent. That night they were guests of a Presbyterian friend of Thomas’, the Rev. Samuel Ralston, president of the board of trustees of Jefferson College at Canonsburg. The next day they were home at last, in the county seat of Washington. With its some hundred and seventy-five private houses, situated upon a hill, the town would remind the Campbells of Rich Hill in both size and location. Recent visitors had commented on its “thriving manufactories and trade” and its “handsomely built dwelling-houses.” The house to which Thomas took his family was not among the “handsomely-built.” A property of his friends, Thomas and David Acheson–who purchased two lots on the outskirts of town in a plot generally described as “a hole in the ground,” and there built for him a one-and-half story log house with a basement kitchen suited to the sloping lot—the dwelling was among the cheapest. Its rooms were small, the ceilings low. But it fitted Thomas’s limited means as a minister without a parish. It was new and clean and quite as comfortable, if not so picturesque, as the whitewashed, thatch-roofed cottage the Campbells had left in Ireland. Any place would seem home to Jane, now that she was restored to the arms of Thomas.

“i like the bold christian hero” Alexander’s first interest was the “Declaration and Address.” He read the proof sheets as rapidly as they came from the presses, and with every page his wonder and his interest grew. In the small upper room of a western Pennsylvania farmhouse, writing quietly and unpretentiously for himself and a group of neighbors, Thomas Campbell had produced a classic of Christian literature. He had written a charter of unity for the church and a charter of liberty for free Christians everywhere. He had, in effect, produced an American religious Declaration of Independence. As Thomas Jefferson had challenged citizens to a bold new adventure in selfgovernment, so Thomas Campbell proposed a similar adventure in Christian thinking. Indeed, he expressly challenged all Americans with the direct question: In this highly favored country, where the sword of the civil magistrate has not as yet learned to serve at the altar . . . a country happily exempted from the baneful influence of a civil establishment of any peculiar form of Christianity . . . can the Lord expect, or require, any thing less, than a thorough reformation in all things civil and religious? To the citizens of “this happy country,” who had already accomplished political reform by sloughing off old tyrannies and appealing to primary “natural” and “inalienable” rights, he now offered a comparable religious reform to be initiated by clearing away “the stumbling blocks,” the ecclesiastical “rubbish of ages,” to use Locke’s phrase, and returning to “fundamental truths” and “first principles.” The “Declaration and Address” fitly opened with a bold assertion of independence—”From the series of events which have taken place in the churches . . . especially in this western country . . . we are persuaded that it is high time for us not only to think, but also to act, for ourselves”—and then immediately broached

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“i like the bold christian hero” the plea for Christian unity which was to be argued with closelyreasoned logic and with apostolic fervor throughout the fifty-four pages of the tract. “Tired and sick of the bitter jarrings and janglings of a party spirit,” it stated, “we would desire . . . to adopt and recommend such measures as would . . . restore unity, peace, and purity to the whole church of God.” These “measures” were summarized in thirteen “propositions,” prefaced with the arresting statement that “they are merely designed for opening up the way, that . . . disentangled from the accruing embarrassments of intervening ages, we may stand with evidence upon the same ground on which the church stood at the beginning.” The first proposition was to become Thomas Campbell’s most famous sentence on Christian unity: “That the church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one.” He declared, therefore, “that division among Christians is a horrid evil, fraught with many evils,” which he described in their effects upon the spread of Christianity in frontier settlements and upon the conversion of the American Indian. The “universally acknowledged” cause of such “corruptions and divisions,” he wrote, is the introduction of “human opinions and . . . inventions . . . into the constitution, faith, or worship of the church.” He proposed that the New Testament is a “perfect constitution for the worship, discipline and government of the New Testament church”; that “nothing ought to be . . . required . . . as articles of faith . . . [or] as terms of communion” except what is taught by Christ and his apostles “either in expressed terms, or by approved precedent”; and that, as a full knowledge and apprehension of all “revealed truths” are not necessary to entitle persons to church membership, a profession of faith in and obedience to Christ” is all that is absolutely necessary to qualify them for admission into his church.” To make it clear that he was not imposing an embargo on religious thought, he added that “doctrinal exhibitions of the great systems of divine truths” and “inferences and deductions” from Scripture may be “highly expedient” and useful to the “edi-

“i like the bold christian hero” fication of the church” but should be recognized as products of human reasoning and adopted only as “human expedients” so that “any subsequent alteration” in their observance “might produce no contention nor division in the church.” He wrote in high hope of the eventual success of these “measures” because of his confidence “that all the churches of Christ, which mutually acknowledge each other as such, are . . . agreed in the great doctrines of faith and holiness . . . [and] as to the positive ordinances of Gospel institution; so that our differences, at most, are about the things in which the kingdom of God does not consist, that is, about matters of private opinion, or human invention.” Calling on his “dearly beloved . . . brethren of all denominations” to join the Christian Association of Washington, Pennsylvania, in this work of reform, he sealed his appeal to unity with the appeal to their love of liberty: Resume that precious, that dear bought liberty, wherewith Christ has made his people free; a liberty from subjection to any authority but his own, in matters of religion. Call no man . . . master upon earth; for one is your master, even Christ . . . Stand fast therefore in this precious liberty, . . . for the vindication of [which] . . . have we declared ourselves hearty and willing advocates. . . and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. When Alexander finished reading the last proof sheet of the document, he had a cause, he had found purpose and direction for his ministry. He informed his father that he would devote his life to advocating its principles. Thomas was delighted, although he knew that his son was not yet ready to begin such a mission.

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“i like the bold christian hero” The “Declaration and Address” specifically stated: “We have no nostrum, no peculiar discovery of our own to propose to fellowChristians . . . we have nothing new.” Thomas realized that many before him had yearned and labored for Christian unity. He knew that many before him had exalted the Bible as the only standard and sought to restore the church to its “original simplicity” and “primitive purity.” Moreover, as his “overture for union” freely acknowledged to his “dear brethren of all denominations,” he also knew that he had his “educational prejudices, and particular customs to struggle with as well as they”; and he appreciated that it would be no easy thing to sweep away “the rubbish of ages” which littered and concealed the “original ground” where the apostles had stood. Many of these things Alexander had still to learn. So Thomas advised his son: “to divest himself of all earthly concerns, to retire to his chamber, to take up the Divine Book, and to make it the subject of his study for at least six months.”

w Alexander took the advice seriously. Every day of pleasant weather he carried his books to the shade of a widespreading tree in a nearby grove until, much to the wonderment of Washington citizens, he had worn a well-defined path to his p l a t o nic academia. His first winter and spring in America passed, as he later recorded, in “examination of the scriptures, ecclesiastical history, and systems of di v i ni t y, ancient and modern,” with a particular emphasis on “all the Protestant platform of church union, communion, and co-operation.” In the end, he had quite satisfied himself as to “the polestar” of his course. He had also oriented that course with nineteen centuries of church history—a history that from the vantage point of his new polestar, could best be described in terms of the church’s long struggle to relate and reconcile the two ideals of corporate uni t y and of individual liberty.

“i like the bold christian hero” As the “Declaration and Address” succinctly stated: “A manifest attachment to our Lord Jesus Christ in faith, holiness, and charity, was the original . . . foundation and cement of Christian unity.” Then gradually, it appeared, “the faith” came to mean not personal trust in Christ but an elaborate dogma about Christ, which was formulated from century to century by a succession of doctrinal statements—in the Apostles, the Nicene, and the Athanasian creeds as well as later confessions and decrees of councils. Even by the third century, numerous human interpretations and additions were beginning to overlay the original simplicity of the Christian gospel. In the fourth century the conception of the church itself underwent a radical change, from a voluntary fellowship of believers to a compulsory association in which religious dissent became treason to the empire. In this way, the medieval church achieved conformity and solidarity. At the same time, it professed to perpetuate the primitive church in all its purity, enriched by centuries of accumulated tradition. But R o m a n Catholic unity was unity without liberty. Even in the period when the Roman church presented the greatest show of external unity, there were heretics who doubted its infallibility and purity—men like Peter of Bruys, who was burned at the stake for his intent to “restore Christianity to its pristine simplicity”; and the Waldensians, the Hussites, and John Wycliffe and the Lollards, all of whom based their revolt on a return to a primitive Christianity they found depicted in the New Testament. And many paid in blood and fire for their revolt. The individual conscience counted for little in an age of absolutism. The Renaissance broke the bonds of feudal and ecclesiastical orthodoxy and recovered freedom for the human spirit. In the fifteenth century the revival of learning began to rediscover the individual in the realm of the intellect. By the sixteenth century, the Reformation was asserting the rights of the individual in religion. But the liberty first attained was implied rather than actual. While the reformers of the first century of the Reformation made sincere

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“i like the bold christian hero” attempts to find a basis for Christian unity and from the start assumed that a true reformation could be effected only by appeal to the faith and practice of the apostolic church, they carried over from Rome the belief that unity was dependent on acceptance of creedal conformity and of the state church. Luther and Calvin each sought to formulate a complete biblical theology and each ended with a doctrinal and ecclesiastical system little less dogmatic and tyrannous in its own jurisdiction than that of Rome. Luther refused fellowship to Zwingli and Calvin ordered Servetus burned at the stake. Centuries of absolutism could not be overcome in a few decades, and the dogmatic autocracy of Luther and Calvin gave Protestantism a solidarity perhaps essential in that period of life or death struggle with Roman Catholicism. Once this victory was assured, the impulse to liberty unleashed by the Renaissance began to reassert itself. Protestantism gradually split into such a multitude of warring factions that Herder justly called the seventeenth century “that wretched century of strife.” Two revolts against the rigors of Calvinism arose within the Reform Church: Armi ni a nism, which deni e d Calvinistic predestination and gave new freedom and responsibility to the individual by its doctrine of free grace secured through faith, and the federal or covenant theologians, who insisted on a more free and rational relation between God and individuals and sought a more reasonable method of biblical exegesis. Other movements, such as the Anabaptists, the Schwenkfeldians, and the Socinians, were entirely separatists and voiced their dissent and protest against established Protestantism as well as against Romanism. Episcopal, Presbyterian, and independent each asserted that its form was the one divinely authorized and preferred. There was no impulse to unity because each sect was convinced that it alone held the true doctrine and that uniformity of opinion was requisite to ecclesiastical solidarity. But the century did make one contribution of value. As the non-established churches had always affirmed the right of dissent,

“i like the bold christian hero” so the established churches also gradually lost their inquisitorial character and began to perceive that the adherence of all citizens to one national church is not essential to the security of the state and to realize that even division is preferable to an external unity achieved by oppression and coercion. Though each sect might still feel that every dissenter from its particular dogma was gaining freedom at the price of damnation, it was a gain for individual liberty when each person was free to go his or her own way to perdition. Even in this era of sectarian strife there were individuals who valiantly sought some comprehensive scheme for unity among Christians. The Roman Catholics Bossuet and Spinola, and the Protestants Leibnitz and Grotius explored ways to heal the great schism of the Reformation. Failing this, Leibnitz and Grotius tried to formulate terms of peace between the various factions of Protestantism. In England, the Anglican, Stillingfleet, published his “Irenicum,” which declared, “For the church to require more than Christ himself did, or make other conditions of her communion than our Savior did of discipleship, is wholly unwarrantable.” Heroic efforts to avoid the split between the establishment and the non-conformists were made by Puritan leaders like Richard Baxter, who wrote “The True and Only Way of Concord of all the Christian Churches” and gave new currency to the classic slogan coined by the German, Rupertus Meldenius: “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.” When the Stuart despotism returned to power, its answer was the Act of Uniformity of 1662 and the even harsher Conventicle Act of 1664. Unity overtures remained the plea of individuals and were never taken up by organized groups. In any event, another principle had to be established before attempts at unity could become effective—the principle of toleration. To this task many able minds of the seventeenth century turned their attention. Among Anglicans, William Chillingworth died in prison for his loyalty to Charles I and yet he wrote, “Take

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“i like the bold christian hero” away this persecuting, burning, cursing, damning of men for not subscribing to the words of men, as the words of God . . . and restore Christians to the first full liberty of captivating their understanding to Scriptures only”; and the eloquent Jeremy Taylor published his treatise on toleration, “A Discourse on the Liberty of Prophesying.” The chief honors in the battle for toleration belonged to the Puritan independents—John Owen, Milton, and Richard Baxter. Cromwell’s religious settlement was the most tolerant which England had seen or was to see again for many a day. Yet the Puritan was beset by a contradiction. Inner conviction demanded that they fight for liberty of conscience; still, they could not rid themselves of the notion that the Word was self-evident and that there was some prime authority, a discipline, which the Puritan knew by direct insight. Thus a militant moral idealism often betrayed the best efforts at toleration. It was left for the secular philosopher, John Locke, to mark “a watershed in human thought.” Penetrating beneath the Puritan contradiction, he chose a toleration which was more than the right of “soul-freedom” for the righteous; it was the right to free speech and free belief for all alike—those in grace, those in doubt, and those reprobate. In his four “Letters of Toleration,” published after the Glorious Revolution that ended the Stuart despotism and placed William III on the throne in 1689, Locke furnished religious liberty with its philosophical defense. His empirical method and theory of the limits of human knowledge heralded a shift from the absolute to the relative point of view in regard to human means of knowledge and belief. This idea, when applied to religion, led inevitably to a relaxing of the claim to authority upon which church and state had historically based their decrees of council and acts of uniformity. Once released from these bonds, dissenting sects gradually became more secure and respectable, Protestantism crystallized around its various sects, the Restoration emphasis passed away in the maturing communions and the thought of Christian unity was laid aside. An era of complacent

“i like the bold christian hero” denominationalism was begun. Locke, though he had little liking for sectarianism, did not present any specific plea for Christian unity in his “Letters,” for he knew that unity had to wait on vindication of the full right of dissent; and, while religious controversy continued, the pleas for toleration had one signal effect: recognition of the “right to differ and be damned” gave way to the broader recognition of the “right to differ and not be damned.” While the seventeenth century spent itself in an orgy of disintegrating individualism, the eighteenth century faced the task of developing a reasoned and philosophical conception of the relation between individuals and their place in society. Two movements sought the answer in two entirely opposite directions. The first sought to discover within persons a common basis for unity by appealing to feeling, to the fundamental element of emotion. From this appeal grew not one but several great movements: the Quakers, led by George Fox; Pietism; Moravianism, under Count Zizendorf; and Methodism. The second approach to the problem sought the common basis for unity in reason instead of emotion, with an assumption that divine truth could be ascertained by pure reason unassisted by supernatural revelation. Though the net result of this appeal to reason appeared disastrous to religion for a time, the philosophy of the Enlightenment—the philosophy, par excellence, of individualism—clarified the significance of the individual in every phase of life and so prepared the way for a reconstruction that would both safeguard liberty and preserve order. The eighteenth century also reasserted the idea of reformation through “restoration.” Methodism itself, like the other major reformations before it, was certain that its model was drawn straight from New Testament Christianity, and John Wesley congratulated his American brethren on being “at full liberty simply to follow the Scriptures and the primitive church.” But the idea of “restoration” as their exclusive end and aim was set forth by a number of small, independent movements which sprang up in Great Britain

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“i like the bold christian hero” from time to time throughout the century. Where the sixteenth century placed emphasis on restoring the pure doctrine of the apostles and the seventeenth century on a divinely authorized form of church polity, these eighteenth century restorationist sects centered their attention on working out in literal detail what they considered the original pattern of the structure, ordinances, and public worship of the New Testament Church. One of the earliest and strongest of these movements was that initiated by John Glas and carried forward by his son-in-law Robert Sandeman. Glas forswore the national Covenant of Scotland in 1728 because he could find no apostolic precedent for such connection between church and state. The churches he and Sandeman established—variously known as Old Scotch Independents, Glasites, or Sandemanians—were dedicated to “revive and exemplify the order and discipline of the primi t i v e church.” When, toward the close of the century, the Haldane brothers and Greville Ewing likewise separated from the Church of Scotland, their movement held much in common with these earlier churches, and James A. Haldane described t h eir intent in the title of his book published in 1805: A View of the Social Worship and Ordinances Observed by the Fi rst Christians, Drawn from the Scriptures Alone; Being an Attempt to Enforce their Divine Obligations; and to Represent the Guilty and Evil Consequences of Neglecting Them. But the union of Christians was not part of these programs, and their net result was divisive. A part of the Glasite movement, deci ding that immersion was the only form of apostolic baptism, separated to form the Scotch Baptists, a sect itself quite distinct from the English Baptists; and the Haldanes seriously objected when Greville Ewing introduced the works of Glas and Sandeman into the Haldanian seminary at Glasgow. With their whole energy bent on discovering the structure of the “true church,” none of these groups appeared to advance its primitive platform as a rallying point for re-uniting a divided Christendom. Roman

“i like the bold christian hero”

Portrait of John Glas, whose thinking influenced Alexander.

Catholicism had offered uni t y, without liberty; Protestantism had achieved liberty, without unity. Thus, the nineteenth century inherited its task and its challenge: to effect a synthesis—a synthesis of authority and liberty which, translated into religious terms would achieve solidarity of the church and yet guarantee the individual rights of private judgment and free action. Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address” had proposed western America and the year 1809 as the perfect conjunction of time and place for working out this synthesis and proposed a new fusing of the two old ideals of restoring primitive Christianity and of unifying the church. Obviously, if this attempt was to succeed where others had failed, a different approach to the problem would have to be made. Despite the

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“i like the bold christian hero” author’s sincere conviction that he had “nothing new” to propose, there were revolutionary seeds in his “overture to union.” For one thing, the “Declaration and Address” was not a wholly Protestant document. Its first proposition—“That the church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one”—was a catholic manifesto. It transcended Protestantism in its unequivocal avowal to recover the lost catholicity of the church, a concept for which Thomas perhaps owed a debt to his High-Church father who once found haven in Roman Catholicism and had died a communicant in the Church of England. Protestantism itself, never quite able to ignore Christ’s high priestly prayer for the unity of His people and, hence, never quite comfortable in its divisions, had appealed to the fiction of an invisible church which, whatever its divided state on earth, is united in the mind of God. Thomas Campbell flatly denied this appeal as a dangerous and pernicious evasion. Unity in Christ must be a “catholic constitutional unity,” “visible” and “ecclesiastical.” Therefore as the tenth proposition affirmed, schism is sin, it is “anti-Christian, as it destroys the visible unity of the body of Christ; as if he were divided against himself, excluding and excommunicating a part of himself.” In seeking the basis for this unity, Thomas Campbell did not look within the individual as the eighteenth century theorists had done; since persons are not uniform but diverse, the appeal to either individual emotion or individual reason had proved disintegrating, not unifying. The individual as defined by Locke did not have within him or herself the universal element that might provide the basis for unity. Hence, the basis must be sought not with in but without—in a return to authority. Here again was catholic ground. It was also apostolic, Paul having emphasized the principle of liberty in law. Moreover, if it contained a catholic emphasis on authority, in placing the seat of that authority the “Declaration and Address” became radically Protestant, Thomas’ position having been given its classic statement by Chillingworth,

“i like the bold christian hero” the seventeenth-century Anglican: “The Bible and the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants.” Alexander Campbell, following his father’s lead, was to declare this statement of its “immortal” author “the great central truth of Protestantism.” Yet both Campbells were too aware of historical antecedents to suggest that embracing this dictum within itself offered any solution. On examination of Scripture alone, Luther and Calvin had sought to discover a complete biblical theology, Cartwright and Laud an authoritative form of government, Glas and Haldane a jure divino program of public worship—and all had failed to bring unity to the church. Obviously, these seekers after “simple” Apostolic Christianity had not reduced their requirements for church communion to simple enough terms, had not properly distinguished between universals and particulars, between Christiani t y ’s essence and its incidentals. Christian union must come from acceptance of the authority of the Bible, but not of the whole Bible. Approaching the problem from this angle, however, even the persuasive and classic slogan of Meldenius, “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty,” had proved to be specious in practice. Christians could not agree on the proper demarcation between “essentials” and “non-essentials,” and matters remained as before. Indeed, a hundred appeals to Scripture sometimes seemed to yield a hundred answers. Thomas Campbell, therefore, proposed a program that was at once more simple and definite and yet more inclusive. Perceiving that there was far less room for difference of opinion about what the apostles required as conditions for entrance into the church than about the doctrine, organization, and forms of worship of the apostolic church, he approached the problem on this basis and suggested the proposition that an acceptance of Christ as Lord “is all that is absolutely necessary” for admission into the church. Thus he removed his proposal for union from the realm of the subjective and anchored it firmly to an objective fact in history—to the person and ministry of Christ. Once more he

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“i like the bold christian hero” was on Catholic ground. In implementing this idea, he disavowed “the trite indefinite distinction between essentials and non-essentials” and affirmed instead the distinction between “express precepts” and “human opinions,” which he considered more factual, clear-cut, and capable of demonstration. Luther had declared that “the Holy Spirit is the most plain and simple of all writers.” The “Declaration and Address” declared that “surely truth is something certain and definite”—but immediately limited the apparently sweeping statement with the explanation that the Gospel way, to be a way of concord and unity for all, “must be a plain way,” a “common sense” way, “very far remote from logical subtleties, and metaphysical speculations.” Here Thomas Campbell sought to define the area of freedom consistent with the authoritative imperative of the New Testament. He assumed that the only unity worthy a free Christian must be unity without uniformity, a unity with toleration for diversity. He assumed, therefore, that the area of freedom must embrace the whole large, complex, and indeterminate area of human opinion, or “inferential truths,” where Christians, while united by the imperative of loyalty to Christ, were free to evolve their subtle metaphysics on such questions as the Trinity or the atonement and to explore certain “human expedients” in regard to organization and ordinances, all without elevating these questions into terms of communion. In clarifying his distinction between precept and opinion, he again approached Catholic ground by making his appeal to “truths demonstrably evident” in the light of both Scripture and “right reason.” He called upon his fellow ministers of the various denominations, “as the professed and acknowledged leaders of the people, to go before them in this good work, to remove human opinions and the inventions of men out of the way by carefully separating this chaff, from the pure wheat of primary and authentic revelation.” Certainly, if a consensus of qualified opinion, of the intelligent and consecrated scholarship of the church, could not arrive at the “certain and def-

“i like the bold christian hero” inite” elements of truth essential to the peace and concord of the Lord’s people, then Christian unity must be forever despaired. Thomas Campbell was not a man to despair of his ideal. Of course, he was aware that the proposal of the “Declaration and Address” was “of a general nature” only. To the future belonged the task of separating the chaff from the wheat. The task presented a challenge great enough to satisfy a young man even of Alexander’s boundless energy and ambition.

w For all his concern to master the lessons of ecclesiastical history and the various platforms of Christian unity, Alexander could not devote all his time to self-education. Since his father was largely occupied with visiting the scattered families of the Christian Association and urging the principles of the “Declaration and Address,” it fell his lot to tutor his younger brothers and sisters and to instruct a young man of the Christian Association, Abraham Altars, who wished to become a minister. As he had done the previous year at Glasgow, he spent New Year’s Eve recording resolutions for the coming year, and he projected a careful schedule of work: Arrangements for studies for winter of 1810. One hour to read Greek - from 8 to 9 in the morning. One hour to read Latin - from 11 to 12 in the morning. One half hour to Hebrew - between 12 and 1 P.M. Commit ten verses of the Scripture to memory each day, and read the same in the original languages, with Henry and Scott’s notes and practical observations. For this exercise . . . two hours . . . Other reading . . . church

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“i like the bold christian hero” history, and divers other studies . . . to constitute the principal part of my other literary pursuits. Regulations for Abraham Altars 1st. Read to me in the morning, from 7 to 8, in Scott’s Fa mily Bible. Say one lesson every day in Greek Grammar. One . . . in Latin, and one in Rhetoric. Two days of the week to recite in English Grammar and parse. To prepare a theme each week, . . . to be corrected and . . . written clear in a book. Abraham and the children, from ten to eleven, will read a Scripture lesson. These attentions will occupy three hours . . . every day. Dorry, Nancy and Jane say English Grammar and parse with Abraham Altars . . . [on] Mondays . . . Thomas is to prepare a lesson every day in Latin Grammar. One hour for writing, and half an hour to hear any particular lessons from D., N., and J. The whole time spent thus will be nine hours. ....... May God in his great mercy afford me time, ability and inclination to attend to these intentions, and to his name may all the glory and honor redound through Jesus Christ. Amen. Alexander Campbell, Sunday, 31st December 1809. A young man of such scholarly zeal could not long go unnoticed in the community. In any event, seniores from the University of Glasgow were rare in the western country. Almost immediately after Alexander’s arrival, a lawyer named James Mountain, one of the trustees of an academy in Pittsburgh, offered him a thousand dollars a year to take charge of the academy. Quite aside from the handsome salary, it was a tempting offer. Alexander liked to teach.

