Authors: William Maxwell
The five evangelists formed a presbytery of their own—or what they called a presbytery; there were no officers, or any lay members, or any churches which the Springfield Presbytery could be said to represent. They were merely an unorganized group of independent Presbyterian ministers with a common purpose of reform. Other ministers, convinced by their arguments, united with them. Though they went about enthusiastically preaching and printing pamphlets against everything the Presbyterian Church stood for, they innocently hoped to remain an independent unit of it, and when they were not allowed to, they dissolved their “presbytery” and thereafter went by the name of the Christian Church. The action was announced in an ironic document of considerable importance—“The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery.” As Stone explains, quoting Scripture, where a testament is, there must of necessity be the death of a testator, otherwise it is of no strength at all. Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground, and die, it abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.
The Testament begins: “The Presbytery of Springfield, sitting at Cane Ridge, in the county of Bourbon, being, through a gracious Providence, in more than ordinary bodily health, growing in size and strength daily; and in perfect soundness and composure of mind; and knowing that it is appointed for all delegated bodies once to die; and considering that the life of every such body is very uncertain,
do make and ordain this our last Will and Testament, in manner and form following, viz.:
“Imprimis.
We
will
, that this body die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large; for there is but one body, and one Spirit, even as we are called in one hope of our calling.
“Item.
We
will
, that our name … be forgotten …
“Item.
We
will
, that our power of making laws for government of the church, and executing them by delegated authority, forever cease …
“Item.
We
will
, that candidates for the Gospel ministry henceforth study the Holy Scriptures with fervent prayer, and obtain license from God to preach the simple Gospel,
with the Holy Ghost sent down from Heaven
, without any admixture of philosophy, vain deceit, traditions of men, or the rudiments of the world. And let none henceforth take
this honor to himself, but he that is called of God as was Aaron.
“Item.
We
will
, that the church of Christ … resume her native right of internal government …
“Item.
We
will
, that each particular church … choose her own preacher, and support him by a free will offering without a written
call
or
subscription
—admit members—remove offenses; and never henceforth delegate her right of government to any man or set of men whatever.
“Item.
We
will
, that the people henceforth take the Bible as the only sure guide to heaven; and as many as are offended with other books, which stand in competition with it, may cast them into the fire if they choose …
“Item.
We
will
, that preachers and people, cultivate a spirit of mutual forbearance; pray more and dispute less …
“Item.
We
will
, that our weak brethren, who may have been wishing to make the Presbytery of Springfield their king, and wot not what is now become of it, betake themselves
to the Rock of Ages, and follow Jesus for the future.
“Item.
We
will
, that the Synod of Kentucky examine every member, who may be
suspected
of having departed from the Confession of Faith, and suspend every such suspected heretic immediately; in order that the oppressed go free, and taste the sweets of gospel liberty.…”
This mixture of piety and cheerful impudence acted, Stone says, “like fire in a dry stubble. The sparks lighting in various parts of the field would quickly raise as many blazes all around.”
Most of the churches for which the revivalists had preached joined them, and new churches were organized. This is what happened when Stone preached to a group of Baptists in southwestern Ohio: “The result was, that they agreed to cast away their formularies and creeds, and take the Bible alone for their rule of faith and practice—to throw away their name Baptist and take the name ‘Christian’—and bury their association and to become one with us in the great work of Christian Union. Then they marched up in a band to the stand where Mr. Stone was preaching, shouting the praises of the Lord, and proclaiming what they had done.”
In a short while, all but two of the Presbyterian churches in southwestern Ohio had become Christian churches. Soon there were hundreds, all through Kentucky, Tennessee, southern Ohio, and Indiana.
There was also trouble. In 1805 the Shakers sent missionaries to Kentucky. “They informed us that they had heard of us in the East,” Stone says, “and greatly rejoiced in the work of God among us—that as far as we had gone we were right; but we had not gone far enough into the work—that they were sent by their brethren to teach the way of God more perfectly, by obedience to which we should be led into perfect holiness. They seemed to understand all the springs and avenues of the human heart. They
delivered their testimony, and labored to confirm it by the Scriptures—promised the greatest blessings to the obedient, but certain damnation to the disobedient. They urged the people to confess their sins to them, especially the sin of matrimony, and to forsake their wives, wives their husbands. This was the burden of the testimony. They said they could perform miracles, and related many as done among them. But we could never persuade them to try to work any miracles among us.… They had new revelations, superior to the Scriptures, which they called the old record, which were true, but superseded by the new. When they preached to the world, they used the old record, and preached a pure gospel, as a bait to catch the unwary; but in the close of their discourse they artfully introduced their testimony. In this way they captivated hundreds and ensnared them in ruin.”
Among the captivated were two of the original five ministers who left the Presbyterian Church together—McNemar and Dunlavy. And they were indeed ensnared in ruin, for Dunlavy “died in Indiana, raving in desperation for his folly in forsaking the truth for an old woman’s fable,” and the Shakers had a revelation given to them to remove McNemar from their village and take him to Lebanon, Ohio, and set him down in the streets, and leave him there destitute, in his old age.
Two more of the five ministers, Marshall and Thompson, disliking so much freedom of theological opinion, returned to the Presbyterian Church.
Through all this, Stone went about preaching and converting with undiminished enthusiasm. If he preached in a house, it was full to overflowing. If he preached out of doors at some country crossroads, men, women, and children walked six or seven miles to hear him. “The darkest nights did not prevent them; for as they came to meeting, they tied up bundles of hickory bark, and left them by the way
at convenient distances apart; on their return they lighted these bundles, which afforded them a pleasant walk. Many have I baptized at night by the light of these torches.”
