A history of the Baptists in the western states east of the Mississippi...

Front matter

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Preface

In preparing this history a chief difficulty has been in the collection of material. The sources of it have been, to a considerable extent, the favors of obliging correspondents, who in more than one instance have been at great pains to render in a really helpful way the aid solicited. In that connection we name, with the most sincere thanks, such as Drs. Samuel Haskell and A. E. Mather, and Prof. Daniel Putnam, of Michigan ; Rev. James Delany, and Drs. David Spencer, D. Halteman, and M. G. Hodge, of Wisconsin ; Dr. Justus Bulkley, Eev. B. B. Hamilton, and Eev. E. S. Walker, of Illinois ; President W. T. Stott, of Indiana ; Drs. Daniel Shephardson and George E. Leonard and Mr. George E. Stevens, of Ohio, with Prof. F. W. Shephardson, of the University of Chicago, Rev. W. F. Boyakin, of Kansas, and Mrs. G. S. Bailey, of California.

In footnotes and otherwise, in the body of the book, acknowledgment is made to these and others who, either in correspondence or in papers read on different occasions and made available in their printed form, have so efficiently aided in a task which, only for such aid, would have been very much more difficult if not practically well-nigh impossible. At the end of the book are named the several sources, in a table, with a view to make this acknowledgment more full and explicit.

6 FREFACE

That in such an amount of detail as Baptist history in these States written at the present time makes imperative serious omissions will occur, is much to be feared. The writer has been especially anxious at this point, yet apprehends that with all his care and solicitude his success in making his work in this feature of it complete will be only partial. May he hope for the generous consideration of his brethren in that regard ? To have been in any sense unjust to any one, or to any interest, will be the more an occasion of regret as his long association with those of whom in these pages he often has occasion to write, and his personal relations to many things here to be recorded, have so much enlisted his own personal sympathy, while recalling associations, alike with the living and the dead, which often could not be thus recalled without deep emotion.

However all this may be, the book is offered as a service and a tribute, in recognition of the sterling merit alike of those who have led and those who have cooperated in Baptist progress on this great field, and of that splendid record so made, to which some future historian may do justice where the present one has failed.

J. A. S.

Contents

I. Early Times in the West, 9

II. First on the Field, in Ohio and Illinois, 24 III. First on the Field, in Indiana, Michigan,

and Wisconsin, 54

Chapter I

TPHAT rivalry between France and England, often -i- taking the form of active hostility, which signalizes so much of European history, found other opportunities of manifestation upon the American continent. What New York, New England, and Virginia, were to England, Canada was to France, while each nationality might seem, equally with the other, entitled to gain and hold new domain toward the west, in the measure of its enterprise in exploring and taking possession. Collision, however, was inevitable. As French adventure and colonization moved westward by way of the great lakes, and southward and westward to the Ohio and the Mississippi, they found after a time their right of occupancy disputed. Meantime, while French and English were contending on battlefields in Europe, it could not fail to happen that wherever representatives of those two nationalities should meet in the new world, it must be as enemies, not as- friends.

Differences of religion, besides, gave to these collisions and rivalries a significance even wider than that concerning ownership and occupancy of mere territory. Were the vast regions to which there were these conflicting claims to be Papal or Protestant? This momentous issue was involved in all that earlier history. The Jesuit missionary was often even in advance of the explorer and the fur-trader, and while he was eagerly seeking to make converts of the Indian tribes, the missions planted by him became centers of Catholic colonization. While such adventurers as La Salle, Joliet, and Nicollet, were extending westward and southward the limits of discovery, Marquette and his associates were no less active, and with no less of daring and self-sacrifice, in preparing the way for what it was meant should be a definite and permanent settlement of the country.

" Soldiers and fur-traders/ ' says Parkman, 1 " followed where these pioneers of the church led the way. Forts were built here and there throughout the country, and the cabins of the settlers clustered about the mission-houses." The " new colonists, emigrants from Canada or disbanded soldiers of French regiments," however wild in their habits of life, were devout Catholics, and wherever a little community of them gathered there was a center of the Roman faith. The missionaries were animated, no doubt, in the main by intense desire for the conversion of the native tribes. " While the colder apostles of Protestantism labored on the outskirts of heathendom, these 1 "The Conspiracy of Pontiac," Vol. II., p. 251.

champions of the cross, the forlorn hope of the army of Rome, pierced to the heart of its dark and dreary domain, confronted death at every step, and were well repaid for all, could they but sprinkle a few drops of water on the forehead of a child, or hang a golden crucifix round the neck of some warrior, pleased with the glittering trinket," x None the less were they the instruments of designs far more secular in character.

