The Travel Letters of Alexander Campbell . . .

HOME SWEET HOME

There is no question but what Alexander Campbell loved Virginia, the Old Dominion, and especially the village of Bethany, which he himself named, and the domestic serenity it provided him. His extended tours to all parts of our young nation, and finally even abroad to Great Britain and Scotland, which were sometimes upwards of six months in duration, are not to be interpreted as an indifference on his part to the family hearth, or that he had about as soon be out in the hustings as to be at home. The truth seems to be that Alexander was not only devoted to his family, but that it was with considerable difficulty for him to be away as much as he was.

From New Orleans in 1839 he wrote to Selina back in Bethany: “We are all homesick enough, but as much as I desire to see my dear Selina and my children and friends—and I never more longed to see them all—I must, like the soldier enlisted in the war of his country and kin, faithfully serve my term and get an honorable discharge. I have undertaken a mission and I must perform it all.” On the same journey he wrote from Jackson, La.: “I only want the consolations of your presence, my dear Selina, to fill up the measure of my earthly happiness, and to see my dear family partaking with me in the good things of the heavenly religion of our Savior and benefactor. Amidst all the company which I have around me—and it is most acceptable and often greatly interesting—there is none that can fill the place of the mother of my dear children and the partner of all my fortunes, good and evil. Strange relation! Wonderful union! Certainly it is a divine institution? God said it is not good for man to be alone. Alone in the midst of society I often am, merely because I am not all here.”

It was Margaret of course, and not Selina, who was the wife of his youth, and some have wondered if Campbell was ever as devoted to his second wife as he was the first, or if Selina ever felt as loved and appreciated as Margaret must have. Dr. Richardson, his biographer, describes Campbell as a man naturally inclined to conjugal devotion and recounts instances in which he shows unusual kindness and solicitation toward Selina. His many letters to her would suggest as much. On the 28th anniversary of his first marriage, he wrote to Selina from Louisville, Ky., referring to Margaret as the one “who desired to bless both you and me by nominating you to be her successor.” While he believes no doubt as to his great love and appreciation for Margaret, he makes it clear that Selina is “all that is desirable in a woman.” And she might well have dropped a tear when he added, after four months away from home, “I have seen many an amiable and excellent woman since I gave you my heart and my hand for life, I have never thought that I saw one more deserving of my affection and esteem than yourself.”

In this letter he promises Selina, as if with a pang of conscience, that he will never leave her so long again, which happened that time to be a few days short of six months. Except for his trip abroad he kept that promise. He goes on in the letter, almost like a child, to ask Selina to pray for him, that he will be humble, spiritual, and devoted to the Lord. This soul-baring letter gives support to Louis Cochran’s view in The Fool of God that Alexander was nagged by pride and self-sufficiency, especially when he writes of how the Lord has borne with all his frailties—“and I am aware they are neither few nor little.”

Between his trip to New York and New England, which we reviewed in our. last, and this trip to the deep South, the travel letters which we are now studying, Campbell conducted that great debate with the Roman Catholic divine, Bishop Purcell, in Cincinnati in January, 1837. Dr. Richardson tells us that this debate did much to disabuse the clerical mind of its prejudices toward Campbell, which included the famous Lyman Beecher of Cincinnati; and it set the stage for a more candid hearing for his plea for primitive Christianity. Too, the published debate had an extensive sale, raising him to a much higher position than he had yet attained in the eyes of the public. His part of the proceeds of the sale of the book, which was considerable, he donated to Bible societies, remaining consistent to his vow never to accept remuneration for his work for the Lord. That means that all these tours were at his own expense, which accounts for his concern for the cost of things as reflected in these letters. The cost of travel in the South, he tells us for example, was twice as high as in the North, due probably to the sparse population!

