The Travel Letters of Alexander Campbell . . .

CAMPBELL’S EARLY JOURNEYS

Coming to America in 1809 as a young man barely 21, Alexander Campbell did not begin to travel extensively in the country until some twenty years afterward. These were the years he spent studying with his father Thomas, getting married, starting a seminary, formulating his view on restoration, preaching in the environs, and in 1823 starting the Christian Baptist. The circumstance, however, that catapulted him into prominence was his debate with John Walker in 1820 in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio and his subsequent discussion with W. C. McCalla in Washington, Kentucky in 1823. These debates were the occasion of his first extensive journeys away from his beloved Bethany, Virginia, and they aroused such widespread interest as to persuade him to publish first the Christian Baptist and later the Millennial Harbinger, which in turn became the contacts through which he became one of the most traveled men of his generation.

One of the mysteries of Campbell scholars is the disappearance from history of the many letters that he must have written to his first wife, Margaret, during these early trips away from home, one trip to Kentucky in 1824 lasting all of three months. Margaret died in 1827, just after taking a long journey with her husband to Nashville, having been Alexander’s wife for 16 rears. While there was little occasion for correspondence with her during most of those years, there must have been numerous letters written to her during the three or four years prior to her death, at which time Alexander began his long absences from home.

One view is that Selina, his second wife, destroyed them. Another is that Campbell removed them to his office at Bethany College, where they were burned with the college in 1853. If I were to guess, I would say that Alexander deposited them with Dr. Richardson, his biographer, and they were finally lost when his home was destroyed by fire. Against this view is that Dr. Richardson makes so little use of such letters, using only one of them in his Memoirs, one that Alexander wrote to Margaret while away in Kentucky to debate McCalla. But it is the inclusion of this one letter that supports my view, for if the doctor had one of the letters he might well have had them all, and he used none of the others because he had no occasion to do so. In any event I cannot believe that Selina would have destroyed them, for she simply loved Margaret too much for that, and, having an eye for history as she had, becoming herself a biographer of Campbell, she would not have destroyed such obviously significant material.

However that may be, it is an unfortunate loss. How I would like to have those letters in writing this series! I could make this first installment more interesting and more revealing of Campbell’s early thinking, that’s for sure. In the one letter that Richardson passes along to us, though not in its entirety, Alexander says to Margaret: “I intend, if my health will permit, to visit Lexington and Cincinnati after the debate, and therefore you need not expect to see me for nearly six weeks from my departure from home. I will write in a few days again.” He also tells his wife that there is great expectation and zeal in reference to the debate, but too much party spirit, and he hopes that through his efforts the cause of truth will be glorified.

If we had that letter that he said he would write to Margaret after a few more days, and others that no doubt followed, we might know more about his private judgements about the debate as well as about the exciting things that happened on his visit to Lexington (but not to Cincinnati), despite the illness he referred to, which was dyspepsia that had afflicted him since leaving home. During the McCalla debate and in his preaching engagements that followed, he was pale and exhausted and could not stand erect.

Campbell’s performance in the Walker and McCalla debates, in which he defended immersion as the scriptural mode of baptism, made him a hero among the Baptists, who, because of their lack of an educated ministry, were badly in need of someone to stand up for them against the sophisticated Presbyterians. McCalla himself, a Presbyterian divine, recognized Campbell as the chief exponent of the Baptist position. In preparation for the debate he wrote to Alexander: “I am inclined to meet you, not from any favorable opinion of your piety or sincerity, but because you are allowed (and I suppose justly) to be the greatest champion of baptism in America.”

So profuse was the outpouring of admiration from the Baptists that Campbell felt that honesty compelled him to relieve them of any apprehension that he was championing their cause. “Brethren, I fear if you knew me better you would esteem and love me less,” he said to the Baptist ministers at the McCalla debate in a private meeting with them. “Let me tell you that I have almost as much against you Baptists as I have against the Presbyterians. They err in one thing and you in another.” Led by Elder Vardeman, who became important to restoration efforts in Kentucky, the Baptist preachers asked of Campbell a list of particulars of what he thought their errors to be. He replied that he was too weary with debating with McCalla to undertake so heavy a task, but agreed to share with them some of the articles he had just issued in the Christian Baptist. having a few numbers of the new journal along with him that had not yet reached Kentucky.

The articles had to do with Campbell’s objection to the clergy system and “the call to the ministry,” as well as sectarian attitudes in missionary efforts. Vardeman and the other Baptists decided they could tolerate these peculiarities in Campbell’s thinking, and continued to view him as their chief spokesman and to circulate his writings far and wide. They began to change as Campbell began to stress the design of baptism as being “for the remission of sins,” as well as the mode of baptism. A break with the Baptists finally came, with Campbell debating them in his publications as much as those who practiced sprinkling. But in later years he expressed regret that the Disciples and Baptists ever had to go their separate ways, having as much in common as they had.