As intimated in the first words of the above extract, Protestantism found no such fervid championship. The day was to come when a different form of effort for conversion of the natives should be made by ministers of a truer faith and with better results than those just described. In the time of which we here write, Protestantism was represented simply in the person of the American pioneer, seeking a home farther and farther in the depths of the Western wilderness, perhaps with his religious instructor and guide sharing with him the rude conditions of wilderness life, perhaps not, yet in either case representative of ideas which must mean in Western development something far different from all that appeared in the Jesuit missionary or the Canadian settler.

We cannot speak here of the more warlike forms of this contest for possession and occupancy of those regions within which lie the States whose religious history in one aspect of it, is to occupy us in the following pages. Nor can we do more than simply to thus note in passing, how much deeper was the sig- 1 Parkman's " Conspiracy of Pontiac," II. , p. 250.

nificance of the struggle, often so fierce and bloody, than simply as a contest for the possession of territory. It was indeed not possible that this vast domain should ever belong to France. Had it been so, aud had this been the actual outcome, who can measure the difference in result from what appears at present, not only in American history, but in the history of true religion throughout the world?

Due recognition should not, meanwhile, be denied to the hardy and resolute men who were first to explore the mighty wilderness beyond the Western lakes and along the Western rivers : such as La Salle, Joliet, Marquette, and Nicollet. Of these, La Salle appears to have been the first. In 1669 he discovered the Ohio River, and followed its course down as far as where Louisville now stands. A year or two later he passed through Lake Michigan as far as the present site of Chicago, crossing thence to the Illinois River and descending it, as is claimed, to its junction with the Mississippi. In 1678, on his third adventurous expedition, he built a fort on the Illinois below what is now Peoria, leaving his heroic associate, Tonti, to occupy it, while he himself returned to Canada for reinforcements and supplies. In 1682, in a fourth attempt, he explored the Mississippi to its mouth and in the name of his king, Louis XIV., took possession of the whole vast region from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains, giving it the name Louisiana.

Joliet and Marquette were more or less associated in their expeditions, much the same in character as those of La Salle, save that Marquette, as a Jesuit missionary, had aims and hopes of his own. The first human dwelling other than the wigwams of the Indians, where Chicago now stands, was the little log hut erected for Marquette in October, 1674, by the two Frenchmen who remained with him while Joliet proceeded upon his farther explorations, and which sheltered him in the illness caused by hardship and exposure. In the following year, prosecuting his mission among the Indians, he proceeded as far south as Kaskaskia, in the Illinois country. Returning northward, his strength only enabled him to reach a small river in the west of Michigan, near the promontory called the " Sleeping Bear." Here he died, his remains being taken for burial to St. Ignace, also in what is now the State of Michigan.

The explorations of Joliet were along the Wisconsin, the Illinois, and the Mississippi Rivers, in the years 1672-1674. To whom the honor of actual discovery of the Mississippi belongs, whether to La Salle, Joliet, or Marquette, their expeditions to the great river occurring so nearly at the same time, is, we believe, a question still undecided.

The first actual settlements of the territory now occupied by the five States of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin were, as we have said, in the interest and hope of a French occupation of this whole region. Detroit, in Michigan ; Yincennes, in Indiana; Kaskaskia,in Illinois; Green Bay, in Wisconsin, were originally French. Whether, however, they were to prove actual outposts of French occupancy, depended upon the continuance of the French possession of Canada, and this in no small degree upon the outcome of what was taking place upon the continent of Europe itself. While France found its resources taxed to their utmost in holding its ground in wars there raging, it had but few men and small treasure to spare for the subjugation of a continent on the other side of the sea. The loss of its Canadian possessions upon the taking of Quebec by the British under General Wolfe, meant hopeless failure to its scheme of occupying with French settlements the western shores of the great lakes, and the banks of the Wabash, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. The question of destiny, in the particulars here considered, was finally decided when, during the war of the Revolution, the enterprises of Colonel George Rogers Clark resulted in gaining for American freedom and possession, not only the States with which we are here concerned, but very much more than even this. Very just is the tribute paid to him, where it is said : "All that rich domain northwest of the Ohio was secured to the public at the peace of 1783, in consequence of his prowess." l

Save in the exceptional cases where military occupation more or less prepared the way, it may perhaps be said that original possession of the territory bor-