He took his daughter Lavinia with him on this trip South. She was about 20, the fourth of Margaret’s five daughters, left for Selina to mother. Selina says that Lavinia was tall and sprightly like her mother. “She was beautiful, and she was graceful in her walk, and needed not the graceless French accomplishment of learning to dance,” wrote Selina of her in her Home Life and Reminiscences of Alexander Campbell. She was at this time unmarried, and Selina reveals that men across the country were always wanting to marry the pretty and intelligent Campbell girls, bearing their requests to their father rather than the girls themselves! Lavinia married William K. Pendleton, who later became the second president of Bethany College. She died a few years after her marriage, but left a daughter, Alexandrina Campbellina (guess who she was named for!), who became one of Bethany’s great teachers, and is the one that kept the college alive during its darkest days of financial crisis by summoning support through endless letters. There is quite a tradition around Bethany about “Miss Cammie,” not only as a great teacher but also as having the drive and determination of her grandfather. There was also a skeleton in her closet, for in her youth she had run away to California to marry some rogue, only to be deserted. Her father went after her, and somehow they slammed the door tight on the old skeleton, and “Miss Cammie” went on to become an important part of Bethany history, few people ever knowing that she had once been married.

William K. Pendleton, by the way, was son-in-law to Campbell twice, having married Lavinia’s younger sister Clarinda sometime after Lavinia’s passing. Selina always felt an obligation to defend this circumstance, insisting that “there is nothing at all in the scriptures against it,” even though there were efforts then afoot in England to legislate against a man marrying his sister-in-law.

In one of his letters back home, Alexander mentions that Lavinia is insisting, despite all the great country she had seen, that there is no place like Virginia. Alexander was tempted to agree. Like that old Virginian that he so greatly admired, Thomas Jefferson, Campbell believed that there was something special about Virginia. He wrote of how those who have traveled the world, including the plains of Italy, Spain, and France saw in Virginia “the most to please and admire, the most to raise, excite, and transport the mind of a scientific and cultivated beholder.” Though Virginia was his adopted land, he found it more exciting than all his memories of Scotland and Ireland. Virginia was his home, and there was no place like home.

On this trip South Alexander encountered a Dr. John Thomas in Painesville, Va., which gives us insight into Campbell’s attitude toward other believers. Thomas, who had been immersed by Walter Scott, the most legalistic of our pioneer fathers, was a dogmatist about immersion for remission of sins, insisting that only those so immersed, who understood remission as the purpose of baptism, were truly disciples. He would not even pray with the Baptists since they did not have proper knowledge of baptism. This remains a problem even to this day in the Campbell movement, and it may be helpful to see how Alexander handled it.

Richardson assures us that Campbell always opposed the practice of reimmersion, insisting that baptism is valid wherever there is a sincere belief in Christ, however ignorant one may be of the import of immersion. Campbell believed that nothing could justify immersing again one who had already been buried with Christ unless the individual was destitute of faith in Christ at the time. But Thomas was an able and persuasive man, using his talents to disturb people about the validity of their baptism, and many, including some immersed by the reformers themselves, were reimmersed, just to be sure.

Thomas had been a guest in the Campbell home, and he held great promise for the movement, so Alexander sought to avoid a confrontation. that would destroy his usefulness. But when Thomas went on to teach what we would now call “Russellism,” or a materialistic, soul-sleeping doctrine that denied a final judgment, Campbell concluded that the man was seeking to build a sect for himself and thus discredit the reformation effort. So Campbell confronted Thomas before his own followers in private discussions, and when it was agreed that it should be taken to the public, several open sessions were conducted. This was sufficient to expose Thomas’ opinionism and he consequently lost the influence he had among the disciples.

The question of reimmersion was again to rise several generations afterwards among Texas ministers, this time to be opposed and discredited by David Lipscomb of the Gospel Advocate. Interestingly enough, the Firm Foundation, one of Texas’ leading brotherhood papers, was started as an effort to resurrect the old doctrine of Dr. John Thomas. This story makes it clear enough where Campbell stood, who probably would not have reimmersed a person even upon request. Through all these years our pioneers would not have considered reimmersing a Baptist. They were accepted as Christians who only needed to give up their man-made creeds and stand upon the primitive gospel itself.

