Overview
Robert Bray tells the full story of the long relationship between Cartwright and Lincoln, including their political campaigns against each other, their social antagonisms, and their radical disagreements on the Christian religion, as well as their shared views on slavery and the central fact of their being "self-made."
In addition, the biography examines in close detail Cartwright's instrumental role in Methodism's bitter "divorce" of 1844, in which the southern conferences seceded in a remarkable prefigurement of the United States a decade later. Finally, Peter Cartwright attempts to place the man in his appropriate national context: as a potent "man of words" on the frontier, a self-authorizing "legend in his own time," and, surprisingly, an enduring western literary figure.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252090592 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Peter Cartwright, Legendary Frontier Preacher
By ROBERT BRAY
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09059-2
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Conviction
Be ashamed of nothing but sin.
Exactly when the Cartwrights left Virginia for Kentucky isn't known, but it was probably in the late summer or fall of 1790, in the first of several removals, always instigated by the father and always into emptier western territory. They were literally following in the tracks of thousands of Virginians who had gone before. In the years since 1783 and peace with Britain, the Cartwrights had watched the emigrant stream flow by, heading southward along the Blue Ridge—like an endless parade across their dooryard—then west over the mountains. Now, after selling their bit of property and preparing as best they could, it was their turn to go. They joined a train of more than two hundred families, supported by another group of one hundred unattached "young men, well armed," who were to help secure the party in return for food and shelter along the way (17–18). But strength in numbers could not save them from a terrible part of the rite of Kentucky passage: Indian depredations. One night close to their journey's end, seven entire families perished because, exhausted, they foolishly balked at pushing on a few more miles to safety at Crab Orchard, the first white settlement on the trail. The Cartwrights had the woodcraft to know better. "Thus you see," Peter Jr. remembered in 1856, from a huge distance in time and civilization, "what perilous times the first settlers had to reach that new and beautiful country of 'canes and turkeys'" (21).
In fact, the Cartwrights were far from being the "first settlers" in Kentucky. They essentially followed the old "Warriors' Path" and Daniel Boone's route, a trail worn deep by more than twenty years of white westward movement. Passing through the Cumberland Gap, they headed up the Wilderness Road, little more than a trace wide enough for pack horses, through Crab Orchard, and into the settled part of Kentucky, Bourbon and Lincoln Counties. Besides six-year-old Peter and his father and mother, the family group included John and Edmund Wilcox, young Peter's half-brothers, and his two sisters, Rosanna and Polly. Somewhere up the trail toward Lexington they were to meet Justinian Cartwright, Peter Sr.'s younger brother, who had emigrated much earlier with his wife, Frances, and several children. By 1790, Jesse, as he was familiarly called, had been in Kentucky for nearly ten years, having originally come out in 1781 as a surveyor for Lincoln County, where he remained to farm and perhaps practice law. Thus he knew the country well and could advise his brother about the best places to locate.
The Autobiography implies that the family went directly to Lincoln County: "After my father reached Kentucky he rented a farm for two years in Lincoln County, on what was called the 'Hanging Fork of Dick's [Dix] River,' near Lancaster, the county seat" (23). But another source suggests that the Cartwrights' first Kentucky location was rather in Bourbon County, closer to Lexington and the center of the state's population on the eve of statehood. The name "Peter Cartwright" appears on two petitions from "sundry inhabitants of the County of Bourbon" that were sent to the Virginia state government (both undated, but one endorsed at Richmond on "Octo. 22nd 1790"). The first of these pled for continued and unobstructed navigation of the Licking River above the "Junction of Hinkson and Stoner fork," the better to get their tobacco to market, and therefore against the allowance of a grist mill across the waterway, as was being petitioned by other of the "sundry inhabitants." The second asked for a tobacco inspection station in their "County town ... situate upon Stoners fork of Licking." If this is the same Peter Cartwright—and there is no evidence for more than one adult of that name in early Kentucky—we can suppose that the family stopped a while in Bourbon County, where Peter Sr. lent his name to "internal improvements" petitions, though not a freeholder or even intending to stay in the area. Perhaps they simply wintered over and moved on in the spring of 1791, which would square with Peter Jr.'s recollection that they lived in Lincoln County for two years, biding their time until the lands "south of Green River" were officially opened to settlers. In any case, by the fall of 1793 they were ready to go again: south into newly formed Logan County, where they hoped to redeem their Revolutionary War warrants and pick up some cheap acreage besides. This time, Justinian Cartwright and his family went along.