1 Appleton's "Cyclopaedia of American Biography," article "George Eogers Clark."

dering on the great lakes and the Ohio, now embraced within the States of which we are here especially to speak, was in general otherwise than by any form of deliberate colonization. As population in New York, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, spread to the western or northern limit of those States severally, it would soon break over the border, under the pressure of that restless desire for change which has been so much an impelling force in American character from the beginning. First to occupy the new ground would be the hunter and the pioneer. Only after a lapse of time, save in exceptional cases, could formal settlements grow up, and these in their earlier history could only be of the crudest kind. It was not long, however, before the fame of the rich soil and manifold openings for enterprise in the West began to suggest the idea of methods in* colonization more deliberate. Families of emigrants from the older States sought the new* territory, and the cabin of the mere pioneer gave place to the better-ordered dwelling of " the settler."

Among these latter themselves there was enough of a class unique in American life to impart a character of its own to Western population, with elements whose influence in many ways was to be felt long after. Speaking especially of Illinois, a well-informed w r riter says : *

The larger proportion of these first American settlers came

1 Hon. John Moses, in his "Illinois, Historical and Statistical," Vol. I., pp. 229, 280.

16 niSTORY OF BAPTISTS IN WESTERN STATES

from Virginia and Maryland. While a few had received a rudimentary education, and had lived among communities which may be said to have been comparatively cultured, the most of them were hardy, rough, uncultivated backwoodsmen. They had been accustomed only to the ways of the frontier and camp. Many of them had served in the war of the Revolution, and all of them in the border wars with the Indians. While they were brave, hospitable, and generous, they were more at ease beneath the forest bivouac than in the "living room" of the log cabin, and to swing a woodman's axe among the lofty trees of the primeval forest was a pursuit far more congenial to their rough nature and active temperament than to mingle with society in settled communities. Their habits and manners were plain, simple, and unostentatious. Their clothing was generally made of the dressed skins of the deer, wolf, or fox, while those of the buffalo and elk supplied them with covering for their feet and hands. Their log cabins were destitute of glass, nails, hinges, or locks. Their furniture and utensils were in harmony with the primitive appearance and rude character of their dwellings, being all home-made, with here and there a few pewter spoons, dishes, and iron knives and forks. With muscles of iron and hearts of oak, they united a tenderness for the weak and a capability for self-sacrifice worthy of an ideal knight of chivalry, and their indomitable will, which recognized no obstacle as insuperable, was equaled only by integrity which regarded dishonesty as an offense as contemptible as cowardice.

Communities made up of such elements, and under conditions like those which the making of homes on a remote frontier must necessarily create, would have a character quite their own. Yet the writer we have quoted intimates farther on that the primitive settlers were in some respects of a higher type than some, at least, of those who came later. " In moral endowmerits," be says, " even if not in mental attainments, these sturdy pioneers of Illinois were, it must be admitted, vastly superior to many of those who followed them when better facilities for transportation rendered the country more accessible."

It is suggestive to note, in this connection, upon the other hand, what Parkman says of those French settlers who were first on the ground, and who were in due time to give place to such as those we have just mentioned. He is describing in particular the colony at Kaskaskia, Illinois :

The Creole of the Illinois, contented, light-hearted, and thriftless, by no means fulfilled the injunction to increase and multiply, and the colony languished in spite of the fertile soil. The people labored long enough to gain a bare subsistence for each passing day, and spent the rest of their time in dancing and merry-making, smoking, gossiping, and hunting. Their native gayety was irrepressible, and they found means to stimulate it with wine made from the fruit of the wild grapevines. Thus they passed their days, at peace with themselves, hand and glove with their Indian neighbors, and ignorant of all the world besides. Money was scarcely known among them. Skins and furs were the prevailing currency, and in every village a great portion of the land was held in common. 1

It is not by such as these that States are founded or civilization developed in institutions that endure as centuries come and go.

Of points upon this then new territory which became in due time chief centers of population, may 1 "Conspiracy of Pontiac," p. 252.

be named the sites, respectively, where now stand the cities of Detroit, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Chicago. The settlements at these points, especially at the first and the last, owed their origin, first of all, to their importance as military posts — the date of their occupancy being in the order just named. First upon the ground at Detroit was La Motte Cadillac, by whom a military colony was planted, and a fort built in 1701. It soon grew to be one of the most important of French outposts in the West. The British took possession of it in 1760, at the time of their conquest of Canada, holding it until 1787, when the United States gained possession, with General Arthur St. Clair as commandant at the fort. In 1812 the British regained the fort, and for a short time held it. In 1813 it passed again into American hands, and from that time to- the present Detroit has been included in the domain of the republic, growing in due time into one of the most attractive of American cities.

