"Father Clark," or The Pioneer Preacher

by John Mason Peck

5. They endeavored to consult the true interests of all parties concerned.

6. They ever upheld the constitution and laws of the country in a peaceful way. Some of this class were chosen to official stations in both the territory and state of Illinois, and took the oath to support the constitution and laws of the United States without quibbling and evasion.

Their general faith and practice corresponded with the principles of Baptists in general Union.

Mr. Clark had gradually become a Baptist in all respects. For eight or ten years after he had been baptized in the manner already described, he remained in an independent position. With the exception of his visits to the lower country, the larger portion of his time he spent on the western side of the Mississippi, with occasional visits to his Illinois friends. The members that remained of the society he organized near Bellefontaine in Illinois, had attached themselves to other churches,—some to the Baptists, and others to the Methodist Episcopal church. Those about the Spanish pond and Coldwater settlements in St. Louis county gradually became Baptists, and regarded him as their pastor and spiritual guide. For some years he watched the course of his old friends, the Lemens’ and others of that class. He felt deeply interested in their anti-slavery position. Their quiet, unobtrusive method of managing the perplexing question of slavery corresponded with his own views and experience. The father, his old friend and associate, had become an ordained minister, and two of his sons, who had studied under Mr. Clark, were now heads of families, and joint pastors of Cantine, (now Bethel) church, and, with their compeers in the ministry, were performing much itinerant service in the destitute settlements. Benjamin, the eldest son of Captain Joseph Ogle, was an ordained minister in this connection of Baptists. Father Clark and these brethren had always enjoyed fraternal intercourse, though no formal church connection had been formed. His manners were so inoffensive, his labors in the ministry were so disinterested and unremitting, his views were so scriptural, and his daily conduct so fully exemplified a life of faith on the Son of God, that no one thought of calling in question his regular standing in the ministry. He might have lived and died without reproach, and enjoyed the confidence of all good men in the same isolated position he had occupied from 1796. But his sound judgment guided him, and the impressions received in prayer prompted him to unite with others in a formal association. He was fearful he might set an example for erratic preachers to follow.

This class of Baptists held an annual meeting within the bounds of their churches on each returning autumn, though they had not assumed the form of a regular association. Such a meeting Mr. Clark attended, with some of the brethren from Coldwater, and proposed union and coöperation. Not from any necessity of knowing more of his character, but as a precedent for subsequent cases he was examined on his Christian experience, views of doctrine, and practice. The result being highly satisfactory, he was received by the hand of fellowship being given by all the brethren present, while an appropriate hymn was sung.

His views on African slavery gradually acquired firmness and consistency. We have traced his convictions on this subject to his exquisite sense of human rights, his innate principles of natural liberty, his sympathies with afflicted and oppressed humanity, his own deprivation of liberty by the British press-gang, and his imprisonment for nineteen months by the Spaniards in Havana. In a personal acquaintance of fifteen years, and the examination of various fugitive papers, we find no confusion of thought, and no lack of just conceptions of the subject. His intercourse with slave-holders was ever courteous and kind. He never obtruded his opinions where no good impressions could be made, nor in any way disguised his sentiments before any person. His frankness and candor were so well known, that all classes had entire confidence in his motives and mode of treating this subject.

When the subject of the colonization of free colored persons in Africa was brought to his mind by the formation of the American Colonization Society, he hailed it as an omen of good. He understood the strong objections to the emancipation of slaves remaining amongst us. He understood well the prejudices against the peculiarities of the African race, as one of the barriers to amalgamation with white people, and amidst the gloom that surrounded the hopeless bondage of that race, he saw one luminous spot in the moral hemisphere. The star of hope appeared to him to arise in Africa. The finger of providence pointed in that direction, and he abounded in faith and prayer for success in the enterprise. He was not so visionary as to imagine there would be no defects in its management, or no drawbacks in the colonization movement. He well understood it was an object not to be accomplished in one generation, and that its influence upon emancipation must be gradual and indirect. He desired to have an influence produced in the minds of slave-holders towards the moral and religious interests of the slaves.

So long known and so well understood were his anti-slavery principles, and his interest in the colonization scheme as the means of removing one of the most formidable obstructions to emancipation, that the ladies of Lofton’s prairie, then in Greene, (now Jersey) county, Illinois, one of his monthly preaching stations, paid him the compliment of making him a life member of the county auxiliary society.[55]

Mr. Clark wrote several circulars for the annual association of Baptists, to which he belonged, on the subject of Slavery, which were published in their minutes. They were dictated by a courteous and christian-like spirit, plain, pointed, impressive and efficacious.

After he joined the Baptists, his labors were the same as before, except in a wider range of traveling, and more extended christian intercourse. No time was wasted in idleness or frivolous pursuits. Always cheerful, always the same devout, praying man. There were two or three families in Missouri, as Upper Louisiana was called from the period of the organization of the territory in 1812, where he made his home. All his earthly wants were cheerfully provided for by his friends. Certain mothers in Israel vied with each other in providing his annual supply of clothing; the domestic manufacture of their own wheels and looms. The cloth was the same as was then worn by the farmers of the country, but was kept by the wearer in a neat and tidy manner. He did not live to enter on the era of this frontier, when dress, equipages, furniture, and houses, as in the old states, were used for the special benefit of other people’s eyes. Nor at that period would rank, or social position be detected by the dress a man or woman wore.