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Introduction
I. Religious & political context
II. Nathan Bangs (1778-1862)
III. The Journals (1805-1806, 1817)
I. Religious & political context
Initial settlement
patterns in Upper Canada
Before the 1780s all the land across the northern shores
of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie was a “howling
wilderness” virtually devoid of any non-military European presence.
Not surprisingly, however, the loss of all thirteen
“rebelling” colonies at the conclusion of the American
Revolutionary War in 1783 dramatically increased the value
of this land in the eyes of the British Crown. Almost
immediately the colonial government began surveying the land for the settlement of some 6,000
British refugees who either could not or would not
settle in Nova Scotia (Craig 8). As early as the spring
of 1784 these
settlers, who would come to be called United
Empire Loyalists, began the difficult work of carving
out homesteads on between one-hundred and two-hundred
acre land grants primarily in and around the
north-eastern and south-western shores of Lake Ontario
(present-day Kingston and Niagara) as well as up along
the northern shore of the St. Lawrence towards the
island of Montreal. The British government meanwhile did what it could to provide
the settlers with farming implements and other modest
forms of assistance. By 1792 Kingston had grown into the
largest of the new settlements with some fifty houses
(Craig 26).
Before any of the new settlements could truly flourish,
however, a major political problem faced the British
government. At the time of the initial settlement in the
1780s, Kingston, Niagara, and the northern shore of the
St. Lawrence were all administratively
considered part of Quebec—the entire colony of which had
been surrendered by the French to the British in 1763 at the
end of
the Seven Years' War. The British, who found themselves in the awkward
position of overseeing a “British colony”
of French Catholic Canadiens, passed the Quebec
Act in 1774 that allowed the Canadiens to continue to use France’s civil (but not criminal)
laws and to practice their Catholic religion without
undue interference from the government. Unlike the other
British colonies (including the only non-rebelling
English colony of Nova Scotia), however, Quebec was
not provided with an elected assembly. Naturally the refugee loyalists
arriving from the United States were not content to
live under these conditions. They began to agitate almost
immediately for the creation of a separate province
where British common law would prevail and where an
elected assembly could be established. It was, they
argued, the only means by which they could retain
the same privileges they had
previously enjoyed while residing in the former thirteen colonies.
Church of England and “established” religion in Upper Canada
At least in part because the British authorities
continued to fear that the remaining loyalists might be
tempted to join the Americans, the government passed the
Constitutional (or Canada) Act in 1791 that divided Quebec into
Upper and Lower Canada. In
addition to providing both provinces an elected
assembly (as well as an appointed legislative council
and
executive council), it also set
aside one-seventh of all Crown lands in Upper Canada for the
“maintenance of a Protestant clergy.” These lands, known
as the “clergy reserves,” were intended to be rented or
sold for the benefit of the church. The ambiguity of the phrasing of this
clause,
however, caused such intractable wrangling among the
various political and religious bodies of the province
that they were eventually sold for
educational rather than religious purposes. That
eventuality, however, was far from the mind of the first
governor-general of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, a
staunch churchman who conducted his government as though
the Church of England was already established (Craig
21). In addition to providing Anglicans with choice land
on which to erect churches in various new settlements
(Preston xcii), Graves also passed a Marriage Act in
1793 that limited the legal solemnization of marriages
to Anglican clergymen alone. In the same year, also at
Simcoe's urging, Jacob Mountain was appointed the first Anglican
bishop of the diocese of Quebec (embracing Upper and
Lower Canada). In view of that fact that there were only
three clergymen in the entire province, however, Simcoe
was forced to revise the Marriage Act in the following
year to allow
justices of the peace, when clergymen were too distant,
also to solemnize marriages. In 1798, two years after
Simcoe left office, the Church of Scotland together with
some Lutheran and
Calvinist denominations were also authorized to perform
marriages. Methodists, however, would have to wait more than three
decades before finally being accorded equal privileges in
1831 (Ryerson 162-163, 181).
Indeed, among all the so-called “dissenting”
denominations, Church of England clergymen despised the
Methodists the most. In 1794, when Methodist activity in
the Canadas was still in its infancy, Bishop Mountain derided
them them “mendicants” and “ignorant enthusiasts”
(Preston 292). As the years passed Methodist itinerants became
increasingly troublesome as they proved to be far more
successful at attracting members, and even raising
money, than their better-educated Anglican counterparts. Indeed, the
political privileges
accorded to the Church of England did little to help its
cause and belied the fact that
the religious convictions of settlers in Upper Canada
were extraordinarily diverse. In addition to Anglicans
who were largely concentrated in Kingston, the province also
contained large numbers of Catholics, Presbyterians,
Lutherans, Mennonites, Quakers, Baptists, and an ever
increasing body of Episcopal Methodists (Fahey 12 n41).