The letters on this trip South, which took Campbell through the nation’s capital and on down to New Orleans, express his views on many interesting topics, secular as well as religious, revealing the breadth of his interest in his expanding world. In Washington he is impressed with “the pomp and splendor” of the rising Capitol, still unfinished in 1838. The sculpture adorning the new building he recognized as Roman and pagan, and saw in this evidence that the gospel of peace had had little influence upon Americans, if indeed theirs is a representative government. It leads him to assert that “I know of nothing more antipodal to the gospel than politics,” an unlikely statement for one who had himself served the constitutional convention of Virginia.

The leaky rundown church houses he had to speak in in southern Virginia led him to file some complaints on church architecture. First, they should be as clean, comfortable and commodious as the homes of the members. They should avoid the appearance of magnificent display on the one hand, and cheerless, squalid poverty on the other. He admitted that saints should be satisfied with caves or cottages in times of persecution, but when believers are prosperous they should erect buildings suitable for the ministry of the Word. It bothered him to leave with his host from an elegant home and repair to a dilapidated building for a Christian service.

He complained that those who erect church houses show less science and imagination than in any other kind of architecture, a disease common to all sects. Pulpits are absurdly arranged, for example, for the speaker should be the lowest man in the room, so that he might be seen and heard and get good air. The auditorium should thus be on an inclined plane from the pulpit toward the back, one foot incline for every eight or ten. The ceiling should never be more than 16 feet above the floor, and ‘Windows that will open and close should be large. How he would have appreciated air-conditioning! Stoves should never be near the speaker, the source of many a sore throat for him, he says.

It was a thrill to him to get to see the University of Virginia, which in 1838 had an impressive enrollment of 250. It did great credit to its illustrious founder, Thomas Jefferson, said Mr. Campbell, but he was disappointed in not being able to address the students, the obstacle being what he called a “quadrangular orthodoxy,” in the form of four chaplains “with four ways to heaven” who had no interest in any contribution the man from Bethany might make.

It disturbed him to find Monticello, the home of Jefferson, in a state of disrepair. Fences were dilapidated, with posts and bars prostrate on the ground; the frame of a gate was swinging in the air, and even the monument at the statesman’s grave was tottering and broken. He could have hardly then imagined that within a few years there would be a child born at Monticello who would become his own son-in-law, which was the case with Judson Barclay, whose parents owned Monticello for a time and who married his youngest daughter, Decima.

He moved by railroad, stage, and steamboat from Petersburg, Va. to Charleston, S. C., a distance of 400 miles in 48 hours. Charleston had recently been decimated both by yellow fever and a great fire that left much of the city in ruins. Campbell refers to some remaining cases of yellow fever while he was there, and the ruins left by the fire reminded him of ancient cities that perished in a similar fashion. As he passed through the city he saw tottering walls, solitary chimneys, charred timbers scattered along the way, and immense piles of ruins covering entire city blocks. And all this he saw in the silence of early dawn, “broken only by the howling of a dog and the wheels of our chariot,” which led him to ask the biblical question, “Has there been evil in the city and the Lord has not done it?”

He observes that a man up North might look at Charleston’s devastation and see it as God’s judgment upon the institution of slavery, while the southerner will look to the fires that smote New York the year before and see it as divine displeasure against the violence of abolitionism. So each interprets as he will, and neither reforms of any evil that such calamities might point to, he added.

His journey through South Carolina and on into Augusta, Ga. gave him a close look at slavery in the deep south, and he concluded that the system has been no greater blessing there than in Virginia. The system had exhausted the natural fertility of the soil and had super-induced the worst system of agriculture imaginable. Tobacco, rice and cotton may be profitable crops for slave labor, but when they are married to the soil and burden it year after year, they are destructive. He warned that if South Carolina could not turn to manufacturing she was doomed to be a desert, and with all her water resources such a conversion he saw as possible.