“i like the bold christian hero” Pittsburgh, situated where the Monongahela and Alleghany rivers joined to form the mighty Ohio, was considered “the key to the Western Territory.” Its population of almost five thousand, though generally given more to money-making than to cultured pursuits, supported two dramatic societies and the Apollonian Society, which presented credible concerts of Haydn, Pleyal, Bach, and Mozart. Attorney Mountain himself was said to be a man “of deep learning” and the owner of a “judiciously selected” library. Alexander was not to be ensnared by such considerations. Instead, he told his father that he was accepting the challenge of the “Declaration and Address” and that he had made a further resolve never to accept pay for his preaching; to which Thomas replied, “Upon these principles, my dear son, I fear you will have to wear many a ragged coat.” Thomas was underestimating both his son’s capacity and the good fortune that was to attend him in material affairs. But he did not underestimate his potential as a preacher. About the time Alexander finished his proposed six months of intensive study, Thomas called upon him unexpectedly at a meeting to deliver a short exhortation. At its conclusion, Thomas involuntarily murmured aloud, “Very well.” Others agreed, and Alexander was urged to prepare a regular discourse. On July 15, 1810, he delivered his first sermon. He spoke in a grove on the farm of a Major Templeton about eight miles from Washington, an appropriate place for one who had first felt the greatness of America not on her city streets but in her virgin forests. Many being curious to hear what the young preacher could do, a good crowd was seated on the rough plank benches or on the grass under the shady maples. They saw before them a young man of almost twenty-two, with a tall, athletic figure, a face whose clean, strong lines bespoke both determined self-assurance and good-natured optimism, a fair complexion that still retained some of the freshness of Ireland, a high forehead crowned with abundant dark brown hair, and a pair of dark blue eyes as bright and eager as those of his grandfather Archibald when he charged

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“i like the bold christian hero” the French lines at Quebec. Alexander read the whole of the Sermon on the Mount, and in his remarks dwelt particularly upon the parables of the wise and foolish virgins and of the “wise man who built his house upon a rock.” Nervous at the beginning, he soon became conscious that he was holding the attention of his audience, and he concluded with an eloquent and animated exhortation. Some of the older members remarked to each other: “Why, this is a better preacher than his father!” Considering their opinion of Thomas, they could have given no higher praise. Alexander spoke the following Sunday at the Crossroads meeting place, choosing the appropriate subject of Christian unity. He began to find his services in demand every Lord’s Day and sometimes on weekdays as well. He had written his first sermon entirely and memorized it but later recorded that he had “felt embarrassed as one corseted.” The second sermon turned out “a sort of patch work,” part memorized, part extemporaneous. Next, he tried speaking from notes, but, thinking his effort still too labored and conscious of style, he soon dispensed with these aids a l t ogether and consequently “felt more freedom of thought, and . . . of speech.” Further, to improve his preaching, he and Thomas set up a practice of mutual criticism of each other’s sermons after every service. Since quite a few members of the Christian Association lived at a distance from the Crossroads, it was decided about this time to establish a second meeting place in the valley of Brush Run, some two miles above its juncture with Buffaloe Creek and two miles southeast of West Middletown. There, in a grove of giant oaks on the farm of William Gilchrest, a temporary stand was erected. Alexander was chosen to dedicate the new meeting place on September 16, just two months after his first sermon. With every effort he felt his confidence growing. On one occasion, perhaps thinking of a martial line in the “Declaration and Address” which called Christians to battle for Christ against “the Goliath schism . . . that is sheathing its sword in the very bowels of his

“i like the bold christian hero” church, rending and mangling his mystical body into pieces,” he concluded a rebuke to this “doleful” and “evil” partyism with the militant declaration: “When I consider what Paul and thousands of others suffered for a good conscience, I would do so too. I desire to fight for ‘faith once delivered to the saints.’ I like the bold Christian hero.” He soon had the chance to enact, at least in a small way, his role of “bold Christian hero.” The Presbytery of Chartiers, despite the Associate Synod’s instructions of May 1809 to erase Thomas Campbell’s name from their rolls, continued throughout the year to send him citations to appear and answer for his heresy. Finally, in the spring of 1810, Thomas sent a reply in writing that evidently convinced the presbytery that he was not to be reclaimed, and on April 17 they formally voted to unfrock and “depose Mr. Campbell from the office of the Holy Ministry.” Thereupon, several of Thomas’s good friends among the mi nisters of the regular Presbyterian church assured him that he would find a more liberal reception there than among the seceders, and they began to press him to apply for admission to the Presbyterian Synod of Pittsburgh. Alexander, already more of a realist than Thomas would ever be, was not so sanguine of their reception and urged his father not to risk a second rebuff. But Thomas was not to be denied a last chance to find shelter for his reform in the church in which he had begun his ministry. When the synod met at Washington in October 1810, he applied for “Christian and ministerial communion.” The reply was curt and harsh. However “specious” and “seducing” the plan of the Christian Association might appear, the synod declared, all experience with “similar projects” had evinced their “baleful” and “destructive” tendency to promote “divisions instead of union,” to degrade “the mi ni s t erial character,” and to admit “errors in doctrine” and “corruptions in discipline.” Thomas personally was cited for laxity of views regarding the Confession of Faith and for “encouraging or countenancing his son to preach the gospel without any regular author-

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“i like the bold christian hero” ity.” Whatever his disappointment or chagrin at the terms and tone of the reply, Thomas was inclined to accept the decision without comment. But not Alexander. He had expressed his intention to fight for the faith they professed. The next semi-annual meeting of the Christian Association was to be held in Washington on the first Thursday in November, and the Washington Reporter carried a notice that Alexander Campbell, V.D.S. (Verbi Divini Servus, Servant of the Word of God—itself a rebuff to the D.D.s of the reverend synod) would deliver at that time “an appropriate discourse” to illustrate the true “principles and design” of the association and obviate the objections which “ignorance or willful opposition” had attached to their overture “to the friends and lovers of peace and truth throughout all the Churches.” This he did, on the morning of November 1. The keynote of his address was struck in the introduction. That keynote was liberty. The French Revolution, he said—a point the “Declaration and Address” itself suggested—had opened up a new era. People were at last aroused to a true sense of civil and religious liberty and the churches of both Europe and America were aroused to a true concern for spreading the Gospel in every land and for healing divisions and promoting a renewed spirit of Christian brotherhood. He summed up the purpose of the Christian Association in a striking phrase: “to open the gates of admission into the church as wide as the gates of heaven.” But he emphasized, as his father had done, that its members were but one group in a worthy succession. Indeed, he specifically stated, “Many within these last sixteen years, both by writing and preaching, have been engaged in the arduous work.” In some respects this was the most provocative sentence in a long and impassioned address. Though time, he said, forbade the enumeration of these other “noble exertions,” his choice of the exact period, the last “sixteen years,” indicated that already, within a year of his arrival in America, he had become acquainted with other indigenous American movements which, like the Christian

“i like the bold christian hero” Association, were dedicated to the twin ideals of religious liberty and Christian unity and were seeking to establish in America a free church worthy of her free society.

w The first of these movements had its beginning among the Methodists of Virginia and North Carolina in 1794, precisely sixteen years before Alexander’s address in answer to the Synod of Pittsburgh. Actually, from the days of the first settlements, the American colonies had been fertile ground for the growth of religious independence. The American revolution itself had constituted a rebellion against both political privilege and ecclesiastical tyranny, with the non-conforming churches as chief propagators of the gospel of liberty for state and church alike. Shortly before the revolution, in 1774, James Madison wrote a friend denouncing “that diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution” which, at that very moment in his own vicinity, was holding “not less than five or six well-meaning persons in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments, which in the main are very orthodox.” The revolution had guaranteed liberty of conscience and put an end to persecution by law for religious opinion. But, as Thomas Campbell was to learn by harsh experience, it had by no means achieved toleration. Each sect still pugnaciously maintained the exclusive rightness of its own dogma and wielded dictatorial power within the bounds of its own jurisdiction. From 1784 to 1792, American Methodism was almost completely subject to the will of Bishop Frances Asbury, who was known to declare that a layman’s one rule was to “pay, pray, and obey”—a sentiment particularly obnoxious to a fiery Irish preacher named James O’Kelly, who, counting Thomas Jefferson among his friends and having fought and been imprisoned in the Revolutionary War, had thoroughly imbibed Patrick Henry’s dictum that “resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.” Asbury was tyrant enough for him.

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“i like the bold christian hero” At the Baltimore conference of 1792 O’Kelly proposed that a preacher who felt himself “injured” in his appointment by the bishop to a certain circuit might appeal his case to the conference. His supporters were loud in their cries: “Did not our fathers bleed to free their sons from the British yoke? And shall we be slaves to ecclesiastical oppression?” Nevertheless, the motion for right of appeal was defeated. O’Kelly and several other preachers withdrew to form the “Republican Methodists.” But even this name smacked too much of allegiance to old partyism. When the new group met on August 4, 1794, in Surry County, Virginia, Rice Haggard, an illiterate but discerning preacher always ready with a plan of action, lifted a New Testament aloft and moved that they follow its precept and “henceforth and forever . . . be known as Christians only.” The motion carried, along with a motion to take the Bible as their only creed. By 1795 these “Christians” were to cost the Methodists at least sixty-five hundred members in Virginia and North Carolina. On O’Kelly’s death, his tombstone was to carry the inscription, “Southern Champion of Christian Freedom.” The second movement started independently a few years later among the Baptists of New England. In 1800, Abner Jones, a Vermont preacher, became disturbed “in regard to sectarian names and human creeds.” Two years later he organized “the first free Christian Church in New England.” Soon, another popular Baptist minister, Elias Smith of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who had been preaching almost the same views, united his church with the Jones movement. In 1805 Smith began publishing the Christian Magazine, which gave way in 1808 to the Herald of Gospel Liberty, advertised as “the first religious newspaper published in the world.” Within a few years, the persistent propaganda of Jones and Smith had established organizations throughout New England and in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The third and last of these movements—and the most impor-

“i like the bold christian hero” tant both in general church history and in relation to the Campbells—had its origin in the “Great Revival” of the West in the early 1800s. The revival itself began among the Presbyterians of Kentucky, one of whose leaders was Barton Warren Stone. In time, Stone was to become a devoted friend and trusted coadjutor of the Campbells. The story of his movement and of the social and religious forces which gave it birth was essential knowledge for the Campbells if they were to comprehend the country of their adoption and the conditions which would at once challenge and help to mold their own reform efforts. The impetus for the Stone movement came with an upturn in one of the cycles of fervor and apathy that marked the course of American religious history. Religious motives played a dominant role in the founding of America and religious zeal was manifest in the early civic life of the colonists. Then, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw a sharp decline of interest in the church. This period of apathy ended with the “Great Awakening of 1740” under the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, assisted by the fiery evangelism which George Whitfield brought from Great Britain, where he had already helped inspire the Wesleyan revival. Eventually, a reaction again set in, both in America and across the Atlantic. It aroused the people from this period of apathy, it triggered Thomas Campbell to organize the Evangelical Society of Ulster, the Haldanes to begin their Reformation in Scotland; and in America, in the aftermath of the revolution, conditions were more acute still. From Massachusetts to the Spanish territory of Florida, the new republic was sunk in a postwar mire of moral laxity and spiritual indifference. Divorces, drunkenness, and crime multiplied. In politics all was turmoil between the bitter factions of Hamilton and Jefferson, and challenges to duels were passed even in the halls of Congress. Some blamed the demoralization on the atheistic principles imported from France through societies of “Illuminati” being organized in every important city. Some

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“i like the bold christian hero” believed an angry God was punishing His shepherds who had so recently forsaken their flocks for the battlefield and exchanged their sword of the spirit for swords of steel. Some sought the answer on a more material plane, explaining that the war itself had weakened the church by decimation of its clergy and members and by destruction of its property and financial resources. The more perspicacious even perceived that the hardest blow to the prestige of the churches had come, ironically enough, from the application of the principle of separation of church and state, a principle for which they had labored so diligently. With the equality of all communions before the law established by the Constitution, no denomination could seek a dominant position through power of government. Once the need for cooperation in the common cause of revolution was ended, the sects were separated by an even wider gulf, a spirit of suspicion and rivalry. On that vast frontier extending westward from the Allegheny Mountains to the Mississippi River, the state of affairs was far worse than in the East. While throughout the 1790s the West was being steadily populated by many settlers who were educated, responsible persons determined to establish civilization in the wilderness, but the necessary difficulty of administering the law over so large and sparsely settled an area made the region a natural haven for criminals and outlaw bands. Other settlers were young adventurers—many of them Scots-Irish immigrants or Revolutionary soldiers—seeking freedom from the restraints of the older communities, truculent, fierce-willed, counting hard drinking, gambling, and horse racing as their favorite amusements. As in the East, disputes were commonly settled by dueling, but with a difference. Frontiersmen, having no time for elegant byplay with swords, sometimes stood knee-to-knee hacking away at each other with tomahawks or hunting knives. In such a society, atheism found fertile ground. Even without this antagonist, however, religion faced a difficult challenge. The churches of the East were far too weakened and impoverished by the recent war to send ade-

“i like the bold christian hero” quate missionaries to the rapidly expanding region. Though Methodism discovered the best solution with its circuit riders who often appeared on the ground ready to hold religious services before the plows could be unslung from the Conestoga wagons, many a pioneer still was laid away with none to say a prayer and years would pass before children could be baptized. At the same time, Jacobin clubs flourished, for the French Revolution retained a greater popularity than in the East where the atrocities of the Reign of Terror produced a more shocked reaction. Every crossroads boasted its skeptic eager to expound the gospel of Tom Paine’s age of reason in heated and interminable debate with the crossroads theologian, while the theologians further weakened their own cause by their constant eagerness to fight among themselves at drop of the word Calvinist or Arminian. Then came the day in 1799, at a Presbyterian meeting in Logan County, Kentucky, when God seemed to send a second outpouring of amazing grace that might cleanse all America with fires of purification, as had occurred a half century earlier through the ministry of Jonathan Edwards in New England. For three years the Rev. James McGready had prayed for this miracle, laboring in his pastorate—a spot infamous throughout the frontier as “Rogues’ Harbor”—and persuading a few to sign his solemn covenant of prayer and fasting to plead with God “to revive his work.” Now the prayers seemed answered as the Holy Spirit renewed its wondrous work. Among the three or four hundred gathered at the Red River Meetinghouse, some fell to the ground jerking in convulsions, some fell motionless in a death-like trance. Soon, sinners were crying to the Lord to release them from the demons of hell, and the saved were describing the glories of bliss witnessed in their trances. The news spread, and throughout the frontier, preachers, hastening to seize the moment of awakened interest, announced other meetings in rapid succession. Barton Warren Stone, pastor to Presbyterian congregations at Cane Ridge and Concord, Kentucky, visited one of McGready’s meetings,

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“i like the bold christian hero” observed the revival phenomena “with critical attention,” and was convinced that it was “the work of God; . . . that cannot be a satanic work which brings men to humble confession and forsaking of sin.” In August 1801, the “second awakening” reached its height at a sacramental meeting on the grounds of Stone’s church at Cane Ridge. Eighteen Presbyterian ministers were present, assisted by several Methodists and with Baptists joining in but not communing. Military men on the ground judged the crowd to be twenty thousand. For seven days and nights the work continued until the bodies of the worshippers, alternately transported by joy and terror, and the provisions of the countryside as well, were exhausted. But three thousand souls had been snatched from the ranks of Satan to swell the hosts of glory. The revival fervor spread even beyond the Rev. James M c G r e a d y ’s fondest hope. Southward it penetrated into Tennessee and the Mississippi Territory and northward beyond the Ohio River into the Northwest Territory. The mountain barrier to the east fell before its advance, and the Tidewater country as well as New England were invaded. A magazine in far-away London carried the story of the great awakening. In 1803 the excitement began to decline and by 1805 abated appreciably. But the revival method continued in the camp meeting, which became an established institution with grounds for annual gatherings being set aside, rules drawn up for their conduct, and state laws passed for their protection. Recent events convinced many of the God-fearing, especially among the Methodists, that only the dramatic appeal of the revival could “hold the advance of religion equal with the advance of sin” on the frontier. Unhappily, the spirit of Christian unity and toleration fostered by the revival for a time was not so persistent. At the height of the awakening, doctrinal differences had been sidetracked while Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian united in the war on apathy and atheism as communions of the East had previously joined in the struggle against

“i like the bold christian hero” the tyranny and taxes of George III. Frontier preachers of the several sects had written in genuine elation: “Party spirit and narrow faced bigotry are dying fast; Blessed be God, the present century begins with . . . more catholicism and benevolence than any former period.” But these sentiments were by no means universal, some considering such heterodoxy a snare of the devil to catch the unwary. As the fervor abated, sectarian dogmatism again became assertive. Indeed, much of the positive good of the Great Revival would have been lost had not its liberal tendencies crystallized into a movement under the leadership of Barton Stone and several of his friends. From the beginning, the Presbyterian Church as a whole had looked askance at certain manifestations of the great revival, particularly its unseemly “exercises” and its lax attitude toward untrained evangelists. In 1803, the very year that the Associate Synod of Ireland banned Thomas Campbell’s participation in the Evangelical Society of Ulster, the Synod of Kentucky called its revival leaders to account. Stone and four others answered by withdrawing from the synod, forming the independent Springfield Presbytery, and explaining their position in a hundred-and-fortyone page pamphlet entitled “An Abstract of an Apology for Renouncing the Jurisdiction of the Synod of Kentucky, Being a Compendious View of the Gospel and a Few Remarks on the Confession of Faith.” But having already become radical pioneers in their struggle to adapt religion to an unfettered frontier, they soon felt too restricted even by a presbytery of their own making. Therefore, in June, 1804, they dissolved this body, adopted the simple name “Christian,” and, to herald the change solemnly drew up “The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery.” Written more than five years before the “Declaration and Address,” these two early documents of the Stone group were in a sense its forerunners, and the second, in fact explicitly stated in a few brief pages the leading principles which Thomas Campbell was to elaborate.

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“i like the bold christian hero” First, the “Last Will and Testament of the Presbytery” decreed “that this body die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the body of Christ at large” in order that it might testify to “the beautiful simplicity of Christian church government stripped of human invention and lordly tradition”; then expressing concern over “the division and party spirit among professing Christians,” principally owing to the adoption of human creeds and forms of government it declared the Bible the “only sure guide to heaven” and concluded with an ironical suggestion, certain to appeal to the frontier sense of humor, that the Synod of Kentucky should immediately ban every heretic “suspected of having departed from the Confession of Faith . . . in order that the oppressed may go free, and taste the sweets of gospel liberty.” The document was signed by six “witnesses,” who also appended a brief “Address” closing with their expression of “thanksgiving to God for . . . the glorious work he is carrying in our Western country, which we hope will terminate in the universal spread of the gospel, and the unity of church.” While the Campbells were still in Ireland, these three American religious movements—founded in religious liberty and originating independently among the Methodists of the South, the Baptists of New England, and the Presbyterians of the West— had begun to make contact with each other. A member of the original O’Kelly group in Virginia, Rice Haggard, was present at the Kentucky meeting which dissolved the Springfield Presbytery. Having suggested to the Republican Methodists in 1794 that they adopt the name Christian only, he made the same suggestion to the Stone group in 1804, and thus became a connecting link between the two Christian movements. In time, the Jones and Smith Christians of New England also became aware of the new western group, and when Smith began the publication of the Herald of Gospel Liberty in 1808, he reprinted “The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery” in the first issue. The first

“i like the bold christian hero” church of the Stone group was not to be started in Washington County, Pennsylvania, until 1812, but by the time Alexander answered the synod, there was regular intercourse between the southern, eastern, and western Christians and the story of the great revival and its outcome was common knowledge in the country where the Campbells had settled. In assuming the role of “bold Christian hero,” Alexander was aware that he marched in a good American company.

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rom the first Alexander felt at home in the New World, and he explored his surroundings with a lively curiosity. Whatever his father’s injunction and his own religious inclination, a young man of twenty-one could not entirely “divest himself of all earthly concerns.” A traveler to Washington, Pennsylvania, in 1807 declared himself “well pleased “ both with the “thriving town” and with its inhabitants, “a spirited and polished people, mostly descendents of the northern Irish.” Indeed, much of Pennsylvania west of the

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“a new peak” Alleghenies and the neighboring country of western Virginia had been settled by those who, like the Campbells, came from Ulster. These Scots-Irish had stamped their character on America as surely as the Puritans of New England or the cavaliers of the South. Bold and hardy, turbulent and obstinate, they advanced the frontier line of settlement westward, and they followed Washington to fight at Brandywine and Yorktown as stubbornly and valiantly as their forefathers had followed Cromwell and William III to fight at Londonderry and the Boyne. Alexander rejoiced to see that his neighbors were an independent, strong-willed lot, free to express whatever opinion pleased them without fear of a monarch’s displeasure or of reprisals by a troop of Welsh horsemen. One evidence of the thriving character of Washington, Pennsylvania, was the large number of its taverns—the Golden Swan (which on its opening in 1791 had borne the more prosaic name White Goose), Globe Inn, Buck Tavern, Cross Keys, and a new inn, opened across from the courthouse in 1808, called the Indian Queen. Whenever groups of farmers, merchants, traders, and wagoners gathered at the taverns or about the courthouse Alexander was certain to hear lively discussions of the nation’s policies, politics, and difficulties. There was angry talk against England because of her depredations on American shipping, talk all the more easily inflamed since the hated George III was still on the throne. Some were loud in defense of former President Jefferson for his attempts to settle the issue by negotiation instead of war. Others, resentful of the curtailment of their markets for tobacco, corn, and bacon through the Non-Intercourse and Embargo acts, were loud in demand that President Madison pursue a different course. Whatever their disagreement on foreign policy, these men of the western waters were generally agreed on internal affairs. When Jefferson in 1803, through a brilliant coup in international politics, purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, the whole four thousand miles of the Mississippi’s imperial extent were secured and a million square miles of addi-

“a new peak” tional territory opened to the empire builders of the West. Here, Alexander was finding on a grand scale a society animated by that spirit of liberty and enterprise of which he had dreamed since he first read the pages of John Locke. But if he agreed in general with the traveler of 1807 and declared himself well pleased, with the commu nity of Washington, he disagreed at another point. He found its citizens far more spirited than polished. Soon after his arrival, he became a welcome addition to the parties of the countryside as the young people of Washington discovered that the pastor’s son from Ireland, for all his dedication to the ministry, was a young man of lively wit and high spirits. Though Pittsburgh might boast several dramatic and music societies, the settlers around Washington were more likely to seek their entertainment in combination work-and-play gatherings where corn huskings and log rollings, quiltings, and apple parings were followed by evenings of boisterous fun that contrasted rudely with the decorous society in Glasgow and Helensburgh from which Alexander had so recently come. Pioneers of a new country, he learned, did not always find it easy to hew a home out of the wilderness by day and cultivate graceful amenities by night; voices loud in expounding the principles of Thomas Jefferson were often weak on quoting the English poets. After a while he decided, characteristically, to have his say about the social decorum of Washington. One of the first and most agreeable of his new friends was William Sample, who in 1808 had begun publishing a local weekly, The Washington Reporter. Sample had printed Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address” on his presses, and not long after he and Alexander met, Alexander was writing, at Sample’s invitation, for the Reporter. His first contributions were in verse. As early as March and April 1810, while he was still in the midst of his proposed six months of theological study, three of his poems appeared over the pseudonym “Juvenescence”: “On the Death of a Friend,” written in imitation of an ode by Horace; “The Ocean,” which he

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“a new peak” had composed while on the voyage to America and now prefaced with another ode of Horace’s accompanied by his own translation; and “Oh Hope,” purportedly “written by request of a Lady.” By the time he composed his first sermon, in support of his father’s religious reformation, he was ready to turn from poetry to prose for his literary contributions to the Reporter, with a series of satirical essays on “social improvement and reformation.” They were carried in ten issues from May 15 to July 23 and written, as Alexander thought, much in the manner of the Spectator. Most of the pieces appeared over the signature of “Clarinda,” a pseudonym that Addison himself had employed in the Spectator. Actually, their style was far more suggestive of Dr. Johnson than of Addison, and few Washington citizens were deceived into thinking them the work of a young lady. The object of the essays, wrote Clarinda, was not to disparage parties themselves, for “man is naturally a social creature” and social feasting could claim ancient and honorable lineage from the days of Jacob and Artaxerxes. Rather, the censure was leveled at the “puerile trifles” which sufficed to amuse the young people of Washington at their parties. To begin with their games were nothing more than “children’s toys and juvenile amusements” modified for the obvious purpose of exciting “amorous intentions.” Then, lest anyone infer that this stricture suggested a priggish attitude toward romance, Clarinda devoted an essay to a general observation on western society which, revealed the strong bent of Alexander’s own desires and thoughts in this summer of 1810. Decrying the number of unmarried men and women around Washington, Clarinda grew eloquent in defense of that “most connatural law of Heaven—”it is not good that man should be alone”—and suggested a fitting epitaph for the old bachelor: Here lies O.B. of inglorious memory who while he lived was dead. His talents were so exquisite, that they

“a new peak” could not be discerned . . . His Services to his country were so hidden, that they were known only to himself. This complaint brought a swift reply from “Eusebia Anxious” of West Middletown who, surmising that Clarinda might not be “a native . . . brought up in our country,” wrote to explain that this “present pitiable situation . . . is the certain effect of the foolish or wicked policy of our federal government in confiscating . . . the country from the honest, industrious, useful working people, in order to enrich a few idle . . . useless speculators” and that this policy had brought to an end the “golden age” of the America of her grandfather’s day when land was free for the pioneer’s asking and in “such a happy equality” of opportunity no man was “poor and wretched, no woman forsaken and miserable.” Clarinda continued the subject of matrimony with another revelation of the essayist’s own mind. “I am enraptured at the appearance of genuine personal beauty,” Alexander-as-Clarinda professed, but he hastened to remind the ladies that “social pleasure spring[s] from the mind” and that it would be a miserable fate to spend one’s days with a lady whose conversation extended “no farther than the etiquette of the tea table, or the minutiae of the adventures of the day.” Evidently not many of the young people of Washington satisfied the exacting standard of the young satirist who considered “cultivation . . . of the mind” the first requisite of “an agreeable companion.” Clarinda returned to the subject of parties with the tart comment that when their “puerile” games gave way to conversation, the quality of the entertainment was not improved. The conversation was “vain at the best, sometimes wanton,” and usually “empty and uninteresting” with everyone “in labor for something to say.” The “gabbling matches” of the women reminded Clarinda of the Turkish maxim that “women have no souls;” and their slavish vanity prompted a Miltonic apostrophe to fashion, “O grim-visaged tyrant!”

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“a new peak” The men fared no better in Clarinda’s estimation as they condescended “to all the frivolities and weaknesses” of the female. Another essay, written in the guise of a young man, “I.C.,” reinforced Clarinda’s criticism by taking to task certain “young fops (I cannot call them gentlemen)” who were guilty of the “Horrid vice” of swearing in the presence of ladies and who attended “splendid parties, late suppers, balls, and . . . our periodical, lunatic, or comedic theatrical productions” wearing dirks in their bosoms “so nigh the ruffles, as to appear upon a particular motion of the body.” Withal, I. C. concluded, an evening of such entertainment was “pitiable return for the loss of a few precious hours which not India’s wealth could purchase!” The satire of the Clarinda papers was neither biting enough nor its charges definite enough to arouse any great protest. Only one letter addressed to Clarinda and signed “Observator,” appeared in the R e p o r t e r to accuse the satirist with being “a wolf in sheep’s clothing . . . some . . . have gone so far as to name a certain young gentleman in the town of Washington.” “Observator” confessed himself of two minds about Clarinda, who he sometimes thought a female when he considered “the diffusiveness (sic) . . . of your style; your…rapid flights . . . from the simple to the bombastic; from the fantastic to the solemn,” and at other times thought a male when he considered “the audacity of your design, the keenness of your satire.” Clarinda replied mildly, if rather pompously, in the words of “the immortal Addison”: “Censure . . . is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.” And the issue was closed. Even “Observator” admitted that many were “as lavish . . . of their applause” as others were “of their censure.” Having once broken his lance of social reform, Alexander soon found cause to enter the lists again. This time his satire was caustic. Moreover he attacked a center of influence and privilege and in consequence let loose in the little town a tempest of debate that raged for several weeks. The citizens of Washington were quite proud of their stone

“a new peak” academy called Washington College. It was operated by the Presbyterians who in accord with their historic high standards of education were making valiant efforts throughout the West to keep the march of learning in step with the rapidly advancing frontier. Having established Jefferson College at Canonsburg, only seven miles distant, they opened the college at Washington in 1806 and already it boasted fifty students. Alexander attended the closing exercises of the summer session on September 27, 1810. He was amazed and appalled. The young men of the University of Glasgow were not famous for their quiet decorum on all occasions, but their university exercises were dignified by orations in Latin and Greek and dissertations on taste and logic. The Washington students, on the other hand, some dressed as Indians or as backwoodsmen in coonskin caps, carrying tomahawks, and knives, sought to entertain the public by rowdy buffoonery. There were boisterous fiddle tunes accompanied by fife and drum, dueling and boxing matches, a mock trial at the bar, caricatures of the Dutch and the Scots-Irish, and satiric sketches on the drunkard, the gambler, the swearer, and the fop. The most literary presentation was a few scenes from Smollett’s farce, The Reprisal, an example of eighteenth-century England’s decadent theater which, in Alexander’s eyes, would scarcely raise the educational or literary level of the exercises. The principal of Washington College, Reverend Matthew Brown, and his faculty were equally aware of the shortcomings of the performance. They understood the untrammeled temper of their new western country and believed their students unprepared for a full imposition of strict scholastic discipline, and so they were able to view the exercises with a tolerant detachment and an amused leniency that were incomprehensible to Alexander. Less than a year in America, he was still young enough to be a perfectionist, and his standards were the standards of the centuries-old University of Glasgow. He was prepared to hold Washington College to a strict reckoning.

