Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made

by James Dabney McCabe

"O, yes; he was a beautiful, white, shining being."

"Did you smell him?" asked Peter, bluntly.

The man looked at him in amazement, and the preacher continued, sternly, "Well, did the angel you saw smell of brimstone? He must have smelled of brimstone, for he was from a region that burns with fire and brimstone, and consequently from hell, for he revealed a great lie to you if he told you I was to live forever."

The dreamer turned off abruptly, and disappeared amidst the jeers of the crowd that had listened to the conversation.

On the 16th of September, 1806, Mr. Cartwright was ordained a deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church by Bishop Asbury, and on the 4th of October, 1808, Bishop McKendree ordained him an elder. Upon receiving deacon's orders he was assigned to the Marietta Circuit. His appointment dismayed him. Says he: "It was a poor, hard circuit at that time. Marietta and the country round were settled at an early day by a colony of Yankees. At the time of my appointment I had never seen a Yankee, and I had heard dismal stories about them. It was said they lived almost entirely on pumpkins, molasses, fat meat, and bohea tea; moreover, that they could not bear loud and zealous sermons, and they had brought on their learned preachers with them, and they read their sermons and were always criticising us poor backwoods preachers. When my appointment was read out it distressed me greatly. I went to Bishop Asbury and begged him to supply my place and let me go home. The old father took me in his arms and said: 'O, no, my son; go in the name of the Lord. It will make a man of you.'

"Ah, thought I, if this is the way to make men, I do not want to be a man. I cried over it bitterly, and prayed, too. But on I started, cheered by my presiding elder, Brother J. Sale. If I ever saw hard times, surely it was this year; yet many of the people were kind and treated me friendly. I had hard work to keep soul and body together. The first Methodist house I came to the brother was a Universalist. I crossed over the Muskingum River to Marietta. The first Methodist family I stopped with there, the lady was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, but a thorough Universalist. She was a thin-faced, Roman-nosed, loquacious Yankee, glib on the tongue, and you may depend upon it I had a hard race to keep up with her, though I found it a good school, for it set me to reading my Bible. And here permit me to say, of all the isms I ever heard of, they were here. These descendants of the Puritans were generally educated, but their ancestors were rigid predestinarians, and as they were sometimes favored with a little light on their moral powers, and could just 'see men as trees walking,' they jumped into Deism, Universalism, Unitarianism, etc., etc. I verily believe it was the best school I ever entered. They waked me up on all sides; Methodism was feeble, and I had to battle or run, and I resolved on the former."

Just before he was made an elder, Mr. Cartwright left his circuit, and went home on a visit to recruit. He had made a good fight with poverty during his labors, and at the time of his departure for home he was in a condition sufficiently hard to test any man's fortitude. "I had been from my father's house for three years," says he; "was five hundred miles from home, my horse had gone blind, my saddle was worn out, my bridle reins had been eaten up and replaced (after a sort) at least a dozen times, and my clothes had been patched till it was difficult to detect the original. I had concluded to make my way home and get another outfit. I was in Marietta, and had just seventy-five cents in my pocket. How I would get home and pay my way I could not tell."

He did reach home, however, after many characteristic adventures, and obtained another outfit, and while there he took an important step—he married. "After a mature deliberation and prayer," he says, "I thought it was my duty to marry, and was joined in marriage to Frances Gaines, on the 18th of August, 1808, which was her nineteenth birthday." Peter and his bride knew that a hard life was in store for them, but they felt strong in the love they bore each other. They were simple backwoods folk, and their wants were few. "When I started as a traveling preacher," he said fifty-three years afterward, "a single preacher was allowed to receive eighty dollars per annum if his circuit would give it to him; but single preachers in those days seldom received over thirty or forty dollars, and often much less; and had it not been for a few presents made us by the benevolent friends of the church, and a few dollars we made as marriage fees, we must have suffered much more than we did. But the Lord provided, and, strange as it may appear to the present generation, we got along without starving or going naked." There is something awe-inspiring in the simple trust in God which this good man displayed in every stage of his life. Once satisfied that he was in the path of duty, he never allowed the future to trouble him. He provided for it as far as he could, and left the rest to the Master whose work he was doing. Poverty and hardship had no terrors for this brave young couple, and it was very far from their thoughts to wait until a better day to marry. They would go out hand in hand into the world and meet their trials together. Children would come, they knew, and those little mouths would have to be fed, but they would be industrious, saving, and patient, and "God would provide."

Peter Cartwright's mission was to plant the Methodist Episcopal Church in the West as well as to preach the Gospel. For that end he worked and prayed. The Methodist Episcopal Church was his haven of safety. Without, all was storm and darkness; within its fold all was peace and light. He believed his church to be the best door to heaven, if indeed it was not in his estimation the only one. He was a fanatic, pure and simple, as regarded his own denomination, but a fanatic full of high and noble purposes, and one whose zeal was productive only of good. This fanaticism was necessary to the success of his labors. It was his perfect belief that his was the only church in which sinners could find perfect peace that carried him through the difficulties which encompassed him. Men were dying all around him, and they must come into his church. They had other denominations close at hand, but they, in his estimation, would not do. The Methodist Episcopal Church was a necessity for sinners, therefore it must be planted in all parts of the land. No sacrifice was too great for the accomplishment of this object. He has lived to see those sacrifices rewarded, to see his church one of the most numerous and powerful religious bodies in the country.

Being so zealous in behalf of his own church, it is not strange that he should have clashed frequently with other denominations. He got along very well with the majority, but with the Baptists and Universalists he was always on the war path. The latter especially excited his uncompromising hostility, and he never failed to attack their doctrines with all his forces wherever he encountered them. "I have thought," says he, "and do still think, if I were to set out to form a plan to contravene the laws of God, to encourage wickedness of all kinds, to corrupt the morals and encourage vice, and crowd hell with the lost and the wailings of the damned, the Universalist plan should be the plan, the very plan that I would adopt....