The slaves fared better than he had supposed. While he saw glaring exceptions, they were for the most part well clothed and housed and generally comfortable and not overworked. Yet he insisted that Christian sympathy means more than this. While he did call for the slave’s freedom, he did urge upon their owners to provide for them moral culture. The Bible teaches that slaves are to be treated just and equal, he observed, and that certainly is not the case so long as their education is no more than that of the mules they drive.

In talking with southerners who owned many slaves, he found it untrue that the typical master believed “the more ignorant the Negro, the better the slave.” The best servants are those who are enlightened in the principles of Christianity, he discovered.

He had a word also for the northern abolitionist, who were much at fault, he believed, in their reasonings upon the institutions of the South. They should confine themselves to the abolition of the slave trade, to the non-importation of Africans into the South. With this slavery will soon end, if by no other means by the bleaching effect of the southern sun and soil, which will eventually turn blacks into whites! In any event the abolitionists should leave the South to mind its own affairs, and leave it to that great innovator and amalgamator, Time, to solve the problem.

He was greeted in Augusta by a boycott, staged by an association of Baptist preachers, who issued public notices that churches should close their doors to him, for “A. Campbell of Virginia is notorious for producing strife, divisions, and confusion among the Regular Baptist Churches.” Their proof-text for such action was, “Mark them that cause divisions among you,” taken from Rom. 16:17. This gave Alexander the chance to point out that the passage is abused, being applied to anyone who would dare attempt to state a new truth, and that it could be made to apply to Jesus and the apostles, who also caused divisions. He urged that the entire passage be considered: Mark them that cause divisions among you contrary to the doctrine which you have learned. He went on to admit that any reformer, including the Lord himself, might have to create divisions in order to teach the truth. Thus shut out by the Baptists, he was well received by both the Methodists and Unitarians,. who opened their buildings to him. Some Baptists, he said, were inclined to become Unitarians because of their charity toward him!

He found southern churches 20 years behind those of the West (Kentucky and Ohio) and especially dependent upon an ignorant priesthood. “They seem to think it their duty to pay the pastors for thinking and praying for them,” he complained. Finding the churches terribly creed-ridden, he sought to give them a religion based upon the Bible alone.

Only the Unitarians allowed him a place to speak in Savannah,. the small disciple group meeting in a private home. But he had a fair and attentive hearing through five discourses. He writes of “a colored church in Savannah” that had 1800 members, the pastor of which, one Andrew Marshall, greatly impressed him. This enterprising black man worked and saved his way out of slavery, buying his wife, himself, and his children off the block! Even though he was past 50, he purchased himself at the high price of $600, and at the time of Campbell’s visit he was worth $20,000. He was persecuted around Savannah, not so much for being a free black man, but for being “tinctured with Campbellism.” It appears that part of that Campbellism was his talent for turning stones into gold!

One thing for sure, Campbell never let a little thing like being shut out of buildings deter him. At one place along the way he held a meeting in the open air, out under the stars, only a short distance from the shut doors of a Baptist church. And his host at that time was the gentleman who gave the land on which the church stood, which led Alexander to observe, “Meetinghouses are built for preachers rather than for the owners of them.” In Abbeville, S. C. he visited with a man who was so eager for his neighbors to hear Alexander Campbell that he sent hands over the country and gathered up a congregation in his own house—after being shut out of the very church that he himself had paid for!

Montgomery, Alabama also closed all church doors to him, so he made use of the courthouse as he so often did. Intending to speak one time and then move on, he was urged to continue by the editor of Montgomery Advertiser and a local judge, “friends to free discussion and gentlemen of liberal minds.” The second meeting at the courthouse was too large for the space available, confirming the men in their confidence, despite the frowns of the clergy.

Passing through Alabama country, he was invited to address several Baptist churches along the way, always entertained by the most progressive people of the communities. He records having experienced the heaviest rains and the darkest nights in those parts as he had in all his previous journeys. Arriving in Mobile, he again was invited by the Unitarians after having begun in the courthouse, and at both places he had overflowing crowds.

