Contents
 Preface
 Prologue: Virginians
 Part 1. The Kentucky Boy
 1. Conviction
 2. Conversion
 3. Commitment
 4. Controversy
 Part 2. The Elder in Illinois
 5. Politics
 6. Power
 7. Perishing
 8. Public
 9. Preacher
 10. Pasture
 Notes
 Index
 5
 Preface
 The title of this book comes from a phrase in an 1869
 article in Zion's Herald, a Boston publication of the Methodist
 Episcopal Church. The author of the piece noted that in every
 institution, from royal courts to republican governments to
 Christian churches, there were those rare figures who were
 `greater than the king.' While not having received the final
 preferments of their organizations, such men were nonetheless
 their most powerful and influential members. According to Zion's
 Herald, Peter Cartwright (1785-1872), the humble-born and
 uneducated pioneer circuit rider of Kentucky and Illinois was,
 both within the Methodist Episcopal Church and in the national
 imagination, somehow greater than all the church's prelates. In
 idea and fact, this elusive `somehow' is what I have tried to
 capture in the life of Peter Cartwright.
 Any biography of the man must be a fencing-match with his
 Autobiography (1856). It is a classic of Americana and the ur-
 source of most of the stories that have contributed to
 Cartwright's folkloric reputation as a western frontier hero.
 Another way of putting this is to admit that much of what we
 believe we know about the subject is based on what he chose to
 remember in that single book. I have therefore subjected the
 Autobiography to a skeptical analysis, matching its claims,
 wherever possible, against the sketchy documentary record. And I
 have striven to fill in the Autobiography's personal and
 political silences by providing a context wider than American
 Methodism. For Cartwright was deeply involved with important
 national issues like slavery, and for more than twenty years
 (beginning in 1832) he was a political, social and religious
 antagonist of Abraham Lincoln. Finally, he was also a redoubtable
 `man of words' in preaching and debate and a writer (though he
 denied any gift as such) whose best-selling book has proved a
 lasting contribution to ante-bellum United States literature.
 In my account of Cartwright's Kentucky years, I have relied
 on the foundational research of Theodore Agnew, whose 1950
 Harvard PhD dissertation was the first scholarly study of the
 preacher's earlier life. Brian Hohlt's more recent dissertation
 on Cartwright's Illinois political career (St. Louis University,
 1998) has been immensely valuable. The Great Rivers Conference
 United Methodist Archives in Bloomington, Illinois, holds
 important documents relating to Cartwright's nearly fifty-year
 ministry in Illinois. The Great Rivers archivist, Catherine
 Knight, has unstintingly helped me find what I sought in her
 collection, for which I am most grateful. And thanks also to the
 conference historian, Richard Chrisman, taught me the
 complexities of Methodist Church polity in the Illinois
 Conference. Three eminent Lincolnists have helped me understand
 the complex interaction between Cartwright and Abraham Lincoln:
 Rodney Davis and Douglas Wilson of the Lincoln Studies Center at
 Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois; and Michael Burlingame, late
 of Connecticut College. John Hallwas, of Western Illinois
 University, has read the manuscript twice, offering excellent
 advice each time. Two devoted editors at the University of
 6
 Illinois Press have seen this long project through: Richard
 Wentworth from the start, and Judith McCulloh, who has recently
 pushed me towards the finish line. Finally, my own institution,
 Illinois Wesleyan University, has generously supported the
 research, writing and publication of this book through its
 faculty development grants program.