Cincinnati affords an example among cities on the territory now under view, of deliberate colonization. It was, indeed, early a military post, as Fort Washington, yet the occupation of the site chosen for a town seems to have been more a formal and deliberate one than in either of the other instances named. A colony from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, in 1789, first broke ground for the city, which in due time came to be known as the " Queen City of the West." The introduction of steam navigation on the Ohio River supplied a marked impulse to trade and enterprise, so that Cincinnati was one of the first of Western cities to acquire renown as a center of Western growth and power.

Chicago, even as a military post, is of more recent date than either Detroit or Cincinnati. It was more than a hundred years later than the original French occupation of what is now Detroit that, in 1804, Fort Dearborn was erected where Chicago now stands. As in the case of Detroit, a population soon began to collect around the military post thus created, and although in 1812 Fort Dearborn was taken by the Indians, and the soldiers, with several inhabitants of the place, massacred, still the site was not abandoned. The fort was again occupied, a town plat surveyed in 1 829, and since that time the growth has been constant. During the last half-century, indeed, such has been its rapidity as to make Chicago a marvel in this respect among cities of either the old world or the new.

The French occupation at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and other points in the southern section of what was at the time a part of Virginia, but is now Illinois, has already been mentioned, but should be more particularly noticed in this connection. In 1778 Kaskaskia, and the whole region of which it was the center, was won from the French by Colonel George Rogers Clark. Of those who were with him in these military undertakings, several made choice of the region about Kaskaskia as a home, and settled there. Besides these, the first to become a permanent settler was

Captain Nathaniel Hull, from Massachusetts. " Aside from the members of Clark's command/' says Judge Moses, " some of whom doubtless remained continuously in the country/' Captain Hull " was the first original immigrant/' his arrival occurring apparently somewhere about 1780. In the following year a party of immigrants arrived from Maryland. In 1783 more of Clark's old soldiers found permanent homes on the scene of their recent conquest, and in 1786 several immigrants from Virginia arrived, among them James Lemen and his family, so conspicuous among early Illinois Baptists.

The first mention in history of Milwaukee, as far as we can ascertain, is in the report of an officer in the United States engineers, Lieutenant Sarrow, in 1817. It is spoken of by him as "a Pottawatomie village lying on the right bank of the Milwaukee River at its confluence with the lake." An attempt at French settlement farther north, at Green Bay, had been made in 1639. It shared the fate, however, of many other such attempts. The beginnings of Milwaukee, nevertheless, were of the same nationality, the first white man to make a home on the present site of that now flourishing city being Solomon Juneau, a French fur trader, who located there in 1825. He lived to become, at a later day, the first mayor of the city which had grown up where his own humble cabin originally stood. In 1835 Milwaukee was laid out and organized as a village, the lake commerce and other favoring conditions developing it rapidly to city proportions, with a question of rivalry in growth and claim to consideration between it and Chicago which, even forty years ago, was yet unsettled. In point of beauty of location it still is far in the ascendency, while in general attractiveness it has few equals among Western cities.

For purposes of this history we have only occasion to notice, in this place, further, and that briefly, the order in which the five States under view attained first to territorial organization, and then at last to Statehood. It was in 1783, in the treaty with Great Britain at the close of the war of the Revolution, that what was then designated as the Northwest Territory was confirmed to the United States. As this vast region became occupied by permanent settlers, local government was at once a necessity. The first application to Congress with this in view, appears to have been by those who had settled in Kaskaskia, Illinois. On July 13, 1787, what is styled the ordinance of 1787, making provision for the organization of the Northwestern Territory, became a law. Of this, as quoted by Judge Moses, 1 Chief Justice Chase once said : " Never, probably, in the history of the world, did a measure of legislation so accurately fulfill and yet so mightily exceed the anticipations of the legislators. It has been well described as having been a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night in the settlement and government of the Northwestern States." That feature in the ordinance which has 1 "Illinois, Historical and Statistical," Vol. I., p. 187.

been most conspicuous in the history, not only of the Northwest, but of the whole land as well, is that which declares that after the year 1800 there should be in the States to be formed out of this territory " neither slavery nor involuntary servitude otherwise than in punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

First of what are now the five States east of the Mississippi to be organized as distinct territories were Indiana and Ohio. The latter was set off as a Territory in 1800, that portion of the general domain west and north of it being organized as Indiana. From this latter Illinois was in like manner set off in 1809, and Michigan in 1824. Wisconsin was at first included in Illinois, but when Illinois attained to State organization, Wisconsin became part of Michigan Territory. In 1836 Wisconsin itself acquired a territorial government, being made, for the time, to include what are now the States of Minnesota and Iowa, with a part of the Dakotas.