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“a new peak” The Washington Reporter carried in the same issue both the brief official account of the exercises—which, perhaps to forestall criticism, explained that the entertainment was “suited to the various tastes of the audience,” to “wise men and fools,” with “the object . . . to please, not to offend”—and a lengthy burlesque “Correct Compendious Account of the late Exhibition of Washington College,” signed by “Bonus Homo.” Gone now was the half-apologetic tone of the Clarinda essays. Alexander sallied forth fully panoplied with barbed sarcasm to describe, in a vein of mock approval, the “very flattering progress” lately exhibited by the youth of Washington. As the clergy were present, smiling their approbation, “Bonus Homo” caustically commented that evidently the Westminster Confession’s prohibition of stageplays “is only to be understood of stage-plays in large cities” and suggested that the display of “fencing, boxing, polite swearing . . . polite blackguarding, and . . . other . . . elegant accomplishments” must be “by no means, inconsistent with true morality” and perhaps even demonstrated “the genuine effect” of “the late revivals in religion among the Presbyterians” on “the western side of the mountains.” Bonus Homo appeared on October 1, the day before the convening of the Synod of Pittsburgh, which, three days later, was to consider the Reverend Thomas Campbell’s application to their body for “ministerial communion.” The identity of the essayist was in little doubt, as Alexander learned when he met the college principal, the Reverend Mr. Brown, in a Washington shop and somewhat to his embarrassment was abruptly greeted, “Well, Mr. Bonus Homo, I hope you are well this morning.” However merited his strictures, this untimely appearance of Bonus Homo probably had a bearing on the harsh tone in which the Presbyterian synod refused fellowship to the father of this youthful satirist of their literary institution. In any event, the supporters of Washington College quickly took to the press. In the October 8 issue of the Reporter, two letters

“a new peak” of protest appeared. One was by an anonymous correspondent, “A Friend to Truth”; the other by a newcomer to town, a Sarah Hastings, who wrote both to denounce the “Compendious Account” as an “indirect attempt to crush the rising honor of the infant college” and “pour contempt on the late revivals of religion” and also to deny authorship of the piece, which she feared might be attributed to her. Two other replies to Bonus Homo appeared in later issues, signed by “Bonus Puer” and by “John Buckskin, Ju.” The latter was purportedly a student writing to defend the recent exercises at both Presbyterian institutions; but so broad and damning was its caricature as to suggest that this “defense” might, in truth, be another of Alexander’s own inventions: I wish some of your squeamish modest bonus homo’s had heard the speech on the Irish delivered at ours [the Canonsburg exhibition] last fall—why the Irish people was compared to sheep & hogs & lice fleas & what was worst of all to a gammon of bacon . . . I could see no fun in this kind of blackguarding, but I seen that the Doctors . . . laffed very harty . . . So I concluded it must be right . . . . At some of our exhibitions we have mock sermons . . . a whole burlesque sermon—mocking certain clergymen, but sure there was no harm in this—as the design was to give the Seceders a touch. . . . [People here] took all these things in good humor except a few foolish people who, as they had no rotten eggs in their pockets, had recourse to more petrifick [sic] materials & let them fly a few stones at the trustees—but no harm was done. One grazed the head of a revd. doctor, but if it has come in contact, it could not have done any injury to a head anointed with the oil of doctorship . . . A defendant of quite different caliber was “A Friend to Truth,” who may well have been a professor or trustee of Washington

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“a new peak” College; his exchange of letters with Bonus Homo continued in the Reporter for two months. While admitting that the “Compendious Account” was “an unequaled satire” in which the “writer has placed the different objects of his wit with as much elaborate regularity as if he had been penning a homily,” A Friend to Truth charged that Bonus Homo was seeking to destroy, not to reform, perhaps with the intent of erecting a new academy. He defended the Washington exhibition on the grounds “that it is usual in western seminaries of learning thus to indulge the students . . . [who], at such times . . . ‘freed from college rules and commonplace book-reason,’ feel an elasticity of spirit that laughs at the gravity of discipline, and frequently introduces . . . things which serious propriety would perhaps have omitted.” To Bonus Homo’s mind this was a damning defense. Since “everything low, lewd, vulgar and prophane (sic) ought forever to be banished from the seat of learning,” he exclaimed, What a stab is this, at the institution!!! To declare that the boys are left . . . to follow the dictates . . . of puerile folly, unrestrained . . . that they are permitted to expose themselves and the faculty, through the indolence of the faculty!!! As for the aspersions on his motive, he denied any intent to start a new academy—”I conceive one calling,” he explained, “to be enough for one man. I have made my choice and mean to abide by it”; and he concluded with a plaint that he was to echo many times in the years ahead: “My well meant attempt, then, was to reform not to destroy; but it seems this gentleman knows no difference between reformation and destruction.” On October 22, in the same issue which carried the notice that Alexander Campbell, V.D.S., would address the Christian Association and answer the charges of the Synod of Pittsburgh,

“a new peak” Bonus Homo expressed himself in a long satiric poem which A Friend to Truth promptly declared “for . . . dulness [sic] and obscurity to be [worthy] the hero of a modern Dunciad.” Entitled “The Genius of the West; a Descriptive Poem on the Late Exhibition at Washington College, September, 1810,” its twentyseven lugubrious stanzas described how: Here Roman wit and Attic lore! . . . [Are] mangled and disgrac’d! . . . And all their charms defac’d!! . . . In these rude western parts. Already he and Sarah Hastings had engaged in a duel of verses, and Bonus Homo had prefaced his contribution with the remark, “Pray, madam, did you think that you were the only favorite of the muse in the western country? I can rhyme a little if I cannot write poetry, and the productions of my muse that have come to the public eye have been dignified with the name of poems.” The last exchange in the Bonus Homo controversy appeared on December 10, and Alexander concluded his year’s literary career in the Reporter as he had begun it—with a poem over the signature of “Juvenescence.” It was published on December 31 and was prefaced with a line from another ode of his beloved Horace that had inspired the verses appropriately entitled, “Reflections on the close of the year 1810.”

w Certainly, it had been a portentous year for a young man just turning twenty-two, and for reasons far nearer his heart than his excursions into homilies, satire, and poetry. Alexander could afford to make slighting remarks about old bachelors in the Clarinda essays and speak frankly of “strong desires ungratified”

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“a new peak” because he was already making plans to become a man of family. On arriving in Washington, he had eagerly sought out his old and beloved friend, Miss Hannah Acheson, who had accompanied his father to America, and to his joy had found that the two years separation only made her eyes shine all the more brightly. Hannah, some three years his senior, was a tall, comely, romantic young woman; and within two months, he was writing a long and ardent letter of proposal: Miss Acheson My very dear and lovely friend: In vain do I any longer endeavor to conceal my love from you. My natural timidity and bashfulness are overcome; and all my fortitude gives place to love. My thoughts by day and my dreams by night are turned on love; and you the beloved object ever live in my imagination. The only apology I can make to you for thus dropping these few lines into your fair hands is that I am compelled to it by a love for you which only wants your kind return, to make it lasting as my life . . . I . . . would have made choice of a warmer and more cordial manner than this cold way, had not your extreme Reservedness prevented me; when not long since, I strove to lisp out my heart’s true emotions in your modest ear. I hope you’ll be so kind as to excuse this liberty. I can only tell you in a plain and sincere manner, my affection. . . . Perhaps you may enquire when did this love originate? Was it in a few weeks, or a few days? . . . I would candidly and plainly answer you, that it was my intention to have made my desires known to you, before either you or I left our favorite Native Isle of the Ocean, had not timidity and puerile bashfulness prevented me. Of so old a date has my attachment been. Could you doubt of the sincerity of one

“a new peak” whose attachment, not distance, not absence, not chance, nor time itself, could change? Now, my very lovely friend . . . I submit myself and wait your kind answer. What do you think! when you read this. My heart trembles, waiting for your answer! I would wish to converse with you on this subject, at a fit opportunity . . . You might, no doubt, enquire into the cause of my affection, the motives that cause my love. These I shall inform you of with cheerfulness, candor, and sincerity if you require them, but this page would not hold the half of them. Since I could form an idea or a wish, it was to be a loving husband. It is better to enjoy one’s love in Solitude than to live lovelorn in the crowded city in the midst of opulence and gaity— “Marriage rightly understood Gives to the tender and the Good A paradise below . . . “ . . . I conclude begging your pardon for wearing out your good nature, with this long scroll,--assuring you that my chief Happiness would consist in seeing you happy, and Remember that love, and love only, is the loan for love, which I earnestly desire, and expect from you. December 1809 Washington My very dear friend, While I am Your very much attached Alexander Campbell. Such a warm outpouring of “heart’s true emotion” quickly melted Hannah’s “Reservedness.” She and Alexander were betrothed. Perhaps he was aware that, in a sense, he was not the romantic Hannah’s first love, for she was an outspoken and “worshipful admirer” of a young Irish patriot, Robert Emmet, who had

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“a new peak” been sentenced to death by hanging for his role in instigating the Rebellion of 1808, when she was just eighteen. As one of her greatest treasures, she had brought to America an engraved copy of Emmet’s farewell address to his countrymen bearing his picture, which sometimes, with tears in her eyes, she would apostrophize “as her martyred hero, whom she loved next to her Savior.” Though her betrothed doubtless supplanted the deceased hero in her affections for a time, the course of their love was to be upset by a trivial incident. One day, when Hannah was drinking a glass of water, Alex, in a playful mood—and forgetful of Clarinda’s scorn of “juvenile amusements,”—tipped up the glass and spilled the water over her dress. Hannah’s sense of humor failed the occasion, and she broke the engagement. The date was not recorded, but thoughts of this shattered romance may have inspired a plaintive note in the Clarinda essay of July 16, 1810: “I am Clarinda, the unfortunate Clarinda, and I address myself to those who once had the power to choose a husband—and did not—I once--I forbear to name it—Yes, he’s gone.” In any event, Alexander was indeed “gone” from the side of Hannah Acheson, forever. She was to live unwed, growing with the passing years into a reserved, undemonstrative woman, but a romantic figure to the end as she gradually withdrew from all society into the seclusion of her room, alone with her mementos and the memories of “her martyred hero” Emmet to assuage regret for the hasty temper that had sent away her lover. As for Alexander, charming young men with manners and minds polished by a year in a European university were uncommon on the American frontier, and he was not long in finding consolation. While visiting friends in the Christian Association, Thomas Campbell had become acquainted with John Brown, a well-to-do farmer who had emigrated to the Virginia panhandle from Maryland about 1790, married a Miss Grimes of Charlestown [Wellsburg], and bought several hundred acres of land in the fertile Buffaloe Valley. There, in a comfortable threestory farm house generally known to his neighbors as “The

“a new peak” Mansion,” he lived with his only daughter, Margaret, whose mother had died when she was a child, and with his second wife, the former widow Glass, and her daughter Jane. Having promised to lend Mr. Brown some books, Thomas decided to send them by Alexander. So on an October day in 1810, Alexander dismounted at the stile by the Brown gate and, carrying his saddlebags filled with books, walked up the path to the house. Evidently, Thomas had seen that his son’s reputation traveled before him; for Margaret Brown, who was seated at the parlor window spinning, turned laughingly to her stepsister, Jane Glass, and exclaimed, “Jane! here comes my [future] husband!” Alexander was soon a regular visitor at the Virginia farmhouse. Mr. Brown enjoyed the intelligent, animated conversation of the young preacher, and Alexander admired Mr. Brown’s independent, inquisitive turn of mind, his integrity and simplicity. Sometimes long evenings were spent in religious discussion. Once an eccentric Baptist minister happened to call, and, Mr. Brown being a Presbyterian, the three argued the subject of baptism until almost morning. At other times the Browns entertained their young guest with stories of Indian days on the frontier. Ever since General “Mad” Anthony Wayne had defeated the tribes of the Northwest in 1794 and forced them to a treaty, Indian warfare had departed forever from the valley of the Ohio. Buffaloe Creek, which meandered for some forty or fifty miles through Washington county, Pennsylvania, and the Virginia panhandle before emptying into the Ohio at Charlestown [Wellsburg], once marked a noted Indian trail and Mrs. Brown herself was the heroine of one of the most famous Indian stories of the Virginia border. It had happened in March 1789, while she was still Mrs. Glass and living on the farm adjoining the land later to be bought by John Brown. She had been in the house spinning, alone with her two-year-old son, and her Negro servant, a woman, and the servant’s two small children, when a group of Indians suddenly appeared at the door, armed with muskets. They ransacked the house, took the two

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“a new peak” women and the children captive, and, after killing and scalping the older Negro child, carried the others by canoe to the mouth of Rush Run and then overland to their encampment. Meanwhile, Mr. Glass, returning from the fields to find his family gone, had run to Wells’ Fort (on the site where the town of Charlestown later was built) and collected ten men. Eventually, they discovered the Indians’ canoe at the mouth of Rush Run and in it a pack of letters which Mrs. Glass had managed to drop there as a clue. Picking up the trail to the encampment, they surprised the Indians at their dinner and so rescued the captives, unharmed. But Alexander’s frequent visits to the Browns were not inspired by religious discourse or the excitement of Indian tales. Margaret Brown, at nineteen, was tall, slender, and graceful, her long hair a dark brown, her large, expressive eyes a dark hazel. Her piety and industry were beyond reproach, and her smile bespoke a gentle humor quite in contrast to the sharp Irish temper of Hannah Acheson. Moreover, she was said to possess a “rare loveliness of mind,” and her education was the best “at that time accorded to females”—an important consideration for a young man who so recently, in the guise of Clarinda, had scorned the company of ladies whose conversation extended “no farther than the etiquette of the tea table, or the minutiae of the adventures of the day.” Gradually he conceived the idea long settled in Margaret’s mind. He proposed marriage. Margaret, becomingly surprised, accepted; and the Washington Reporter for March 18, 1811, carried the notice: Married—on Tuesday evening, the 12th inst., by the Rev’d James Hughes, ALEXANDER CAMPBELL, minister of the gospel, of this Borough, to Miss MARGARET BROWN, daughter to John Brown, esq., of Brooke County, Virginia.

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Photo of Margaret’s gold wedding ring. Margaret Brown and Alexander Campbell were married on March 11, 1811, in the parlor of John Brown’s mansion in Buffaloe, Virginia. Rev. James Hughes of West Liberty per formed the ceremony.

The “tradition of a large wedding” lingered long in the countryside. Over the forest-covered hills and through the valleys a good company came by horseback and carriage to fill the Brown parlor where the young couple, kneeling on the two black walnut, gold-trimmed prayer benches that usually stood against one wall of the room, said their vows before the Rev. James Hughes, the Presbyterian pastor at West Liberty, Virginia. James Hughes had married John Brown to the widow Ann Glass in 1797 and was well known throughout the region as the first man whom the Redstone Presbytery “licensed to preach the Gospel in the west.” On the following day, Alexander and his bride went to Washington to receive the congratulations of friends at his father’s house. When the reception was over and the family gathered for evening prayer, the groom’s eleven-year-old sister, Jane, who had been troubled all day about a proper selection of Scripture, quoted the passage from Proverbs beginning: “Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her.” About two weeks later, Alexander and Margaret returned to the Brown farm in the Virginia Panhandle, where they were to make their home. John Brown, in addition to farming, operated a gristmill and a sawmill which he built beyond a great bend in the Buffaloe some distance from his house, and he was glad to have

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“a new peak” his son-in-law’s assistance in managing the farm. Nothing could have suited Alexander better. He had not lived on a farm since the days at Hamilton’s Bawn in County Armagh, but he had lost none of his love of turning the earth under the plow or tending the young shoots that sprang up in the furrows.

w As the year 1811 drew to a close, Alexander, as usual, set aside a time for meditation on accomplishments of the past year and resolutions for the new. This time he faced a particularly important decision: should he be formally ordained to the ministry? In the same issue of the Washington Reporter that carried the announcement of his marriage on March 12, there appeared a news report (later proved erroneous) of the death of George III and an angry article of protest against “the vexations and depredations” of American commerce at the hands of the British. In the capitol city on the Potomac the young “war-hawks” led by Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina were demanding that these depredations be avenged by arms. But neither the reported death of his former sovereign nor the imminence of war with his native country, nor, indeed, his own marriage, were able to deflect Alexander’s mind from his vow to the ministry. The Sunday before his wedding he preached twice at Brush Run and the two succeeding Sundays at Washington. The first Sunday after moving to Virginia he preached at a nearby farmhouse and on succeeding weeks he continued to preach in the neighborhood. Yet both he and his father were becoming aware of a distressing truth. Thomas Campbell had written the “Declaration and Address” in high expectation that its message would challenge the church of the nineteenth century to a new era of unity and concord much as Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses challenged the medieval church to a new era of purity and freedom. Having

“a new peak” assured the public that he and his associates had “no intention to interfere, either directly, or indirectly, with the peace and order of the settled churches,” he confidently believed that other Christian associations would spring up throughout the country and that ministers and whole congregations from various denominations would embrace what seemed to him the wholly reasonable, plausible, and clearly Christian plea for a society “formed for the express purpose of promoting Christian unity, in opposition to a party spirit.” In actuality, the “Declaration and Address” appeared to fall stillborn from the press. Its plea was either ignored or viewed with suspicion. No other ministers came forward as its advocates. No similar societies were formed. Though the Christian Association of Washington included respected and influential citizens—such as General Thomas Acheson (a lieutenant-colonel of Pennsylvania militia) and Andrew Munro, the postmaster at Canonsburg and bookseller to Jefferson College—it attracted no new members. Gradually, the old members forsook the services of their regular church to attend the preaching of the two Campbells. Unmistakably, the Christian Association was beginning to look very much like a church but without being able to offer the privileges or require the obligations of church membership. Thomas Campbell was faced with an unhappy question: were all his hopes and labors in promoting a society free of religious parties to end only in the formation of another independent church? The answer seemed inescapable. Members of the association agreed when they assembled for their semi-annual meeting on the first Thursday in May 1811—a year and nine months after their hopeful first meeting “as voluntary advocates for church reformation.” On the following Saturday, May 4, 1811, “the First Church of the Christian Association, meeting at Crossroads and Brush Run,” was formally organized. Thomas Campbell was chosen elder, Alexander licensed to preach, and four deacons appointed. The next day being Sunday, the first communion service—soon to

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“a new peak” become weekly—was held and both Campbells delivered discourses. The new church was organized at the Brush Run site where the members were apparently still meeting under the temporary stand erected the previous September. It was now decided to construct a permanent building. There was a sawmill on the adjoining farm, belonging to David Bryant and his two sons, one of whom, Joseph, found his zealous interest in the association not at all diminished by the presence of Alexander’s vivacious oldest sister, Dorothea. Joseph cut the timbers, and the members set about building a small frame church. Meanwhile, on May 16, only two months after his marriage, Alexander started out on his first preaching tour—speaking at Wheeling, Virginia, and at various points across the river in Ohio. He recorded in his journal reports of “crowded houses,” curious “mixed audiences,” and occasional religious arguments “finished in a disorderly manner,” an experience giving him a foretaste of many tours to come. He returned home in time to deliver the first sermon in the new, still unfinished Brush Run Church. His text was from Job which he doubtless hoped would prove prophetic; “Though thy beginning was small, thy latter end should greatly increase.” Throughout the fall of 1811 he continued to make other preaching tours to nearby points in Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Still, he was not formally ordained to the ministry or certain that he wanted to be. Ordination meant public, final, irrevocable consecration of his full time and talents. The failure of the “Declaration and Address” to win adherents coupled with the rejection of his father by the Synod of Pittsburgh had combined to crush his first enthusiastic expectations and made him, as he later wrote, “despair of reformation.” Though he might continue to advocate the reform principles on occasional brief tours, and though he spoke confidently at the dedication of Brush Run Church, of “humble beginnings” that should issue in greatness, he no longer had any substantial hope of being permitted to “enjoy the social

“a new peak” institutions” of the Gospel except with the single, small congregation already established. On this belief, he had all the more gladly undertaken to help manage his father-in-law’s farm. Here was life he loved, and work he knew and did well; and the fertile alluvial land of the Buffaloe valley promised a rich harvest for his labor. Gradually he began to ask himself: could he not satisfy his duty to God and the obligation of his vow by serving the First Church of the Christian Association on the Lord’s Day and, at the same time, pursue the course of his father-in-law and enjoy life as a Virginian farmer, prosperous and content? So conscience and desire debated the question during the first months of his marriage. At last, on Christmas day, he went quietly apart with a notebook in hand and carefully listed the “special instances of Divine power” which he believed bound him “under obligations to be specially devoted to Him” with his “whole mind, soul, and body.” These “instances” were twelve in number and included: his training by religious parents; his receiving an education “providential” in that his first “grand design” to “shine in literary honors and affluence” was frustrated and his mind “turned to desire” the office of the ministry, and he was “introduced, quite contrary to expectation,” to “the literary advantages” of the University of Glasgow; his resolution “to serve God in this way on two occasions of extraordinary deliverance” at sea; the “particular persecutions” that befell his father, which “shut up any prospects of support” in the ministry and yet did not discourage his own “preference” for that office; his “favorable and easy circumstances;” his “choice companion, congenial” to his inclination; his own “tolerably good talents” for the purpose; and, finally his “desire to suffer hardships and reproach” in seeking “after the salvation and reformation of mankind.” Clearly, in this ledger the balance was on the side of the Lord.

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Above: Painting of Brush Run Church, organized May 4, 1811, and used until 1828. Left: Campbell was granted the official right to perform the rite of matrimony on December 28, 1812. Opposite Top: Alexander Campbell was ordained a minister on January 1, 1812; his official certificate was signed by Thomas Campbell on September 21, 1812. Opposite: Sarah Matthews Hanen: Charter member of Brush Run Church.

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“a new peak” On January 1, 1812, Alexander Campbell was formally ordained. His ordination was finalized “after a due course of trials preparatory to the work of the holy ministry”—according to the legal statement certified at the Brooke County (Virgini a ) Courthouse by Thomas Campbell, as “Senior minister of the First Church of the Christian Association, meeting at Crossroads and Brush Run, Washington County, Pennsylvania,” and by the four deacons of the church. On March 13, 1812, Alexander and Margaret became parents of their first child, a daughter whom they named for his mother, Jane. The happy event precipitated an important doctrinal question. Should or should not baby Jane, in accord with Presbyterian custom, be received into the church by the rite of baptism? From the very beginning some members of the Christian Association had been disturbed by the question of the relation of baptism to the faith and order of the primitive church. At the meeting in 1809 when Thomas Campbell first propounded his slogan, “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent,” Andrew Munro, the bookseller, and a shrewd Scots seceder, immediately remarked, “Mr. Campbell, if we adopt that as a basis, then there is an end of infant baptism”; whereupon General Acheson had leaped to his feet, dramatically placed his hand over his heart, and exclaimed, “I hope I may never see the day when my heart will renounce that blessed saying of the Scriptures, ‘Suffer little children to come unto me”; and then, bursting into tears, he left the room while James Foster called after him, “Mr. Acheson, . . . in the portion of Scripture you have quoted, there is no reference, whatever, to infant baptism.” Meanwhile, in Glasgow, Alexander was hearing the vexed question discussed. Just a few months before he entered the university the Haldanian Church divided when the Haldane brothers adopted the practice of immersion, and Alexander was “much prejudiced against” the Haldanes since his friends, Greville

“a new peak” Ewing and Dr. Wardlaw, objected to the Haldane view. Soon after coming to America and pledging himself to the principles of the “Declaration and Address,” he chanced to meet a Dr. Riddle of the Presbyterian Union Church, who remarked to him that these principles, “however plausible in appearance, are not sound. For if you follow them out you must become a Baptist.” Alexander was “startled, and mortified” at the suggestion, as he later recorded. He considered the Baptists “an ignorant and uneducated population.” Of their writings, he knew only Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he had read that without realizing its author was a Baptist. Despite differences that were making it impossible for him or his father to commune with the seceders, he still confessed himself “better pleased with Presbyterianism than with anything else.” Therefore, he requested Andrew Munro, who was present at his conversation with Dr. Riddle, to send him every treatise from his bookshop in favor of infant baptism. For the greater part of a year he studied the pedobaptist works. The more he read the more unsettled became his conviction. Laying aside the theological treatises he took up his Greek New Testament and found “no resting place there.” Finally, he carried his difficulties to his father. Thomas agreed with Dr. Riddle, that the Scriptures authorized infant baptism in “neither express terms nor express precedent.” He insisted that those “once in the church . . . could not ‘unchurch or paganize . . . [themselves]’; put off Christ and then make a new confession . . . as would a heathen man and a publican.” Alexander acquiesced in his father’s views, for the time. “Having the highest esteem for his learning,” he later explained, “and the deepest conviction of his piety . . . his authority over me then was paramount and almost irresistible.” When in November 1810 he defended his father’s position on infant baptism in answer to the Synod of Pittsburgh, he explained, “we conclude that it should be a matter of forbearance, as . . . circumcision was in the primitive Church,” but he added, “by no means considering it a matter of indifference. It can never be a light thing to mistake the

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“a new peak” will of God.” In referring to baptism in a sermon as late as June 1811, a month after the Christian Association became a church, he remarked, “As I am sure it is unscriptural to make this a matter of communion, I let it slip.” Other members of the new church were already taking a firm stand. At the first communion service it was noticed that Joseph Bryant with two others, did not commune. When questioned, they replied that they had not been baptized and that they desired the rite to be performed by immersion, since Christ Himself had been “buried in baptism” and the disciples of the primitive church had followed His example. Thomas admitted the logic of their request, “We certainly could not call a person buried in the earth if only a little dust were sprinkled on him.” The ceremony took place on July 4, 1811, in Buffaloe Creek, about two miles above the mouth of Brush Run on the farm of David Bryant. Still, Thomas, with his strong sense of Presbyterian decorum, apparently felt uncomfortable about the proceedings. The pool of water being narrow and deep enough to reach the shoulders of the candidates for baptism, Thomas stood out of the water on the roots of a projecting tree and performed the rite by bending the heads of the candidates forward until they were covered by water—an unimmersed minister immersing others. The incongruity was not lost on those present, Alexander among them. He renewed his questionings about baptism. Dare he fail to explore every meaning of the Holy Ordinance? Could he “let it slip”? when Jesus Himself had expressly spoken in His Commission to the Eleven: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.” Pondering further upon these words of the Great Commission, Alexander perceived that there must be a direct connection between belief and baptism. He was therefore brought to the perplexing subject of faith. Questions about baptism, he decided, should begin with questions about faith. With these questions crowding his mind, he spent the first winter of his marriage, the winter of 1811-1812, in intensive study.