Wherever Peter Sr. moved in Kentucky—Lincoln, Logan, or Livingston Counties—his character would be closely associated with his brother's, so closely indeed that history has occasionally switched their identities. One persistent tradition even makes Justinian the father of Peter Jr., a mistake not fully erased from the record to this day. Its source was Susannah Johnson, a Methodist associate of the family and a Livingston County neighbor between 1805 and 1815, who confused the brothers' names in recalling Cartwright's parentage: "His father, old Justinian Cartwright, was quite a poor man, and not so much a bad as a good-for-nothing kind of man. Mrs. Cartwright had been a Widow Wilcox, and had two sons—Edmund, who became a local preacher in the Methodist church, and John, who after a life of wickedness, fraud, theft, perjury, and murder, atoned for his crimes upon the scaffold—stained in soul, as many believe, with the blood of his own son." And that wasn't the worst, Johnson recalled. Cartwright's sister Polly "'took up' with a man named Pentecost, led a life of dissipation and debauchery, and died respected or lamented by nobody," while Christiana Cartwright she called a termagant: "A woman of fierce and ungovernable passions, subjugating husband, children and all others in her power, in most relentless style."
Susannah Johnson's portrait of the Cartwrights in Kentucky has endured, despite her obvious animus and a memory as cloudy as her rheumy eyes. Recollections of the Rev. John Johnson (1869) was the product of her last years, viva-voce rocking-chair reminiscences of people and events fifty years gone, which her son Adam dutifully recorded but couldn't save from sounding like wholesale calumny. She probably did know the family well, which makes the misidentification of Cartwright's father all the more unaccountable. Justinian's wife's name was Frances, not Christiana, and if either Cartwright brother was "good-for-nothing," it was Peter Sr. Justinian seems always to have been the more successful of the two. When his health was broken during the Revolution, he hired a substitute "at the enormous price of $500 equal to silver," and his Kentucky land holdings were more than two thousand acres in Caldwell County alone. Then, too, his name appears in the public record much more often than his brother's: as a justice of the peace, a constable, a trader in land, even something of a philanthropist. In other words, a squire, or nearly so. By contrast, Peter Sr., who pursued the delusion of "gentleman planter" all his life, occupied a succession of small farms in several counties and was heard of no more until his death in 1809, when he left personal property worth about four hundred dollars—half of which was in horseflesh. It may be that Susannah Johnson remembered the character of Peter but called him Justinian—a plausible mistake in view of the latter's living in the area for more than twenty years after his brother's death.
The Autobiography does not reveal much about Cartwright's parents. From Christiana he received religion and a sufficiently strong will to follow it; Peter Sr. provided the example of a Revolutionary patriot and an intrepid woodsman. An anecdote from the "dark and bloody ground," tinged with myth, shows the son's admiration. Cartwright recalled that during the migration his father, while on sentinel duty, raised his rifle and felled an Indian from a great distance in the dead of night—Hawkeye personified (18–19). Peter Sr. was for the boy an important model of Virginia backcountry manhood (and Cartwright's uncle Justinian was probably another from the same mold). It was a manhood now truly to be tested. They were going to Rogues' Harbor, refuge of hardened criminals from all over, many of whom had come to the area prior to Kentucky's statehood and regarded the land as incontestably theirs, the law whatever they would make it.
* * *
Peter Sr. entered land near the present town of Adairville, twelve miles south of Logan Court House, soon to be renamed Russelville and made the county seat. The home farm, eventually extending over some two hundred acres, was just a mile north of the Tennessee line, part of a larger tract that had not been surveyed before settlement. Where "land claims overlapped each other like shingles on a roof," it was not uncommon for several claimants to assert title to the same land—and all of them have a good case. Peter Sr. once more found himself living on a crazy-quilt of metes and bounds with no sure way of knowing his own property from his neighbors'. This was land that rolled without being hilly, amply watered with springs and branches, including the Red River, which flowed beside where the Cartwrights chose to build their cabin. Thus his promise to Christiana he could redeem: despite plenty of timber, the land was sufficiently "barren" to make large-scale clearing unnecessary. There was indeed a meadow right out her front door. Beneath its grasses was a soil as red as the sunburned necks of the Cartwrights soon working it, but fertile enough to support subsistence crops (maize, flax, and cotton, along with herbs for tea) as well as tobacco for barter and specie.