The Anglican clergyman Joseph
Addison reported in 1796, for example, that in the
Niagara region most of the settlers were Presbyterians
(Fahey 14). To make matters worse Darius Dunham had
established a Methodist circuit in Niagara the
previous year which, by the time of Addison's writing,
was serviced by two full-time itinerants and reporting
a membership of 140 people (Cornish 264). East of
Kingston around the Bay of Quinte, Anglican clergyman John Langhorn reported to the Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel that only 300 of the 1,500 settlers in
his region were
Anglicans. The rest were made up of “Moravians,
Quakers, Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and the
fanatical New Lights” (Fahey 14). Beginning with the
arrival of William Losee in 1792 Longhorn had to
contend with an ever expanding Methodist presence as
well.
None of this, however, stopped Simcoe from
dreaming of the day when Upper Canada's economic prosperity
would be matched only by its peaceful religious
uniformity. Envious Americans, he further hoped, would
soon wish they had never rebelled against his Britannic
Majesty and choose to relocate their families in his
utopian province. Ironically, the
spectacular success of Simcoe's plan to populate the
province with “loyal” Americans only helped to ensure
that its religious diversity became further entrenched. Between 1791 and the War of 1812 Simcoe's cheap
land-granting policies attracted some 90,000 Americans
(or “late-Loyalists”) who brought their eclectic
religious faiths with them. And although some of these groups, including
the Methodists, lost numbers during the War of 1812, by
1819 most had fully recovered their losses.
Many modern readers will doubtless think Simcoe's dream
quaint at best. It should be
remembered, however, that the principle of the separation of
church and state originated south of the
border among the American republicans. Simcoe, on the
other hand, despised republicanism and lived in an
empire where the monarch was head
of both the Church and the State. In Britain the Church stressed
loyalty to the Crown while the State shored up
the interests of the Church. For Bishop Mountain and
Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe nothing could have been more
natural than linking their imaginations
in a grand imperial strategy that had as much
to do with piety as it did with politics.
Methodism in the
United States
Although Methodists in Upper Canada were considered
“dissenters” by the Church of England and the
government, John Wesley (1703-1791), the founder of
Methodism, was himself never a dissenter. Wesley and his
brother Charles (1707-1788) were ordained Church of
England clergymen who began a renewal movement that was
never intended to grow beyond its ecclesial borders. For
this reason many early Methodists, even after they
became independent of the Church of England, continued
to refer to their churches as “meeting houses” or
“preaching houses” and
Methodism itself as a connexion rather than a church
(Lee 47).
Although Wesley had spent some time as a missionary in
the newly founded colony of Georgia in the mid-1730s, it
wasn’t until the 1760s that Methodist missionaries began
to cross the Atlantic in any great number. Their
organizational structure, however, proved to be ideal
for spreading their faith among a people largely
dispersed among the wilderness. American independence,
however, forced Wesley to make some hard choices. After
the conclusion of the War in 1783 it was no longer
seemly for Methodists to remain under the aegis of the
Church of England for obvious reasons. Consequently, in
1784 at the famous “Christmas Conference” the Methodist
Episcopal Church of America was born with the blessing
of John Wesley. Francis Asbury became its first bishop
and would serve in that capacity until his death in
1816. It is a testament to the difficulty with which
Wesley must have made this decision that Methodism in
Britain remained within the Church of England until
1795, four years after his own death in 1791.
Methodism to quickly
became the most potent religious force in America. A highly organized machine for spreading its unique
brand of Christianity, the separation of church and
state enshrined in the Bill of Rights allowed it to
compete for souls in the United States without
government interference and therefore on a level playing field. Because Methodists moved fast and
traveled light they were often able to reach far-flung
communities spread across the American wilderness years
in advance of other denominations. Their unique
hierarchy, moreover, ensured that where seeds were
planted they were also watered and tended with regular
care.
The highest decision-making body of the Methodist
Episcopal Church was the quadrennial General Conference
at which the bishop (or bishops) presided. The Church
was further divided into very large “conferences” that
were governed by an annual meeting or “conference” whose
decisions were subject to the approval of the
General Conference. Before 1784 when American Methodists
were part of Wesley's single Methodist movement they
were administratively part of an “American conference.”
Similarly, Canada was also set aside by the Methodist Episcopal
Church in America as a separate conference in 1824 before achieving
status as a separate Methodist Church 1828. Conferences
were further divided into districts that were overseen by
senior members of the Methodist clergy known as “presiding elders.”
Each district was then divided into “circuits” or
collections of communities and settlements served by one
or two “circuit riders” or itinerant preachers who were
usually ordained to perform baptisms and officiate at
what was variously called the Lord’s Supper, the
Ordinance, Communion, or the Sacrament. Itinerant
preachers and presiding elders were, at least in these
earliest years, appointed for four-year terms (or
longer) by the bishops at the General Conferences. All
of these individuals were also, at least until 1816,
eligible to attend the Quadrennial Conferences as
delegates. It has been observed that Methodists moved
fast and traveled light. Itinerants were paid very
little and required only a horse, a bible, and a hymnal
to do their work. Most circuits could be traveled in a
period of two weeks, though some of the earliest and
largest circuits might take as long as a month to
complete. Along they way itinerants would have daily “preaching appointments.”