“a new peak” While Margaret’s thoughts were concerned with the mystery of gestation as she awaited the birth of their first child, her young husband was occupied with other mysteries, the nature of Christian faith and baptism. He gathered every available work on faith as he had done on baptism; and he sustained a long correspondence with his father on the subject, carefully transcribing their letters, giving to Thomas the pseudonym “Philologus” and to himself that of “Philomathes.” At the outset, Thomas encouraged the independent, “upright inquiry” that should deliver them “from being servile followers and copyists either of ourselves or of others,” but he also warned his son: “We are all children of yesterday, moderns in the newest sense of the word, and, therefore, will find it no easy matter to look back over the heads of eighteen hundred ages, and to think, speak, and act, in matters of religion, as if contemporaries with the apostles and members of the primitive Church.” To which Alexander replied: “I am convinced that superstition, enthusiasm, formality, will . . . prevail to the ruin and disgrace of scriptural and ancient Christianity. And as truth can never be injured by being examined, to call all the doctrines and religious practices, in this generation, in question, appears an immediate and indispensable duty.”

w With these confident words, Alexander launched on what was to prove his most exciting intellectual adventure, one that would cut him loose from all the safe moorings of his past and set him almost alone for a time on new and strange seas of religious concept and belief. Already he had studied much in church history and called into question accepted church practices, but with the winter’s study of 1811-1812 he began for the first time to question the entire structure of logic on which his previous Calvinistic orthodoxy rested. Thomas’s warning at the outset served to challenge his independence of mind, his intellectual ingenuity, and

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“a new peak” his determination. If he accepted his father’s challenge with confidence, it was because he sensed that he possessed both the mental attitude and the intellectual tools to chart a firm and independent course of inquiry. Thomas Campbell had initially set that course when he introduced his schoolboy son in Ireland to the writings of John Locke. He taught Alexander always to test his own opinions at the bar of universal reason, to search out the universal Christian mind on any subject under investigation. The “Declaration and Address” had explicitly stated that all things religious must be proven by appeal to both “scripture and right reason.” At the University of Glasgow, Alexander found the emphasis not on the works of Aristotle as they had dominated the dialectic of medieval universities but on the thought and method of the new sciences and learning that stemmed from the flowering of the seventeenth century. If the seventeenth century was, religiously speaking, “that wretched century of strife,” it was also, intellectually speaking, “the century of genius,” the century that began with Bacon, ended with Newton, and contained the work of Galileo, Harvey, Descartes, Spinoza, Liebnitz, and Locke. Tutored in such a tradition, Alexander could not fail to realize that, for all his dedication to the reform principles of the “Declaration and Address,” he still did not belong in the usual company of religious reformers. In fact, he was never to consider or call himself a theologian. He thought of himself, rather, as a seeker after truth; and truth, he believed, whether religious or scientific, was best discovered through the empirical psychology of Locke and the inductive method of Bacon. Both by training and temperament, he was a child of the new age born of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. He scorned the Aristotelian dialectic which sought truth through the deduction of specific conclusions from magnificently general assumptions and so moved in a narrow and baffling circle of uncriticized assumptions and pre-ordained conclusions. He embraced, instead, the modest, questioning work of

“a new peak” experiment that began with a doubt and a clean slate and put every assumption, no matter how venerable, to the test of observation. Bacon bade men brush from their minds the “cobwebs of learning”; Locke bade them clear out the “rubbish of the ages” ; Thomas Campbell repeated Locke’s phrase and added his own, “the accruing embarrassments of intervening ages”; and Alexander rephrased it again as “the rubbish of human tradition.” Indeed, he was beginning to perceive that the person of experiment, the “groper” realizing the multiple and complex facets of truth, was a more mature person than the person of dogma, who must ever limit the world to his or her own simple certainties. All history bore witness that the inevitable result of the postulate of a fixed, absolute truth, whether Roman or Protestant, was a closed world, a closed system represented by the medieval motto which showed a ship turning back at Gibraltar into the Mediterranean bearing the inscription “Non plus ultra,—go no farther.” Its inevitable progression had been from dogmatism to tyranny and from tyranny to persecution. The Council of Trent burned John Huss; Calvin burned Servetus; New England Puritans whipped the Quakers; and the Presbytery of Chartiers, though shorn of the power of auto-da-fé by laws of the republic, proscribed and excommunicated Thomas Campbell. In contrast, Bacon’s experimental method and Locke’s doctrine of probability—which denied to fallible human beings the authority of an “absolute knower”— posited an open world, an open system, and so were the parents of both toleration and liberty. Therefore, when in the years ahead Alexander sought to call the roll of humanity’s greatest benefactors, he would begin, not with religious reformers or theologians, but with his “immortal” trio: Bacon, Locke, and Newton. At the age of twenty-six, John Calvin, though he came in the wake of the Renaissance and brushed shoulders with the humanists, published his Institutes of the Christian Religion—a work as scholastic in scope and method as the Summa Theologiae of Aquinas. It was symmetrical in form, elaborate in logic, proposing

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“a new peak” a complex dogmatic absolute truth, declaring it the first duty of humankind “to confine our minds, that they might not be wandering in the boundless regions of uncertain conjecture.” But Alexander Campbell was always to remain aware from day to day of the mental fruits of his ever-enlarging experience. He was to ask the pertinent question: “What philosopher or sage can, with effect, say, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther,’ and here shall your investigations cease?” By the time he was twenty-six, he declared himself proudly in the company, not of the “absolute knowers,” but of the “gropers,” proclaiming that in his search for the truth he had “halted, and faltered and . . . explored every inch of the way.” He was assiduously training himself to think and act, as he later wrote, “under the conviction that we may be wiser today than yesterday.” The young thinker would not always live up to the high tradition he had espoused. His logical mind occasionally betrayed him into propounding too neat a system. After groping his way to a position, he was sometimes tempted to identify it as a self-evident truth, to be promulgated with impressive but irritating assurance. True to the spirit of his Celtic Highland ancestors, passionate, headstrong, and confident, he could not always attain the calm judicial air of a John Locke or the scientific detachment of a Francis Bacon or an Isaac Newton. Yet, in espousing that tradition, he was unwittingly forging the weapons that were sure to lay low the fortress of his Calvinistic orthodoxy, once he seriously tested them against the structure of Calvinistic logic during his winter’s study on faith and baptism. He began with the spirited controversy over the nature of saving faith that had been waged throughout the eighteenth century. One of the most popular works in the controversy was Theron and Aspasio, or a series of Letters upon the most important and inter esting Subjects written by James Hervey, once a member of John Wesley’s Godly Club at Oxford. It defined faith as a state of feeling rather than an act of intellect and placed faith at the end

“a new peak” rather than at the beginning of the process of conversion: first, repentance; then, a period of agonized “seeking”; finally, an outpouring of divine grace that manifested itself in an emotional “assurance of forgiveness,” which was “saving faith.” Perhaps the most celebrated reply to Hervey was the two-volume work, Letters on Theron and Aspasio, written by Robert Sandeman, who denied both parts of Hervey’s thesis. He maintained that faith is not a state of feeling but an act of the intellect in which truth is apprehended through the acceptance of testimony, and he placed faith at the beginning instead of the end of the ordo salutis. Andrew Fuller, the leader of the English Baptists, attempted a mediating position between Hervey and Sandeman; Archibald McLean, the Scots Baptist, supporting Sandeman, wrote several pamphlets in reply to Fuller. All these Alexander read, and he read also Glas, Cudworth, Scott, Erskine, Marshall, Bellamy, and still others “of minor fame” in the controversy. Indeed, they were “not only read, but studied,” he recorded, “as I studied geometry.” He “wrote [them] off in miniature”; he placed “Paul and Peter, James and John on the same table”; true to the Baconian tradition he had espoused, he “took nothing on trust.” To discover the seeds of this eighteenth-century controversy, he knew that he had to go back to the great combat of the fifth century: the combat between St. Augustine, who had fastened on the church the awful doctrines of predestination, original sin, and total depravity, with the corollaries of the bondage of human will and the damnation of infants dying unbaptized, and the British monk, Pelagius, who had asserted the freedom of the human will, the dignity of human nature, and the limitation of the action of the divine grace. Though at the time Augustine triumphed and Pelagius was declared a heretic, Latin Christianity had in reality adapted a semi-Pelegian position, midway between the harsh determinism of Augustine and the sterile rationalism of Pelagius. It had remained for the Protestant Reformation to carry the church back to Augustine. Herein lay what Alexander was coming

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“a new peak” to regard as one of the great tragic ironies of history. If his own allegiance to the trinity of Bacon, Locke, and Newton was certain to bear exotic fruit in the growth of a religious reformer, it was not, he would be the first to protest, an allegiance which was alien to the true spirit of Protestantism. For, as he was often to point out in later years, “the revival of literature in Europe, preceded the revival of religion, usually called Protestantism,” and thus the Reformation fell heir to a whole new world of freedom of thought and action. But Luther and Calvin fell back on Augustine; the Reformers split into warring camps; and Protestantism forgot its high heritage and reverted to a futile scholasticism. “St. Augustine [became] the Aristotle of Protestant Christendom,” whom, Alexander wrote of Calvin, the Geneva Reformer studied “with so much admiration, that his Institutes look more like a systematic development of [Augustine’s] thoughts than an original treatise.” In disgust over the crude Roman doctrine of works with its mechanical process of merit making, Luther had exalted his theory of “justification by faith alone” and Calvin had developed his thoroughly deterministic ideas of sovereign grace and election which made the free will of men and women virtually nonexistent in the process of conversion. By the nineteenth century these dogmas had been carried far beyond the intent of the great sixteenth century reformers. Evangelical Protestantism became mired in a degenerate and paralyzing mysticism, expressed in a thoroughgoing doctrine of salvation by faith alone which regarded persons in the process of conversion as the purely passive recipients of a miracle of divine grace, a process popularly called “experimental religion” on the American frontier. Any activity on the part of the “seeker” in order to work his or her own salvation was generally regarded not only as useless but as dangerous and actually sinful. Even reading the Scriptures was frowned upon, since the duty of the seeker was to suppress the mind and will and “wait on God,” an attitude that was aptly described in the popular hymn by James Proctor,

“a new peak” “Doing is a deadly thing, Doing ends in death.” Though the Methodists made much of their anti-Calvinistic dogma of free will, they had wedded it, however illogically, to a belief in the direct, supernatural operation of the Holy Spirit and so developed the mores of the “mourners bench,” where agonized sinners “wrestled for salvation.” When the second awakening came, Arminian Methodist and Calvinistic Baptist and Presbyterian alike prayed for a miraculous outpouring of divine grace and exhibited the startling physical manifestations that characterized the great revival in the West. At the age of fourteen, Alexander had confessed his inability to accept the dogma of infant damnation. At sixteen he declared himself “converted” without benefit of a proper supernatural “experience.” When he came to America and heard the story of the great revival and its exercises, he first realized to what extreme though logical conclusion the Calvinistic theory of conversion might be carried. Whether the Holy Spirit descended quietly and decorously at Ahorey, Ireland, or violently and melodramatically at Rogues’ Harbor and Cane Ridge, Kentucky, the process was, in essence, the same. That realization both amazed and appalled him, but all these reactions had been based on emotional rejection rather than logical reasoning and analysis. Not until he undertook a serious study of the nature of faith did he discover the rationale, a justification for his earlier aversions on sound philosophical and psychological grounds. On beginning the winter’s reading about faith, he wrote, he was “the most prejudiced against” Sandeman and “the most in favor of” Hervey. Hervey, expounding a Methodist-Moravian view of faith, offered a compromise semi - Pelagian position that affirmed human responsibility and repudiated some of the extreme Calvinistic tenets which Alexander had already rejected. It retained the ideas of sovereign grace and operation of the Holy Spirit which he still accepted, as evidenced in a sermon delivered in April 1811, when he declared that faith “is the finger of God

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“a new peak” . . . an effect of Almighty power and regenerating grace.” By the spring of 1812 he had come to believe that any view defining faith as a miracle wrought by the Holy Spirit in an utterly depraved heart unconditioned by previous inclination toward God was not only absurd but anti-Christian. He would, rather, define faith as an act of judgment, induced by evidence that could be weighed by universal reason and involving the active cooperation of the will of persons with the free grace of God. From the standpoint of the eighteenth-century controversy, he concluded that Sandeman, who defined faith intellectually as the belief in testimony, “was like a giant among dwarfs . . . like Sampson [sic] with the gates . . . of Gaza on his shoulders.” Surely Alexander had come a long way in one year. His radically changed concept of faith not only laid low the main structure of his Calvinistic logic, it also fashioned a potent new weapon for the hands of the “bold Christian hero” who had already enlisted for the battle against religious absolutism. He was now equipped to march in the ranks of the democratic pragmatists whose war on theological determinism had long since been enjoined in the land of his adoption. Many decades before a young student in North Ireland had found inspiration in the “Letter on Toleration” or turned the pages of the Novum Organum, a critical spirit, an incipient rationalism, was stirring in the New World. It was beginning to ask questions and to hold old dogmas up to the light of common experience. In the corrupt, autocratic worlds of Augustine and Calvin, the doctrines of total depravity and special election might have seemed reasonable explanations for the common brutality. Even in Colonial America, the Augustinian-Calvinistic concept of the nature of God and man began to lose its social sanction, and for many a New England villager, the remarkable imprecations of Jonathan Edwards fell on deaf ears. As the leveling process stripped away the old aristocratic social distinctions, it became increasingly difficult to believe that humanity, through no fault or

“a new peak” action of its own, was arbitrarily divided into classes of the elect and the damned. As a new, self-reliant individualism emerged and intensified with every advance of the frontier, it gradually discredited the belief that men and women, their heritage of natural freedom cast away by prenatal sin, were no better than an Asian serf at the mercy of an implacable and capricious sovereign will. The decline of political despotism was presaging the end of theological despotism. As the republic of Thomas Jefferson was born, nurturing its citizens in the doctrines derived from Locke and Rousseau, fostering the humanistic concept of the dignity of a human being as a free moral agent, the subject of rational laws of nature and mind, the good Calvinistic divines—from the new Yale Divinity School established to combat the encroaching Unitarianism to the log meeting-houses in the farthest western settlements—were undeniably caught under a hard necessity. The unregenerate members of society graced with a sense of humor and a taste for the niceties of disputation, could find delightful entertainment in the dilemma of Calvinistic logicians who must labor to damn the individual by predestination and “yet worry out enough freedom for him to be decently damned on.” When the second awakening came in 1800, it emulated the fervor but not the harsher dogma that characterized the Edwardian awakening of 1740. Calvinism was suspect among the hardy pioneers gathered at Red River and Cane Ridge to whom self-reliance was both a virtue and a necessity. No puppets of a reasonless fate (though that fate be called God) were they, but tall human beings able to carve their own destinies from a hostile new land, and they harkened to preachers in buckskin who encouraged them to make their own peace with God even as they wrested their own living from the wilderness. In joining the ranks of these democratic pragmatists in the revolt against Calvinism, Alexander had no fear that he would fall into the company of those whose sympathy with the Renaissance spirit led them into pure secularism or a pagan materialism. He

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“a new peak” found the essential core of his own humanism in the New Testament itself: an individual’s exalted “rank and dignity in the universe” is his birthright as a child of God. Souls made free in Christ are no longer subject to the whims of earthly tyrants, nor, it logically follows, can they envision God in the role of heavenly tyrant. Indeed, this was an attitude little at variance with the concept of God and humanity which he had learned at his father’s feet. Though Thomas Campbell considered himself a reasonably sound Calvinist, his early rearing in the mild Arminianism of the Church of England had in truth moderated the hard intransigence of the theology that he was taught in Divinity Hall of the seceder seminary at Whitburn. The sovereign will, he felt, was in no way subject to the human and was ever inscrutable; yet he never doubted that, moving behind the veil of impenetrable mystery, all the ways of God are ways of justice, mercy, and reason. It required the more incisive mind of young Alexander to perceive that such a concept of the deity and the relation to humanity, along with the principles of freedom so boldly enunciated in the “Declaration and Address,” struck at the very taproot of Calvinistic logic. Moreover, he was impelled toward his religious position quite as much by the demands of his own nature as by the force of his democratic philosophy; two concepts were slowly maturing in his mind which would shape his views and attitude on every question he was to face, whether personal or philosophical, religious or political—the concepts of “the whole man” and of “the rational mean.” Perhaps it was natural that Augustine, who had reveled in every iniquity and taken to himself at a very early age the pleasures of a concubine, should have suffered a violent revulsion at the time of his conversion when the first holy words he read were the admonition of Paul: “Make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof,” and that he should thereafter have been as passion-

“a new peak” ate toward spirituality as he once was toward sensuality. But there was no such association between sin and physical desire in the mind of Alexander Campbell, who spent his university days in the serious pursuit of learning and a summer vacation among the young ladies of Helensburgh in the decorous role of tutor, and who now even with his wife of only a few months, was happily planning for the advent of their first-born. Life on the rich acres of the farm in the beautiful Virginia hills seemed good to the young reformer. He saw in all creation the poetry and beauty of its maker and it was not strange if he felt certain that the best fruits for religion were not produced through an attitude of other-worldly abnegation. His own religion, therefore, like Bacon’s philosophy, would aim at practice rather than theory. It would seek first not speculative symmetry but the present increase and illumination of human good. Though encompassed by constant awareness of the power of divine love, he would insist equally on the beauty and spirituality of human love. So long as persons are earth-bound, he reasoned, they must seek completion in their threefold nature as body, mind, and spirit. No contempt of the flesh or over-emphasis on an ascetic spirituality would ever distort his view of “the whole man.” Yet some thirty years after his winter’s study on faith, when not an orthodox Calvinist would have admitted him to their ranks, he was to write: “I am neither Arminian nor Calvinian, [but] I have . . . perhaps more against James Arminius than John Calvin, and more against John Wesley than Saint Augustime.” No statement ever revealed more clearly his personal allegiance to that Greek way to excellence through sanity, balance, and reason which Aristotle termed “the golden mean” and which Alexander liked to call “the rational mean.” Thomas Campbell, in the “Declaration and Address,” “had counseled a middle way, a safe way.” Alexander was to elevate the phrase, Via media tutissimi est, into a motto for the guidance of life. In spite of all his admiration for the philosophy of

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“a new peak” the Enlightenment and his impatience with the restraints of a “bespeckled orthodoxy,” he would seek to steer a middle course between a secular humanism and a Calvinistic fatalism. He buttressed his position by appeal to both Locke and Paul. His “fallen man” had become not a poor sinner trembling in an agony of perpetual guilt and shame but simply a person defined by Lockian psychology as one whose avenues of knowledge are limited to five senses. The curse of Adam, “original sin,” is therefore, an inherited and perpetual limitation of the individual’s power of perception, not an inherited and perpetual guilt. By demonstrating that the human mind, when entering the world, is a tabula rasa, Locke implied that Augustine’s “inherited guilt” involves a contradiction in terms: humanity, not being of one consciousness with Adam, cannot be held accountable for Adam’s supposed sin. A curse turns upon responsibility for conscious acts, and responsibility is individual, not racial. To Alexander this was cogent reasoning. Yet he was aware that such an optimistic assumption posed disturbing questions. In honest appraisal of humankind’s wretchedness, did it not appear that there are accursed people, even as Ham and his posterity were cursed? Did not fathers eat sour grapes, and their children, guilty or not, have their teeth set on edge? Did some mysterious force not seem at work, which might well be termed the inscrutable will of God, a force that even Christ Himself was powerless to command? Alexander would always have these sobering questions, sprung from a grim Calvinistic realism, to warn him against too arrogant a pride in the p owers of the individual which was latent in the proud Renaissance spirit. Therefore, he could not quite say with Bacon, “Men are not animals erect, but immortal gods.” He would say, rather, with Paul, to whom, indeed, both Augustine and Calvin had turned for textual authority, that humanity is “a little lower than the angels.” He would say with Locke that, for all the dignity and worth of individuals, they can never attain the farthest reaches of knowledge; they may be worthy of the company of angels yet

“a new peak” cannot usurp the godhead. Here Alexander found his sane middle ground on which to stand firm. His hard common sense made him acknowledge that humanity seems to have inherited an obvious and distressingly high penchant for sin. He would equally insist that, for all practical purposes, human beings must think and act as free and responsible moral agents. No dogma could ever serve for him which did not admit a free and democratic world based on a rational idea of God and humanity. Applied to the study of faith, these formative concepts of “the whole [man]” and of “the rational mean” bore interesting fruit. It was resulting in a definition of faith that sought a via media between a sterile intellectualism and a debased mysticism and that would command the allegiance of the whole person—will, intellect, and emotion. When he turned from the eighteenth-century controversy between Hervey and Sandeman to take up Paul and Peter, James and John, he, like John Locke, became convinced that the Gospels were written primarily to prove that Jesus is the Messiah, that the real question of faith involved in Christianity is not “What do you believe?” but “On whom do you believe?” Salvation, instead of depending on some subjective, inner experience was objectively provided, by God’s grace, through the person of Christ. Therefore, the miracle is not subjective, but objective, since it had been performed in history, in the Incarnation. Human beings are not the passive recipients of some grace mysteriously worked within their souls but the active participants in the acceptance of a fact that occurred in history. Therefore, true faith becomes historical faith because it is acceptance of historical record. It is “saving faith” because it is belief in the saving fact that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.” Thomas Campbell had presented a catholic concept of the church. Alexander was now advancing an essentially catholic concept of the nature of faith. It was a position that would enable him to repudiate the all-too-prevalent narrow individualism and excessive subjectivism and observantism and to emphasize anew the

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“a new peak” social aspects of Christianity. At the same time, keenly aware of the beneficent religious revolution that had occurred with the Protestant emphasis on “justification by faith,” he would not be tempted into a mere moralism that neglects the element of personal communion with God which is the very essence of religion. Faith, for Alexander Campbell, was defined as the acceptance of New Testament testimony concerning the messiahship of Jesus, not as a matter of intellect alone but also as a personal and often deeply emotional conviction regarding a unique person. By the time these views were clarified, Alexander realized he could no longer accept the Calvinistic interpretation of the ordinance of baptism. He had laid the foundation, of course, with his schoolboy rejection of infant damnation, and he began to find a philosophical justification when he accepted Locke’s interpretation of fallen men and of original sin. Still, he evidently perceived no connection with infant baptism until, soon after coming to America, he sent for and read all the pedobaptist works from Andrew Munro’s bookshop. The more he read the historical record the more he became convinced that the practice of infant baptism did not arise until late in the second century and did not become universal until Augustine propagated his doctrine of universal sin. Hence, he became convinced, he wrote, “that it was all a grand Papal imposition.” Without the Augustinian interpretation of original sin, there was no logic for infant damnation; without infant damnation, there was no rationale for infant baptism. The full force of this logical progression of ideas apparently did not occur to him until he undertook the winter’s study of faith. Then, once he was convinced of a New Testament connection between baptism and faith, he lost his last weapon for defending infant baptism, even as a matter of “forbearance.” As he reasoned, if faith implies personal choice and responsibility and if faith is prerequisite to baptism, the only proper subject is, obviously, one who has arrived at an age of accountability.

“a new peak” So much for the proper subject. What of the proper mode? He could find no help in the word “baptize” itself, since it was merely an anglicized Greek word by which the early translators had neatly sidestepped a delicate controversial question. After a long study of commentaries and his Greek Testament, he decided that the majority of competent scholars were agreed that the literal translation of baptizo is “to immerse,” but that, at best, was a legalistic reason for immersion, and Alexander was no legalist. He found a richer suggestion in the New Testament’s repeated use of the word “burial” in connection with the rite. Though it seemed clear to him from New Testament accounts that the first issue of the faith of the early converts was always in obedience to the ordinance of baptism, he was convinced that its importance in the Apostolic Church was not because the rite was commanded, for he did not believe that Christ would arbitrarily command any ritual act as a mere test of obedience. Therefore, he decided that baptism must have had some mystic design apprehended in the early church, whose meaning had become obscured or corrupted in the passing centuries. What was this design? It was a question he would not answer to his satisfaction for several years. But by the close of this winter’s study on faith and baptism, he had come to believe that the significance of the rite was connected with its symbolic representation of the death, burial, and resurrection of the Christ and furnished the means by which every believer could share symbolically in the greatest miracle of the Christian faith as one dead to sin is buried in baptism and arises to walk in newness of life. Surely, then, it appeared to Alexander, immersion is the only adequate physical representation of this mystery. By his definition of the nature of both faith and baptism he had now cut the two main anchors of his past.

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“a new peak” He realized all too well the consequences of his decision. Still he might have been tempted to defer any positive action, but the birth of baby Jane Caroline brought the question abruptly to a head. During many long hours he talked the problem over with Margaret. In the end she agreed with him. Their infant daughter should not be baptized, and they themselves should be immersed. Immediately, Alexander went “in quest . . . of an acceptable Baptist minister,” and the only one he knew was an Elder Matthias Luce, who lived some thirty miles from the Brown farm. On the way he stopped at his father’s house, for he would not take so important a step without Thomas’ knowledge. To his surprise, when he arrived, his sister Dorothea took him aside to confide her own doubts about infant baptism and ask that he present the case to their father. It was no easy task. “I told him,” Alexander later recorded, “that, with great reluctance, I must dissent from all his reasoning upon that subject and be baptized.” Thomas listened quietly and then replied, “I have, then, no more to add, you must please yourself.” The next evening Alexander was stating his mission to the Baptist minister. Elder Luce was gratified by the convert, but he explained that according to Baptist custom the candidate for baptism must appear before the church and give a satisfactory relation of his “experience.” Alexander replied that it was not Baptist but apostolic custom that he was seeking, and he would be baptized only into the confession of faith which he believed had been required of the first converts, that is, “into the belief that Jesus is the Christ.” Elder Luce was amazed at the novel proposal and also disturbed, for if he consented he knew that he might be held “to account before the Association.” But in the end he decided to “risk the consequences.” June 12, 1812, was the day selected for the baptism, and the place was the same pool in Buffaloe Creek where the first baptisms of the new Christian Association Church had taken place almost a year before. It was a beautiful day, and a large and curi-

“a new peak” ous crowd gathered. Elder Luce persuaded two other Baptist elders to accompany him. Besides himself and Margaret, Alexander found that his mother and Dorothea had come to be baptized and, to his amazement, his father also. Thomas had struggled long against the decision. He had been able to view Alexander’s changing concept of the nature of faith with fair equanimity; after all, when he was tried for heresy before the Presbytery of Chartiers, his own questionable position on “the essence of Saving Faith” had been the first item of libel. Infant baptism, however, was another matter. To change from an attitude of “forbearance” to outright rejection of the rite was, he knew, to drive another and major wedge of separation between himself and all his former religious associates. It was a bitter realization for one who had cherished the hope of opening a road to unity so broad that all Christian parties could walk the way together. He could console himself, it was true, with the knowledge that in one important sense he was now adopting the more catholic practice. While all Baptist Christendom rejected the validity of infant baptism, believers’ immersion was universally recognized as valid. Neither he nor Alexander had any illusion that this argument would easily prevail. They prefaced their baptisms, therefore, with elaborate discourses in explanation of their changed convictions. Thomas spoke first, and once more, as on that evening in Ireland when he had exhausted his father’s patience with a long prayer, time was forgotten and his words flowed in an endless torrent. At length Alexander spoke, far more briefly. He spoke to emphasize, he explained, “the necessity of personal obedience,” of personal choice and action—the line of argument that he knew most likely to appear reasonable to the independent-minded western citizens in his audience. The soul-searching orations continued almost seven hours. Not all their audience was so heedless of passing time—or of external events. The war hawks in Washington were fast pushing Congress and President Madison into a formal declaration of war

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“a new peak” on England, and Joseph Bryant had to leave the meeting by the Buffaloe to attend a muster of volunteers. Even so, he returned in time to hear an hour’s preaching and witness the baptismal ceremony. Some two months before their baptism, Alexander had written to his father: “I am weary of controversy. I reap some advantages, but not enough to counterbalance the disadvantages.” It was little wonder that he was weary, for during the past year, as he carefully noted, he had read more than forty works by theologians of many minds and opinions. But Alexander’s moods of weariness were likely to be fleeting. Actually, he loved the excitement of investigation and controversy. He realized that his decision on baptism had not marked the end of a cycle of thinking but rather challenged a new beginning. The next three or four years, from about 1812 to 1816, were to be the period of his most intensive studies in ecclesiastical history and theology. Others might change their views on some one element of Christian doctrine “without ever allowing themselves to trace its connexions with the whole institution of which it is either a part or a symbol,” but, he explained, “My mind, neither by nature nor by education, was of that order. I must know two things about everything—its cause and its relations.” In pursuit of this goal, he read every theological work he could gather about him, from the earliest Roman Catholic fathers to the latest Protestant reformers. He perused the commentaries of Henry and Scott and volumes of criticism from Michaelis to Sharp. In the end, he considered that he had become quite capable of “assorting my own mind, and labeling my own notions— finding so much of Plato, so much of Origen, so much of Ambrose, so much of Calvin, and so much of the modern schools, [so that] I can easily detect a notion, and recognize its parentage, no matter how often it may have been crossed.” While Alexander was quite ready to acknowledge himself “a debtor” to the religious thinkers before him, he was also ready to

“a new peak” confess a sharp impatience for much of their hair-splitting metaphysics. Though “edified and instructed by their labors,” he felt that they “were impeded in their inquiries by a false philosophy.” So much “rubbish of human tradition” overlaid their thinking that, to his mind, “not one of them was exactly on the tract of the apostles,” not one “had clear and consistent views of the Christian religion as a whole.” By 1816, he was indeed “weary” of their interminable debate, he had forever “lost the taste” which he “once had for controversial reading of this sort.” Many a weighty treatise found its way to his library shelves, never again to be removed. Not finding the answers he sought in works of theologians or expositors, he turned once more to the Scriptures. This time he tried to read them in a different manner. He had been trained in the orthodox method of Biblical interpretation which considered the Bible, Old Testament and New, as a series of infallible texts, each equally authoritative and equally inspired. At age twentyfour, like a good Calvinist divine, he could lace his sermons “with scores of texts in proof of every point,” and yet he gradually became convinced that he really understood “not a single book” of the New Testament. “The Bible as a whole,” he wrote, “the religion of Jesus Christ as a whole was hid from me.” Therefore he began to wonder if a verse in the Bible could be rightly considered apart from its context any more than could a passage from other historical or philosophical works. Why should not the Bible be read as a whole, as a consecutive record of God’s revelation? Why not take “the naked text” and, following “common sense,” read it, subject to ordinary rules of interpretation? Though he knew that such a suggestion would be generally decried as the quintessence of sacrilege, he decided to try the experiment. He later recorded, the Bible “became to me a new book . . . But, alas!” he added, “as I learned my Bible I lost my orthodoxy; and from being one of the most evangelical in the opinion of many, I became one of the most heretical.”