Following the McCalla debate Campbell visited Lexington and addressed Dr. James Fishback’s famous Baptist church, one of the most flourishing in all the West. To see Fishback himself would have been worth the trip, for he was a man of superior talents and imposing physique, having been both a lawyer and physician before his ordination to the Presbyterian clergy. One convinced that immersion was the true mode of baptism, he cast his lot with a small and despised Baptist group only to build it into a great congregation. There stood Alexander Campbell in his pulpit, still a young man and a stranger from the hills of Western Virginia. Basing his remarks upon Heb. 1 and rejecting the “textuary preaching” so common in that day, he spoke for two hours upon the divine glory of the Son of God, despite his illness, to an audience that sat in rapt attention.

In the audience sat a youth named Theodore S. Bell, who was to become a distinguished physician in Louisville. In later life after Campbell had long since become a famous man, Dr. Bell wrote:

“I never had heard anything that approached the power of that discourse, nor have I ever heard it equaled since. Under the training of my mother, one of the most thorough scholars in the Bible that I ever knew, and of Dr. Fishback, although I then made no pretensions to Christianity, I was almost as familiar with the Bible as with my alphabet. But that speech on Hebrews lifted me into a world of thought of which I had previously known nothing. It has been 45 years since I heard that pulpit discourse, but it is as vivid in my memory, I think, as when I first heard it.”

It is difficult for us, amidst all our technology, to realize the hardships of the traveling man on the American frontier in the 1820’s. To meet his appointment for the debate with Mr. McCalla, 300 miles from Bethany, Alexander rode horseback for ten long days. He could have gone by steamboat part of the way, but the Ohio was then too low for navigation. One can fly these days from Dallas to Houston, a similar distance, in 45 minutes! Wouldn’t such a possibility have fascinated the mind of Campbell, who became an authority on travel in a growing nation through some 40 years of experience?

On that journey by horseback through the wilderness of Ohio and Kentucky he was accompanied, interestingly enough, by Sidney Rigdon, who was then a Baptist pastor in Pittsburg, but who was later to become one of the founding fathers of Mormonism. At the discussion Rigdon took copious notes that Campbell later used in publishing the McCalla debate, revealing a talent that he later used in revamping a fanciful novel by one Mr. Spaulding into the Book of Mormon, or so it is claimed. In any event Mr. Rigdon was a man for novelty. having both the holy kiss and foot-washing in his Pittsburg church. Campbell was later compelled to expose the Book of Mormon as a hoax and to reject Sidney Rigdon. But no doubt he often thought of that long horseback journey with Rigdon as he witnessed the growth of Mormonism and its move across the West to build a magic city in Utah. By then, however, Rigdon was out of it, having competed with Brigham Young for leadership and lost.

The following year, 1824, Campbell made a short journey over into Ohio as a representative of the Wellsburg, Virginia congregation to the Mahoning Association of Churches, and later in the year a 90-day tour into Kentucky where he met both Barton W. Stone and Raccoon John Smith.

There is an interesting story behind Alexander being appointed messenger of the Wellsburg church, a few miles distant from his home in Bethany. The first church of the Campbell wing of the movement was at Brush Run, near Washington, Pennsylvania, which grew out of the Christian Association, the group organized by Thomas Campbell that had no intention of becoming a church and wanted only to be a force for unity in the established churches. After the Campbells were rejected by the Presbyterians, the Brush Run congregation, where Alexander was a member joined the Redstone Association, a confederation of Baptist churches.

These were days when Campbell was not faring too well with Baptist ministers, who had decided to exclude him from the next meeting of the association. Learning that the clergy of the Redstone group were ganging up on him, Alexander quietly asked permission of the Brush Run group to take some 30 of their members and start a new congregation at Wellsburg, which was somewhat nearer their homes. This made Alexander a member of Wellsburg, so when the Redstone people met, he was present merely as a spectator, while others, including Thomas Campbell, were delegates from Brush Run. When the time came to refuse Alexander a seat in the association, they were stymied when they learned he was no longer a member at Brush Run, but of a church that had membership in another association.

“Never,” said Alexander afterwards, “did hunters, on seeing the game unexpectedly escape from their toils at the moment when its capture was sure, glare upon each other a more mortifying disappointment than that indicated by my pursurers at that instant, on hearing that I was out of their bailiwick, and consequently out of their jurisdiction.”

It is interesting that the Mahoning group “At the request of the Church of Christ at Wellsburg received it into the Association,” which may be the earliest use of that name in our history. When the Brush Run congregation disbanded and moved to Bethany in about 1827, they erected a brick building which still stands, bearing the name Church of Christ, chiseled in stone above the door. Barton Stone, down in Kentucky, was also using this name, gladly calling himself an “elder in the Church of Christ.” In time however this name, only sparingly used in the growing movement, gave way to Disciples of Christ, the term preferred by Alexander.

