The Travel Letters of Alexander Campbell . . .

INTO MISSOURI AND ILLINOIS

After a journey in 1842 to eastern cities, including New York and Philadelphia, in behalf of the college, and a trip to Lexington in 1843 to conduct the famous debate with N. L. Rice, the Presbyterian, Alexander embanked on an extensive trip to Missouri and Illinois, which was then “the Far West.” This trip produced another set of interesting travel letters, to which we now turn.

In the first of these letters he writes of the increased pressure of the college, which, along with all his other obligations, makes months assume the importance of years. If all men of good sense and good means would but do their duty, he complains, “the car of reformation” would be pushed forward. Money was needed, and even though the disciples were mostly poor, the 200,000 adults in the churches could give at least $600,000 yearly. He sets forth in this letter what could be done with such an amount, and he calls for the erection of 100 meeting houses annually, the support of 50 evangelists along with 200 candidates for the ministry, and $10,000 a year for four colleges. He also asked for 100,000 Bibles a year and $100,000 for the poor.

He has somewhat to say about liberality, asserting that a person’s charity is the measure of his piety. He would be surprised to find one miser or niggardly churl in heaven. He quotes that beautiful passage that reads: “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, for our sake he became poor, that we through his poverty might be rich.”

In this context Alexander uses 1 Cor. 16:2 in a way different from what is usually made of it. On the question as to whether all this money should be gathered into a common treasury, either at a church wide or congregational level, he sees this as unnecessary and dangerous. If the disciples would do as Paul instructed the Corinthians, then each person would “lay by him in store for the Lord’s treasury,” and thus be “waiting for a call” for the money to be summoned and used. Commentators before and since Campbell generally agree with this interpretation, which discounts the notion that 1 Cor. 16:2 calls for a common fund to be controlled by people other than the ones who gave it. Campbell sees Paul as instructing the Corinthians to lay something aside at home each week so that when the need arises it will be there, and he thought this plan was good enough for the Restoration Movement. Those who know the history of our disputes realize that we have suffered divisions over how “the Lord’s money,” deposited into a common treasury, is to be used. It seems that Campbell joins Paul in calling for a simple plan. It makes us look foolish to have disputes over “the Lord’s treasury,” when the scriptures make this nothing more than each man’s dresser drawer at home.

By this time the disciples had begun to have state meetings, and Alexander arranged his schedule so as to be present in Columbia for the Missouri state meeting of 1845. One hundred churches were represented and 4,000 people were present, most of them seeing the renowned Alexander Campbell for the first time. Alexander mentions, however, that he met numerous old friends in Missouri who had migrated from Kentucky and Ohio. He visited the recently founded state university while in Columbia, where he was impressed with what one seldom saw in that day, a building that cost $118,000. The fiscal minded Campbell comments in passing that he would have put only $40,000 into the building and the rest in endowment to support the program in the building.

He made a large circle through Missouri from St. Louis — Columbia, Booneville, Lexington, and Independence, his farthest point ever in the West. Then to Liberty, La Fayette, Glasgow, Fayette, Paris, Palmyra, Hannibal, and then into Illinois. He had large crowds waiting for him in these places, with the clergy cooperating by opening their churches to him. Along the way he gathered funds for the college, with Baptists and Methodists often subscribing more than the disciples.

On this side of the watershed the apples on the trees grew thicker. In Paris he chose to speak in the Presbyterian building since it was the largest, but even then only a portion of those who wished to hear him could do so. In Palmyra it was the Methodist church, which seated 1500, but still 500 had to be turned away.

In Hannibal he was a guest in the same home where his co-laborer in reformation, Barton W. Stone, had died only a few months before. He spoke twice in the Methodist church there, then moved on the next morning. We mention the brevity of his stay in Hannibal due to a reference made by Mark Twain that Alexander Campbell once bolted into the print shop where he worked as a boy, complaining that Jesus Christ was represented in one of their publications as J. C. Mark Twain represents Campbell as crass and pompous, demanding that the printer make a retraction without delay.

It is true that while Campbell was in Hannibal one Samuel Clements, a boy of 12, worked in the local printing shop. But Alexander was there but for a day and a night, and as busy as he was visiting and lecturing, he almost certainly did not call on the local printer with such a complaint as Mark Twain describes in later life. Twain is probably referring to some Campbellite preacher whom he confused in the intervening years with Alexander Campbell, whose visit to Hannibal when he was a boy he might well have remembered. Besides, Campbell simply was not the radical that Twain describes, and being a publisher himself he would never have been so brutal to a colleague over such an inconsequential matter.