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w He was not overstating the case. Thomas Campbell may have envisioned a reform movement on the basis of a rather general plea for Christian charity and uni t y. Young Alexander, however, already saw his mission as a whole new approach to the Christian system, and once he seriously and fully shouldered the challenge of the “Declaration and Address” to separate the “chaff” of “human opinions and inventions” from “the pure wheat of primary and authentic revelation,” the results were in some respects revolutionary. He emerged from this session of study with a position on certain essential elements of belief which isolated him from all other organized Christian bodies, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, a circumstance he later described by calling to mind that maxim he adopted from his beloved John Newton of Olney: “Thus I went on correcting my views . . . until I became so speckled a bird that scarce one of my species would cordially consociate with me; but I gained ample remuneration in the pursuit, and got a use of my wings which I never before experienced.” The new trial of his wings was greatly assisted by the fact that he was now formulating the basic principle by which he was to test all his future religious interpretations; namely, that Christianity is a religion wonderfully adapted to the whole nature of humankind. Every element has design and purpose in regard to the enrichment and the needs of spiritual life. Nothing, therefore, is arbitrarily commanded to test individual obedience and satisfy the inscrutable caprice of sovereign will. Rather religion, as Jesus had said of the Sabbath, is “made for man and not man for religion.” Centering his attention during this period of study on the relation of the cardinal Christian doctrines of faith, repentance, baptism, conversion, and regeneration, he came to believe that in the apostolic era these elements were connected in a single process and that from this unity and harmony of design proceeded much of the power and validity of the original Gospel.

“a new peak” To state his new position briefly, he had come to the conclusion that in the early church conversion and regeneration were identified and that baptism, preceded by faith and repentance, was the instrument of this change. In fact, he did not see how it could be denied that the New Testament writers had regarded baptism as the means of regeneration when they constantly employed the terms “baptism for the remission of sins,” a “death and a resurrection to new life,” a “bath of regeneration.” Then step-by-step, it appeared to him, a process of fragmentation had set in, a disruption of this original unity of design. First, Roman Catholicism gradually separated conversion and regeneration. Then Protestantism finally separated baptism from any connection with regeneration. As he now read church history, the process began when the church fathers conceived the idea that baptism, in effecting regeneration, may act like a charm and, apart from operative faith and repentance in the person, can in itself mechanically convey the grace of God; and that conversion, no longer playing a part in regeneration, has to be continually renewed through the priestly sacraments of regular confession and absolution. The triumph of Augustinianism completed the separation by leading to the universal practice of infant baptism. The medieval church, after semi-Pelagianism returned to favor, did insist that faith and repentance were necessary prerequisites to baptism and were pledged through the sponsors of the baptized infants. From the start of the Reformation the need for conversion at the beginning of Christian life was again emphasized. In the spiritual and emotional fervor of the great revivals, conversion and regeneration were once more identified in the Christian scheme. The abuses in the Roman church had caused the reformers to regard the doctrine of baptismal regeneration with such repugnance that, though the cultus of infant baptism was now too firmly established to be removed and though the Biblical equation of “baptism for the remission of sins” was retained in the creedal statements, baptism was in practice regarded as an act entirely dis-

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“a new peak” associated from the process of conversion and regeneration. Even the Baptists, who made baptism synchronize in point of time with the period of conversion and regeneration, considered it little more than a ceremony, the penitant’s act of joining the church, coming after his conversion and having no saving value. To Baptist and pedobaptists alike, it was now an act of obedience, not a channel of grace. To Alexander’s mind, the statement of this historical process represented no arid theological disquisition, for he had become convinced that the fragmentation it described had had important moral and spiritual consequences for the church. With his own emphasis on individual choice and responsibility and with a definition of faith that demanded an active and not a passive subject, he would join the first reformers in repudiating, as grossest superstition, a dogma of baptismal regeneration which conceives that grace can be magically conferred on an unconscious subject through the waters of baptism. He would be equally unimpressed by the Roman theory, held also by the Greek and Anglican churches, that faith and repentance can be exercised by proxy. On the other hand, he was beginning to believe that in adopting its “low” doctrine of the Christian sacraments (or “ordinances,” a term just coming into popularity which he would always use in preference to “sacraments”), evangelical Protestantism had run so fast out of Rome that it had run past Jerusalem. Alexander perceived a great spiritual value in Augustine’s conception of grace as a real power communicated by God to humanity, the conception on which all sacramental efficacy is based. At the same time, embracing the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, he would insist that baptism is the outward symbol of the inward conversion through faith and repentance—Peter’s “answer of good conscience toward God.” He would also insist that no mere symbolic interpretation would do justice to Paul’s descriptive phrases of baptism as “putting on Christ,” “dying to sin,” and “being raised to newness of life.”

“a new peak” Already, in pondering that knottiest problem of philosophy, the relation of body and soul, he had rejected any gnostic dualism which presumes an eternal warfare between spirit and matter, soul and body. Relating this attitude to the question of baptism, he was beginning to reason that so long as an individual inhabits a bodily temple, so long must the spiritual in some sense function through the physical. What more fitting a channel for bestowing of grace than the ordinance of baptism, rightly understood and administered? Indeed, he was reaching toward a definition of the process in relation to the whole nature of the “whole man.” He was ready to argue that humanity’s intellectual needs are predominately satisfied in the acceptance of faith and the emotional needs in repentance, while in baptism individuals become active participants in their own regeneration. Their need both for action and for a s s u rance of forgiveness are satisfied through an appropriate ceremoni a l and sacramental ritual which marks their mystical incorporation into the body of Christ and translates them into a new sphere of grace, the Divine Society. Here, to his mind, was an interpretation of baptism that assured its permanent validity in a scheme of redemption designed to meet all the needs of humankind’s spiritual nature and that revealed an original harmony in the Gospel plan of conversion which he believed had been obscured for centuries by the accumulated “rubbish” of human invention and tradition. The full implications of these ideas were to be slow in maturing. In fact, they were not to be finally clarified in syllogistic form or publicly discussed until 1823, eleven years after his own baptism. But from the day he first conceived of baptism in its new relation and began to reach an essentially “high” interpretation of its mystic design, he felt that he was restoring this holy ordinance to the central and dramatic place it had not held since the early days of the church. Moreover, for the very reason that it was so radically at variance with what all his theological studies had taught him, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, he did not

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“a new peak” believe that this change of view had come to him simply by a process of rationalization. Rather, it seemed to come to him with all the force of a spiritual revelation. Alexander was, in the main, the child of his Huguenot mother with a French heritage that predisposed him to cool logic and rationalism, an attitude naturally strengthened by his allegiance to the new Baconian science which emphasized the rational order of things. At the same time, he was on his father’s side, true to the spirit of a Celtic Scot, fiery, passionate, and inclined to mysticism. Both tendencies of mind were apparent when, in later years, thinking back on this period of intensive study following his baptism he wrote: my mind was, for a time, set loose from all its former moorings. It was not a simple change of views on baptism, which happens a thousand times without anything more, but a new commencement. I was placed on a new eminence—a new peak of the mountain of God, from which the whole landscape of Christianity presented itself to my mind in a new attitude and position.

w Nevertheless there was no question that what might appear to Alexander as a revelation of truth lifting him to “a new peak of the mountain of God” would loom in the eyes of his neighbors as a damnable heresy. In fact, from the June day in 1812 when he and his father were immersed in the waters of the Buffaloe, they immediately, and long before Alexander announced any of his more startling views, became false teachers in the opinion of the Scots-Irish Presbyterians whose influence was so thoroughly entrenched in the country extending westward from Washington, Pennsylvania, to the Ohio River. The Presbyterian surprise and displeasure at the Campbells’ action was made quickly apparent.

“a new peak” The Brush Run congregation itself was divided. Some of its most influential members, including Thomas Acheson and Andrew Munro, withdrew their support. Others supported the Campbells’ example until the church became a small group of twenty-eight immersed believers who shared together a sense of isolation and even mild martyrdom. They were shunned at public gatherings, and those in business lost patronage. Due to the withdrawal of substantial members, they were unable to complete or pay for the little building they had started. Foreclosure was threatened; in the coldest months they were forced to meet there without a fire. They frequently visited each others homes to spend the greater part of the night in prayer and seek consolation in the Scriptures. Sometimes, at their baptismal services, sticks and stones were thrown into the water and imprecations and threats were shouted from the woods. No such demonstrations, however, took place at Alexander’s appointments. There was something in the determined set of his chin, the sharp challenging glance of his eye that discouraged hecklers. However one evening on returning from an appointment, he was caught in a violent storm and stopped at the house of a seceder to ask shelter; the woman of the house, on learning his identity, shut the door in his face, and he had to continue on the lonely path through the forest with the rain falling in torrents and timbers crashing about him. Yet for all his cold and discomfort the experience was not without its satisfaction for a young man who had declared his desire to be a “bold Christian hero” and suffer, like Paul, “for a good conscience.” The Campbells soon found that Presbyterian disapprobation was matched by the delight of the Baptists, who did not conceal their pleasure at seeing their pedobaptist rivals discomfited. Though there were few Baptists in the Buffaloe valley, they was a numerous sect east of Washington, along the Monongahela and in the valleys of the Allegheny foothills where they had preceded the Presbyterians by organizing their Redstone Association the

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“a new peak” year the Declaration of Independence was signed, five years before the Redstone Presbytery was formed. These Baptists soon began pressing the Campbells to preach among them, and Brush Run Church was invited to join the Redstone Association. At first, Alexander was not at all interested in this suggestion of union. He had lost none of his old Presbyterian scorn for the “illiterate and uncouth” Baptists, and the Redstone preachers whom he knew he considered “narrow, contracted, illiberal and uneducated men . . . not of the calibre, temper, or attainments to relish or seek after mental enlargement or independence.” Still, fearing that he “might be unreasonable, and by education prejudiced against them,” he attended the Redstone Association when it met at Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1812. He returned, “more disgusted” than when he went, “not intending ever to visit another Association.” Actually, this explanation did not quite tell the whole story. In truth, however sincerely devoted he was to the principles of the “Declaration and Address,” Alexander was enjoying a short session of separatism that he was justifying to himself by a sort of perverse logic. In a sermon before his marriage he brought up the question of why he did not “join some party” and answered it: “Because no party will receive into communion all whom God would receive into heaven.” The sects disregarded Christ’s commandment to keep the “unity of the spirit,” and so he could not unite with them. For a time this attitude was apparently intensified by that changed perspective on the “landscape of Christianity” which he gained from his “new peak of the mountain of God.” He felt constrained to hold apart from others who had not beheld so great a vision. Such a position could not long remain tenable to a son of Thomas Campbell, and some ten years later he would be writing of this period with ironic humor: I have tried the pharisaic plan, and the monastic. I was once so straight, that, like the Indian’s tree, I leaned a lit-

“a new peak” tle the other way . . . I was once so strict a Separatist that I would neither pray nor sing praises with any one who was not so perfect as I supposed myself. In this most unpopular course I persisted until I discovered the mistake, and saw that on the principle embraced in my conduct, there never could be a congregation or church upon the earth. In any event, he began to preach to Baptist congregations “for sixty miles around”; and whatever their ministers’ lack of “academic accomplishments or polish,” he gradually came to the conclusion that he “was better pleased with the Baptist people than with any other community.” Finally in 1813 or 1814 the Brush Run congregation put the question of union to a vote and, not wishing the Baptists to be deceived about their sentiments, drew up a lengthy document “expressing a willingness . . . to co-operate . . . provided always that we should be allowed to teach and preach whatever we learned from the Holy Scriptures, regardless of any creed or formula in Christendom.” After “much debate” of this proposal, the Redstone Association—at its annual meeting in 1815—”decided by a considerable majority” to receive the reform church into communion. Certainly, much debate was in order and the majority voting in favor of the union showed a courageous liberality, for a wide gulf on theological opinion separated the Calvinistic Baptists and the Christian association reformers. They differed on the nature of faith and conversion, on the importance of creeds and weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper, and even on the meaning and design of baptism itself. Some of the Baptists, to be sure, were perhaps prompted to overlook the differences from the fact that the accession to their ranks of two preachers of learning and polish like the Campbells marked a substantial victory over their Presbyterian rivals. On the other hand, their Baptist history was distinguished by its long and honorable record in the fight for religious tolerance and liberty. One thing was sure.

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a“a new peak” Thomas Campbell was relieved and gratified that the Brush Run congregation, after several years of enforced independency, was now in communion with an established body of Christians. For his part, Alexander recorded: “We felt the strength of our cause of reform . . . and constantly grew in favor with the people. Things passed along without any very prominent interest for some two or three years.” Alexander Campbell, however, was not a man destined for peace.

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“We Court Discussion”

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o o n a f t e r his marriage and move to Virginia, Alexander applied for his naturalization papers. Two years later he became a citizen of the United States. While in Philadelphia in December 1815, on his first journey to the East since arriving in America, he wrote a letter to his Uncle Archibald in Newry, Ireland, describing something of the pride and joy he felt in his new status: I cannot speak too highly of the advantages that the people in this country enjoy in being delivered from a proud

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“we court discussion” and lordly aristocracy; and here it becomes very easy to trace the common national evils of all European countries to their proper sources, and chiefly to that first germ of oppression, of civil and religious tyranny. I have had my horse shod by a legislator, my horse saddled, my boots cleaned, my stirrups held by a senator. Here is no nobility but virtue; here there is no ascendance save that of genius . . . and knowledge. The farmer here is lord of the soil, and the most independent man on earth . . . . No consideration that I can conceive of, would induce me to exchange all that I enjoy in this country . . . for any situation which your country can afford. I would not exchange the honor and privilege of being an American citizen for the position of your king.” Though he knew that his uncle was still a devout seceder and an elder in the church at Newry, he confessed with evident pride that the spirit of his adopted country had inspired a new attitude of independence and freedom in his religious thinking and practice: More than seven years have elapsed since I bade farewell to you and my native country. During this period of years my mind and circumstances have undergone many revolutions. I have . . . renounced much of the traditions and errors of my early education. I am now an Independent in church government . . . and a Baptist in so far as respects baptism . . . What I am in religion I am from examination, reflection, conviction, not from “ipse dixit,” tradition or human authority; and having halted, and faltered, and stumbled, I have explored every inch of the way hitherto, and I trust, through grace, “I am what I am.” He added a word about Thomas: “Though my father and I accord in sentiment, neither of us are dictators or imitators.

“we court discussion” Neither of us lead; neither of us follow,” and here he spoke modestly. In 1810 he had still considered his father’s authority “paramount and almost irresistible.” But in 1812, when concurring in Alexander’s decision on baptism, Thomas conceded to his son the leadership of the reformation he had initiated, and from that day forth father and son tacitly accepted their reversed roles. At the time Thomas was just forty-nine, in the prime of middle life, vigorous and experienced; Alexander was young and untried, not yet twenty-four. Thomas, though he had a stubborn courage in standing by his convictions, had little aggressiveness in defending his beliefs from attack or pressing their acceptance on others. He could formulate an idealistic general principle as in the “Declaration and Address,” yet he was hesitant in following the proposition through to practical and unforeseen results. He lacked the adventurous spirit to carry the movement beyond his first mild and gentle overtures. Alexander, on the other hand, in spite of his youth, was already decisive, critical, realistic, a great admirer of the Scriptural injunction, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might”; and, perhaps because of his youth, he felt less regret over breaking with old loyalties and less trammeled in adventuring new paths. Thomas Campbell possessed the quiet, inner strength of a Melancthon; Alexander, the bold, aggressive strength of a Luther. When almost twenty years later Alexander himself sought to describe the common character and temper of “all real and useful reformers,” he wrote: Great moral courage, boldness, independence of mind, untiring zeal for the glory of the Lord, and unaffected benevolence for men, are essential to a reformer. The man who faints at the sight of blood will make a puny soldier, and a worse general. He that wants nerve to oppose errors can never reform them. One Luther was more puissant than a thousand Melancthons.

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“we court discussion” He intended no disparaging comparison. Rather he had come to know that the power of a Luther is both strengthened and tempered by the mild remonstrance and admonition of a Melancthon. As for the Campbells own relation, though temperament and circumstance might force the younger to the initiative, their constant and affectionate cooperation never altered. To Alexander, his father was always his wisest and most honored counselor. For Thomas’ part, he rejoiced that his principles and plea found their ablest expositor and defender in his son. He was proud that his son was a man to whom others instinctively turned for leadership. Moreover, as Alexander observed, it seemed that at last their “cause for reform” might be growing “in favor with the people.” Some of the Redstone churches and even some in the Stillwater Association of Ohio began to show interest. Margaret’s father and stepmother decided to follow the lead of their son-in-law, and certain young ladies of the neighborhood evidently found the plea of the magnetic young reformer irresistible since it was recorded that “a few in Charlestown (Wellsburg) . . . mostly females, had become obedient to the faith.” But most of these converts were too scattered to join the Brush Run church which, as some of its members moved away, was actually decreasing in size. Discouraged by this lack of progress and harassed by continuing opposition in Pennsylvania, the congregation decided to explore the bold initiative of moving as a body farther to the West. They were not eager to break the wilderness and form the first line of the advancing frontier, but ever since General Harrison’s defeat of Tecumseh’s warriors at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811 several hundred miles of additional territory had become safe for a second advance of the frontier by permanent settlers who would build the hamlets of the first pioneers into towns and cities. At a meeting on April 13, 1814, they formally decided to move and named Alexander with four other members as a committee instructed to set out for the West and select a site near a town not too close to

“we court discussion” the Indian border, where the artisans of their group could find work, the farmers buy land, and together build a school to educate their children under their own direction. Thomas Campbell had already moved across the Ohio to Cambridge, leaving the Brush Run Church in the pastoral care of Alexander and James Foster. The Brush Run committee selected a site some sixty-five miles farther to the southwest, near Zanesville, Ohio, and prepared a detailed written report of its advantages. The report received approval at a meeting on June 8 along with the decision to begin the migration as soon as the members could put their affairs in order. The plans were unexpectedly frustrated. John Brown had been against the idea from the start. He had no wish to leave Virginia nor did he want his only daughter and her family separated from him by a journey of several days. So he made his sonin-law a proposition: he would give him a deed in fee simple to the house and farm on the Buffaloe. Since he was getting too old to relish the job of farming, he and Mrs. Brown would move into Charlestown, where he also owned property, and open a grocery business. Though a young man given to an unworldly calling, Alexander made a worldly-wise decision. He accepted the offer. Doubtless he considered it an act of Providence designed to give his family financial security in order that he might more easily carry out his vow to serve the Lord without pay. The decision put an end to the colonization plan of the church, so much did its members consider that the success of their project depended on the enthusiasm and energy of the younger Campbell.

w Through his father-in-law’s generosity, Alexander at twenty-six became master of a house and some three hundred acres of land. John Brown, by a deed of conveyance dated March 15, 1815, granted the lands and mansion to Alexander in “consideration” of

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“we court discussion” “$1.00 & love and affection.” It was not so fine an estate as the manor house and gardens of Mr. Richardson of Richhill where a young tutor had once dreamed of fortune and fame, but it was a place to justify the pride and pleasure of its new owner. The house probably dated from about 1795, the year John Brown recorded his first purchase of land in Brooke County. Built at a time when most settlers still lived in chinked-and-daubed log cabins, it seemed so pretentious an edifice that it became known throughout the valley as “the Mansion.” Its three stories consisted of a stone-walled basement floor and two upper stories made of hand-cut walnut shingles. The parlor, where Alexander and Margaret married, was a large, cheerful low-ceilinged room, sealed with tongue-and-groove panels of black walnut and finished with a hand-tooled molding and carved cornices. The wainscoting was painted white, while the cornice, panel work below the surbase, and mantelpiece were a sky-blue. The floors were of heavy oak, and the massive doors were hung on long hinges of bronze. To the rear of the parlor were two small bedrooms, and a winding staircase behind the parlor door led to other bedrooms above. A large kitchen was on the basement floor, with another room and a cellar adjoining. The entire house was held together with wooden pegs and with nails made by a blacksmith who had a rude shop on the creek where he forged the nails from iron brought across the mountains on packhorses. Glass for its windows and the built-in cabinet that flanked the left wall by the parlor fireplace was said to have been the first imported to that section of Virginia. Positioned on land sloping east and west to the clear, rapid waters of Buffaloe Creek, house offered from any window a view of wooded hills, some rising steeply like cathedral spires so that Alexander loved to call them his “Gothic hills.” Indeed, he could hardly have been better pleased with his new prospect. The larger part of the farm was high rolling land located in a great sweeping horseshoe bend of the Buffaloe, and its deep limestone soil grew abundant crops of grains and pasturage for the sheep that grazed

The Campbell Mansion.

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“we court discussion” its hillsides. These rich lands lay in a country whose rugged beauty was a daily reminder of earlier, happy hours among other highlands beloved of his youthful favorite, the bard Ossian. The whole surface of Brooke County was cut by deep ravines through which swift creeks fed by numerous rivulets flowed westward to the Ohio. Buffaloe Creek alone had no less than fourteen tributaries in the county, called by such names as Ghost Run, Grog Run, and Panther Run. Its steep hills were covered with primeval forests of oak, hickory, and walnut. At the same time, it was by no means an isolated region. The Panhandle gained an early notoriety from boundary disputes following the discovery that surveyors had left this narrow strip of Virginia territory running up between the Pennsylvania line and the Ohio River. Hunters’ stories of its “fabulous fertility” attracted a class of settlers whom Alexander found agreeable company. They were, for the most part, younger sons of the older eastern families, “horse-racing, fox-hunting, jolly Marylanders and Virginians, . . . men of education and refinement, . . . given to hospitality, good living, fun and intermarriage,” many of whom “led commissions under the sign manual of Washington himself.” Known locally as “Short Creekers,” they appropriated the rich country around West Liberty (Short Creek), a pre-Revolutionary seat of justice, which was only four miles southwest of Alexander’s farm. In general, these Short Creekers held aloof from the Scots-Irish settlers who predominated in the White Oaks region, a little to the north, and whom they considered “in a manner, outside the sporting pale.” By the same token, they were less seriously concerned with religious questions and likely to be more tolerant of divergent views. In any event, they observed that young Campbell on the Buffaloe had about him none of the sedate air of the cleric. Once the farm was his own, he went to work with intelligence and purpose to make improvements and set everything in order. So they welcomed him as a gentleman farmer like themselves, who held a proper appreciation of the values of good land and good living.

“we court discussion” Though West Liberty was his nearest settlement and post office, Alexander’s chief point of contact with the outside world was through Charlestown (Wellsburg) on the Ohio, seven miles to the northwest. A tiny hamlet when it became seat for the new county of Brooke in 1797, by the close of the War of 1812 it was one of the most noted shipping centers on the Upper Ohio with a population of almost a thousand. Its exports of flour and whiskey rivaled those of Pittsburgh; and its glassware, pottery, and Queensware fashioned by craftsmen imported from England graced the house of many a planter on the Mississippi. During President Thomas Jefferson’s admi nistration, the government built gunboats there. Once, several small schooners were said to have been built at the mouth of the Buffaloe and, loaded with flour, sailed directly to Liverpool and Glasgow, sorely puzzling the mariners who overhauled the vessels for clearance papers and had to get out a map to discover “any such port.” In 1811, a strange boat, propelled by steam and constructed at Pittsburgh under the supervision of a man named Robert Fulton, created the “profoundest amazement” among the river dwellers, who gladly paid twenty-five cents a head to go aboard and see the “mighty curiosity.” Charlestown was proud of its one hundred substantial houses, mostly built along one long street parallel to the river. Equal pride was expressed for its “convenient little court house of stone, with a small light cupola spire,” behind it the gaol and in front of it the pillory, over which a “large, round wooden cover, like an immense umbrella,” served as shelter for the criminal in the stocks or for the citizens gathered to discuss the latest news. The town also boasted a “good brick” academy and numerous taverns. But in all Charlestown in 1815, there was not a single church building. Indeed, Alexander noted, “not only the Baptist cause, but all forms of Christianity in Brooke County, were very low.” When the colonization project of the Brush Run Church was abandoned, Alexander proposed that, instead of removal farther west, they

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“we court discussion” should build another meeting house, in Charlestown and offered his services for three or four months to make a tour soliciting the necessary funds. His suggestion was quickly accepted.

w On December 12, 1815, he began his first trip eastward since arriving in 1809, and this time he traveled quickly and pleasantly by stagecoach from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. Again he kept a careful journal of his tour, in which the earlier enthusiasm of the newly arrived immigrant gave way to the sober discernment of the citizen and political economist, who noted with satisfaction the farm improvements and thriving towns along the way. In Philadelphia, he preached to his first audiences in a large eastern city, with varied results. One Baptist minister was so pleased with what he heard that he urged the eloquent young preacher from the West to stay among them and accept a pastorate. Another plainly did not know what to make of a sermon not based on familiar theories from Gill and Fuller, but a second discourse cleared his mind; Alexander was not given a third opportunity to corrupt his flock. Doubtless, Alexander’s own most treasured memory of Philadelphia came from a visit to a private home a few miles outside the city to see the “venerable patriarch,” Charles Thomson. Once a fiery patriot, the “Sam Adams” of Philadelphia, he was the secretary of the Continental Congress whose integrity was so universally appreciated that it sustained the people’s faith through the dark uncertainties of the Revolution. Even the Indians called him a name meaning “the man of truth.” This was Alexander’s first opportunity to meet and talk with a man who had been a major participant in the war for independence, a close confederate of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, Richard Henry Lee, and Patrick Henry. Perhaps it was this visit that moved him

“we court discussion” to the glowing words in the letter to his Uncle Archibald of Newry, in which he declared that he would “not exchange the honor and privilege of being an American citizen for the position” of the British king. From Philadelphia, he traveled by way of several New Jersey cities to New York, and here his welcome was more generous than he expected. Among other “influential Baptists,” he met William Colgate, who was just getting his soap manufacturing business well established. Colgate came out to greet him, still wearing his apron, and made a substantial donation for the Charlestown church, which inspired Alexander to the accurate prophecy that the Lord would “abundantly bless and prosper one who dispenses his income” on such principles. The Baptist clergy were equally generous, in spiritual substance. They recognized him for one who preached “the true grace of God,” and they pressed him to relocate in New York and accept the pastorate of an elderly minister who was “a good Welshman, a good exhorter, but a poor preacher.” Alexander declined, and when they pressured him again, with “most generous offers” and “kind persuasions,” he made the refusal final by the explanation that “if they knew me better, they would love me less,” and “rather then produce divisions among them, or adopt the order of things then fashionable in that city, I would live and die in the backwoods.” He started his return journey to those “backwoods” by way of a stop in Baltimore and then on to Washington—his first visit to the capital city of his new country. It must have been a depressing sight. The city was still little more than a grandiose plan in the mind of its French architect, a rude settlement in a swampy, malaria-ridden wilderness, well deserving the descriptive jibe, “a city of magnificent distances.” Moreover, it still bore the scars of war from its capture in August 1814, when the British had burned its capitol, the executive mansion, and other public buildings, forcing President James Madison

