The Travel Letters of Alexander Campbell . . .

THE MAJESTY OF NIAGARA FALLS

Any man traveling on the American frontier in the 1830’s would be expected to encounter hardships. If Alexander Campbell suffered more than was normal for his time, it was because he traveled more than was normal. Like the great apostle, Campbell could write of being “in journeys often,” and of long, arduous journeys as well. They were hazardous not only to his health but to his very life.

His journey to the Northeast in 1836, in company with Tolbert Fanning, was so perilous that he was led to say: “We are never fully sensible how much we owe to that Eye ‘which slumbers not nor sleeps,’ for our deliverance from harm and from danger; but there are certain occasions which more forcibly remind us of our obligations, and call forth our grateful acknowledgments to Him who is the guide and the guard of those who commit their steps to his direction.”

He spent all night traveling by stagecoach between Hudson and Bedford, Ohio, a distance of only 12 miles, due to rains and bad roads. Almost half that distance he had to walk through mud and swamps, abandoning the coach intermittently so as to avoid serious bodily injury. Swollen rivers, impossible roads, wilderness pathways, derailed trains, broken-down coaches, inoperable steamers, and reluctant horses were all within the experiences of this pioneer in broadcloth who shared in the romance of carving a nation out of a new frontier. The Mississippi and the Ohio were his avenues to a new world, though they were sometime too shallow for navigation or so caked with ice as to make travel most difficult. He was among the first to sail the Chesapeake and the Great Lakes, where he encountered storms equal to those on the high seas. Like Paul, Alexander Campbell could include in his perilous life shipwrecks at sea, dangers from rivers, danger in the wilderness, danger from false brethren, “toil and hardship through many a sleepless night,” cold and exposure. (2 Cor. 11)

Yet it was amidst these travels that his restoration mind forged some of those ideas that gave birth to a new religious movement. It was here that he was exposed to the raw nerve center of frontier religion. It was the frontier that he encountered in his travels that became his arena more than his editorial office back in Bethany. It was here amidst conversation and debate, whether in southern mansions, aboard a steamer, in the large cities, or on horseback, that he did much of his writing and thinking. It was on Lake Erie that he wrote part of the story of his journey to the Northeast, which he closed with the note “Written in the midst of a crowd, and with many interruptions.” The postscript well describes the context of Campbell’s life, so much of which took place “in the midst of a crowd.”

Cleveland in 1836 was to Campbell the most beautiful town of Ohio, which, even though but then a village, was destined, he believed, to be “the great emporium of the northern section of the state.” But it was terribly inflicted with the spirit of infidelity, he observed, which was the case with most new towns of the West in their first settlement. So he centered his ministry in Cleveland upon the sceptics, inviting them to “state their objections in public, and to open their difficulties to full and free discussion.”

He argued the authenticity of Christianity on the ground that if the New Testament should be destroyed the life of Jesus could be established from the writings of unbelieving Jews and pagans who flourished in that age, making reference to the histories of Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny, and the decrees of emperors Trajan, Adrian, and the Antonines. He insisted that even such enemies of the faith as Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian bear witness to the testimony of the apostles.

This confrontation with scepticism in Cleveland, similar to his experiences in New York, which we have described, is typical of Campbell’s struggle with secularism on the American frontier. He could rightly be called “the great apologist” of the nineteenth century. Only a small percentage of frontier folk were church members, and they were led by a virtually illiterate clergy that was incapable of coping with the aggressive scepticism that sprang from the rugged individualism of frontier life. Scepticism was advocated by intellectuals who were disgusted with ignorant and superstitious religionists, and who usually had no difficulty supporting their philosophy against the claims of an unlearned clergy, who usually avoided any confrontation.

So Alexander Campbell was something different, not only in his ability to expose scepticism as untenable, but his eagerness for the contest, inviting the leading sceptics in to the area for a showdown if not a shootout. He would debate with them until they gave up the fight or until he himself became exhausted. In Cleveland he had to step down because of severe hoarseness, only to have one of his colleagues carry on the exchanges that would extend for hour upon hour, day and night, and always before a crowded house.

Lake Erie, which was to Campbell “the American Mediterranean,” bore him toward Buffalo, despite difficulties. The shaft of the water-wheel broke before they were passed the lighthouse, delaying him for a day. Taking another steamer, one of its boilers failed, causing the passengers even more discomfort, for they were “rolled to and fro for half an hour, as in a tub over which we had no control.” Alexander records that the waves on Lake Erie were respectable even for the Atlantic, but he had a capacity to repose himself in the Lord when almost all others went without both appetite and sleep. While others were seasick, he reported to the diner as usual; and while others sat up and watched the storm, including Tolbert Fanning, he slept peacefully in his bunk until the ship was safely harbored at Buffalo.