And then a pleasant surprise: on the eastern edge of the farm they discovered two saltpeter caves—raw material for gunpowder, which they later manufactured, exported, and profited from. Cartwright remembers making the stuff: "really number one" in quality, "strange to say." Together with some neighbors they "cut down a large poplar-tree, and dug out a large and neat canoe," which they heaped up with homemade gunpowder and "launched ... into Red River, to go out into Cumberland River, and at the mouth of said river to ascend the Ohio river" to the destination: an army garrison at Ft. Massaic in the Illinois Territory. This back-door, backwater trading expedition became a community event. Everyone had a wish-list—coffee, cutlery, ribbons, tinware—to be traded for with the staple gunpowder. The pilot was a local Methodist who took the makeshift canoe down and up the several rivers, returning after having bargained with the army "to the satisfaction of nearly all concerned" (26–27).
Yet until this cottage gunpowder industry could get established, the Cartwrights hunted and gathered for survival.
We killed our meat out of the woods, wild; and beat our meal and hominy with a pestle and mortar. We stretched a deer-skin over a hoop, burned holes in it with the prongs of a fork, sifted our meal, baked our bread, eat it, and it was first-rate eating too. We raised, or gathered out of the woods, our own tea. We had sage, bohea, cross-vine, spice, and sassafras teas in abundance. As for coffee, I am not sure that I ever smelled it for ten years. We made our sugar out of the water of the maple-tree, and our molasses too. These were great luxuries in those days. (26–27)
They needed shelter for at least five people—the parents, Peter Jr., and his two sisters—and seven if John and Edmund Wilcox lived with the family, which they probably did at first, though old enough to begin thinking of independence. Accordingly, the Cartwrights raised a cabin that still stands today, though barely, on the old claim. The cabin has long since been abandoned and is now ramshackle and overgrown with brush. Local tradition is fully satisfied that this is in fact the original Cartwright dwelling, and if archaeologists have doubts, they have wisely not looked too closely into the matter. The relic is a tin-roofed, puncheon-log structure about fifteen by twenty feet, with a sturdy brick chimney on its north face. There is a half-story above—really just a sleeping loft with narrow stairs—and two rooms below, a main living area and kitchen. If a cabin of this size housed seven Cartwrights, the crowding must have been stultifying even to people used to packing close together. In this cramped space Christiana Cartwright made their home. Besides tending Peter's two sisters, she kept a weather eye out for him as he approached adolescence—dividing his time between the house and working in the fields with his father and his two half-brothers.
The family almost certainly did all their own labor. In the early Logan County years the Cartwrights owned no slaves, more from penury than principle. If lack of land was one reason they had left Virginia, the shadow of slavery was another: even presuming Christiana's moral misgivings and Peter Sr.'s Republican notions of equality, the plain fact was that they simply hadn't been able to keep up with the larger Amherst planters like their neighbor, William Cabell, whose hundred slaves were needed to work his extensive holdings—which grew as he bought out the Cartwrights and others giving up on Virginia. One brother who stayed behind, John Cartwright, did own a few slaves. Justinian and Peter Sr. saw that slave labor undercut their yeomanly prosperity and put them in a bind: either they acquired slaves or they couldn't compete. Like Kentuckians generally, then and afterward, they temporized with the peculiar institution, which only made it stronger. As Peter Jr. realized years later, where slavery (and so much else) was concerned, Kentucky was Virginia's unnatural offspring. It had been foolish of the Cartwrights to expect otherwise.
So the only labor the Cartwrights could force was their own: the men outside, Christiana and her little helpers within. Besides cooking and cleaning, she made the family's clothes from cotton and flax grown in a back patch. She picked the fibers, "scutched," spun, wove, and sewed the garments. Peter helped with the domestic work. No wonder that he remembered the word "scutch" fifty years later: he had blistered his young hands beating flax. This particular childhood memory was washed in nostalgia. He remembered sallying out into company in the new homespun suit that was the first fruit of their mutual labor, thinking himself, with characteristic democratic pride and humor, "as big as anybody" (26).