Sermons were typically delivered before crowds in
marketplaces, fields, barns, and private homes and for
this reason the early Methodists did not necessarily require
expensive church buildings or parsonages. At night they would be
fed and sheltered by Methodist (or potential Methodist)
families along the way. In place of any formal
educational requirements, aspiring itinerants would
apprentice or serve “on trial” for a period of usually two years (Lee
68). This system allowed Methodists to
renew and expand their clergy at a rate no other
denomination could dream of matching. The life of an
itinerant, however, was hard
and lonely. Marriage was all but impossible and many
itinerants either died in the course of their duties or
“located” in order to start families of their own after
a few years of this arduous labour. Some, however, like
Bishop Asbury, continued to function as circuit riders
throughout long and productive lives riding as many as
six-thousand miles across poor roads and
trackless wilderness to preach upwards of four-hundred
sermons every year.
To aid the itinerant in his work there were also local
ministers (often former itinerants) who earned their
living within a community by farming or practicing a
trade full-time. In the absence of the circuit
rider these local ministers would perform funerals,
preach Sunday sermons, and generally oversee any
necessary administrative duties. Methodists also met in
mandatory small groups called “class meetings” over
which a class leader (appointed by the circuit rider)
would preside. Anyone interested in joining the
Methodist Church would first have to attended such class
meetings regularly for a period of at least several
months before being accepted as a member. Unlike circuit
riders and local preachers, many of the early class
leaders were women (often in charge of classes composed
entirely of other women). Periodically, in addition to
regular preaching and worship services, there were
special member-only celebrations called love-feasts
at which bread and water were taken and “enthusiastic”
public worship offered. Circuit riders often distributed
printed tickets for admission to these celebrations.
Such celebrations were eventually supplemented by
camp meetings as well—large tent revivals preached
usually in the wilderness by four or more circuit riders
over a period of two, three, or four days. These events were
for Methodists and non-Methodists alike and usually resulted
in a sharp growth in the number of Methodist adherents
and members in the regions where they took place.
By 1791, the year of Wesley's death and the
establishment of the first Methodist circuit in Upper
Canada, the United States contained 43,000 Methodists
along 97 circuits being served by 198 circuit riders (Playter
26).
Arrival of
Methodism in Upper Canada
The Hecks and Embury families, credited with
holding the first class meetings and
building the first Methodist meeting house in New York in
the the mid-1760s, are also considered to be the first
Methodists to arrive in the regions that were later to
embrace Upper and Lower Canada in the mid-1770s.
Originally settling east of the Ottawa River, they
relocated in 1785 to Augusta which was later to form
part of the Oswegatchie circuit—the same circuit that
Nathan Bangs rode while keeping his Upper Canadian
Journal in 1805-1806 (Carroll 5, 126-128). In January
1790, William Losee became the first Methodist circuit
rider to actually cross the border, entering Quebec
somewhere east of Matilda and travelling down the St.
Lawrence as far as the Bay of Quinte region and
Adolphustown, site of the 1805 camp meeting. (Playter
22-23). The following year Losee was appointed by the
New York Conference to create a new circuit around the
Kingston area where the largest number of loyalists had
settled. Although he didn't have much luck in Kingston
itself, which contained the largest concentration of
Anglican loyalists in the region under the ministry of
Rev. John Stuart, he did manage to organize a few
societies in the surrounding regions including west of
Kingston from Ernestown to the Bay of Quinte. In the
absence of official statistics for this first year, it
isn't probable that Losee numbered more than
several dozen Methodists along his entire circuit.
The following year Losee was returned to Upper Canada to
form another new circuit, the Oswegatchie, east along the St.
Lawrence between Kingston and the Ottawa River. The old
Kingston circuit was renamed Cataraqui and assigned to
Darius Dunham (Playter 34). That year the first
Methodist meeting house was also erected in Adolphustown
because “the Congregation on the Hay Bay increased so
much that the house of Paul Huff was too small” (Playter
30). At the end of the year Losee and Dunham reported a
combined membership along their circuits of 165
Methodists (Cornish 31).