From Kentucky the pioneers streamed out into other states—into Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa—taking the Christian Church with them. And Stone found himself in charge of a loose association of eighty churches, with thirteen thousand members, thirty-eight elders, and thirteen unordained preachers, over all of whom he denied having any authority. But through a magazine, the
Christian Messenger
, which he edited and published, and through his firmness of character, he had become the most influential personality of his church, and to all intents and purposes its leader.
In the absence of statistics, the pioneers believed what somebody told them, and it was said at this time that in Ohio such wheat, rye, oats, and corn grew in the river bottoms as had never been seen before, and that if you threw a hen into a field of grain there was no chance of its ever getting out. Also that when the women went for roasting ears, they needed an ax to cut down the cornstalks.
In 1813 Stephen England moved north into Ohio, taking his wife and ten children and two sons-in-law with him, and lived there for five years. Then a disease broke out among the cattle. Calves were aborted, the cows gave only a quarter of the usual amount of milk. The disease was of unknown origin, and highly contagious, and had no cure. From drinking the milk of infected cows, human beings developed a fever and other symptoms, such as a headache and sweating, and lost all desire to move. This lasted about two weeks, stopped, and then started up again.
One day the blackbirds flitting from branch to branch observed a different kind of activity in the clearing. The carpenter’s tools and cooking utensils, the hoes and the log chain, the mattock, the axes, the bedding, the spinning wheel and the big wheel, the churn, the looking glass and the loom and the Bible were stowed away in the wagons. The teams were backed up to the traces. The women and children were disposed, by families and by age. And, leaving the doors of their cabins standing open and the grain nodding in the fields they had cleared with so much
labor, my great-great-great-grandfather and his sons-in-law headed for the Territory of Illinois.
They arrived at Edwardsville, in Madison County, which is a little east of St. Louis, in the fall of 1818, a few weeks before Illinois was admitted as a state of the Union. They didn’t like it here—why I don’t know. It appears not to have been poor country. The first white man to visit the locality was James Gillham, twenty-five years before. He came here in search of his wife and three children, who had been taken captive from their home in Kentucky by a band of Indians. French traders told him that his family was being held for ransom in the Kickapoo village on Salt Creek, near the present site of Lincoln—as far away again as he was from Kentucky—and, with two Frenchmen as interpreters and an Irishman as an intermediary, he managed to get them back. He was so impressed with the beauty and fertility of the region around Edwardsville that he settled here. Perhaps the reason Stephen England and his sons-in-law didn’t like it was that they no longer had the choice of the best land. Glowing reports of the country farther north induced them to set out in the middle of winter on a hundred-mile journey of exploration.
The contour of the land in the San-ga-mo country amazed them. In Ohio and in southern Illinois there were hills and valleys, as at home. Here it was as flat as a table top and the sky was like an inverted bowl over their heads. As they passed through what is now Springfield, the county seat and the state capital, they saw no signs of human habitation; only the tracks of wild animals. On the south bank of the Sangamon River, a short distance from the southwest corner of what is now Logan County, a man named William Higgins had just built a cabin. They stayed overnight with him. Next morning they crossed to the north side of the river and there paced out, in the timber and prairie, the dimensions of their new farms. To prevent
others who might come after from choosing the same ground, they cut some logs, laid them across each other in three piles, and each man cut his initials on a tree to show that the land was claimed. Then they went back to their families. In March they returned, bringing Stephen England’s son David, who was still a boy, with them. A foot of snow fell the night they arrived. Homespun, deerhide, whatever they had on, offered almost no protection against the cold that blows across that country in the wintertime. Three of them were grown men and better acquainted with physical hardship, and what they experienced was only what they expected. They dismissed the cold from their minds, as they did the howling of the wolves. The boy, lying in the shelter of a fallen tree, with his father’s heavy arm around him, was close enough to childhood to be surprised that life was so unkind.
Stephen England and his son felled trees and cut logs for a cabin sixteen by eighteen feet, and soon had the walls up and the door and the chimney place cut out. Andrew Cline and Wyatt Cantrell still had their materials on the ground when the melting snow warned them that they must start south at once or they wouldn’t be able to get their wagons across the river. They tried to bring their families north immediately, but the teams weren’t equal to drawing the heavy wagons through the mud and slush. They gave it up. Taking two of Stephen England’s grown daughters with them to do the cooking, they went back to Sangamon County in April, completed their cabins, cleared land, and planted crops.
The first week in June, William Higgins’ wife and two daughters heard the crack of whips and the creaking of heavy wagon wheels. The dogs started to whine and bark. The women came out into the sunshine and stood with their hands shading their eyes, ready to greet their new neighbors.
That same spring, other families settled nearby and, “the
people having planted their crops, wished to have religious services, so Mr. England announced that he would preach at his own house late in June.… Everybody in the entire settlement came. Two women walked five miles through the grass, which was almost as high as their heads. The husband of one of them walked and carried their babe. That was the first sermon ever preached north of the Sangamon River in this county and probably in Central Illinois.”
*
The first year, the three families who settled on the north bank of the Sangamon River got about half a crop, but the following year the yield was nearly sixty bushels an acre. The flies would sometimes so trouble the horses and the oxen that they had to be driven into the timber and a fire kindled to drive the insects away. In the fall nearly everybody suffered from the shakes. You got it from walking through the wet grass. It had a fixed beginning and end, and came generally on alternate days. It was followed by a burning fever, and when that abated, the victim felt “entirely woebegone, disconsolate, sad, poor, and good for nothing.” A woman who went back to Tennessee reported that Illinois was a good place for men and horses, but it was hell on oxen and women.