The trip to Kentucky was an effort to bring Baptist churches into the movement for reform. He felt close enough to them to believe that they might rally to a call for change that would effect the whole Christian world. In a letter to a correspondent in Missouri he writes: “I intend to continue in connection with this people so long as they will permit me to say what I believe and to censure what is amiss.” He added: “I have no idea of adding to the catalogue of new sects. I labor to see sectarianism abolished and all Christians of every name united upon the one foundation upon which the apostolic Church was founded. To bring Baptists and Pedobaptists to this is my supreme end.”

It was with this spirit that he visited the Kentucky Baptists, among whom he found several with like-minded views of reform, mainly Barton W. Stone, whom he met at Georgetown. Others who became prominent figures in our history that he met on this journey were Jacob Creath, Sr., James Challen, and Raccoon John Smith.

In his Biography Stone says he heard Campbell several times during his sojourns into Kentucky, in both public and private meetings. “I saw no distinctive feature between the doctrine he preached and that which we had preached many years, except on baptism for remission of sins,” he wrote. Campbell was not explicit enough in reference to the influence of the Spirit, Stone said, but added that later in life Campbell became more explicit. Had he done this earlier many honest souls would still be with us, Stone went on to say.

As for Campbell’s character Stone wrote: “I will not say there are no faults in brother Campbell; but that there are fewer, perhaps, in him, than any man I know on earth; and over these few my love would throw a veil, and hide them from view forever. I am constrained, and willingly constrained, to acknowledge him as the greatest promoter of this reformation of any man living. The Lord reward him! “

This gracious tribute to Campbell tells us more about Stone than it does about Campbell. One does not associate with leaders in the church for long without realizing that this willingness to step back and give the other fellow the credit is rare indeed. Stone was 15 years older than Campbell, and he was busy in reformatory efforts while Campbell was still but a lad back in Ireland. Besides, the youthful reformer from Virginia was invading his territory. But Stone was not a small person given to jealously and envy. He rather fell in love with Campbell and thanked God for his labors. That is the stuff that true reformations are made of.

And Alexander reciprocated with like trust and friendship. Despite the disagreements they were never able to resolve, some of them perhaps serious, they loved each other as brothers in the Lord. Campbell once wrote to Stone following a serious dispute on the nature of the preexistent Christ: “I will call you brother because you once told me that you could conscientiously and devoutly pray to the Lord Jesus Christ as though there was no other God in the universe than he.” The Stone-Campbell controversy is a testimonial to us all of how men can differ and still be brothers together in the Lord, loving each other fervently.

Some two years before Campbell’s first trip into Kentucky, Raccoon John Smith was addressing his Baptist congregation. He suddenly stopped and cried out to the surprised audience, “Something is wrong among us, but how to get it right I know not.” It seems to have taken an Alexander Campbell to get Raccoon and his Baptist friends moving in the right direction. Once copies of the Christian Baptist fell into his hands, Raccoon was more than eager to lay his eyes on the reformer from Virginia, around whom there was now a whirlwind of controversy.

When Alexander came into Raccoon’s part of Kentucky, the pious backwoods preacher hurried to meet him. So eager was he to study the man who had implanted so many new thoughts into his mind that he wanted to sit down and scan him for an hour, without anyone saying a word. But he only had time to meet the man before it was time to hear him speak. Campbell spoke that evening on the allegory of Sarah and Hagar in Gal. 4. Raccoon kept listening for some clue that would reveal what sect Campbell belonged to, but there was none. “He seemed to move in a higher sphere than that in which these isms abounded,” he said.

Once the service had ended Raccoon complained to a friend, “Is it not a little hard to ride thirty miles to hear a man preach thirty minutes’?” The friend suggested that he look at his watch, which revealed that Campbell had spoken for two and a half hours! To which Raccoon responded, “Two hours of my time are gone and I know not how, though wide awake. When asked by a friend as to whether he discovered Campbell’s ism, Raccoon replied: “No, I know nothing about him, but, be he devil or saint, he has thrown more light on that epistle and the whole Scriptures than I have heard in all the sermons I ever listened to before.”

Able to be with Alexander privately for awhile, Raccoon asked him to tell him his religious experience, a subject that much engrossed his thinking at the time. Campbell related an experience that more than satisfied Raccoon, who insisted it would be accepted by any Baptist church in the land, though no details were given. One wonders what Campbell said in relating his experience to a Calvinistic Baptist.

Such are some of the highlights of Campbell’s early travels, which are but a prelude to the great drama that was to unfold in his life at home and abroad. — the Editor

Next installment: Campbell takes his dying wife to Nashville.