In 1794 Upper Canada became a separate district under
Darius Dunham as presiding elder. The following year two
more circuits were established, one in Niagara by Darius
Dunham (much to the irritation of clergyman Joseph
Addison) and another in the Bay of Quinte by Sylvanus
Keeler and Elijah Woolsey. Between 1795 and 1805
Methodism grew at an extraordinary rate in Upper Canada
with membership swelling to almost 1,800 and Methodist
circuit riders, at ten, outnumbering Anglican clergymen
3 to 1. Membership would climb by another 1,500, served
by twenty (mostly American) circuit riders, before the
outbreak of the War of 1812. The war was a major setback
for Methodists (as well as Baptists and other
denominations) in Upper Canada. By the time hostilities
had ended in 1815 membership had fallen to 1805 levels
though sixteen circuit riders continued to work in the
region. To compound difficulties, British Wesleyans
arrived from Nova Scotia with the impression that they
would be able to make use of the Methodist meeting
houses in the province for their own purposes. This
caused a great deal of consternation until it was
finally agreed, in 1820, that the British Wesleyans
would occupy Lower Canada exclusively (where the
Methodist Episcopal Church had been active since Joseph
Sawyer formed a Montreal circuit in 1802) while leaving
the upper province to the American Methodist Episcopal
Church.
At the General Conference 1824, with 5,215 Methodist in
Upper Canada served by twenty-nine circuit riders (many
more of whom where now Canadian-born), Upper Canada was
set aside as its own Conference (which since 1810 had been a part of the American Genesee Conference). By this
time many Canadian Methodists were agitating for
separation from the Americans—especially Henry Ryan (a
presiding elder since 1810) who was becoming
increasingly disaffected by proposed changes in church
polity (Playter 234-237). The newly created Canada
Conference held its first conference in Hallowell under
bishops Enoch George and Elijah Hedding. Hedding
continued to preside at the Canadian Conferences until
1828 when the Methodist Episcopal Church in Canada was
granted complete independence with forty-nine active
circuit riders and nearly 10,000 members (Cornish 31).
After Nathan Bangs declined an offer by Canadian
Methodists to become their first bishop, William Case
took up episcopal duties on a temporary basis until, in
1833, the Methodist Episcopal Church in Canada merged
with the British Wesleyans to form the Wesleyan
Methodist Church in Canada (Stevens 269, Cornish 29-30).
II. Nathan Bangs (1778-1862)
Biographical sources
The importance of Nathan Bangs to the development of
early Methodism in both Canada and the United States is
belied by the scant attention he has received from
modern scholars. Earlier historical documents, however,
are disproportionately plentiful. These include John
Carroll’s Case and His Cotemporaries (1867-1877),
George F. Playter’s History of Methodism in Canada
(1862), William Strickland’s History of the Missions
of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1850), as well as
Bang’s own four-volume History of the Methodist
Episcopal Church (1838-1841). The richest published
primary source for information about Bangs’s life,
however, is Abel Stevens’s Life and Times of Nathan
Bangs issued by the New York Methodist Book Concern
in 1863. Stevens enlivens his narrative appreciably by
quoting liberally from Bangs's own manuscripts,
especially his autobiography written in the 1850s. Stevens heaps superlatives on Bangs,
accounting his importance within American Methodism as
second only to Bishop Francis Asbury’s and arguing that
his literary and publishing achievements set him apart
as “the principal founder of the American literature of
Methodism” (13). All this would make the fact that Stevens’s biography didn’t see
a second printing
seem strange were it not for the fact that Bangs’s
reputation suffered an all but fatal blow some twenty
years earlier when he failed to support the position of
Methodist abolitionists at the General Conference of
1844 (Tuttle 106-9; Herrmann 160ff.). In fact,
Bangs received no further dedicated biographical
treatment until the appearance of Alexander Tuttle’s
much smaller, self-conscious “miniature” of Stevens’s
earlier biography, in 1909. Though equally
hagiographical in tone, the small volume seems to have
fallen largely on deaf ears.
Modern treatments of Bangs's life and career are limited
to brief notices in histories of a more general nature,
such as Neil Semple's The Lord's Dominion: The
History of Canadian Methodism (40, 75, 129, 150) and
George Rawlyk's The Canada Fire: Radical
Evangelicalism in British North America, 1775-1812
(112-120, 147-155). Three doctoral dissertations from 1973 and 2004 have also
been written about Bangs's life and career. It is significant that all three dissertations
marvel at the discrepancy between Bangs’s achievements
and his modern reputation. All of these items are listed
in this site's Bibliography.
For information concerning the location and extent of
Bangs's manuscripts please see this site's
Archival
Resources page.
Early
career and the Oswegatchie circuit
Bangs was born in Stratford, Connecticut in 1778 and
received a comparatively good New England common school
education though not a “classical education” (Carroll
26). In 1799 at the age of 21 Bangs emigrated
from New York State to
the Niagara region and took up the position of tutor for
a family living about sixteen kilometers (ten miles)
from Newark (present-day Niagara-on-the-Lake). Although
Bangs always evidenced an interest in organized
religion, the local Anglican clergyman Joseph Addison
left him uninspired. He wrote “Though in holy orders, he
was a card-player and a drunkard, and performed the
liturgical service with indecent haste, following it
with a brief, rapid, and vapid prelection” (Stevens 39).