 7
 Prologue: Virginians
 Farewell, my friends, I'm bound for Canaan,
 I'm traveling through the wilderness
 --"Parting Friends," John G. McCurry
 Born, he said long after, in Amherst County, September
 1, 1785.1 Born, he didn't say, a year and a half before his
 parents married.2 Born, he said from legendary twilight, in a
 canebrake where his mother had been hastily hidden during an
 Indian attack.3 And born again at a frontier Kentucky revival in
 1801 (37-8). Vague about Virginia, as he would be vague about
 Kentucky and Illinois, indeed about most places and persons,
 particularly himself, he spoke in passing of an early boyhood
 somewhere "on James River" near the Blue Ridge, insuring that
 anyone looking for the spot would have the devil of a time
 finding it. The sole property of record for the family was a poor
 piece of upland, barely held, described in the plat book
 according to its metes and bounds: "a parcel of Land Containing
 forty Acres (be the same more or less) Lying and being . . . on
 the Branches of Purgatory below Findley's Gap . . . bounded as
 followeth to witt Beginning at pointers Corner to William Cabell
 and Richard Murrow & running thence on Jessee Martins line North
 Sixty five Degrees East sixty poles to a Red Oak, thence with a
 line of Marked Trees fifty eight poles crossing a Branch to a
 small Red Oak and Pointers in the Old Line, and with it south
 twenty two Degrees West one hundred and Eleven Poles to Pointers
 in William Cabell's line & with it South twenty three poles to
 the begining."4
 Not much of a farm if farmed at all. Forty acres more or
 less, and no evidence of a mule. But plenty of scrubby trees,
 more than they could ever clear or use; fields of rocks that
 sparked and snapped the plow: it was third-rate land, bought
 before by speculators hoping someone like the Cartwrights would
 come along. Subsistence in the1780s: broadax ringing down the
 valley, slash and burn, smoke and ash; lowing, manuring cattle;
 noonday scream of wheeling hawk, a crying in the cabin. And
 behind these, never still, heard in the quiet, the burble and
 seep of Purgatory, swampy creek sliding to the James.
 No, not much of a place, even for the Piedmont, foot of the
 mountain, hind quarter of Virginia society. They had come about
 as far from cavalier gentility as they could and still stay on an
 eastern watershed, still within the "Old Dominion." If they
 despised the big planters, who had the best land and the most
 slaves, they also envied and wanted to emulate them--and could
 not, from lack of acreage, slaves, money. So like Jefferson from
 Monticello, after the Revolution they looked west, fancying that
 real liberty lay beyond the washboard of receding blue ridges, a
 world away from the stinking salt smell of Tidewater. Kentucky:
 Kain-tuck: Canaan. Now there was a notion for a new nation, a
 hopeful gleam in Peter Sr.'s eye, since the boy was born, and one
 that wouldn't go away no matter how hard he blinked and rubbed:
 Why stay here, he thought, when I can be an over-the-mountain
 man, for which he had the makings if not the means: boyhood
 8
 woodcraft perfected during the late war, his rifle and a man's
 Republican discontent in the after years: poor and poorly landed
 (some would say forever shiftless in a shifty, shifting country,
 but to his son forever an unnamed buckskin hero), with just a
 western land warrant and a cache of war stories to show for his
 Revolutionary service.
 A decade or a dozen years back he had come to Amherst from
 St. Mary's County, Maryland (or maybe it was from Pennsylvania,
 or Carolina, or God knows where), emigrating with four brothers
 (or was it five? later culled to two at the battle of Brandywine,
 or was it three?), all of them tucking snugly into the covert
 wrinkles of the Ridge.5 He knew the best land was gone, the
 mediocre too expensive. So he would be a sojourner there:
 Purgatory before Canaan. But in another respect coming to
 Virginia was a good move: somewhere in those dark blanket folds
 of hills and valleys, perhaps during a stint of Revolutionary
 frontier fighting, he met his "destiny." She was a woman whom
 history has known slightly and variously as an orphan from
 Pennsylvania, a "Widow Wilcox," and simply a "spinster." Whoever
 she was, whatever her social state, she knew her mind: she was of
 age and she determined to have this man--after a decent trial, of
 course. Thus for a while they cohabited. When his active service
 was over, they rode out the rest of the war like a long spell of
 lowering weather in the valleys, surviving, loving, celebrating
 peace at last with a new birth. Before they knew it, the boy was
 walking, ready to talk. "Isn't it time?" he asked her. Taking pen
 in hand, she answered, "long past," instructing the judge: "This
 shall be your Sufficient Warrant to issue Peter Cartwright a
 License to marry me, Given under my hand & Seal, Christian
 Garvin, Feb. the 26, 1787."6
 By their act down in Amherst, they made legitimate a son who
 would soon be two years old. But out on the branches of
 Purgatory, a days' ride from town, life was lived by common law
 and custom, and the published fact of marriage made little
 difference (except to release their precious £50 of bonding
 money, or at least the moiety not put up by brother William).