In that gloomy cabin, nearly airless despite a couple of windows, Christiana Cartwright did more than keep house. She made their home a center for local Methodism. Duly transferring her membership from Virginia to Kentucky, she renewed the "Methodist connection" with two circuit preachers who were to become important influences in her son's life: John Page, whom she had already known in Lincoln County, would toward the end of the 1790s ride Red River Circuit and assist in Peter Jr.'s conversion in 1801; and Jacob Lurton, who visited them in Logan County, the first "real son of thunder" Peter Cartwright ever heard. Lurton was one of the many preachers of the Western Conference who came and went on the frontier, leaving scarcely a ripple in the history of Methodism, however deep his lifetime's soundings. Yet this all but anonymous evangelist worked effectively wherever he was sent—New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and finally Kentucky, whose Salt River and Cumberland Circuits (1793–94) proved his most arduous and his last before locating. Lurton, moreover, deserves some credit for laying the fire (if not lighting it) that James McGready and his Presbyterians would make blaze later in the decade.
Sometime in the fall or winter of 1794 Lurton came to Logan County as a precursor of the Kentucky Revival. Soon he appeared at the Cartwrights' door and asked liberty to preach in their cabin. Of course such visits did not just happen. The Methodists had an amazing network of faithful in the scattered West, both members and preachers. Lurton may not have been acquainted with the Cartwrights when he rode up to the house, but he almost certainly knew who they were, given Christiana's "connection" and her reputation as an ardent member of the church. Thus Lurton could count on what he could not in many frontier places: a warm welcome and ready permission to hold services. Cartwright highlighted the occasion in the Autobiography, his recollection clear: "I was then in my ninth year, and was sent out to invite the neighbors to come and hear preaching. Accordingly they crowded out, and filled the cabin to overflowing. Jacob Lurton was a real son of thunder. He preached with tremendous power, and the congregation were almost all melted to tears; some cried aloud for mercy, and my mother shouted aloud for joy" (24–25). Behind the formulaic revival prose and the long distance in time stands a wide-eyed boy. Like the best of his western brethren, Lurton was said to have an "original genius" that everywhere caused people to "crowd out" to his meetings, which became important social as well as religious events. The thundering was loud, the "theater" participatory and communal in that tiny cabin overflowing with neighbors. Lurton offered liberation from a more than symbolic confinement, and it must have seemed at times like those that the roof really was raised, letting in a glimpse of open heaven and a touch of its sweet air. Especially the women felt it: Christiana "shouted aloud for joy," as many of her sisters did for mercy. Lurton's words and presence melted almost all of the folk to tears, the significant exceptions being the boy and his father, the latter never professing—young Peter, though awed by Lurton's charisma, was as yet untouched by the Holy Spirit. For the first time that night in the crowded cabin he felt the authority of a gifted individual whose remarkable voice was at the service of a community badly in need of it. Here was another kind of western hero, courageous as the backwoodsman yet religious and communitarian at heart.
It was an important lesson that helped the boy understand the violence all around him. Sometime not too long after their arrival in Logan County, the Cartwrights may have participated in the murderous "Rogues' Harbor War" between entrenched criminals and newly arriving "law and order" settlers. According to the Autobiography the situation was desperate, with the Rogues a majority of the population, using both the power of the vote and inveterate perjury to defy all law. Thus the "honest part of the citizens" felt driven to take matters into their own hands:
Shortly after the Regulators had formed themselves into a society, and established their code of by-laws, on a court day in Russelville, the two bands met in town. Soon a quarrel commenced, and a general battle ensued between the rogues and Regulators, and they fought with guns, pistols, dirks, knives, and clubs. Some were actually killed, many wounded; the rogues proved victors, kept the ground, and drove the Regulators out of town. The Regulators rallied again, hunted, killed, and lynched many of the rogues, till several of them fled, and left for parts unknown. (25)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Peter Cartwright, Legendary Frontier Preacher by ROBERT BRAY. Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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