Almost against his will Bangs found himself moved by the
fervor and sincerity of the Methodist circuit rider
James Coleman. Coleman, however, was not an educated man
and Bangs continued to carry the prejudices of his
father against such men. He resisted. Joseph Sawyer and
Joseph Jewell combined forces, however, and it wasn't long
until Bangs's defenses crumbled. Bangs's sister, already
an ardent Methodist living in the Niagara region, was
delighted at his conversion (Stevens 44-47). After
experiencing Methodist “sanctification” in February 1801
he was received on trial and given a license to preach in August.
There being no formal educational requirements for
Methodist circuit riders of the period, those on trial
were obliged to apprentice with existing circuit riders
for a period of two years and so Bangs began
riding the Niagara circuit with Joseph Sawyer and Seth
Crowell. With the exception of Kingston and Newark, few
settlements in Upper Canada at the beginning of the
nineteenth century were larger than a hundred people.
Sawmills weren't common and many buildings were
constructed from hand-squared logs. Where roads existed
they were often poor. Bridges, even when constructed,
were frequently in disrepair (as Bangs's description of
York in 1800 demonstrates). Things in the United States
weren't much better, though, and the following year he continued to work with
Sawyer in the Bay of Quinte and Home District
(York/Toronto) regions. Bang's itinerating came to a
sudden halt, however, when he contracted a case of
Typhus in December 1803 that was so severe his
attendants all but gave him up as dead. Though Bangs did
eventually recover, the after-effects of the illness,
combined with the fact that he resumed preaching too
soon, left him with a strange “double-voice”
that lasted the rest of his life (Stevens 120-123).
In 1804 Bishop Asbury ordained Bangs a deacon and then
an elder so that he could administer the sacraments along
his circuit. One year later Bangs was assigned, with Sylvanus Keeler, to ride the
Oswegatchie circuit along the northern shore of the St.
Lawrence between Kingston and Montreal. The content of
the Upper Canadian journal covers almost the whole
period of Bangs's itinerancy on Oswegatchie. In addition
to being one of the oldest and
largest Methodist circuits in Upper Canada, accounting
for 25% of the church's membership at that time, it was
also geographically diffuse. It included the
settlements of Elizabethtown, Augusta, Edwardsburg,
Matilda, Williamsburg, Oznabruck, and Cornwall (Cornish
272).
Although this appointment was a sign of Asbury's
confidence in the young Bangs, Keeler was by far the more
experienced of the two. Having been received on trial in
1795, even before Bangs's conversion, Keeler had also
ridden the Oswegatchie circuit in 1802 and had even
located his family in Elizabethtown (Carroll 21-22). The
fact that Bangs does not mention Keeler in his journal,
however, suggests that the two worked largely
independently of one another. Bangs, moreover, probably didn't
want for a helping hand wherever he went: Oswegatchie
embraced the regions where the Hecks and Embury families
had settled in the 1780s. In addition to the descendants
of these families who were
active as class leaders and local preachers, at
least three additional local preachers were also working
in the circuit at that time (Carroll 126-128). Finally,
although Bangs's journal is curiously silent on the matter, it is
almost certain that he became engaged to his future wife,
Mary Bolton of Edwardsburgh, sometime during the course
of this year. They married on April 27th 1806 just
before Bangs was assigned to Lower Canada. Bangs was
appointed to the Quebec circuit in 1806, the Niagara
circuit again in 1807, and returned to the United States
to the Delaware circuit in 1808.
Hay Bay camp meeting September 1805
Camp meetings were an innovation of American Baptist and
Presbyterian revivalists in the 1790s. Major events
at which mass conversions were common, the first camp
meetings were held in Kentucky and
Tennessee and spread north and east from there. Ideally suited for frontier evangelism, they
could be held outdoors to accommodate large crowds at
whatever times of the year best suited the work-rhythms of
rural and agricultural societies. Methodists in
Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia adopted the practice
first, but it was in New York State that some of the
most heady camp meeting revivals would take place
throughout the nineteenth century (Semple 128-129).
Hundreds of families would travel by foot, horse, and
boat to prearranged sites, erect tents around makeshift
stages, and spend several days engaged in enthusiastic
or experimental religious worship. Hymns would be sung,
sermons preached, prayer meetings held, healings
performed, demons exorcised. These large and loud
meetings would attract both the converted and the
unconverted who would watch the spectacle
from the periphery and and sometimes find themselves
irresistibly drawn in. As an effective tool for mass
evangelism, these meetings arguably helped to prepare the ground for
the Second Great
Awakening of the 1820s and 1830s.