Alabamians impressed him as being interested mainly in making money, which was “the mania of the whole South,” a disease that has no cure except conversion to God. Cotton and Negroes is all the folk could think about, he moaned. And yet he found his views on reformation somewhat implanted in people’s minds, mainly through the influence of the few disciple ministers who labored there so effectively.

On to New Orleans, he was impressed more with that city’s efficient police than with the French quarter that was famous even then. The latter was too much like the older parts of Paris, but New Orleans as a whole he found elegant. But the city desecrated the Lord’s day more than any place he knew, with its theaters open on Sunday evening. This time it was the Congregationalists who hosted him, and he had good crowds for New Orleans, causing him to conclude that as assembly of Christians could be formed even in New Orleans, that city of vice and folly.

On the way to Jackson, Mississippi he stopped off at St. Francisville to visit with a General Dawson and his lady, and to address the Episcopal church. The general lived in a veritable paradise, according to Alexander’s description, with its gardens of winter flowers and evergreen forests. But even more elegant and delightful was Mrs. Dawson, says Alexander, whom he found not only amiable but heavenly-minded.

At Jackson the Presbyterians received him for five lectures and he also spoke to the state college, its president being his host during the ten days he stayed there. The cause he pled was weak and unpopular in Jackson, and he was impressed with the courage that some of the leading citizens showed in embracing the cause and speaking in its behalf, the college president being one of them.

Alexander was much encouraged by the culture and refinement he found on these southern plantations where he was wined and dined by the best of society. They were the people who conducted the banks, ran the mills and built the railroads; and they were the civic and educational leaders who read his paper. And they were often people disillusioned by religious systems, and who sought the kind of openness and freedom that he advocated.

In his descriptions of these people he refers to some of their “marginal remarks,” which he thought revealed their true character—“Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” One such instance was a sister who kept a beautiful garden, giving it much of her time. Walking with her among its beauties, she remarked that she was sometimes criticized for all the attention she gave flowers, but that if God was so gracious as to spend time in creating such loveliness, it was proper for her to give time in cultivating them. This impressed Campbell. The women of the South, by the way, impressed him much more than the men in terms of their refinement, education and spiritually. He pitied those poor sisters who had the misfortune of marrying some, of the preachers that migrated from the North, many of whom forsook preaching and gave themselves to the pursuit of riches.

Passing through Kentucky, visiting several churches along the way that he had known before, he finally reached Bethany on March 28, after an absence of almost six months. In reviewing his impressions of the entire experience, he pointed to the reformation of the heart more than of the creed as the greatest need among southern churches. Gross ignorance of the Bible that he found everywhere disturbed him, and the irresponsibility of parents in teaching their children the word of God he viewed with alarm. Piety itself, which he himself had imbibed from youth of the old Calvinistic school, he found seriously wanting. The fear of God, reverence for his authority, prayerfulness, gracious conversation, liberality, care for widows and orphans, care for the ignorant and uneducated—all these, so necessary to the pious life, he found lacking in the broad reaches of the American frontier that had become his parish.

While he was in the South word from Bethany told of the worsening condition of his ailing sister Alicia, who came with him from Ireland to America in 1809. He wrote to her: “You, my dear sister, are thinking of the end of your weary pilgrimage, and of “the house not made with hands eternal in the heavens.’ What a delightful vision is a clear and cloudless view of the land that is afar off, on the other side of the stream of time.” He went on: ‘Whether I shall have the pleasure of seeing you on this side the river Jordan is to me all uncertain. The Lord has brought me here, and I cannot leave his work for sometime; but should I not see you on this side the stream of time, I confidently hope to see you soon, where tears and griefs and pains shall be no more.”

“We have been 3,000 miles since we left home in our journeying hither, and are not much more than half round our circuit,” he wrote to her. “We have minds supremely set upon the end of the journey, upon the place called ‘home sweet home.’”

Alexander was home at Bethany once more, his earthly home at least, and to him it was Home Sweet Home.

But Alicia had gone on to that other Home Sweet Home.—Editor

Next installment: The Watershed of Campbell’s Life