There was no disciple congregation in Buffalo, then a city of 17,000, but Campbell does refer to several devoted advocates of reform who were interested in “getting up a church,” an unlikely expression for him. He addressed a Baptist church there, and met with disciples at Clarence and Williamsville, towns near Buffalo. While in the area he met men whose names have lived on in disciple history — J. M. Bartlett, Silas Shepherd, and J. M. Yearnshaw.

He was reluctant to tarry in Buffalo since it was “wholly given to speculation and idolatry of Mammon,” and so he turned to those whom he thought would be more receptive.

Sailing down the Niagara, he landed in Canada at the mouth of Chippewa creek, only two miles above Niagara Falls. Most of the passengers disembarked on the American side, because of the danger, for if anything happened to the machinery on the three-mile trip across the river, the ship would almost certainly be precipitated over the Falls.

Such flirtations with danger made Campbell something of a poet. In describing his experience at the edge of the Falls, he writes: “There is indeed something indescribably sublime in feeling, while floating across this river in sight of the foam and spray, and in hearing of these troubled waters, feeling at the same time the danger incident upon any contingency interrupting the motion of that complex machinery, on the regularity of which depends one’s escape from a catastrophe so evident and overwhelming.”

He was much impressed by the Falls, preparing a lengthy essay on his experience, which he sent back to Bethany so that his assistant editor, Robert Richardson, could include it in the Harbinger during his absence. He describes the origin of the Falls as “four inland seas,” giving the dimensions of each and how one feeds into the next, and each with its attending rivers directs its waters into the Falls. He points out that even as early as 1836 people from all over America and Europe visited the Falls.

Sitting as he did on the top of a tower 45 feet high, directly above the Falls, he looked down on the tremendous precipice and watched the waters fall 164 feet into a gulf 250 feet deep. “In the midst of such an uproar and war of elements, one feels more disposed to stand and gaze in mute astonishment, than attempt to give birth to the various conceptions and impressions which struggle within him, in the presence of objects so transcendingly magnificent and sublime.”

He closes his essay with a poem by a Mrs. Sigourney, which was his favorite tribute to the Falls. He allows his passion for baptism as immersion to show in publishing the poem, for he actually changes the poetess’ line, “Each leafy bough that lifts itself within thy proud domain, doth gather greenness from thy living spray, and tremble at the baptism,” so that the last word reads rantism, meaning sprinkling in the Greek.

Sprinkling is what the poetess really meant, Campbell insists in a footnote, allowing no place for poetic license, and so changes the text. One is left to wonder how many readers of Mrs. Sigourney’s poem would understand how leafy boughs would tremble at rantism, and the poetess might well insist that the gentleman from Virginia keep his cotton-pickin’ hands off her poem!

He was not as impressed with the religion of the people of Niagara village as he was the Falls. Addressing the Methodist Chapel on the kingdom of heaven, he found them more concerned with the growing fortunes of their community than the subject of his discourse.

He went on to Lewiston, N. Y., where he viewed the statue of General Brock, of Revolutionary War fame, standing 134 feet high, observing that it is a monument to the folly of human ambition and the wickedness of war undertaken by the foes of human rights. At Lockport a deluge of rain resulted in only a small crowd hearing him at a Universalist church, where he contended with the minister on future punishment. At Knowlesville he addressed the Baptists on the origin of the Christian dispensation. At Brockport he found a town “locked fast against our heresy,” with every church door closed against him. A Presbyterian minister complained that he would rather see the town embrace infidelity and all become Owenites than to become Campbellites. Securing the schoolhouse, he was still able to address a respectable audience. When the Methodist preacher found his sexton ringing the bell, signaling folk to the school for the service, he ran to him and forbade him to pull the rope again!

In Greece, N. Y. he met with a number of disciples, “healthy in the faith and zealous for the apostolic institutions,” in a private home. At Rochester, then only 14,000 population, he is impressed by the mighty Gennessee Falls, “second only to those of Niagara,” and comments on the milling industry on the river, that some mills produce 400 barrels of flour per day. The falls and rapids of western New York also make for great water power, enough to supply the entire state for a century, he calculated. But he complained of too much enterprise, as if speaking of our own time as well as his own.” The great multitudes are too much in the bustle to think, too much in the competition for the favors of fortune to listen to the claims of the Bible and its momentous concerns. A sure and infallible way to wealth would be much more acceptable to the great majority than a sure and infallible way to the enjoyment of God and heaven.

He likes his humour and in these travel letters he uses it to soften the pain of the hardships he endured.” I have not yet found a Calvinist in the state,” he says wryly, “who believes that the number of his dollars is so definite and fixed that not one can be added thereto or diminished therefrom.”