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“we court discussion” and his wife to flee so hastily that the dinner prepared for them was eaten by British officers. But ratification of the Treaty of Ghent had at last ended the war in February 1815. A coat of white paint over its fire-blackened walls had given the executive mansion a popular new name, the “White House.” Citizens everywhere were busy forgetting the defeats and remembering only the glorious victories of Commander Matthew Perry on Lake Erie and of General Andrew Jackson, the new national hero, at New Orleans. Wherever one might travel a new expectancy was abroad in the land, a new attitude toward national affairs that held particular interest for a young man who had recently acquired a farm on the Buffaloe. During the late war New England manufacturers, resentful of their losses in trade, had been disloyal to the point of treason. Men of the Mississippi Valley were quick to make the most of their seditious actions in order to hasten the decline in national influence of the northeast, whose conservative leaders, regarded the “American dream” as a distressing nightmare and had long feared and opposed the power of the rising states to the West. Now at last, with the peace of Ghent, America had seceded from dependence on the Old World and turned confidently inland to the expansion and exploitation of its own vast domain. Whether New England liked it or not, destiny was marching westward. And after some three months in the East, Alexander turned happily westward again. His refusal of flattering offers in Philadelphia and New York had not been dictated perhaps as much as he thought by a pure, unselfish devotion to the cause of “original Christianity.” To begin with, any metropolis held little attraction for him. He always felt his soul expand and his spirits soar with every mile he moved into the countryside away from the crowded haunts of city streets. And there was something more. He was a proud citizen of the United States but, more especially, a citizen of the West. The “American dream” was his dream, and he made his home where he instinc-

“we court discussion” tively felt that he belonged. Whatever national policy, the East would always face too much toward Europe to suit a young man who had come to a new world in search of a new way of life. It was a sure instinct that had caused him, the immigrant of six years before, to declare his first vivid impression of America’s greatness when he turned from her seaboard to journey toward the virgin wilderness of her western mountains. While in Washington, Alexander had met another young preacher, the Rev. Stephen H. Cone, ordained soon after concluding his active service in the late war. In later years he would become one of the most distinguished Baptists in America. At the time of their meeting in February 1816, he was serving as chaplain to the United States Congress. They quickly became friends, and on one occasion Cone invited the Virginia visitor to fill his place before Congress. Alexander must have been moved to new wonder at the possibilities of America when he, an unknown western preacher of twenty-six, less than seven years in the country and only three years a citizen, could be invited to speak before the national House of Representatives in which sat such statesmen as Speaker Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and John Randolph of Roanoke. But however sensible of the honor, he declined. Not having quite recovered from his siege of Pharisaic separatism, he felt “doubtful of the propriety of leading in public worship such a body of worldly and unconverted men.” He had not proved quite so exclusive, however, where the money of the Philistines was concerned. He returned home with about one-thousand dollars for building the Charlestown meetinghouse, which he had obtained, he later confessed to his “present shame, by milking both the sheep and the goats.” Meanwhile, John Brown and a few others had been making collections. Soon after Alexander’s return, a neat brick building was erected under John Brown’s supervision at the upper end of the main street and christened the “Regular Baptist Church.” Its high pulpit was tastefully decorated with curtains and cushions made by two devoted

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“we court discussion” young ladies of the town—one of whom was Miss Selina Bakewell, a young lady of scarcely fourteen, whose future was to hold service to the young reformer far more important than fashioning cushions for his pulpit. This seemingly innocent project of building the church in Charlestown (which, by act of the legislature in December 1816 was to be renamed Wellsburg, from its location on the site of the old Wells’ blockhouse and trading post) was the cause of the first open rift between Alexander and some of his new Baptist brethren. Until that time, the only Baptist Church in Brooke County had been Cross Creek, three miles above Charlestown. Its pastor, Elder Pritchard, considered his little frame meetinghouse quite sufficient for the needs of the surrounding country, including the county seat. Elder Pritchard, moreover, was a minister “of very high Calvinistic views,” and he belonged to that minority in the Redstone Association who from the start had opposed the admission of the Campbells and their reform church. For three years he had held his peace. But when the suspect newcomer had the temerity to build a new meeting-house that would carry away some of his own substantial members (John Brown himself had joined the Cross Creek congregation on moving to Charlestown), he thought it time to call upon other members of the Redstone minority for action. “Reports of my heterodoxy,” Campbell recorded, “began to radiate [to the surrounding country] . . . A coalition was formed.”

w Alexander soon gave firm substance to these reports. When the Redstone Association met on September 1, 1816, he delivered a discourse that was to become famous as his “Sermon on the Law.” In the eyes of his opponents, it raised him from the status of one whose orthodoxy was suspect into the rank of a full-fledged heretic. In his own eyes, it was another major link in the “curious

“we court discussion” . . . chain of providential events” that he believed to be shaping his destiny. It involved him in “a seven years’ war,” and thirty years later he even expressed a doubt whether, “but for the persecution begun on the alleged heresy of this sermon, . . . the present reformation had ever been advocated by me.” The delivery of this fateful sermon came about in a rather complicated fashion. Alexander knew the temper of the hostpreacher, and remarked to Margaret on the way, “I don’t think they will let me preach at this association at all.” At first it appeared that he was right. When he was “nominated to preach on the Lord’s day,” Elder Pritchard, a former Marylander, immediately invoked two old Maryland customs: one that gave the host congregation the right to choose the Lord’s Day speaker and another that decreed “those from a distance ought to be heard rather than those in the neighborhood—such as brother Campbell—whom the church could hear at any time.” An Ohio preacher was chosen in his stead, and Alexander tartly observed, “I was disposed of from the same principle which inhibited the building of a meeting house in Wellsburg—that is, I was too near Cross Creek.” However, “a multitude . . . from a distance”—curious to hear a young preacher whose views were so suspiciously heterodox that a coalition of senior ministers organized to deter his influence— formed a deputation to have the decision reversed. Alexander refused. Then the Ohio minister scheduled to preach became ill, and a second invitation was urged upon Alexander. This time he consented, provided Elder Pritchard in person tendered him “a special and formal request.” It was a revealing condition. Alexander, for all his earnest desire to follow the teachings of Christ, did not find it easy to turn the other cheek. Elder Pritchard yielded with what grace he could muster. Not having a subject ready at command, Alexander asked to deliver the second discourse of the day, and when the time came, he had decided, “at the impulse of the occasion, . . . to draw a clear line between the

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“we court discussion” Law and the Gospel, the Old Dispensation and the New.” And so originated the “Sermon on the Law” in which he first advanced his theory of a progressive revelation, developed through successive dispensations. Though he spoke almost extemporaneously, he spoke on the theme that was at the moment most exciting his mind. This was the period when—having recently concluded that three or four years’ intensive theological study following his baptism, rendering him forever “weary” of “controversial reading of this sort”—he immersed himself in intensive Biblical study, trying a new and rational method of Biblical interpretation and exegesis, which made the Scriptures “a new book” to him. Occupied with this interest during his recent trip to the East, he visited the secretary of the Continental Congress at Philadelphia primarily because of Thomson’s reputation as a translator of the Septuagint rather than because of his fame in the Revolution. In fact this train of ideas now advanced in the “Sermon on the Law” had been set in motion many years before. Thomas Campbell himself suggested the fruitful line of inquiry when he stated in the “Declaration and Address” that “the New Testament is as perfect a constitution for the New Testament church as the Old Testament was for. . . the Old Testament church.” Even before leaving Ireland, both Campbells were well versed in the Dutch school of covenant theology, which attempted to show a natural development in God’s plan of salvation for humanity by fitting all the Scriptural commands and promises into a framework of successive covenants or dispensations. For Alexander, the more his attention centered on New Testament studies and problems of Biblical exegesis, the more commanding he found these concepts of the school of covenant theology, the more provocative its role in the history of Christian thought. Some three years before the Redstone Association meeting, his own ideas on the subject were sufficiently matured that he preached a sermon to a small gathering in Ohio based on the same text from Romans

“we court discussion” (VIII:3) with which he introduced his far bolder and more explicative “Sermon on the Law” of 1816. Though this idea of development might appear simple, rational, and firmly based on the New Testament—the Apostle Paul reminding Christians that they were “not under the law, but under grace”; the Gospel of John declaring that “the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ”—the idea had been lost sight of almost immediately in the post-apostolic era; and Reformation theologians did nothing to revive the concept. Calvin, in fact, had insisted upon an eternal, changeless, and timeless relation between God and man that effectually denied any idea of a plan whereby God might change the methods of dealing with humanity as the needs of humanity changed. It was this lack of historic sense that led to the forced and mechanical use of Scripture as an arsenal of proof that, as Alexander concluded, would keep the meaning of “the Bible as a whole, the religion of Jesus Christ as a whole,” forever obscured. It plunged the Calvinists themselves into a dilemma. They asserted the immutability of divine decrees, yet, obviously, they did not obey all precepts and ritual of the Jewish law. Seeking to escape this dilemma, Cocceius, a seventeenth-century professor at Leyden, had developed covenant theology and formulated the common-sense rules of Biblical interpretation that were to win him the title, “father of modern exegesis.” This theology never became the basis of a sect but subtly permeated religious thought of various parties. When Charles II forced prelacy upon Scotland, many of the Presbyterian clergy sought refuge in Holland, where they became imbued with covenant theology. On their return after the Revolution of 1688, they brought back liberal ideas that were to disrupt the Church of Scotland and lead to the secession of 1733. By the time Thomas Campbell came to his ministry in the latter part of the century, the seceder church was steeped in a lethargy that largely obscured the virtues it had derived from the Dutch school. But the framework remained; and the main princi-

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“we court discussion” ples of covenant theology were embodied in Thomas Boston’s popular book, The Fourfold State, which Alexander had been reading the day of his shipwreck in the Hebrides. By 1816 he was ready to carry this method of interpretation far beyond anything Cocceius had anticipated. The Dutch theologian placed the great line of cleavage at the fall of man: before the fall was the covenant of works; after it the covenant of grace, which included the various stages of the patriarchal, Jewish, and Christian dispensations. Even so, contemporaries of Cocceius had accused him of paying too little attention to the Old Testament. Now a young reformer in Virginia having learned to interpret original sin in Lockean rather than Augustinian terms and to reject the Augustinian and Calvinistic anthropology that made the fall of man the most important point in the history of salvation—was ready to relegate the fall to a subordinate and relatively unimportant place. Instead, he set the great cleavage at the line separating the dispensation of the law and the dispensation of the Gospel. The most important factor in the history of humankind was the coming of the Christ, with His gospel of “good news,” of love, hope, joy, “righteousness and eternal life.” Having recently discovered the Bible as “a new book,” Alexander was now eager to share his discovery with others. Therefore, on the “impulse of the occasion,” he mounted the preaching stand in the tent erected under the elms on the border of Cross Creek and challenged his audience to read again the sermons recorded in Acts; they would find “not one word of lawpreaching in the whole of it” for “Christ, and not the law, was the Alpha and Omega” of the Apostles’ message. Like Paul addressing the Galatians, he exhorted his hearers to come forth from bondage in a narrow legalism under old Jewish law and enjoy a new era of spiritual freedom under Christ, for “if the Son shall make us free, we shall be free indeed.” The “large concourse” gathered before him in the quiet Cross Creek valley were variously intrigued, puzzled, astounded, and

“we court discussion” outraged. All were agreed it was an extraordinary sermon—doubly extraordinary coming from a young man not quite twenty-eight— a sermon like no other they had ever heard. Before the close of the century a Baptist historian would dismiss the “Sermon on the Law” as “orthodox to the point of truism and dullness.” But in 1816 it was revolutionary and, to every “high Calvinist” of the Redstone, it was “damnable.” No sooner was its drift apparent than Elder Pritchard created a great confusion by publicly calling out several preachers, ostensibly to attend a lady who had fainted in the audience. Once outside the tent, he proposed an immediate declaration from the stand condemning the sermon as “not Baptist doctrine.” More prudent counsel prevailed when some suggested that they might well examine the sermon to see “whether it be or be not Bible doctrine,” while others pointed out the popularity of the young preacher with a substantial part of the assembled crowd. On a separate issue, however, the coalition was not to be denied victory. Thomas Campbell had moved to Pittsburgh and organized a small congregation that applied for admission to the association; the petition was refused. Moreover, as soon as the dissenting preachers returned to their churches, Alexander became aware that his sermon had created a sensation. He found “hue and cry raised against it” throughout the Redstone Association. A word with harsh and ugly connotation was used—antinomian. It was drawn from the sixteenthcentury German sect whose adherents, because of their declaration that faith frees the Christian from obligation to the moral law, were generally suspected of the most extravagant and licentious practices. He had anticipated the charge and answered it in his sermon, and in order that the public might have his own words, he decided to publish the text. He wrote out the sermon as best he could from memory and a few hasty notes, secured a printer in Steubenville, Ohio, and in the fall of 1816 issued his first publication: a thirty-two page pamphlet, “The Substance of a Sermon Delivered before the Redstone Baptist Association, met on Cross

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“we court discussion” Creek, Brooke County, Va., on the 1st of September, 1816”; By Alexander Campbell, One of the Pastors of the Church of Brush Run, Washington County, Pa. The pamphlet may have forestalled misrepresentation. It also proved a convenience for those convinced that the author’s views were “superlatively heterodox and dangerous to the whole community.” When the next association met at Peter’s Creek in the fall of 1817, the “published discourse” became the ground of an “impeachment and trial for heresy.” Alexander was “taken almost by surprise,” but he still had strong supporters in the association. By “a great stretch of charity” on the part of several elder clergymen, he was “saved by a decided majority” who voted that the meeting had “no jurisdiction in the case” and suggested that the body “leave every one to form his own opinion” of the controversial sermon. He could scarcely have asked for more generous treatment. At the same time, he assessed the strength of the opposition to his views and knew that the era of peace of those first few uneventful years of union when he labored “amongst the Baptists with good effect” were at an end.

w Even while he made this admission to himself, he was busy planning a new project. Since the days when he had conducted his father’s academy at Rich Hill and tutored the daughters of William Richardson, he had lost none of his love for teaching. Believing he might inspire young men under his own instruction to undertake the ministry of reformation, he decided to open “a classical and mercantile academy” at his “mansion” on the Buffaloe. He called it “Buffaloe Seminary,” and the first session began in January 1818. He knew that he could count on the support of his neighbors, who had long proved themselves hospitable to education. In the early days of settlement, the “quality folks” sent their daughters

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East to be educated, while the lesser folks were encouraged to attend the log “field schools” where a motley crew of scholars sat on backless benches to master “round hand writing” and “the rule of three” under itinerant teachers who boarded variously among their patrons and often eked out their scanty livelihood by

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“we court discussion” practicing the trades of cobbler or tailor. But as soon as the population increased, the well-to-do began to think of higher education nearer home for their children, and every town of any size boasted its academy or college. Within a twenty-mile radius of Alexander’s farm there were already no less than four academies—one at Wellsburg, another across the Ohio at Steubenville, and two to the east at Washington and Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Even so, considering the quality of instruction and discipline that he had observed and lampooned at Washington in 1810, he believed he could add something to the scholarly standard of the region. As he soon learned, the public evidently agreed. “A number of leading men” as far away as Pittsburgh sent their sons, one or two came from Ohio, and Dr. Joseph Doddridge, the Episcopal minister at Wellsburg and a noted local historian, enrolled his son. Some of these patrons were interested to see what the former author of the Bonus Homo satire would do with a school of his own, while many were apparently in search of a master for their sons who could enforce discipline where other schools had failed. Thomas Campbell, having returned to his old occupation of a schoolmaster some years before, had already established in the region a favorable reputation for “the strict European method of instruction.” The first classes opened in the parlor of the mansion, and the quality of both instruction and discipline soon satisfied the most skeptical patron. Besides courses in mathematics, geography, history, grammar and parsing, and composition, Alexander, it was said with approbation, paid “uncommon attention to English literature,” taught such sciences as horticulture, and in languages offered not only Latin and Greek but French and Hebrew as well. Tuition was five dollars a quarter and board and lodgings one dollar and a half per week. As many of the boys as possible stayed at the mansion; others boarded at nearby farmhouses. All boarding pupils were expected to attend morning and evening worship with the family and show a becoming progress in knowledge of the

“we court discussion” Scriptures. The year was divided into two long sessions, with only two vacations—four weeks in July and two weeks at Christmas. In setting up this strict regime, the master met his first test. Several of the students from Pittsburgh were almost grown young men who had vanquished many another schoolmaster with their insubordination, but in Alexander Campbell they faced a determination superior to their own. At the first outbreak of rebellion, Alexander seized the ringleader and humiliated him with a thrashing before the entire school. Thereafter, the master’s authority went unquestioned. The preceptor was strict, yet he also had a love and zest for learning which he was able to impart to his scholars. He had not forgotten the days when he found fields and streams more alluring by far than books and classrooms. He could laugh at a lad’s pranks and share in his sports. When the warmth of summer came, he could show his boys how to swim in the Buffaloe, and when the creek lay frozen in winter, he could teach them the fancy figures he once had cut on the River Clyde. According to local custom, he closed each session with a public examination before parents and friends, and these exercises were soon among the favorite excursions for the young people of the surrounding towns and villages. One of the most constant in attendance was Miss Selina Bakewell of Wellsburg, who had helped fashion the cushions for the new Wellsburg church. John Brown, having taken a liking to the industrious young lady, invited her to meet his daughter. She and Margaret soon became fast friends. Quite naturally, in time, Selina also found irresistible the religious teaching of her friend’s compelling young husband and, at age eighteen, was baptized by him at the mouth of the Buffaloe. Not the least of her future services in his cause was the writing of her reminiscences. On one occasion, she recorded, since the mansion parlor was far too small to accommodate the crowds that attended the seminary’s semiannual exhibitions, a platform was built over the creek and the

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“we court discussion” scholars delivered their orations under clustering grapevines. On another occasion, the examinations were held in a large new barn, and the principal speaker was Dr. Doddridge, who later inserted a notice in the Washington Reporter to extol the headmaster as “learned, attentive, and laborious” and predicted that the seminary would “add much to the useful literature of our country.” Alexander did not confine these benefits to boys alone. As became the essayist Clarinda who lauded the charms of educated young ladies, he admitted girls as day-scholars to his academy. Moreover, he was the father of daughters. The eldest, Jane Caroline, was now six, old enough to be a student in her father’s school, and there were three younger girls—Eliza Ann, born September 13, 1813; Maria Louisa, born November 20, 1815; and the baby, Lavinia, born January 17, 1818, just a week or so after the opening of Buffaloe Seminary. Even with the aid of servants, Margaret Brown Campbell found herself a busy young wife, looking after four small daughters and the lads of the seminary as well. As the patronage increased until students filled the house to overflowing, Margaret and Alexander moved their own bedroom to the basement floor. By the second year it was apparent that the mansion would have to be enlarged if it was to continue to serve as the seminary. At the time the school was first opened, Alexander had added a di ning room with a bedroom above. Having a penchant for architecture, Alexander drew plans for an entire new two-story wing that would virtually double the size of the old house. The cornerstone was laid during the public exhibition on July 1, 1819. Local carpenters were scarce, so he had the main part of the structure cut and framed in Pittsburgh, shipped down the Ohio to Wellsburg, and brought to the farm by oxcart. The porch of the original house extended along the entire west side. This he converted into a hall and to it added a large room to serve as the main classroom for the seminary. Above, he placed a dormitory for students, to be reached by a new stairway in the hall. Margaret’s prized grandfather clock

“we court discussion” of rosewood with its moon-faced ornament, brought down the Ohio about 1814, was moved into the schoolroom, where it ticked out the hours for many a weary scholar. To complete the design, he built on the south side a new front porch, with one-story columns. The front door opening into the hall from the porch now gave admittance on the right of the hall to the parlor and on the left to the schoolroom. He had the whole house painted white and added green Venetian shutters. At length the mansion was beginning to assume an appearance more worthy of its name.

w While Alexander had been sinking his roots deep into the soil of the Virginia panhandle, Thomas Campbell had been busy moving about. As Alexander wrote his Uncle Archibald in Ireland, “My father . . . resembles one of our planets in emigrating from place to place” having already established academies of his own in three successive states. Almost immediately after Alexander’s marriage in 1811, Thomas moved his family from their first home in the town of Washington to a farm near the village of Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, where he believed they could live more cheaply, especially since neighbors were willing to do most of the farming for him. Two years later, while on a preaching tour to the West, he became favorably impressed with the country around Cambridge, Ohio, which seemed a good place to buy a farm and establish a seminary. In the late fall of 1813, soon after the Brush Run Church united with the Redstone Association, he again moved his family. The previous January his eldest daughter Dorothea, had married Joseph Bryant, and in November Nancy, next in age, married a young man named Andrew Chapman. His two sons-in-law went along to assist in managing both farm and academy. As Thomas was as excellent at teaching as he was poor at farming, he soon had a flourishing school.

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“we court discussion” Then, in the fall of 1815, he received an urgent letter from his old friend, General Acheson, begging him to return to comfort his brother, David Acheson, who was suffering from a severe “mental disturbance.” Neither religious differences nor a broken engagement had strained their long friendship. Thomas immediately left for Washington and stayed by the bedside of David until his death a few weeks later. Meanwhile, he heard of a favorable opening for an academy in Pittsburgh and before the close of 1815 returned his family to Pennsylvania, where Joseph Bryant continued to assist him in teaching, though Andrew Chapman, having inherited a farm, moved with Nancy to Washington County. In less than two years, Dorothea’s health failed so that the Bryants could no longer help with the academy. Thomas, moreover, was discouraged by the refusal of the Redstone Association to receive the little congregation that he had organized to meet in his schoolroom on Liberty Street, and other fields again looked greener. He heard that the Baptists of Kentucky were the most numerous in the state and given to “much more liberal views and feelings” than he had yet encountered. In the fall of 1817 he moved his family to Newport, Kentucky, while he made a tour of inspection. When he visited Burlington, in Boone County, he discovered a new academy in process of construction, and his reputation as a teacher evidently preceding him, he was offered the position of headmaster. His daughter Jane, now eighteen, was old enough to assist with the academy and soon proved she had inherited the family talent for teaching. Some of “the best families in the State” began to send their children to Burlington to benefit from the Campbells’ instruction, and the “generous and hospitable” citizens of the town vied with each other to show their appreciation and esteem. Thomas’ family began to hope that at last, among these friendly and kindly Kentuckians, they had found a permanent home. They were soon disillusioned. One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1819 Thomas went for a walk that carried him past a grove set aside as an amusement ground for African Americans.

“we court discussion” On an impulse, he invited them into his schoolroom to hear the Scriptures read. They followed him, and if they found his long discourse a little tedious, they joined with enthusiasm in singing the hymns. The next day Thomas was visited by a friend who informed him that he had inadvertently broken a state law that forbade teaching slaves except in the presence of one or two white witnesses. Kentuckians felt the law necessary in order to prevent fanatics or professional agitators from inciting insurrection under guise of preaching the Bible. Thomas did not stop to inquire the reason. He announced that he was leaving Kentucky. Burlington citizens were aghast and his family, dismayed. The townspeople offered him flattering inducements to stay, and when he refused asked that, if he must go, he permit Jane to stay and carry on the seminary. His family added their tearful entreaties; it was no greater trial to leave Ireland than it was to forsake their Kentucky home. Thomas was adamant. He wrote Alexander of his intentions. Alexander replied immediately and proposed that his father come to assist him with Buffaloe Seminary. With the new addition for the school under way, he would especially welcome Thomas’ help. Even so, in Thomas’ place, he would almost certainly have taken a more practical and objective attitude and chosen to comply with the simple stipulation of Kentucky law in order to remain and teach the slaves, rather than rushing off in a petulant mood of moral indignation to seek some more completely agreeable society. Alexander loved liberty and despised slavery as much as his father. But he lived in a slave state, had married into the slave-owning southern gentry, and had become a slave owner by inheritance when John Brown deeded him the farm on the Buffaloe. He did not find the position oppressive to his reformer’s conscience and was educating his own slaves for eventual emancipation. Making his usual appeal to Biblical precept, he thought it incontestable that the New Testament recognized the relation of master and slave to the extent of specifically

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“we court discussion” prescribing their respective duties. The Apostles did not condone but they accepted the political institution of slavery as it existed in their day, and he saw no inconsistency in following their example until this anachronism could be intelligently and justly removed from the statute books of the American republic. As for Thomas, after settling his impressionable younger children again on free soil, he would have no hesitancy in returning to teach in slave territory. So he brought his protesting family back to Washington County, to a farm in Brush Run valley about two miles from the village of West Middletown (so called because it lay on the main road halfway between Washington and Wellsburg) and some seven miles from Alexander’s farm. There at last, in western Pennsylvania, where they had first settled in America, they were to make their permanent home. Thomas resumed pastoral care of the Brush Run congregation and began to assist in running Buffaloe Seminary. Both father and son rejoiced that they were again working and teaching together. But when they surveyed the cause of the religious reformation which they had so hopefully begun ten years before, they saw little to encourage them. Particularly discouraging was the fact that, as Alexander wrote, “literally no coadjutors or counselors [sic]” had come forward to share the leadership. During the past two years that Thomas spent in Kentucky the entire work fell to Alexander, and after the opening of the Buffaloe Seminary, he naturally “itinerated less than before.” In the main, he confined his attention to “three or four little communities”— one in Ohio, one in Virginia, and two in Pennsylvania. Once or twice a year he “made an excursion amongst the Regular Baptists.” So strong was the opposition that he went “with little hope of being useful to the Redstone Association.” Ten years after publication of the “Declaration and Address,” its advocates could count only four small reform churches, having a total membership of not more than one hundred and fifty persons. Until the year 1820, a Baptist historian accurately observed, Alexander

“we court discussion” Campbell had pursued his career “without making much noise in the world.”

w Alexander himself was quite willing to admit that so far he had labored “with but little success.” Then in the fall of 1819 the Rev. John Walker, a seceder Presbyterian minister of Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, challenged the Baptists to a debate on the subject of baptism. An Ohio Baptist, the Rev. John Birch, immediately wrote to Virginia asking Alexander to take up the gauntlet. However suspect on other points of doctrine, the young reformer was thought to be sound on baptism at least, and there was none to deny that he was a forceful and brilliant advocate. But he refused the challenge. Such a method of maintaining truth he considered “rather carnal than spiritual, and better calculated to excite bad passions than to allay them.” Though importuned again, he continued in his refusal for a full six months. Finally, Birch closed a third appeal with the despairing and scriptural cry, “Come, brother; come over into Macedonia and help us.” Alexander capitulated. An unwillingness “to appear . . . afraid . . . to defend the cause of truth,” he explained, “overcame my natural aversion to controversy.” Actually, his “aversion” was not so “natural” as he believed. In the “Declaration and Address,” Thomas Campbell, though offering to discuss its proposals in writing, had bluntly stated, “verbal controversy we absolutely refuse,” and he denounced such controversy as “that most unhappy of all practices.” In truth, Thomas would have made a poor debater. He had a certain fondness for discussion and even some “genius for dialectics.” Yet he was too cautious, forbearing, apologetic, and “oversensitive” of the feelings of others to sustain himself in the rough and tumble of public debate. At the same time, when crossed in an affray of sharp word and argument, he was also likely to appear “high spirited” and “a little sensitive” of his own feelings. Alexander, on the other