 Afterwards, father was still a hardhanded planter on a tiny
 hardscrabble farm. Mother still wrung the neck of each day for
 the family's meager existence. Babies still came, with or without
 a piece of paper saying they were lawful. As the 1780s wore on,
 the Cartwrights continued too poor or too proud for slaves,
 probably both. For more than a hundred years in Virginia, tobacco
 had meant cash and chattels, but where in Purgatory could they
 plant tobacco? Praying for a cash crop next year, always next
 year, they in the meantime ate off and slept on the floor of the
 crude cabin, scratching out board from what he hunted and
 bartered, what she gathered from a truck patch that left no time
 or space for flowers.
 It sounds desperate. Yet through the obscurity of mountain
 shade and windowless cabin shone one golden ray that was
 Christiana's alone: she took Methodism to keep back madness,
 drank the draught as the men took whiskey, daily and deeply, but
 with a crucial difference: this water of life, as even her
 infidel husband Peter had to admit, promised heaven even as it
 9
 brought the family a kind of quotidian salvation too. Methodism
 exalted Christiana's soul in passionate order. How and when did
 faith find her? Bishop Francis Asbury himself had ridden through
 in October of '80 on one of his relentless horseback tours. On
 Sunday the 8th "St. Francis the Traveler" preached to a mountain
 crowd of 500, urging them to renounce "the hidden things of
 dishonesty" and praying that the light of the gospel would reach
 those "whom the god of this world hath blinded." If Christiana
 happened to hear Asbury she would surely have recognized herself
 in his sermon. But even in those early days of the church, the
 bishop wasn't the first Methodist to reach the precincts of
 Purgatory, nor perhaps was that austere man the first to touch
 her hidden heart. For Beverly Allen had arrived the year before:
 Beverly Allen, who would later become so important to the family
 and so notorious in the tightly-networked Methodist world. Allen
 came to Amherst in the fall of 1779 and wintered over. By March
 he was reporting large congregations, warm enthusiasm, a
 successful ministry.7
 And after Asbury and Allen followed a steady string of
 itinerants on the newly-formed Amherst circuit. If neither of the
 leading lights had "turned" Christiana, who finally did and when?
 Did she marry because of Methodism, to cleanse the stain of years
 of "living in sin"? Or was she already comfortably married when
 she decided to join the church? Or dry tinder for the lightning
 of the great summer revivals that swept southern Virginia in
 1787? A small, intense nighttime meeting in the packed cabin;
 prayers, hymns, exhortations; "soul-telling," weeping and
 weaving, agony and joy and hymns again. All the while her husband
 Peter, whatever his real feelings, stands silently by, watching,
 then shrugs tolerantly and goes outside. He doesn't profess, then
 or ever. He knows well enough where she wants to go and hopes
 she'll make it. For he has kindred dreams of crossing over, to a
 place that counts in his worldly mind for the Canaan he can even
 now hear her inside shouting and singing about.
 From that day on, because Christiana lives within herself
 and for something beyond, she can live on earth wherever they go.
 She knows the inextinguishable Kentucky light in his eyes, she
 gradually leans into the freshening western wind, reluctant but
 resigned. But she does speak her qualms: isn't that military
 tract "south of Green River" where you want to go called "the
 Barrens"? Won't our land be as bad as Purgatory? No, he explains
 patiently, because it isn't barren that way: mostly open,
 meadowed, clear of trees for once--and praise your Lord for that!
 You'll have more sunshine than shadow, and together we'll have a
 real chance at a competence. She answers: the way you go on
 Kentucky sounds like no place on earth, about as close to Canaan
 as we're likely to get in this world. Yes, I'll go with you. Sell
 the place for what it'll bring (he did: it brought "twenty four
 pounds current money of Virginia," about half a pound an acre):
 Write your brother Justinian and let him know we're coming,
 sooner or later. I'll tell the family. She turned and left him
 there, walked outdoors and down the Purgatory to the east-flowing
 James, singing:
 10
 I go away, behind to leave you,
 Perhaps never to meet again,
 But if we never have the pleasure,
 I hope we'll meet on Canaan's land.
 11
 Part 1
 The Kentucky Boy