The Hay Bay camp meeting held in Adolphustown in the Bay
of Quinte region from Friday September 27th until Monday
September 30th was the first such meeting to be held in
Upper Canada. Its importance in the history of Canadian
religion cannot be doubted. The success of the Hay Bay
camp meeting led Methodists to hold many more such
meetings throughout the province resulting in a
significant increase in the number of Canadians who
maintained sustained levels of participation in
organized religion throughout the nineteenth century and
beyond. Bangs's manuscript journal is the only surviving eye-witness
account.
On Friday September 27th Henry Ryan and William Case (of
the Bay of Quinte circuit), Daniel Pickett (of the Yonge
Street circuit), Thomas Madden (of Smith's Creek
circuit), Sylvanus Keeler and Nathan Bangs (both of the
Oswegatchie circuit) arrived in Adolphustown, site of
the oldest Methodist meeting house in Upper Canada. They
began to erect a platform and at least a hundred other
participants began to erect makeshift tents about 180
feet (or 55 meters) from the stage. Case, the most
junior of the itinerants, preached the first sermon.
That was followed by a sermon by Bangs, and then,
sometime before midnight, a sermon by Thomas Madden.
After midnight most returned to their tents and Bangs
records that already four conversions had taken place.
Saturday was much of the same. Sunday, however, drew a
much larger crowd. Bangs reports that some 2,500 people
gathered around—believers close to the stage and the
unconverted forming a giant ring around the proceedings.
That figure, if correct, represents a striking 5% of the
total population in Upper Canada in 1805 (Rawlyk 120).
It is clear from Bangs's account that he viewed the
day's events as
spiritual warfare at its most fierce, referring to the unconverted
variously as the “wicked,”
“children of the devil,” and “wolves.” Three events
stand out among the rest as quintessential elements of
early camp meetings of the period. The first is the
dramatic conversion of a young woman “of high rank”
whose sister physically wrenches her away from the
meeting presumably to prevent embarrassment
to her family. By
some means (discrepancies between Bangs's
journal account of 1805, his autobiography of the 1850s,
and Abel Stevens's published account of 1863 are
discussed in the entry's annotation) the young woman is returned to the meeting
and both she and her sister are dramatically converted.
The second striking episode comes in the form of a young
demoniac exorcised by a number of itinerants who must
not only pray for the young man's deliverance, but also
keep off the unconverted who attempt to
liberate him from the Methodists by force. Finally,
Bangs himself is struck down by “a Shock of Divine
Power” and left paralyzed for several hours in a tent
before being able to return to the meeting. Worship and
prayer continued “like fire in a dry stable” throughout the
rest of the night and into Monday morning when the itinerants
reluctantly took leave of the place.
The fullest published scholarly account of the Hay Bay
camp meeting of 1805 can be found in Rawlyk's The
Canada Fire (144-161). See also Semple's The
Lord's Dominion (128-130).
Return to United States and later career
In 1808 bangs returned to the United States and went on
for a time
to an illustrious career. In 1812 he again volunteered
to return to Lower Canada as a circuit rider though the
outbreak of hostilities between the United States and
Britain prevented him from doing so. That may have been a
fortuitous since the following year he was appointed the presiding elder of the
Rhinebeck district in New York State. While occupying
this position
he published his popular Errors of
Hopkinsianism Detected and Refuted (1815) which sold
3,000 copies in six months (Flores 234), The Reformer
Reformed, and first proposed a course of study of
ministerial candidates. In 1819 he was made the
presiding elder of the New York district and founded the
Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
From 1820 to 1828 he served as a highly competent and
innovative Senior Book Steward of the Methodist Book
Concern in New York. During these years he expanded the
Concern considerably, founding the weekly Christian
Advocate, purchasing the Concern's first press, and
establishing a bindery. He also served as the editor of
the monthly Methodist Magazine for the entire
eight year period of his tenure during which he also
edited, added commentary, and published half-a-dozen
books. In 1828, when the Methodists in Canada gained
their independence from the United State Bangs was
offered (but declined) the bishopric. Between 1838
and 1840 his definitive four-volume History of the
Methodist Episcopal Church appeared and went to to
wide audiences in both Canada and the United States.
Bangs took a fatal step at the General Conference of
1844, however, when he failed to support the
abolitionists in order to avoid what he believed was a
greater evil than slavery: church schism. He failed to
reconcile the two camps, however, the church split, and his career went
into a steep decline. Although he continued to publish
and serve as a presiding elder, he was never elected a bishop. One can only speculate whether Bangs ever
regretted that he had not taken up the Canadians on their offer in
1828. He died in May 1862 and was buried in New York
City. Abel Stevens's definitive biography appeared the
following year but failed to reach a wide audience.
Although Bangs's work in Upper Canada and his tenure as
Senior Book Agent of the Methodist Book Concern were
truly remarkable, he is largely forgotten even by
historians of religion today.