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“we court discussion” hand, as he was soon to demonstrate, possessed the qualities most essential and effective on the debating platform - the ability to thrust and parry with incisive logic, telling wit, and imperturbable good humor. And having, at age twenty-two, ventured a sermon in reply to a whole array of reverend doctors of the Pittsburgh Synod, he would not now, at near thirty-two, hesitate to meet a challenger in single combat. Father and son were equally stubborn in defense of the rights of conscience and equally eager to see their cause prevail; but had they lived in the first centuries of the Church when Christian martyrs were sentenced to the arena to amuse the Roman populace, Thomas would have lifted up his eyes in prayer and meekly bared his breast to the lion; Alexander would have treated the spectators to a rousing gladiatorial combat. Therefore, in denouncing the “carnal” effect of “verbal controversy,” Alexander had spoken for the last time in the voice of Thomas. He spoke in his own voice at the beginning of the Walker debate as he said to the audience: . . . Did not the great apostle Paul, thus publicly dispute with the Jews and Greeks? . . . . The Messiah himself, publicly disputed with the Pharisees and the Sadducees . . . And by public disputation did Martin Luther . . . wage war with the . . . see of Rome . . . . Heaven has stamped its probatum est, upon this method of mainta i ning truth. The debate opened on June 19, 1820, at Mount Pleasant, a village located about twenty-three miles form Alexander’s farm, in a fertile part of the Ohio valley chiefly settled by industrious Quakers. Whatever their personal attitude toward religious polemics the audience abounded with these Quakers, Alexander reported, along with “a few Baptists, [and] many Pedobaptists of all parties.” Rev. John Walker, as the challenger, opened the discussion, and in his first sentence stated the argument on which

“we court discussion” he would rest virtually his whole case for infant baptism: “I maintain that Baptism came in the room of Circumcision . . . . That Jews and Christians are the same body politic.” Campbell of course, made immediate appeal to his covenant theology, with its sharp distinction between the Jewish and Christian dispensations, to demonstrate that Walker’s search for analogy from Jewish circumcision to Christian baptism was a fallacious method of reasoning. Thereafter it was apparent that the two debaters were basing their positions, philosophically as well as theologically, upon two radically opposed schools of thought. Walker reasoned, like a medieval metaphysician, from a scholastic concept of “substance,” from universals, from some supposed everlasting covenant as unchangeable as a Platonic archetypal idea or a Calvinistic divine decree. Campbell, a Lockian logician, used the empirical approach: knowledge is gained by concrete and specific observation of particulars, of the “qualities” of things, not by speculation upon their “substance,” which is inscrutable and inaccessible to observation. To learn the scriptural truth about baptism, he asserted, search the New Testament for its concrete and specific statements about baptism, instead of arguing from its supposed archetype in some supposed eternal, changeless covenant. To sustain his position, he brought several books, including some epistles of the apostolic fathers which he assumed with some pride that neither his “opponent nor many in this western country, ever saw . . . as they are now very rare, even in Europe.” Both annoyed and bewildered by the display of learning, Walker commented that “Mr. C. has brought a whole ‘bundle of Greek’ with him . . . but I will stick to my Bible.” Alexander replied that the Bible to which Walker was “sticking” appeared to be the Old Testament; and Walker warned the audience that they had to deal with an antinomian heretic. By his line of reasoning Alexander was proving himself a good Lockian and an advanced exegete of

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“we court discussion” the covenant school. But they were scarcely qualities to recommend him to the orthodox Calvinists of his audience. Most obviously perturbed was Walker’s moderator, the Rev. Samuel Findley of West Middletown, Pennsylvania. Findley and Alexander were old acquaintances and old antagonists. They had met some two years before at the home of a mutual friend, a parishioner of Findley’s and a neighbor of Campbell’s, and become engaged in a religious discussion that ended in a sharp exchange of notes through the pages of the Washington Reporter. When the Walker debate opened, they were engaged in a second controversy through the Reporter, and one of such serious import to Findley that he had come to Mount Pleasant convinced that the reformer from the Buffaloe was not just a mildly dangerous heretic but that he was an outright “child of Satan,” an enemy to God and all religious society. It was little wonder that by the second day of debate Findley’s restraint as moderator was at an end. He suddenly announced, to the amazement of Alexander and the audience alike, that he and Walker wished to conclude the debate with the afternoon, and at the close, he himself started to harangue the audience. When the second moderator, a Judge Martin, charged that his action was contrary to the rules of debate, Findley abruptly dismissed the crowd and strode out before Thomas Campbell could deliver the closing prayer. Such conduct of the affair was, at least, poor strategy. It left even the Presbyterians with the feeling that Walker had not sustained their cause very well. The Baptists in turn were quick to trumpet a great victory, though some thought the victory dearly bought when it was won by appeal to the same heresy that had distinguished the “Sermon on the Law.” As for Alexander, his last doubt was removed about this method of getting before the public both his own views and the principles of the “Declaration and Address.” Ten years earlier their rejection by presbytery and synod had caused him to “despair of reformation.” Now, as he “discovered the effects” of the Walker

“we court discussion” debate, he “began to hope that something might be done to rouse this generation from its supineness and spiritual lethargy.” By the second day of debate he had already mapped a definite campaign. At the morning session he announced that it was “more than probable” that he would publish the debate; and in his closing remarks of the afternoon he announced that, having “accepted the invitation or challenge of the Seceders,” he wished “to return the compliment with the utmost ceremoniousness” and declare himself “disposed to meet any Pedobaptist minister of any denomination, of good standing . . . in a debate . . . either vica voce, or with the pen.” The challenge, moreover, showed a sound instinct for the temper of the times. America was just entering on her great era of debate. In the West especially, during the next thirty years, as frontier villages gave way to towns and towns grew into cities, and the camp-meeting gradually declined as a social institution, the debating platform was to assume a major role in the “higher life” of its citizens. It offered both instruction and entertainment, and the measure of a man was likely to be taken by his ability to maintain his position, religious or political, against every assault or argument of a skillful opponent. It would serve Alexander Campbell well to be one of the early champions in the field. Immediately on returning home from Mount Pleasant, he began preparations to publish the debate from notes taken during the discussion by a disinterested clerk and by himself and Thomas. Due to the unexpected brevity of the debate, he added a lengthy appendix, and in order, as he wrote Walker, “to do you and the subject all the justice in my power,” he suggested that his opponent supply a like appendix to buttress his own position. After waiting eight weeks in vain for a reply from Walker, he sent the book to press. It was printed in Steubenville, Ohio, by the same firm that had printed the “Sermon on the Law.” As one who had ambitions to be a great writer, he had an apology to offer on the publication of his first book: because of the “duties of [his] exten-

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“we court discussion” sive Seminary,” the book appeared without revision, he explained “in the plain garb of my first thoughts.” He was evidently more than satisfied with his reception in the Quaker village where the debate had been held, for he dedicated the book: “To the Citizens of Mount-Pleasant, Distinguished for the Urbanity of their Manners, their Civic Virtues, and their Attachment to the Principles of Civil and Religious Liberty.”

w His own attachment to the principles of civil and religious liberty was much on Alexander’s mind as he prepared his book for press. Even before he left for the Ohio debate, he was already embroiled with Pennsylvania Presbyterians in a controversy on the subject, which had caused him to begin a third venture into the field of social satire through the pages of the Washington Reporter. Once he had appeared there as the champion of good manners; again as the champion of proper education; now he appeared in a role even nearer his heart, as the champion of religious and political liberty. This time his satirical essays were to run almost two years. The origin of the controversy extended back some five years. On April 4, 1815, a group of citizens of “the borough of Washington” organized the Washington Moral Society dedicated to “the suppression of vice and immorality” and pledging every member to become an informer “against any one known to be guilty of profane swearing, Sabbath-breaking, intoxication, unlawful gaming, keeping a disorderly public house, or any other active immorality punished by the Commonwealth.” Its meetings were held in the Presbyterian church. Other local “moral societies” were quickly formed in towns throughout Washington County. Since the Presbyterians were the predominate group, their moral societies soon virtually established rule over the entire civil population of the county. They succeeded in having local laws passed to prohibit any act judged immoral under their strict Puritan-

“we court discussion” Presbyterian code. They set up a system whereby the informer received half the fine imposed by the civil magistrate; and their members themselves began to make arrests whether or not they had legal authority. Stories of these activities became the common talk of the surrounding countryside. On one occasion, a teamster returning from Pittsburgh entered the borough of Canonsburg on a Sunday morning and was immediately informed that he could not travel on the “Sabbath.” After putting up at a hotel over Sunday, he started home again on Monday morning but was stopped by the local constable who demanded a fine because he had traveled on the Sabbath. He refused to pay, and the constable, discovering that he had forgotten to bring a writ of arrest, returned to town for the papers. As soon as the officer was out of sight, the teamster asked a friend to drive his wagon and then disappeared. The returning constable, infuriated, demanded the fine anyway, and a crowd gathered to watch the altercation. Two of the bystanders decided to try a prank. One would bet the constable ten dollars that he could not collect the fine. Betting also being against the law, if the officer fell into the trap the second prankster would inform on them both, collect the informer’s customary split of the fine and turn the money over to his friend. The scheme worked; and the crestfallen constable dropped the case against the teamster on the bystanders’ promise not to inform on him and then stood the whole crowd to a round of drinks at a nearby tavern. On another occasion, a member of the West Middletown Moral Society, while returning from church, noticed a bucket that his teamster had carelessly left at Wilson’s Tavern, and he retrieved the bucket to take home with him. On the way, a friend reminded him that he was breaking the law by carrying a burden on the Sabbath. After some painful reflection, the canny offender decided that he could redeem his reputation for piety by informing on himself as well as save the informer’s half of the fine. But the magistrate saw the situation in a different light. Reminding the

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“we court discussion” culprit that the money was used to support the ministry, he made him pay the whole fine. At other times, the results were far from ludicrous. On an election day in Taylor town, an old Revolutionary soldier was arrested by the local moral society and fined for drinking. Enraged at what he considered an infringement of those liberties for which he had followed Washington to battle, he began to swear roundly and at length. His moral custodians coolly kept account and added another fine for every oath. In the end, the old soldier had to pay to his accusers the entire store of corn on which his family was dependent for their living during the winter. From his haven across the Virginia boundary, Alexander Campbell watched the society activities with growing alarm. He saw in them a clear resurgence to the harsh spirit of old Puritan theocracy, postulating a government of the elect especially called to rule the unregenerate. And he saw the spirit that in 1647 fastened the Cambridge Platform upon the Massachusetts Bay Colony and so wrote the grim prelude to Baptist whippings and Quaker baitings and the whole dark drama of militant intolerance that played itself out in the witch-mania of Salem. On its best side, he was quick to acknowledge, the Puritan attempt to set up in the New World a Herbraic theocracy modeled on the law of Moses and on Calvin’s Institutes had fostered a high ideal of moral stewardship and enlisted good and noble persons into its services—John Cotton, John Eliot, and John Winthrop. Yet the theory of political stewardship by “the best and wisest” never had a fairer trial than in Massachusetts Bay, and its failure was complete. In the end, the Hebraic church-state was to reap a crabbed and scanty harvest, with the creative vigor of its ministry steadily declining until the ground was prepared for Cotton Mather, whose career always appeared to Alexander as the classic and tragic example of the havoc inevitably sown by the forces of bigotry, persecution, and absolutism. American democracy owed nothing to New England’s godly magistrates.

“we court discussion” But it owed a great deal to those who stood against them: to Thomas Hooker, sponsoring in Connecticut a plan of popular government worthy to be entitled “the first written constitution of modern democracy”; to Roger Williams, establishing in Rhode Island such a democracy as caused him to rejoice, “We have not felt the chains of Presbyterian tyrants, nor . . . been consumed with the overzealous fire of the (so-called) godly Christian magistrates”; and, above all, to William Penn, building a society in Pennsylvania where Quaker and Lutheran, Baptist and Anglican, dwelt together in peace if not in fellowship. Here were New Testament persons, not Old, like the saints of Massachusetts Bay, but persons who founded commonwealths upon the law of a God of love, not a God of wrath. Here were persons in Alexander’s opinion, to whose “conscientiousness and benevolence” could be traced “the happiness and prosperity” of whole communities, whose names would “deserve to be remembered while men have rights and human nature has a friend.” He longed to join their ranks as he watched the moral societies of Pennsylvania attempting to turn back tides of history to the days of the Cambridge Platform and realized that it was no trifling threat to the principles of democracy and of civil and religious liberty that was being offered by their godly advocates. Furthermore, he had no fear of the wrath of the Presbyterian clergy. Indeed, he had no desire to be called a “good” man by militant saints who were so certain of their own godliness that they must deny “soulfreedom” to all deemed less godly and who believed that by intolerance they were whipping the devil and saving the unregenerate, the rebellious, and the nonconforming from the sinful consequences of their own actions. Because he was a citizen of Virginia, Alexander believed he should not meddle with affairs in Pennsylvania. Then, in 1819 Thomas Campbell returned his family from Kentucky to the neighborhood of West Middletown and thus came under the jurisdiction of the moral societies, a move that seemed as if he had fled one tyranny to encounter another.

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“we court discussion” Alexander felt that he need contain his alarm and protest no longer. So in the W ashington Reporter of April 17, 1820, there appeared a letter to the editor over the signature “Candidus.” To those versed in their American history the name itself would arouse expectation. This was the pseudonym that the master publicist of the Revolution, Samuel Adams, had chosen when in 1771 he wrote a brilliant series of articles in which, drawing heavily from Locke’s “Second Treatise on Government” to argue the case for natural rights, he sought to arouse a sluggish public opinion so that sovereignty might be wrested from a privileged minority and made to serve the democratic majority. As he urged the people of the colonies toward independence, Sam Adams had employed every device of easy pleasantry, sharp ridicule, biting irony, and dispassionate argument. The same devices were to serve another “Candidus” a half-century later when he sought to arouse the people of western Pennsylvania to battle another threat to independence. Candidus began with a specific attack on the Moral Society of West Middletown, one of the most active of the local societies, under the zealous tutelage of the Rev. Samuel Findley. The society had recently published in the Reporter a lengthy address on the subject of public morals, which had listed ballplaying among the sins “of first magnitude” and declared that “every man who does not become a spy & informer on the conduct of his neighbor is guilty of moral perjury.” Candidus opened with a mock lament for West Middletown, where “the state of society . . . is [so] awfully corrupt . . . that it has become necessary to re-establish the . . . inquisitorial club . . . [to] keep the place from putrefaction.” With a blunt warning that those who “uninvited, place themselves in the censor’s chair, to deal rash judgment . . . on every one they suppose able to pay for their transgressions, . . . cannot expect more leniency than they show,” he then proceeded to point out that some Society members were themselves known to “gamble a

“we court discussion” bit now and then—that is play a game of backgammon for a few gills of whiskey,” or enjoy a cheap dinner won at a turkey shoot. Finally, he concluded in serious vein, I cordially disapprove of everything connected with the moral society plan, believing them to be founded on a mistaken view of the subject and to be subversive of the principles of true religion and civil liberty. A committee appointed by the West Middletown society to frame their reply immediately charged, as was to be expected, that Candidus was “a friend to immorality.” After the passing comment that the charge “affects me, as the barking of a cur affects a gallant horse, it will cause me to quicken my pace,” Candidus offered the countercharge that “these ‘moral associations’ are [themselves] a moral evil,” and he proposed to demonstrate his assertion by a threefold argument: that they “are anti-evangelical, anti-constitutional, and anti-rational.” To sustain his first thesis, that the societies were antievangelical, opposed to the spirit and teaching of the New Testament, he turned, of course, to his covenant theology. Christians do not live under a Hebraic theocracy, he argued, and laws respecting observance of the Jewish Sabbath are not valid under the Christian dispensation. Even more important, since Christ’s kingdom is of the spirit not the world and His dominion exercised through love not law, through power of conscience, not through power of the magistrate, “Christians are not at liberty to interfere with men of the world in anything pertaining to God and conscience;” “to compel by civil law, any man who is not a Christian to pay any [special] regard to the Lord’s day . . . is without authority in the Christian religion” and is “contrary to the Gospel,” for it “is commanding duty to be performed without faith in God.” Therefore, wrote Candidus, “the Bible will justify” the societies “equally in burning a man, or stoning him to death, as it will in exacting money off him, for his sins.” Alexander ridiculed

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“we court discussion” a system which “values the profanation of the ‘Sabbath’ at four dollars” but “the profanation of the Divine name at less than one dollar,” concluding “He that pockets the four dollars is as great a sinner as he who breaks the Sabbath.” So far Campbell had not acknowledged authorship of the satires. In fact, to conceal his identity, he had described himself in the second essay as a farmer, “a plain, blunt man” professing “to have common sense” and explaining that his reading was “not very extensive.” But the public was not fooled. Certainly, the Rev. Mr. Findley of West Middletown was not. It was obvious that Candidus and the author of the “Sermon on the Law” reasoned from the same heresy, and both were, to his mind, possessed of the same unparalleled audacity. He, therefore, wrote a letter to the Reporter charging Campbell with the authorship and impugning his character in such terms that Campbell replied over his own signature demanding proof of the allegations. Since the Campbell-Walker debate occurred at this juncture, it was no wonder that Findley arrived at Mount Pleasant to serve as moderator in no frame of mind to act moderately in anything concerning Walker’s opponent. His frame of mind was not improved when during the course of debate Campbell commented that “it is in no way strange that those who embrace the whole system of John Calvin should persecute even unto death, as he himself set them so striking an example, in persecuting Servetus even unto death,” and then expressed his thankfulness that “in consequence of the pleadings of the celebrated Milton, Locke, and others . . . the civil sword has ceased to operate upon the skeptic and the unregenerate.” To prevent that sword from being unsheathed again in western Pennsylvania, Candidus returned to the pages of the Reporter within a few weeks after the Mount Pleasant debate. He turned to his second important contention, that the moral society activities were “anti-constitutional. O Pennsylvania . . . where is the spirit of thy great Wm. Penn!!!” he cried, as he pointed out that since many citizens of the commonwealth, such as Jews, Seventh-Day

“we court discussion” Baptists, and Friends, could not conscientiously observe the first day of the week as the Sabbath, the moral societies, in compelling that observance by civil law, were violating both the constitution of Pennsylvania and that of the United States which declared that “no man can of right be compelled . . . to maintain any ministry against his consent; that no human authority can in any case whatever . . . interfere with rights of conscience.” Candidus was well aware that a campaign against the little “inquisitorial clubs” of Washington County might not seem a very heroic struggle in comparison with the titanic forces with which Penn and Hooker and Williams had to contend, yet he knew that it was a small skirmish in the same war. Hence, he sought to awaken the people to the fact that “the encroachments . . . made upon the liberties of any people” were nearly always “in the first instance trifling” and attempted under “specious pretexts” of serving “the interests of religion or the public good.” He warned them “so far this infringement of the excellent constitution of Pennsylvania has been analogous to the first inroads made upon the liberties of those once renowned nations that are now the slaves of kings and priests.” John Cotton, Eliot, or Winthrop might praise the virtues of a church-state, but Candidus—viewing “the church of Christ and the state as two distinct communities” and holding that “officers of the church have no right . . . to supersede civil officers”—bluntly stated his conviction that “a man as holy and as zealous as the Apostle Paul” had “no more right” than a Thomas Paine “to interfere with the management” of the civil government. Realizing full well the horror that the name Tom Paine invoked for the pious, Alexander knew that he could have chosen no better example to prove that when he spoke for “liberty of conscience” he meant liberty for all alike—liberty, as he had said in the Walker debate, even for “the skeptic and the unregenerate,” the “soul-freedom” which Roger Williams had proclaimed in “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution” for “the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences.”

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“we court discussion” Turning to his third and last argument, to prove the moral societies “anti-rational,” Candidus attacked their basic principle that fining men for their vices will make them moral. First, he shot a bolt of heavy sarcasm: When they pay dear for their sins, they will, from principles of avarice, become morally correct . . . And what becomes of the fines? Oh! they are given to [educate] . . . young men for the ministry. Go on, therefore, in your misdeeds, ye profane, for the more you sin the more preachers we shall have. Then in high seriousness he argued the point that such attempts to legislate morality or religious observance tend inevitably to “substitute a formal and mocked obedience for an honest, sincere, and devout regard to the institutions of Christianity” and may even actively promote immorality since a law restraining a man from industrious employment on the Sabbath sometimes “only facilitates the commission of crime.” Indeed, he argued—as Locke and Roger Williams had argued before him—that persecution itself creates hypocrisy. No law commanding Christian observance of the Sabbath was ever passed until the reign of the emperor Constantine, and, Candidus concluded, it was an “incontrovertible” fact “that formality and hypocrisy began from that day to stalk abroad with shameless aspect.” Once Candidus opened the attack, he found that he did not fight alone. He was supported in several letters which appeared in the Reporter over the signature V. A. Flint, who assured him, that “you may rely upon my friendship and upon my assistance in so good a cause,” and he himself quoted from a pungent article written for a religious journal by his good friend, Dr. Joseph Doddridge: “Those little detestable inquisitions,” fumed the Reverend Doctor,

“we court discussion” . . . what reformations have they effected? Under pretense of a zeal . . . for the suppression of vice . . . the enlisted spy and informer, looking through the loop holes of poverty and obscurity, like the artful and murderous spider has seized its prey, [and by] fines imposed on the . . . indiscretions of the husband and father have rendered poverty itself more poor. Far outweighing this support, the great majority of the letters stirred up by the controversy through the Reporter were written not to praise but to damn the assailant of the moral societies. He was variously denounced as “the anti-Christ,” as “a son of mischief, a child of Satan, an enemy to all righteousness, morality, and religion.” One correspondent warned, “Tekel is written upon you”; and another even contended that the moral societies should carry out God’s commandment to put “blasphemers and idolaters” to death. Moreover, the Rev. Samuel Findley reentered the lists. He accused Candidus of making his “atheistical attack” on the West Middletown moral society in order to aim at him and asserted an earlier conviction that only “a Campbellite or a Devil might hold such a faith” (here giving currency to an epithet that was to plague Campbell and his friends for many decades). Campbell retorted with an accusation of slander and threatened a civil suit. Fortunately, the entire controversy was not to be conducted on such a level. At the outset, Candidus had expressed the hope that “a gentleman” would appear “to debate the subject . . . with argument, moderation and candour [sic]”; and in the issue of February 12, 1821, the Presbyterian clergy produced a worthy champion signing himself “Timothy,” who declared that he was entering the ring because those formerly opposing Candidus had “exhibited a perfect picture of intellectual imbecility.” Timothy proved to be the Rev. Andrew Wylie, D.D., president of Washington College, which the young Bonus Homo had once

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“we court discussion” lampooned. Despite their sharp differences, he and Alexander were to become warm friends and throughout the rest of their lives kept up a personal correspondence. Years after their Reporter encounter when Wylie emigrated farther west, where by that time Campbell had many followers, he carried letters of introduction from Campbell commending his talents and scholarship, and he soon afterwards became president of the University of Indiana. Eventually, he became a strong advocate for Christian union and left the Presbyterian for the Episcopal Church—an outcome, no doubt the Rev. Samuel Findley would have said, of his association with “atheistical Campbellites.” In any event, Timothy and Candidus were to continue their debate through the Reporter for a full year. The argument was not without its flashes of heat, since the material was inflammable. Alexander liked to deliver keen, hard thrusts too well not to admire an antagonist who could do the same while remembering a gentleman’s obligation to good manners and fair dealing. He always rejoiced to find an opponent who, like himself, loved a sharp debate as the best means of bringing to light the fine points in an argument. The discussion came to an end early in 1822. The last attack against Candidus, which appeared on January 28, was also the most ambitious and the most vitriolic, written in the spirit of Findley, not of Timothy. It occupied a full page in the Reporter, and it purported to be an address from “Pluto” to “My Highly Esteemed Brother Candidus.” The text contained lengthy extracts from “Beelzebub’s docket” detailing for Candidus the victories “you have gained over our enemies” by “sound satanical reasoning,” and among them were listed the victory over Walker, “a moral-law man at Mt. Pleasant,” and “your great victory over the West Middletown moral association of moral law men.” With fulsome praise for the “beloved missionary” of “us devils,” Pluto concluded: “All our princes salute you . . . I, Sir, acknowledge your preeminence over me in almost all your achievements in our cause.” Candidus had the last word on February 25. Disdaining a

“we court discussion” reply to “Pluto,” he complimented the ingenuity of Timothy and apologized for any undue severity of which he might have been guilty during the heat of controversy. Alexander was well satisfied with his two years’ labor as Candidus. The debate had crystallized the determination of those opposed to the moral societies, and an opportunity soon arose to test the question by law. A citizen of Wellsburg, one Isaac Jones, was detained by business at the Washington court until late on a Saturday evening; as his wife was in “delicate health,” he started out for home early the next morning. Near West Middletown he was stopped by five men who told him that he was breaking the law by traveling on the Sabbath and forced him to accompany them back to Washington. When they rode up to the Washington hotel, several attorneys in recent attendance on the court were standing on the steps—James Ross, who had won a reputation for “great eminence” at the Pittsburgh bar, Philip Doddridge of Wellsburg, a brother of the Episcopal minister, and Judge Baird of Washington, a friend of Jones. Their surprise at seeing Jones return changed to indignation as they learned the reason. The five self-appointed accusers became alarmed and started to turn away. But Ross demanded their names, and a day or two later a suit was brought against them for unlawful arrest. The case, after many delays, was finally transferred to the Pittsburgh courts, where the defendants were convicted and ordered to pay such damages and court costs that they were left virtually impoverished. With the legality of their operations thus settled in court, the moral societies soon disappeared altogether, and “the principles of civil and religious liberty”—as defined by William Penn and reaffirmed by Candidus—were once more secured in western Pennsylvania.

w Meanwhile, month by month, the Campbell-Walker debate had been arousing an ever-widening circle of interest. Campbell’s

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“we court discussion” first edition of a thousand copies was quickly sold out, and he prepared a new appendix for a second edition of three thousand copies, which was published in 1822 by a firm in Pittsburgh. As a result, he began to receive invitations “requesting visits and discourses,” and a few “coadjutors or counselors” were at last appearing. One summer day in 1821, while resting on his portico after dinner, he saw “two gentlemen in the costume of clergymen” approaching the house. The elder introduced himself as Adamson Bentley and the other as Sidney Rigdon—both of Warren, Ohio, the first seat of justice for the Western Reserve, the great stretch of territory in northeast Ohio once known as “the Western Reserve of Connecticut” from the days when the seaboard states were claiming all lands extending westward to that mythical “South Sea,” the Pacific Ocean. They were visitors of considerable consequence, for Bentley was the acknowledged leader of the Baptists of the Western Reserve and Rigdon their “great orator.” Bentley was a tall, fair, graceful, and dignified man, with a blandly courteous and cultivated manner and a commanding presence. Though he had been brought as a child to the Reserve while it was still a primitive wilderness, he had received an education well above average for Baptist clergymen of the region, including the advantages of a period spent with the celebrated author and preacher, Dr. William Stoughton of Philadelphia. Eager to elevate the ministerial standards among his Baptist brethren, he established the practice of annual ministers’ meetings for mutual criticism and study and had encouraged the formal organization of the churches on the Reserve into the Mahoning Baptist Association in August 1820. Quite in contrast to Bentley, who was also his brother-inlaw, Rigdon was of medium height, rotund, pompous, humorless, and excitable; but. if he was unstable and given to alternate fits of melancholy and enthusiasm, he possessed a copious eloquence and lively fancy that had made him one of the most renowned and popular orators in northern Ohio. In the spring of 1821 a copy of

“we court discussion” the Campbell-Walker debate fell into Bentley’s hands. Deciding that Campbell was able to do more for the Baptists than any man in the West, he laid plans for a visit to the Buffaloe. Once he and Rigdon were presented to their host’s family and refreshments served, Bentley came quickly to the point. He had read the debate “with considerable interest” and he wanted to inquire about “sundry matters” it set forth. Alexander replied that he would be delighted, as soon as the afternoon duties of his seminary were discharged. They met at teatime and talked until far into the morning. They “went back to Adam, and forward to the final judgment,” while “the dispensations, or covenants . . . passed and repassed” before them. Bentley was an avowed Calvinist but he had often watched his children play “in harmless innocence” about him and grieved that he could not know which of them were to be among God’s elect and which “forever lost”; now he was beginning to perceive a gospel that would admit all to “eternal happiness.” Rigdon excitedly announced that “if he had, within the past year, taught . . . one error from the pulpit he had a thousand.” Gratifying as these reactions were, Alexander, with canny Scots caution, thought it “expedient to caution them not to begin to pull down anything they had builded until they had reviewed, again and again, what they had heard.” The next day his guests “went on their way rejoicing,” with his promise to visit them soon on the Western Reserve. He redeemed the promise in October by attending their annual “mi nisters’ meeting,” at Warren, Ohio. Bentley and Rigdon had prepared the ground well. He received “a full and candid hearing,” even when he attacked the dogma of election in this stronghold of Calvinistic Baptists, and he left with the promise to return for their next annual meeting. Since his father had come to help with Buffaloe Seminary, he was able to preach abroad more than he had done for several years. The Lord’s Day found him rather often at the large Regular Baptist church in Pittsburgh, with the result that almost the entire church of over