In Illinois he visited Pittsfield, Winchester, Jacksonville, Springfield, Tremont, and Bloomington before returning to St. Louis where he was conveyed homeward by Old Man River.

In Jacksonville he addressed an overflow crowd at the Baptist church, and visited the two seminaries located there, now known as Illinois College and MacMurray College. MacMurray (where this writer once served on the faculty) was then a female academy. Alexander listened to them recite “with much fluency and intelligence” and then talked to them extemporaneously on the art of self-improvement.

At Bloomington he was a guest at the then famous Elkhart Grove, a 20,000 acre meadow without a single tree, except for a summit of 700 acres at the center of it. covered with a forest of trees and a stately mansion. The owners were a disciple family that had a son, John Latham, who was in one of the first classes at Bethany, preparing for the ministry. Campbell speaks of him tenderly: “A purer and nobler spirit than he we seldom find in this wilderness of sin.” He had left his wealthy home with his little family to be at Bethany with Mr. Campbell, only to have to return for business reasons, during which time he was seized by a fever and died. His wife had since died.” I saw his desolate dwelling as I entered the grove, which, for a moment, threw over the whole scene a most melancholy reflection”, wrote the man who had himself endured so much grief, only to add in characteristic resignation, “But the will of the Lord be done!”

He sailed up with Mississippi and the Ohio from St. Louis to Wheeling on his return home. He writes of a deluge of snow, with one storm on top of another, “the true presage of the commencement of winter.” Near Wheeling the snow turned to ice, and, writing somewhat like Luke in Acts, “we persevered until we finally struck our prow into a closed river.” He had to disembark above Buffington Island and take to the mountains in sleighs, such as could be hired at any price whatever, as far as Parkersburg, where he spent the Lord’s day addressing a Presbyterian church on Hope. From there a disciple bore him on a better sleigh all the way to Bethany, “over as rough a road and through as much cold and fatigue as I could wish by way of a comfortable correction to the most orthodox of my religious calumniators.”

Following this travel diary are two more travel letters, probably composed at home after his return that deal almost entirely with the topography and geography of the regions he had explored. “In America all things in nature and society are fashioned upon a gigantic and magnificent scale,” he writes, and so he concludes that amidst such amplitude we Americans ought to be a great and a mighty people. He writes of our country as “abounding in lofty mountains whose towering summits reach above the clouds, rich in luxuriant valleys watered by majestic rivers bearing on their bosoms the products of thousands of miles.” All this, along with “wide extended plains, ocean like,” is a call to greatness, and if we are not distinguished among the nations for great attributes of character, for national greatness and for national glory, it is because we are unworthy of such a patrimony.

Alexander believed that a nation’s character is determined in part by the circumstances of climate and geography, and for this reason America should be the greatest nation on earth. Apart from all else that he was, Mr. Campbell was a naturalist, not only because of his love for nature, but also because he believed man’s environment has much to say to him and is a major factor in shaping his character.

It seems strange than an editor, chronicling the events of his travels among the churches, should spend page after page describing the Mississippi and Missouri valleys, the topography of the Rocky Mountains, and the course of rivers. He describes in detail the nature of prairies — “Imagine to yourself, curious reader, a horizon of grass of some thirty miles in extent, with here and there a square log house, of two stories, standing by itself, without a tree within miles of it, and nothing to be seen around it except at the distance of a few rods a very low worm fence, enclosing a few acres of corn” — and writes of ditching and canaling as if he were an expert in the field: “Exposing the bottoms of points to the sun very often increases or produces sickness in their environs.” And he has advice for those who are searching for a healthy location, the gist of which is for one always to move up higher. Plains people and those in swamps and lowlands might move to hill country, and those in the hills to the mountains. But not the reverse of that. Failure to see this, he believed, accounted for much of the sickness he found on the frontier of the new world.

Why did he spend so much time on all such subjects, page after page after page, along with the religious subjects that lay closest to his heart? He was, first of all, a man of vast interests. And he was by nature both a student and a teacher, always eager to learn and just as eager to share his findings. To him America was a wonder world, and he drank down to the last drop whatever she had to say to him, whether of her people and their habits or of her land and its secrets. Too, he simply believed it is better to be informed than to be ignorant, and man needs to be well read in the three great books that concern his origin, mission and destiny — the book of nature, the book of human nature, and the book that is the word of God. — the Editor

Next Installment: In Jail in Glasgow, Scotland