""Yes," said I, "and I will give you the benefit of all the dirks I have," and advanced rapidly toward him.
"He sprang back on the other side of the fence from me; I jumped over after him, and a regular foot race followed."
"It may be asked," says the old man, naively, "what I would have done if this fellow had gone with me to the woods. This is hard to answer, for it was a part of my creed to love every body, but to fear no one, and I did not permit myself to believe that any man could whip me until it was tried, and I did not permit myself to premeditate expedients in such cases. I should no doubt have proposed to him to have prayer first, and then followed the openings of Providence."
Mr. Cartwright was from the beginning of his ministry an ardent advocate of temperance, and, long before the first temperance society was organized in the country, he waged a fierce war against dram-drinking.
This fearless advocate of temperance came very near getting drunk once.
He had stopped with a fellow preacher at a tavern kept by an Otterbein Methodist, who, thinking to play them a trick, put whisky into the new cider which he offered them. Cartwright drank sparingly of the beverage, though he considered it harmless, but, "with all my forbearance," he says, "presently I began to feel light-headed. I instantly ordered our horses, fearing we were snapped for once.... When we had rode about a mile, being in the rear, I saw Brother Walker was nodding at a mighty rate. I suddenly rode up to Brother Walker and cried out, "Wake up! wake up!" He roused up, his eyes watering freely. "I believe," said I, "we are both drunk. Let us turn out of the road and lie down and take a nap till we get sober," But we rode on without stopping. We were not drunk, but we both evidently felt it flying to our heads."
In 1826 Mr. Cartwright was elected to the Legislature of the State, and at the expiration of his first term was reflected from Sangamon County.
He was induced to accept this position because of his desire to aid in preventing the introduction of slavery into the State. He had no liking for political strife, however, and was disgusted with the dishonesty which he saw around him. "I say," he declares, "without any desire to speak evil of the rulers of the people, I found a great deal of corruption in our Legislature, and I found that almost every measure had to be carried by a corrupt bargain and sale which should cause every honest man to blush for his country."
He was full of a quaint humor, which seemed to burst out from every line of his features, and twinkle merrily in his bright eyes. Often in the midst of his most exciting revivals he could not resist the desire to fasten his dry jokes upon one of his converts. No man loved a joke better, or was quicker to make a good use of it. He was traveling one day on his circuit, and stopped for the night at a cabin in which he found a man and woman. Suspecting that all was not right, he questioned the woman, and drew from her the confession that the man was her lover.
Her husband, she said, was away, and would not return for two days, and she had received this man in his absence.
[Ill.u.s.tration: CARTWRIGHT CALLING UP THE DEVIL.]
Cartwright then began to remonstrate with the guilty pair upon their conduct, and while he was speaking to them the husband"s voice was heard in the yard. In an agony of terror the woman implored Cartwright to a.s.sist her in getting her lover out of the way, and our preacher, upon receiving from each a solemn promise of reformation, agreed to do so.
There was standing by the chimney a large barrel of raw cotton, and as there was no time to get the man out of the house, Cartwright put him into the barrel and piled the cotton over him.
The husband entered, and Cartwright soon engaged him in conversation.
The man said he had often heard of Peter Cartwright, and that it was the common opinion in that part of the country that among his other wonderful gifts our preacher had the power to call up the devil.
"That"s the easiest thing in the world to do," said Cartwright. "Would you like to see it?"
The man hesitated for awhile, and then expressed his readiness to witness the performance.
"Very well," said Cartwright; "take your stand by your wife, and don"t move or speak. I"ll let the door open to give him a chance to get out, or he may carry the roof away."
So saying, he opened the door, and, taking a handful of cotton, held it in the fire and lighted it. Then plunging it into the barrel of raw cotton, he shouted l.u.s.tily, "Devil, rise!" In an instant the barrel was wrapped in flames, and the lover, in utter dismay, leaped out and rushed from the house. The husband was greatly terrified, and ever afterward avowed himself a believer in Cartwright"s intimacy with "Old Scratch,"
for had he not had ocular proof of it?
Riding out of Springfield one day, he saw a wagon some distance ahead of him containing a young lady and two young men. As he came near them they recognized him, though he was totally unacquainted with them, and began to sing camp-meeting hymns with great animation. In a little while the young lady began to shout, and said, "Glory to G.o.d! Glory to G.o.d!" and the driver cried out, "Amen! Glory to G.o.d!"
"My first impressions," says Mr. Cartwright, "were, that they had been across the Sangamon River to a camp meeting that I knew was in progress there, and had obtained religion, and were happy. As I drew a little nearer, the young lady began to sing and shout again. The young man who was not driving fell down, and cried aloud for mercy; the other two, shouting at the top of their voices, cried out, "Glory to G.o.d! another sinner down." Then they fell to exhorting the young man that was down, saying, "Pray on, brother; pray on, brother; you"ll soon get religion."