First of these several territories to be admitted into the Union as a State, with the present boundaries, was Ohio in 1802; next, Indiana, 1816; following this, Illinois in 1818 ; then Michigan in 1837 ; and Wisconsin in 1848.

This outline view of history on the field of our present study seemed necessary as preliminary to the main purpose. The field as a whole is imperial in its proportions, even though but a single section of the republic of which it forms a part. During the

EAKLY TIMES IN THE WEST 23

century of time elapsing since the first beginning of Baptist history within these States, most surprising changes are seen, with development iu all elements of civilized life rivaling what can be recorded of any other portion of the Union — a growth in material wealth, in political influence, in social and intellectual culture, and in position as among States of the republic, such as has fully justified the sanguine predictions of those by whom the foundations were laid and the first stones of the superstructure put in place. The story of Baptist beginning and growth on this field is to occupy us in the pages that follow.

CHAPTEK II

FIEST ON THE FIELD — IN OHIO AND ILLINOIS

AMONG the victories achieved in the course of history by human hardihood, courage, and resource, victory over the wilderness, and the stern conditions of life inevitable therein, is by no means the least. Nor is it alone in the mastery of that which taxes physical energy and endurance, that character and capacity are under such circumstances put to the test. So soon as the cabin of the pioneer becomes a group of such, or on the arrival of a colony at the spot where their new homes are to be, societv begins. As others arrive, as settlements increase, and progress is made toward those conditions which call for political organization, law, and rule, during all this nascent period there is occasion for the exercise of those same qualities of character which in older communities win for their possessors position and fame. It may be the lot of leaders in the founding and organization of society under such circumstances as are here supposed, never to be widely known. They may live and die in comparative obscurity. Yet when in a search among the perhaps forgotten annals of a new community one comes upon traces of men like these here in question, he may often have occasion to feel 24 afresh how little after all, in comparison, of the world's worth ever comes to the knowledge of the world itself.

We have here to write chiefly of the pioneer minister. It is a type of ministerial character richly deserving of study, both for what it is in itself, and for the sake of its lessons for those whose work in the ministry may be very differently conditioned and which yet must be always substantially the same. In order that what we have in hand may be rightly and clearly apprehended, it is important to bear in mind that what we term pioneer work at the present time is after all much unlike, in certain important particulars, what the same form of service was when these now populous and flourishing States were still a wilderness. While it is true that one who now chooses his field of labor upon some frontier, has hardships, discouragements, and possibly even dangers to face, he still for the most part finds himself located in a community where there are at least the beginnings of social order and possibilities of speedy attainment in all that is most to be desired where a home is to be made and work to be done. He travels to his field by a speedy aud comfortable mode of conveyance. He is in ready communication with those he has left behind, and can always feel that in emergencies sympathy and help are within ready reach, even should there be the intervention of hundreds of miles of distance. How different were all these conditions in the case of those men of whom we have here to write, will of course be readily divined, yet can be quite realized only as studied in at least a measure of detail. The story is worth the telling, if only in order that men whose names and whose memory have already grown so dim may come once more into the light and be seen in some degree for what they were.

In three of the five States with which this narrative is concerned, Baptist history begins very nearly at the same date: Ohio, in 1790; Illinois, 1796; Indiana, 1798. Of churches planted at these dates we shall speak more particularly later on. At present our principal subject is the men whose names are most prominently identified with these beginnings. The scene of the very first of such beginnings, the opening page in a history whose record is now so full, was what is now the site of Cincinnati. We shall quote here, what may be taken as an authentic entry on the initial leaf of Western Baptist history.

It was on the 18th of November, 1788, that a company of twenty-three men, some of them hardly grown, three women and two children (the oldest only five years of age) landed from the flatboat on which they had floated down from Pittsburg and began to erect the cabins in which they proposed to spend the winter, awaiting the arrival of other relatives — fathers and mothers, and wives and children — in the spring. Most of these people had come from Essex county, New Jersey, and several of them had been members of the old Scotch Plains Baptist Church, from which the First Baptist Church of New York City had been organized, and of which Rev. John Gano, noted for having been among the most efficient and influential chaplains in the army of the Be volution, had been pastor. The leader of that company of pioneers was Major Benjamin Stites, who afterward became so prominent as a member of the first church (as founded by these pioneers), and among them were John (lano and wife, the husband a son of the John Gano above mentioned. 1