III. The Journals (1805-1806, 1817)
Location and description of physical documents
Nathan Bangs's original journals and notebook are housed
in the Methodist collections of Drew University in
Madison, New Jersey. They are described in the
electronic finding aid of the General Commission on
Archives and History of the United Methodist Church.
Copies of Bangs's Canadian journals from 1 July 1805 to
28 April 1806 and the American journal and notebook
covering events between the autumn of 1800 and 1 August
1817 are also available at the United Church Archives at
Victoria College, University of Toronto. In addition to
these documents Drew University also houses thirty-two letters written by Bangs to his daughter
Mary as well as a six-hundred and sixteen page
autobiography probably composed in
the 1850s.
The Upper Canadian journal is written on rectos and
versos of a single gathering of fourteen leaves with
individual pages measuring 22.5 x 18.5 centimeters
(height by width). The twenty-eight handwritten pages
are completely filled with the exception of page
nineteen where Bangs concludes his description of the
Hay Bay camp meeting and leaves the last half of the
page blank. There is some chipping with minor loss of
text from page twenty-five to page twenty-eight (leaves
thirteen and fourteen). There also appears to be a loose
leaf missing from between pages sixteen and seventeen
since the text on page sixteen concludes with a
period and the text on page seventeen begins in
mid-sentence.
The American journal and notebook is written on
rectos and versos of a single gathering of twenty-two
leaves measuring 20 X 16 centimeters (height by width).
There is also an additional loose leaf of the same size
written on recto and verso. The forty-four pages as
well as the additional two pages of the loose leaf are
completely filled. Unlike the Upper Canadian journal,
this gathering seems to have been detached from
a larger notebook and begins in mid-sentence. Individual
pages are also inconsistently numbered from 112 to
[156]. The loose leaf, numbered 49 on the recto side
and 50 on the verso, records events that took place in
October 1802. The lower right-hand corner of the first
leaf (fore-edge) is torn off resulting in a
substantial loss of text on both the recto and verso
sides. Apart from this, however, this surviving portion
of what was presumably a larger manuscript is intact.
Literary character and problems of dating
The Upper Canadian journal and the American journal and
notebook are very different in their literary character
indicating that Bangs probably created them for
different purposes. The extremely introspective nature
of the Upper Canadian journal suggests in particular that
it was never
intended for publication. Wesley kept such a journal
and Bangs encouraged young ministers, in his Letters to Young Ministers of
the Gospel (1826) to “write down your own thoughts, not,
indeed, with a view to publish them, but for your own
improvement in biblical knowledge” (19). Throughout 1805
and 1806 Bangs wrote continually about his private
temptations and spiritual “besetments,” often
ending his entries with short prayers to God for
help and consolation. Internal evidence suggests that
Bangs usually made his entries on the same day (or the day after) the events they record took place.
The entry for 20 August 1805,
in fact,
seems to have been made in several installments throughout the
course of a single day. The only exception to this
practice took place when Bangs set down the events of
the Hay Bay camp meeting retrospectively on
5 October 1805
using an implied (and no longer extant) set of notes. In
the entry for 5 October he writes that “The minutes I took
down myself and they are here corrected and enlarged
upon.” What follows are four individual entries for 27
September to 30 September 1805 detailing his
extraordinary experiences over the four-day period. As Bangs traveled
more routinely throughout the Oswegatchie circuit during 1805 and 1806,
however, he seems
often to have lost track of the day of the month.
Nonetheless, to preserve the historical integrity of the
journal, entries
are listed under Bangs's original (and often
incorrect) date, with
corrected dates appended in square brackets. The editor has
proceeded on the assumption that, since itinerants
usually traveled their whole circuits in a period of two
weeks, and since Sundays would have been of special
importance, Bangs was more likely to have known the day
of the week than the day of the month. If, therefore,
Bangs recorded an entry under Thursday 9 August 1805, but
Thursday in fact fell on 8 August, it has been assumed
that the entry was made on Thursday 8 August 1805 rather
than Friday 9 August 1805. The entries in Bangs's
journal are here presented in the same order they are
given in the physical journal —an
order that, with the exception of the Hay Bay camp
meeting entries, is completely chronological. Finally, existing archival finding aids suggest that the last
entry of the Upper Canadian journal, marked simply
“Monday 28,” belongs (as do the previous three entries) to
March 1806. Although Bangs often miscalculated the day
of the month by one or two, March 28th 1806 fell on a
Friday (as far from a Monday as it could possibly fall)
while April 28th 1806 in fact fell on a Monday. In view
of this it seems more likely that this final entry was
made in April (the day after Bangs's wedding) rather than in March.
The American journal and notebook is far less
introspective and therefore less personal in nature.
