“And the Presbyterian Church, praise God for its glorious history. It has always waged a never ending, uncompromising war against wrong and oppression. The organization is a body of conservatives until aroused, which must be by a cataclysm. Then we never sleep until right prevails, though the road we travel grows wet with blood and tears. Presbyterians came to America for conscience’s sake. They claimed the right to worship God as their conscience dictated. The first settlement was at New Amsterdam in 1628. The church grows as the community is raised to a higher educational standard. With them, religion and education go hand in hand and the catechism used to be found in their school primers. The history of the Presbyterian Church is interwoven with America’s struggle for freedom. In England the revolution was attributed to the Presbyterians. Walpole addressing Parliament said, ‘Cousin America has run away with a Presbyterian parson’.”
After a discussion by others, lasting for hours, a vote was had upon a resolution, the adoption of which would recognize the Cumberland Presbytery, license their lapses and confirm the ordination of Samuel McAdoo and [pg 337] others advanced to the ministry by that Presbytery. The resolution was lost.
Whereupon all the representatives from their churches withdrew from the synod and on February 4th perfected a tentative organization, members of which took to themselves the name of Cumberland Presbyterians. Its growth was rapid. In three years there were three presbyteries and sixty churches. They held their first synod on October 5, 1813, when they proclaimed and published a summary of their faith. As this church came into birth with a great revival movement, so always it has advocated revivals.
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On the night of Wednesday, November 10, 1813, several Shauanese Indians came to the home of Rev. Calvin Campbell. They were runners who had been sent by the nation to notify him that he had been made their chief in place of Tecumseh, who had been killed in the battle of the Thames on October 5th.
The next morning before day he left with them and was gone from home nearly three months. Upon his return he had little to say about his trip, never mentioning its purpose except to his wife.
He told her that a great remnant of the Mingo confederacy including many Shauanese had moved several hundred miles west of the Mississippi, two hundred miles from the nearest white settlement, and had there built new villages upon the banks of the great river, near which were plains on which grazed vast herds of buffalo. That John Mason, who was still a missionary, had gone with them and he had assisted him in reorganizing the nation and in building a church, much like the old Jackson River Meeting House, except it was of logs instead of stone.
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[pg 338] In the early days of Kentucky, when churches were few and far between, the people found it impossible to follow the custom of their ancestors, of burying their dead in the kirkyard. This resulted in each family of prominence having its own burial plot about sixty feet square hedged about by a wall of cut stone and overgrown with ivy or Virginia creeper. Several cedar trees planted within the inclosure kept pace of growth with the family death rate and their branches sheltered the slowly widening circle of graves. The family graveyard was hallowed or consecrated ground which could not be bought. Plantations changed owners, but all conveyances exempted this plot, which descended from father to son, from generation to generation. Laws were made to protect it from incursion or desecration; it was a misdemeanor to tear down the wall or a tombstone, or to plow over the grave of a white person. A statute gave to relatives the right of ingress to such a place, “situate within the lands of another—to visit and to repair the graves or inclosure protecting same.”
These desolate and usually neglected grave yards of half forgotten stranger dead became to the superstitious, “hanted places” to be shunned by night, and the favorite site of many a ghost story told by the “black mammy” to the children of her master.