In Rochester he was so cruelly misjudged by the clergy that he was led to comment that the views and principles attributed to him through false imputation were really more abhorrent to himself than to his accusers. But he sees this as consistent with history, for all those who have sought to benefit mankind with new ideas have had imputed to them positions they never held.” Not one of a thousand has ever been opposed in his own true and proper character, but under a character manufactured for him in the loom of envy by the hand of jealousy, and dyed in the dark font of partizan heterodoxy,” he states.

On Lord’s day in Rochester he attended an old Baptist church, which typified to him the degenerate system whose death he sought to hasten. The audience stood to listen to a feeble choir, then sat as the minister prayed. But Campbell saw in the minister, an Elder Church, a man who stood superior to the system and the party, and one who could have great influence if he had the advantages of a more scriptural order. The elder’s sermon on the resurrection of Jesus impressed Campbell as “a practical and sensible discourse,” but he thought he erred in concluding that Jesus’ body was changed at the point of its resurrection from the tomb. True, Jesus showed unusual power over the laws of nature following his resurrection, such as walking through closed doors and disappearing into thin air, as Elder Church argued, but he also showed such powers during his life on earth. His body did not change, Campbell contends, until the ascension, which is when all of us shall experience the great transformation.

Campbell saw in Auburn, N. Y. one of America’s most beautiful cities, moving him to quote Goldsmith’s lines of another village of the same name: “Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain!” He mentions that some 15 old sea captains had chosen the village, then 7,000 in population, as their place of retirement. He also refers to Auburn’s two opposite institutions, a state penitentiary and a theological seminary, only a stone’s throw from each other!

He spent a half-day at the penitentiary, impressed as he was with its modernity as well as its massive walls. That the inmates were able to be productive in manufacturing various products, enabling the state to actually make money from the operation was partly responsible, he supposes, for their success in rehabilitating criminals. He saw it as a model prison, the finest in the United States. He comments that blacks made up an undue proportion of the prison population and women were disproportionately low in number, which he relates to his conviction that criminals are made through neglect of education in the early years. Nor can he bypass the fact that a number of the inmates were once gentlemen of the cloth who stood behind “the sacred desk” as teachers of religion, but who now suffer ignominiously for their hypocrisy.

As for the Presbyterian seminary, several of its 60 to 70 students turned up for his five lectures on the kingdom of God, but their professors kept a respectable distance. The seminarians, he supposed, were more interested in finding proof of his heterodoxy than in learning the character of the gospel, “a matter by far too simple to be taught in a school of technical and speculation divinity.” The Baptists opened their large house to him, and while its members thought him indeed some kind of speckled bird, he did not appear to them so far out “as one made for the cage, to be pecked by all the ravens and crows and vultures of the forests.”

Leaving Auburn, he moved on to Ira where he gave a 4th of July address to a church of 90-100 members on the good things of a better country. On to Cicero, he felt more at home than at any place in the state of New York, for here the brethren had a building of their own. It gave him opportunity to state that he always felt uneasy in the midst of rich disciples in meeting-houses belonging to their more liberal religious neighbors. Houses, like paper and ink, are important in being “ready unto every good work,” he argued, and he always encouraged the disciples to have a building for themselves and their friends when they call to see them.

In Cicero he met a young woman, Wealthy Ann Lathrop, who was one of his oldest correspondence, who had for years passed copies of the Christian Baptist and the Millennial Harbinger along to her friends in the Baptist church. This had brought the wrath of her minister down upon her, and by a vote of seven males (the sisters were not allowed to cast their lot) she had been summarily excommunicated from the fellowship of all regular Baptists in heaven and on earth. Campbell, impressed by her femininity as well as her intellectual graces, refers to her as “the protomartyr of the Apostles’ doctrine in the state of New York.” Her trials were so prolonged, he says, that they would furnish matter for a heroic poem of twelve books; but he is pleased that her courage and faithfulness gained the admiration and astonishment of the entire town. As for the preacher who got up a party for the express purpose of “putting down a girl,” Campbell describes his end as the visitation of cholera, and he had since been called “to give an account of his stewardship to Him who judges righteously.”

In Cicero he was also visited by an aged brother, Timothy Brewster, whom he describes as the first Baptist minister to avow allegiance to the restoration of the ancient faith. Suffering from rheumatism and the frailty of 76 years, he journeyed 40 miles in a buggy for an interview with Alexander Campbell. “There is something peculiarly consolatory and exhilarating in seeing an aged and venerable Father in Israel, with his eyes steadfastly fixed on the heavenly Canaan, standing forward on the bank of Jordan, and encouraging the sacramental host to combat the good combat of faith, and to lay hold on eternal life,” said Alexander of him after the visit. - the Editor

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