Although Bangs continues to offer his own reflections on
various events, he seems less concerned about
his personal spiritual welfare, nor does he continue
his earlier practice of appending to the end of his
entries prayers for divine assistance. With the
exception of the 1817 entries, moreover, all entries
seem to have been written retrospectively suggesting
that Bangs began this text as an autobiography in 1816
or 1817 only to set it aside until the 1850s when he
began the task afresh. As mentioned, the entries concern
events which took place between the autumn of 1800 and 1
August 1817. With the exception of the events of October
1802, which are recorded on a single loose leaf, entries
are presented on the website in the order in which they
appear in the notebook. That order, it should be pointed
out, is not a chronological or even thematic one. The
notebook begins with Bangs’s frustrated efforts to reach
Montreal at the outbreak of the War of 1812, then
records the events at annual and general conferences of
1813 and 1816. Then, under the heading “A” he records
events while passing through York (Toronto) in January
1802. It is here that the text of the loose leaf is
inserted since it concerns events that took place in
October of that year. Next, under the heading “B,” Bangs describes events that
took place while he was on
trial in 1800. After this there is an entry for 7
January 1816, followed by entries for 3 June, 4 July,
and 1 August of 1817. Given the structure of the
notebook, the fact that Bangs seems to have begun using it as
a journal rather than a notebook sometime in 1817
(giving exact dates rather than simple months), and that
the entry for May 1816 occurs sixteen pages before his
entry of 7 January 1816, it seems likely that the entry
for 7 January 1816 was probably made on 7 January 1817.
There is nothing in the contents of the entry, however,
to prove this definitively.
Both Bangs’s Upper Canadian journal and his American
notebook and journal have been used directly and
indirectly by nineteenth and twentieth century
historians of religion. Bangs himself drew
extensively on both documents in the process of
composing his widely-read and influential four-volume
History of the Methodist Episcopal Church
(1838-1840). In the 1850s Bangs returned to this
material again when composing his more than six-hundred
page manuscript autobiography. When Bangs died in 1862 he left
his autobiography to Abel Stevens who published, in the
following year, a biography of Bangs that drew heavily
on passages from that text. The interplay of these three
texts—Bangs’s early journals, his later autobiography,
and Stevens’s published text—can be seen nowhere more
clearly than in the events of
Sunday 29 September 1805
as they are variously conveyed by these three sources.
Later nineteenth-century historians of Canadian
Methodism, including John Carroll, George Playter,
and Egerton Ryerson, also drew on Stevens’s published
account of these events (that in turn drew on Bang’s autobiography
based on this early journal). The Upper
Canadian journal received its fullest treatment by a
modern scholar when George Rawlyk transcribed selected
sections
that dealt directly with the Hay Bay camp meeting for publication in The Canada Fire in 1994.
An unpublished transcription by Lawrence Kline (c.1965)
of Bangs's American journal and notebook (excluding the
single loose leaf numbered 49 and 50) is also housed at
Drew University.
Editorial conventions
The approach taken to editing Bangs's journals and notebook
has been documentary and not critical in nature (see
Williams and Abbott 55-57). That is, entries have
been transcribed as faithfully as possible to preserve
the integrity of these documents as historical
artifacts. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation have not
been corrected. There are times when, for this reason,
entries may appear unclear. Whenever interpolations have
been made they are always enclosed in square
brackets. Words that Bangs crossed out, where legible,
have also been included. Having said that, Bangs’s handwriting is
difficult and there are doubtless places where
unconscious and unintentional alterations to spelling
and punctuation have
occurred. In contrast, Rawlyk seems to have taken a more
critical approach to the portions of the Upper Canadian
journal he transcribed. Instances where the
present transcription disagrees with Rawlyk’s selections are marked
for comparison. To facilitate such comparisons, and to
safeguard against errors in transcription, facsimile
reproductions (at 600 dpi) of the original pages of the
Upper Canadian journal are also linked to directly from
each entry. It should be noted that a previous researcher has placed incorrect dates in the margins of
the manuscript that carry the suggestion that the camp
meeting took place in early October 1805. Published
primary sources (see Stevens 151ff.) and modern
scholars agree, however, that this revival took place
over the last weekend in September 1805. The
early-October dates seem to have arisen from a failure
to notice that Bangs was recording events
retrospectively on October 5th. Finally, although
Kline's transcription of the American journal and
notebook was also consulted during the course of this
project, variant readings have not been noted since
Kline's work exists only in one copy and is therefore
not easily accessible for purposes of comparison.
Editorial and explanatory annotations appear in a
separate pane to the left of Bangs’s transcribed
entries. Definitions of antiquated words or terms that
acquired special meaning within early Methodism appear
in a separate pane to the right. Such words are not marked
in the original text. Finally, links to relevant
published and unpublished primary sources (including
maps) are similarly provided in the right-hand pane.
Biblical references and allusions, however, are imbedded
within the text in square brackets. Both biblical texts
and primary source materials open in a separate window for purposes of textual
comparison and reader convenience.
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