Presently up jumped the young man that was down, and shouted aloud, saying, "G.o.d has blessed my soul. Halleluiah! halleluiah! Glory to G.o.d!""
Thinking that these were genuine penitents, Cartwright rode rapidly toward them, intending to join in their rejoicings; but as he drew near them, he detected certain unmistakable evidences that they were shamming religious fervor merely for the purpose of annoying him. He then endeavored to get rid of them, but as they were all going the same direction, the party in the wagon managed to remain near him by driving fast when he tried to pa.s.s them, and falling back when he drew up to let them go ahead. "I thought," says our preacher, "I would ride up and horsewhip both of these young men; and if the woman had not been in company, I think I should have done so; but I forebore."
In a little while the road plunged into a troublesome mora.s.s. Around the worst part of this swamp wound a bridle path, by which Mr. Cartwright determined to escape his tormentors, who would be compelled to take the road straight through the swamp. The party in the wagon saw his object, and forgetting prudence in their eagerness to keep up with him, whipped their horses violently. The horses bounded off at full speed, and the wagon was whirled through the swamp at a furious rate. When nearly across, one of the wheels struck a large stump, and over went the wagon.
"Fearing it would turn entirely over and catch them under," says Mr.
Cartwright, "the two young men took a leap into the mud, and when they lighted they sunk up to the middle. The young lady was dressed in white, and as the wagon went over, she sprang as far as she could, and lighted on all fours; her hands sunk into the mud up to her arm-pits, her mouth and the whole of her face immersed in the muddy water, and she certainly would have strangled if the young men had not relieved her. As they helped her up and out, I had wheeled my horse to see the fun. I rode up to the edge of the mud, stopped my horse, reared in my stirrups, and shouted, at the top of my voice, "Glory to G.o.d! Glory to G.o.d!
Halleluiah! another sinner down! Glory to G.o.d! Halleluiah! Glory!
Halleluiah!"
"If ever mortals felt mean, these youngsters did; and well they might, for they had carried on all this sport to make light of religion, and to insult a minister, a total stranger to them. When I became tired of shouting over them, I said to them:
""Now, you poor, dirty, mean sinners, take this as a just judgment of G.o.d upon you for your meanness, and repent of your dreadful wickedness; and let this be the last time that you attempt to insult a preacher; for if you repeat your abominable sport and persecutions, the next time G.o.d will serve you worse, and the devil will get you."
"They felt so badly that they never uttered one word of reply."
Our preacher was determined that his work should be recognized, and as he and his fellow traveling ministers had done a good work on the frontier, he was in no humor to relish the accounts of the religious condition of the West, which the missionaries from the East spread through the older States in their letters home. "They would come," says he, "with a tolerable education, and a smattering knowledge of the old Calvinistic system of theology. They were generally tolerably well furnished with old ma.n.u.script sermons, that had been preached, or written, perhaps a hundred years before. Some of these sermons they had memorized, but in general they read them to the people. This way of reading sermons was out of fashion altogether in this Western world, and of course they produced no effect among the people. The great ma.s.s of our Western people wanted a preacher that could mount a stump or a block, or stand in the bed of a wagon, and, without note or ma.n.u.script, quote, expound, and apply the word of G.o.d to the hearts and consciences of the people. The result of the efforts of these Eastern missionaries was not very flattering; and although the Methodist preachers were in reality the pioneer heralds of the cross through the entire West, and although they had raised up numerous societies every five miles, and notwithstanding we had hundreds of traveling and local preachers, accredited and useful ministers of the Lord Jesus Christ, yet these newly-fledged missionaries would write back to the old States hardly any thing else but wailings and lamentations over the moral wastes and dest.i.tute condition of the West."
The indignation of our preacher was fully shared by the people of the West, who considered themselves as good Christians; as their New England brethren, and the people of Quincy called a meeting, irrespective of denomination, and pledged themselves to give Peter Cartwright one thousand dollars per annum, and pay his traveling expenses, if he would "go as a missionary to the New England States, and enlighten them on this and other subjects, of which they were profoundly ignorant."
Circ.u.mstances beyond his control prevented his acceptance of this offer.
"How gladly and willingly would I have undertaken this labor of love,"
says he, "and gloried in enlightening them down East, that they might keep their home-manufactured clergy at home, or give them some honorable employ, better suited to their genius than that of reading old musty and worm-eaten sermons."
Our preacher did visit New England in 1852, not as a missionary, however, but as a delegate to the General Conference which met that year in Boston. His fame had preceded him, and he was one of the marked men of that body. Every one had heard some quaint story of his devotion to his cause, his fearlessness, or his eccentricities, and crowds came out to hear him preach. But our backwoods preacher was ill at ease. The magnificence of the city, and the prim decorum of the Boston churches, subdued him, and he could not preach with the fire and freedom of the frontier log chapel. The crowds that came to hear him were disappointed, and more than once they told him so.