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“we court discussion” one hundred members became “theoretically reformers,” and when in 1822 the congregation lost their regular pastor, he persuaded them to call Sidney Rigdon and urged Rigdon to accept the call. As soon as possible after Rigdon’s arrival, he was “at all pains” to have his Ohio friend become acquainted with a new Pittsburgh friend whom he had met the previous winter, a young man named Walter Scott. In this young man Alexander had at last found the “coadjutor” he had been seeking. Indeed, for many years to come Scott would form a triumvirate with the two Campbells for broadcasting their seeds of “reformation.” He had sailed into the port of New York form his native Scotland in 1818 at age twenty-two, one of ten children of John Scott and Mary Innes of Moffat, Dumfriesshire. His father was a music teacher of “some celebrity” and a man of “considerable culture” who, despite a large family and moderate means, had managed to send Walter to the University of Edinburgh. The lad entered the college of arts in 1810, the year The Lady of the Lake was published. Whenever he was asked the inevitable question, he always replied that, yes, he and the famous Walter Scott were related, for they both were members of the Scott Clan, the poet belonging to the House of Hardin and his family to the House of Thirlestane—the house descended from a John Scott of the sixteenth century to whom James V, in reward for his loyalty, had granted a crest bearing sheaf of spears and the motto, “Ready, aye ready.” Like his celebrated contemporary, young Walter of the House of Thirlestane was enthralled by Scotland’s Border minstrelsy, and he attracted the attention of one of the city’s best known musicians, a man who had led the military band which accompanied Sir Ralph Abercrombie’s expedition to Egypt. The musician offered to give him lessons on the flute, and Walter proved so apt a pupil that in the opinion of some he surpassed his master to become the most skillful flutist in all Edinburgh. Walter also possessed a clear, rich voice and a heart so compassionate that he

“we court discussion” could never pass by a call for his sympathy or aid. His family’s favorite story of his student days concerned an early New Year’s morning when he was about sixteen. He and his elder brother James joined the holiday celebration in the streets, but they soon became separated in the crowd. After a time James was amazed to discover, near the Edinburgh bridge, a large crowd gathered around a street singer and to recognize the high, sweet voice of his usually bashful young brother raised in a favorite old Scots air. Then he saw, beside Walter, a blind beggar whom the New Year’s celebrants had heedlessly passed by until they stopped to hear a boy’s songs and lingered to fill the beggar’s hat with pennies enough to keep him from want for many a coming day. Not long after his graduation from the University of Edinburgh, Walter left Scotland for the New World. His mother’s brother, George Innes, who had been appointed to the United States Customs Service under Madison and retained his post under President James Monroe, invited him. His uncle secured him a position as Latin tutor in a classical academy on Long Island. But in less than a year, though he liked to teach, he heard the call of the great empire beyond the Alleghenies and set out for the West with a young traveling companion. Reaching Pittsburgh in May 1819, he decided to remain in this bustling “Gateway of the West,” especially since he had met a fellow countryman, George Forrester, a lay preacher and a schoolmaster, who offered him a job teaching in his academy. He discovered that his new associate, some fourteen years his senior, was a devout and thoughtful man, a disciple of the Haldanians and the Sandemanians. Walter himself had been reared in the Church of Scotland and, though he had di s a ppointed his parents by not entering the Presbyterian ministry, he had never questioned his heritage. But he learned that religious investigation was a subject that could excite and engage his interest. Before long, he was immersed by Forrester and joined his little group of emigrants that met in the courthouse and was locally

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“we court discussion” known as “Kissing Baptists” from their observance of the primitive church salutation, “the kiss of peace.” By spring, Forrester decided to devote his own time entirely to his congregation and leave his academy in the hands of his new assistant. Then, a few months later, in July 1820, tragedy ended all his labors; Forrester drowned while bathing in the Allegheny River. To young Scott now fell the care of his friend’s family, his academy, and his church. More and more he wanted to be free of everything that di stracted him from the religious questions filling his mind. In the spring of 1821 a pamphlet on baptism came into Scott’s hands, written by a member of a small congregation of Scots Baptists in New York. It raised interesting new religious questions, and Walter abruptly closed the academy and set out again for New York and the home of his Uncle George. He stayed only three months, unable to find what he was seeking. Learning that other Haldanean and Sandemanian churches had been established along the seaboard (Sandeman himself spent his last years in America, where he died in 1771 at Danbury, Connecticut), he continued his quest—to Paterson, New Jersey, then Baltimore, and finally to Washington. Everywhere the churches seemed to him stagnant and “so sunken in the mire of Calvinism, that they refused to reform.” He climbed up to the “lofty dome” of the capitol and, he recorded, “sat myself down, filled with sorrow at the miserable desolation of the Church of God.” A more personal desolation was also burdening his heart, this summer of 1821. On June 17, his father died suddenly while on a visit to Annan, and his mother was so stricken with grief at the news that she died on the very next day. But some consolation was at hand. While in New York, he had received a letter from Nathaniel Richardson, the father of one of his pupils at the Pittsburgh academy, who wrote that his son Robert missed him sorely and that he, with several gentlemen of the city, were ready to pay an excellent salary if he would return as private tutor to their children. Walter walked the two hundred miles from Washington, arriving dusty and travel-worn

“we court discussion” to occupy the apartment set aside for him in the Richardson house, which contained a schoolroom where he might teach his private charges. It was a happy arrangement. Nathaniel Richardson was a wealthy ship chandler, a native of Ireland, given both to large Irish hospitality and, on occasion, to quick Irish temper; proud of his mansion on aristocratic Fourth Street, with its fine gardens, stables, and servant quarters, and prouder still of his twelve children and his accomplished wife Julia Logan, who had also come from Ireland to grace his mansion with an Old World charm, a rich sympathy, and an unaffected love of the best in music, art, and literature. As became his station, Nathaniel Richardson was a charter member and a vestryman of Trinity Episcopal Church, and he had neither inclination nor patience for exploring any less seemly modes of worship or any strange new paths of religious thinking. He was also a patron of education, concerned to give his children and the children of Pittsburgh every advantage of a “strict European method of instruction.” This concern was causing him unwittingly to introduce his son Robert to associations which one day were to bring about a religious revolution in the boy’s thinking and a consequent upheaval in the Richardson household. It had already led to a “warm personal” friendship with the Campbells several years before Walter Scott first walked over the Alleghenies and into the deep affections of the eldest young Richardson. When Thomas Campbell had opened his Pittsburgh academy in 1815, Nathaniel Richardson was his loyal patron and Robert, age nine, among his favorite pupils. When Alexander began his journey to the East in December of that year to raise money for the Wellsburg church, he spent the first evening with his father at the Richardson mansion and received the first contribution to his building fund from Nathaniel. Richardson was happy to show this regard for two fellow countrymen from Ireland, whose manners and conversation made them welcome guests in Julia’s drawing room.

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“we court discussion” After Thomas Campbell left Pittsburgh for Kentucky in 1817, Nathaniel enrolled his eldest son in the Forrester academy. Two years later, when Walter Scott became Forrester’s assistant and Robert’s most beloved preceptor, the Richardsons—finding that the young Scotsman “seemed to combine the freshness, simplicity, and enthusiasm of a child with the accomplishments of a scholar” —made him a welcome guest. They all shared Robert’s distress when he shortly departed for the East, and Robert’s happiness when he returned, to become an “inmate” of their family and private tutor to some fifteen pupils from Pittsburgh’s first families. Before long word spread that the Richardson tutor was the finest teacher in the city, and, after the first public exhibition of his charges, there was such a general clamor for his services that he reluctantly opened an academy and immediately received more than one hundred and forty applicants. By this time, Robert Richardson was “friend and companion, as much as pupil” to Walter Scott. Separated less than ten years in age, they were joined in a happy unity of spirit and interest. Robert, as a very young lad, had taken a boy’s natural delight in the sights, sounds, and adventures of the gangling little city of his birth that was just beginning to outgrow its pioneer buckskins. The moldering ruins of Fort Pitt and Fort Duquesne inspired games of old French and English and Indian wars, and there was the constant excitement of the daily stagecoaches dashing into town, of the Conestoga wagons carrying immigrants westward to the music of the hame bells on the harness of their six-horse teams, and of the shipyards by the river with the traffic of ungainly flatboats, graceful gondola-shaped keelboats, and luxury steamers resplendent in mahogany and rosewood, from whose business his father made the wealth to provide the Richardson mansion on Fourth Street. When he first became pupil to Walter Scott, at age thirteen, Robert was already becoming his mother’s son, and she found him a willing pupil to private tutors in painting, music, and French.

“we court discussion” Like his older friend, he loved the flute, and he proved so proficient on the violin that he was given his own Stradivarius. Inspired by its beauty, he began to compose music and discovered so much enjoyment that composing, along with painting, were to remain lasting diversions. French he made a second language, which he both spoke and read fluently and with pleasure. Indeed, he began to explore a new and happy world in the spacious Richardson library, and so habitual became his reading that his parents learned that their most severe punishment for a misdemeanor was to exclude him from the library. As a result, he took easily to the rigorous training of his friend and tutor, even when Walter required him to memorize the entire four Gospels in Greek. Walter himself, meanwhile, was becoming more thoughtful and studious and more absorbed in religious contemplation. From the library of his late friend Forrester he read Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity and the works of the Haldanes, Glas, Sandemen, and other Scots reformers. Long past midnight he often pored over his Bible, and his thought began to turn constantly on one question: the Messiahship of Jesus, the belief that the Gospels were written with one purpose, to prove that Jesus is the Son of God. As he read and reread Simon Peter’s declaration to Jesus, “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God,” he found the words which in after years he was always to call the “Golden Oracle.” To keep this great idea before his pupils, he wrote in large chalk letters over the door inside his schoolroom: “Jesus is the Christ.” Without quite understanding, Robert realized that his teacher seemed in the throes of some inner spiritual revolution, and he watched him grow rather thin and pale and much of his old light spirit disappear. Then, during the winter of 1821-1822 at the home of the Richardsons, Walter Scott met Alexander Campbell. To both young men, the meeting appeared providential. It had the quality of an adventure. With growing surprise and excitement they traced the similarity or their histories and spiritual pilgrimages.

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“we court discussion” They had much the same background and training: they both delighted in the education of youth; they had read many of the same books and arrived at many of the same religious conclusions; and their immediate “mutual attachment,” in Scott’s own words, “was exalted by . . . an ardent desire in the bosom of both to reform the Christian profession, which to each of us appeared in a state of most miserable destitution.” In this new friendship Scott ended his spiritual isolation; and Campbell, as he in turn recorded, discovered a congenial “spirit, capable of forming . . . comprehensive views of things spiritual and ecclesiastical,” to cooperate with himself and his father in their “great . . . enterprise.” Robert Richardson, just age fifteen when he witnessed this meeting, seemingly had no intimation that he, too, would someday feel moved “to reform the Christian profession.” He could not know that he would bring to the “enterprise” talents and services no less significant than those of Walter Scott. Nor could he foresee his own unique relation to Alexander Campbell as his personal physician and first biographer. But he was old enough to perceive that, while his two friends were discovering their spiritual kinship, theirs was, in appearance and personality, the attraction of opposites. Campbell possessed the tall, vigorous figure and the rugged handsomeness of a Highland chieftain that seemed peculiarly fitting to the young man, who delighted in nature, found his greatest enjoyment in bold Ossianic landscapes of “cloudcapt mountains” and “swelling billow.” There were no straight lines in his long, fair, strongly marked, expressive features, even his Roman nose turning a little to the right, while a shock of unruly brown hair arched back sharply from a high, bold forehead to crown his head, and no one described the eyes that looked out from beneath his heavy brows more aptly than Scott himself: “the azure eye, edged with the fire of the bird of Jove.” Scott at twenty-five, eight years his friend’s junior, was of medium height, slender almost to spareness, delicate in build and feature, graceful in movement,

“we court discussion” his nose straight, his eyes dark, luminous, and tender in expression, his hair raven black. In methods of thinking, Campbell tended to generalize, to seek analogies and group particulars under a sweeping principle. Scott possessed an analytical mind that tended to divide a subject into component parts and consider its details. While understanding predominated in Campbell, feelings predominated in Scott. Where Campbell was resolute, fearless, constant, self-consistent, without inner tensions, and appeared lively and cheerful even when in repose and alert and communicative even when listening, Scott was excitable, variable, precipitate, and, though at times he matched his friend in mirthful anecdote and flashes of wit, in contemplative, introspective moods he often wore an abstracted and even melancholy air. The fire and daring of Scotland’s border chieftains were in his veins, with the music of her border ballads, yet he was naturally timid, diffident, yielding, and as gentle and sensitive as a child. If the elder suggested a soldier-philosopher, the younger was a minstrel-poet; they themselves seemed to perceive that, in talents and temperament, each was admirably suited to complement the other. After Scott’s return to Pittsburgh, he resumed his place in the little church of the late George Forrester. When Rigdon came to Pittsburgh as pastor of the Regular Baptist church in 1822, Campbell attempted, without much immediate success, to bring the two congregations together. Each remained “very shy” of the other and “sensitive . . . of its own peculiarities.” Yet there was satisfying evidence that the leaven of reform was working. By this time, the fame of the Walker debate had crossed the mountains to invade the eastern seaboard, and Alexander Campbell was learning that his name could sometimes be spread by his opponents quite as effectively as by his “coadjutors.” In 1821, the Presbyterian Magazine, edited by twelve divines in Philadelphia, published a “Brief Review” of the debate in a series of three “Letters to a Friend” written by the

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“we court discussion” Rev. Samuel Ralston, president of the board of trustees of Canonsburg College. This was the clergyman, a former friend of Thomas Campbell, at whose house the entire Campbell fami l y, just arrived from Scotland in 1809, had spent their last night on the road to their new home in Washington. One year later, he had been a member of the Synod of Pittsburgh that refused Thomas admission to the regular Presbyterian Church. Now, a decade later, he was even more dismayed by the career of Thomas’ son, and he believed it his duty publicly to warn the churches on both sides of the Alleghenies that a dangerous new heretic was rising in the West. At Mount Pleasant, so the “Brief Review” declared, the young heretic had shamelessly proclaimed a system, “rotten . . . to the very core,” which pours “contempt upon the church of God” and “the Old Testament dispensation of grace.” In the current Candidus essays, he was seeking to reduce “the orderly, happy, and respectable state of Pennsylvania” to the “blasphemy, anarchy, and licentiousness” of sixteenth-century Germany under the Anabaptists. When the second edition of the Walker debate was published in 1822, Campbell added an appendix in which he replied to the Ralston letters, his “Strictures” also being published in a separate pamphlet. Campbell further angered his critic by citing historic examples to prove his contention that a spirit of persecution was inherent in the Presbyterian system but foreign to that of the Quakers and Baptists. Ralston, in turn, replied to these “Strictures” in a second series of “letters,” and the entire argument was soon afterwards published by Ralston in a book of some three hundred pages. The first ambitious attack on the error of “Campbellism” had appeared, and its author was honored with the degree of Doctor of Divini t y. At last, Alexander Campbell was beginning to make some “noise in the world.”

w

“we court discussion” The immediate result was to cause changes in his plans for the future. Buffaloe Seminary was continuing to enjoy a good patronage; as he later recorded, “[the] project . . . succeeded greatly beyond all my expectations.” At the close of the seventh session, in July 1821, he was so pleased with his charges that he inserted a notice in the Reporter to thank “the students in general, for their orderly, moral and polite behavior,” and for a “remarkable attention” to studies such as he had “never witnessed, in any [other] Seminary.” There was, however, some disappointment. His scholars were not showing any great inclination to become part of the reform mi nistry of the church, and though two of his young men were shortly preaching on the Western Reserve, the majority were to exhibit the soundness of their education at Buffaloe Seminary by their proficiency as lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and politicians, three of them serving “in Congress and legislature.” Moreover, just when his reform principles met their first success, he and Margaret had suffered their first deep personal sorrow. Their fifth daughter, Amanda Corneigle, was born on February 16, 1820. Several months later, in August, she died. It was only a few weeks after the Walker debate, while Alexander was laboring to get the debate to press and resume the Candidus essays, besides carrying on the regular duties of his academy, his ministry, and his farm. Now a site on that farm had to be set aside as a family burying ground. Across the road from the mansion, there was a gently sloping hill, with the side facing the house covered with fruit trees and on the top a broad tract of cultivated tableland. Just south of the orchard, where the Buffaloe wound around the base of the steepest part of the hill, was a somewhat isolated rise, flanked on the west by a beautiful clump of oaks and maples and easily reached by a winding path through the orchard or by the wagon road to the fields on the tableland. Here Alexander and Margaret buried baby Amanda Corneigle, finding what consolation they could in the choice of this peaceful and

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“we court discussion” lovely resting place with its wide view of the Buffaloe valley and the encircling hills. Bringing a greater consolation, a year later a sixth daughter was born, on July 14, 1821. With the current Candidus essays to recall her husband’s first youthful foray in the Reporter, Margaret named the baby Clarinda. The following summer Margaret was again with child. But she was not robust, and much childbearing, the death of baby Amanda, and the constant oversight of the seminary students were proving too great a drain on her strength. Alexander was also overburdened, with the increasing calls on his ministry and the preparation of his “Strictures” on the Ralston letters for the second edition of the Walker debate added to his usual duties. At the close of the session in June 1822, he notified the public through the Reporter “that owing to his domestic concerns, his state of health, and the solicitations of some . . . patrons of the Seminary” who wished him to give their sons more personal, tutorial attention, he felt “induced to limit the number of students . . . hereafter . . . to . . . not more than 15.” Then, on November 10, Margaret gave birth to their seventh child and first son; they named him John Brown; he died on the day of his birth. A few weeks later, at the end of the December 1822, session, Buffaloe Seminary—after five years of operation—was suspended altogether. Alexander’s decision was not made entirely because of these personal considerations. The public reception of his publication of the Mount Pleasant debate had awakened him to the realization that he might do through the press what he had not been able to do merely through preaching. In response he began laying plans for publication of his own monthly magazine. Some intimation of the plan was perhaps intended when, in the appendix written for the second edition of the debate in 1822, he remarked, We ardently wish for, we court decision—”Magna est veritas et prevalebit.” Great is the truth and mighty above all

“we court discussion” things, and shall prevail. We constantly pray for its progress, and desire to be valiant for it. Truth is our riches. In later years when accused, as he often was, of following a popular course in pursuit of fame and material reward, he always felt that he had only to point to his early career in refutation. He never denied that he was ambitious. He had dreamed of literary fame; he had been tempted to “a seat in the bar” or “a good benefice in one of the honorable sects of the day.” “I once,” he frankly admitted, loved the praises of men, and thought it would be a great happiness could I so shape my course as to merit . . . the approbation of [both] men [and God] . . . I saw but little difference in many sects as respected true piety . . . For there was a John Newton in the church of King Harry and a George Campbell in that of St. Charles. Then, in exploring the Scriptures, he “lost his orthodoxy” and became “actuated,” he explained, by a most vehement desire to understand the truth. I did . . . put the world out of my sight. I cared no more for popularity than I did for the shadow which followed my body when the Sun shone. In proof of his new “contempt” for fame and “human horror,” he had refused “places of . . . conspicuous eminence in the cities of Philadelphia and New York” and had taken “his Bible and the plough and . . . [sat] down among the hills of Western Virginia, and, from the age of 21 to 31—ten of the most ambitious years of human life”—moved in this “quiet vale of retirement, aloof from all the hobbies and . . . great undertakings of the day.” Only when the world itself opened a path into his quiet Virginia valley to

259

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“we court discussion”

“we court discussion” inquire of the “truth” he was seeking did he acknowledge at last that “flattering prospects of usefulness on all sides” were beginning “to expand” before him, and so make his plans to enlarge that “usefulness” through the press. In the spring of 1823 he issued the prospectus for his magazine. For a dozen years or more he had been constantly studying, loading the arsenal of his mind with ammunition for defense of his views. Now, like a soldier with a new sword, he was anxious to test the steel of his weapon. At thirty-four, he was ready to nail up his theses and join the ranks of Luther and Calvin.

261

262

Index

Acheson, David 55, 107, 115, 170, 226 Acheson, Hanna 55, 95, 107, 158160, 162 Acheson, Thomas 55, 107, 113, 197 Ahorey congregation xv, 15, 22, 25, 32, 49-51, 53, 56, 70, 90-91, 179 Altars, Abraham 113, 131 Anderson, John 109-110 Antrim county 11, 14, 27, 83 Armagh xiv, 14-17, 19, 21-22, 39-40, 53, 64, 70, 81, 83 Asbury, Frances 137 Associate Synod of North America 107, 110-111 Bacon, Frances 175-176, 178, 183 Bakewell, Selena xv, 223 Baptists 197-199 Beattie, James 74-75, 94 Bethany College xv, xvii “Bonus Homo” articles 154-157 Brooke county 210 Brown, John 160-161, 205, 213, 223 Brown, Margaret 160-163, 188, 215, 223-224, 257-258 Bruce, Archibald 15, 24 Brush Run congregation 162, 16465, 168, 197, 205 Buffaloe Creek 161, 167, 206-209 Buffaloe Seminary 220-225, 247, 257 Calvin, John 9, 33, 35, 122, 129, 175, 178, 180-184 Campbell, Alexander ancestry, 35; birth, 13; boyhood, 16, 22, 27; schooling, 23, 26, 29-30, 34, 36, 41-42, 45; teacher, 40, 58, 132;

Glasglow University Student, 7093; shipwreck, 60-66; call to ministry, 64, 89. 91-92, 96, 167; engagement 158-160; marriage 162-163; ordination 169-170; children: Jane, 170, 188, 224; Eliza Ann, 224; Maria Louisa, 224; Lavinia, 224; Amanda Corneigle, 257; Clarinda, 258; John Brown, 258; Washington Reporter articles, 149-157; baptism, 187-189; baptism study, 170-196; spiritual development, 31-35, 42-46, 50, 84, 91; Buffaloe Seminary, 220-225, 247, 257; Sermon on the Law, 214-220; Walker Debate, 230-234; Christian Baptist, 260-261; Campbell, Archibald 3-9, 13, 58, 133 Campbell, Enos 23, 32 Campbell, Thomas ancestry, 3-9; teacher, 10-15, 29-30, 38, 40, 225; call to ministry, 6-7; Glasgow University student, 14; Whitburn student; 14-15; marriage, 11; children: Alexander [see Alexander Campbell]; Dorthea, 15, 60, 63, 166, 188, 225; Nancy, 15, 60, 225; Jane, 37, 59-60, 163; Thomas Jr. 37, 60; Archibald, 37, 60; Alicia, 40, 60; sailing to America, 56-57; western Pennsylvania ministry, 107-114; “Declaration and Address,” 114-115, 117-131; Spirituality, 30-33. “Candidus” essays 235-245, 256 Cane Ridge 142, 179, 181

263 Chartiers Presbytery 107, 112, 135, 175, 189 Christian Association of Washington Pa. 113, 119, 136 Christian Baptist 260-261 Christian Unity 31, 54-55, 118, 124125, 128-129 Clarinda articles 150-152, 224 Corneigle, Jane 11, 22-23, 28-30, 33-34, 40, 45, 59-60, 66, 96, 116 Cromwell, Oliver 48-49, 124 Cross Creek 214, 218 “Declaration and Address” 114-120, 127-131, 149, 164-166, 182-183, 192, 225 Doddridge, Joseph 222, 242 Down county 3, 5 Edwards, Jonathan 89-90, 139, 180 Emmet, Robert 159 Evangelelical Society of Ulster 53 Ewing, Greville 70, 72, 85-88, 106, 170-171

Jones, Abner 138 Jura, Paps of 68-69, 82, 106 Knox, John 8-9 Last will and testament of the Springfield Presbytery 143-144 Latona 94, 96, 98-99, 104 Leibnitz 123 Locke, John 42-44, 49, 124, 147, 149, 174-178, 184-186, 242 Londonderry 57, 59 Lough Neigh 27-28, 38 Luce, Matthias 188 Luther, Martin 122, 129, 178, 203 Mahoning Baptist Association 246 Markethill 15, 21, 23, 33 Milton 48-49, 95, 97, 124, 151 Moral Society essays 235-245 Munroe, Andrew 170-171, 186, 197 McGready, James 140-142 N

Fugitive-Agrarian movement xiv, xxiii Glas, John 51, 126-127, 129 Glasgow University 14, 66, 70-85, 153 Glass, Ann 161-163 Glass, Jane 161 Greenock 70, 94, 96, 99 Haggard, Rice 138 Haldane, James & Robert 51, 85-88, 126, 129, 170-171 Hamilton’s Bawn 15, 22-24 Hibernia 59-60, 66, 92, 98 Hume, David 74-76, 87 Islay, Isle of 65-66 Infant Baptism 170-196 Jardine, George 75-78, 81 Johnson, Samuel 68, 77, 94, 150

Newry 4-5, 15, 19, 23, 32, 58, 210202 Newton, Isaac 175-176, 178 Newton, John 89-90 New York City 103-104, 211 O’Kelly, James 137-138 Orange Society 16 Ossion 68-69 Owen, John 48-49, 89, 124 Philadelphia 104-107, 210-212 Pittsburgh 149, 165, 209-210, 246, 249-251 Presbyterianism Seceder, 14, 45, 47, 53, 85, 90-91, 108, 112, 202; Anti-Burgher 14, 47, 54; Old Light 47; General 8, 10-11, 18, 46

264

index Redstone Association 197-199, 204, 214, 220, 226 Reid, Thomas 74-76, 78, 81 Richardson, Robert xxi, xxii, 250254 Richardson, William 39-40 Rich Hill xv, 18, 20, 38-39, 48, 5051, 53, 58-59, 113, 116, 206, 220 Rigdon, Sidney 246-248, 255 Sample, William 149 Sandeman, Robert 51, 126, 177, 180, 250 Scott, Walter 248-255 Sermon on the Law 214-220 Shane’s Castle xv, 12, 26, 27 Sheepbridge 4, 10, 14 Smith, Adam 74, 87 Smith, Elias 138 Society of United Irishmen 17-20 Stewart, Dugald 75, 78 Stone, Barton 139, 141, 142

University xii, xiv Vine Street Christian Church xiii, xix Voltaire 74-75 Walker, John [debate] 229-234 Wardlaw, Ralph 88 Washington College 153-157 Washington Reporter 149-152, 234245 Washington Pa. 116, 135, 147-148, 163 Wellsburg [Charlestown], Va. 161, 209, 213-214 Wheeling, Va. 166 Whitburn Seminary xv, 14-15, 24 Whitfield, George 139 Wilson, William 108-110 Wrather, Eva Jean ix-xxvi Young, John 75-76, 78 Zwingli 12

Ure, Andrew 77-78Vanderbilt

A l e x a n d e r Ca m p b e l l VOLUME ONE

s text set in 11 / 15 Electra title set in Castellar and Bernhard Tango book and jacket design by Barbara M. Whitehead

Eva Jean Wrather

Of related interest: Dale Fiers Twentieth Century Disciple D. Duane Cummins A. Dale Fiers was one of the most significant figures in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) of the twentieth century. Fiers had a major impact on not only his denomination but American Protestantism in general, particularly its approach to such social issues as missionary work and civil rights.

TCU Press Fort Worth

ISBN 0-87565-305-7

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