"Is this Peter Cartwright, from Illinois, the old Western pioneer?" they asked him once.
He answered them, "I am the very man."
"Well," said several of them, "brother, we are much disappointed; you have fallen very much under our expectations, we expected to hear a much greater sermon than that you preached to-day."
It was a regular Bostonian greeting, and it not only mortified and disheartened the old pioneer, but it irritated him. "I tell you," says he, "they roused me, and provoked what little religious patience I had.... I left them abruptly, and in very gloomy mood retreated to my lodgings, but took very little rest in sleep that night. I constantly asked myself this question: Is it so, that I can not preach? or what is the matter? I underwent a tremendous crucifixion in feeling."
The result was that he came to the conclusion that he _could_ preach, and that the people of Boston had not "sense enough to know a good sermon when they heard it." A little later old Father Taylor, that good genius of the Boston Bethel, a man after Cartwright"s own heart, came to him and asked him to preach for him, and this, after hesitating, our preacher agreed to do, upon the condition that he should be allowed to conduct the services in regular Western style.
"In the meantime," says he, "I had learned from different sources that the grand reason of my falling under the expectations of the congregations I had addressed was substantially this: almost all those curious incidents that had gained currency throughout the country concerning Methodist preachers had been located on me, and that when the congregations came to hear me, they expected little else but a bundle of eccentricities and singularities, and when they did not realize according to their antic.i.p.ations, they were disappointed, and that this was the reason they were disappointed. So on the Sabbath, when I came to the Bethel, we had a good congregation, and after telling them that Brother Taylor had given me the liberty to preach to them after the Western fashion, I took my text, and after a few common-place remarks, I commenced giving them some Western anecdotes, which had a thrilling effect on the congregation, and excited them immoderately--I can not say religiously; but I thought if ever I saw animal excitement, it was then and there. This broke the charm. During my stay, after this, I could pa.s.s anywhere for Peter Cartwright, the old pioneer of the West. I am not sure that after this I fell under the expectations of my congregations among them."
Sixty-seven years have pa.s.sed away since the old pioneer began his preaching, and still he labors in the cause of his Master. Age has not subdued his zeal or dimmed his eye. His labors make up the history of the West. Where he first reared his humble log-hut, smiling farms and tasteful mansions cover the fertile prairies of the West; cities and towns mark the spot where his backwoods camp-meetings drew thousands into the kingdom of G.o.d; the iron horse dashes with the speed of the wind over the boundless prairies which he first crossed with only the points of timber for his guides; the floating palaces of the West plow the streams over which he swam his horse or was ferried in a bark canoe; and stately churches stand where the little log chapels of the infant West were built by him. It is a long and a n.o.ble life upon which he looks back, the only survivor of the heroic band who started with him to carry Christ into the Western wilds. He has outlived all his father"s family, every member of the cla.s.s he joined in 1800, every member of the Western Conference of 1804, save perhaps one or two, every member of the General Conference of 1816, the first to which he was elected, all his early bishops, every presiding elder under whom he ever ministered, and thousands of those whom he brought into the Church. "I have lived too long," he said, in a recent lecture; but we take issue with him. He has not lived too long whose declining age is cheered by the glorious fruition of the seed sown in his youth and prime. Few, indeed, are given so great a privilege; and few, having lived so long and worked so hard, can say with him, that during such a long and exposed career, "I have never been overtaken in any scandalous sin, though my shortcomings and imperfections have been without number." A man who can boast such a record, though he be as poor in purse as this simple-hearted backwoods preacher, has earned a Great Fortune indeed, for his treasure is one that can not be taken from him, since it is laid up in Heaven, "where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal."
IX.
AUTHORS.
CHAPTER x.x.xIII.
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.
Wherever the English language is spoken, the name of HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW has become a household word, and there is scarcely a library, however humble, but can boast a well-worn volume of his tender songs,--songs that
"Have power to quiet The restless pulse of care, And come like the benediction That follows after prayer."
He was born in the city of Portland, Maine, on the 27th of February, 1807, and was the son of the Hon. Stephen Longfellow, a distinguished lawyer of that city. The house in which he was born was a square wooden structure, built many years before, and large and roomy. It stood upon the outskirts of the town, on the edge of the sea, and was separated from the water only by a wide street. From its windows the dreamy boy, who grew up within its walls, could look out upon the dark, mysterious ocean, and, lying awake in his little bed in the long winter nights, he could listen to its sorrowful roar as it broke heavily upon the sh.o.r.e.
That he was keenly alive to the fascination of such close intimacy with the ocean, we have abundant proof in his writings.
He was carefully educated in the best schools of the city, and at the age of fourteen entered Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, where he graduated in his nineteenth year. He was an industrious student, and stood high in his cla.s.ses. He gave brilliant promise of his future eminence as a poet in several productions written during his college days, which were published in a Boston journal called the "United States Literary Gazette." Among these were the "Hymn of the Moravian Nuns,"