Another strength of the Baptists lay in their democratic organization. Their heroic struggle for separation of church and state, stoutly resisted by authorities during the colonial era, was vindicated by postwar legislation. The Baptists extended concepts of democracy to the congregation, which selected its own minister and established its rules of decorum. Baptist churches could not be accused of elitism, since their often uneducated farmer-preachers came from the same elements as the congregations, which in early years were likely to represent the poorer economic classes of society.
The Baptists suffered two disadvantages, particularly with respect to the Methodists. Partly because of the lack of a strong central authority capable of resolving doctrinal issues, Baptist congregations often split on relatively minor matters. Divisive issues in the early nineteenth century included missions, education, temperance, and Freemasonry. Another handicap was the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, and as time passed, the Baptists began to emphasize a doctrine of general atonement.
The Methodists. In contrast with other denominations, the Methodists had an organization ideally suited to conditions in West Virginia and to the needs of an expanding frontier. Like the Baptists, they had a strong grass roots base. Small congregations were served by a lay reader, or lay leader, who lived in the community and conducted services. Periodically, however, they received visits from a circuit rider, a regularly appointed minister whose charge included several churches. In the organizational pyramid, circuits were grouped into quarterly conferences, which in turn formed annual conferences. The entire structure was capped by the authority and prestige of the bishop. As settlements expanded, new congregations were added to existing circuits, which could be rearranged to accommodate shifting populations. With the best features of both centralization and decentralization, the Methodists remained close to the people but escaped many of the disruptions that plagued the Baptists.
In some respects the circuit riders were the key figures in the Methodist organization. These dedicated men traveled hundreds of miles each year over arduous mountain trails, braved the perils and hardships of storms and freezing weather, faced dangers from ferocious animals, and suffered great physical discomfort. The rewards for their labors were most often spiritual rather than monetary. They belonged, “like the early founders of Christianity, to the toiling classes of the community. They were taken from the plow, the loom, the bench, the anvil.” They proved singularly effective in setting forth “those soul-saving truths which brought the sinner to dust, and raised the fallen to the blessings of pardon and salvation.”4
Complementing the work of the circuit riders was that of the indefatigable Bishop Francis Asbury, who frequently left the beaten paths “to seek the outcasts of the people.”5 Between 1776 and 1815 Asbury made at least thirty-four journeys to the frontiers, setting out from Baltimore and swinging westward to the outer fringes of settlement. His close association with the people themselves does much to explain the vitality of early West Virginia Methodism.
Although Methodism continued to appeal to the masses, it also drew support from the natural aristocracy of the areas into which it advanced. It began as a movement within the Church of England in 1739 under the spirited leadership of John Wesley. The first three Methodist missionaries arrived in the colonies in 1766, but during the Revolutionary War all except Francis Asbury returned to England. Asbury remained and took the lead in establishing the ecclesiastical independence of American Methodists from their English counterparts. Yet American Methodism retained a measure of the prestige that had attached to the Anglican Church. Locally prominent families, such as the Zanes, McMechens, McCulloughs, Doddridges, and Wellses in the Northern Panhandle and Edward Keenan in the Greenbrier region, could readily become Methodists without feeling alienated from all previous spiritual values.
Other advantages of the Methodists derived from their own hymnody, the social qualities of their class meetings, and their effective use of the camp meeting. The origins of the camp meeting are usually traced to the famous Cane Ridge revival in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1801, and to techniques used by James McGready, a Presbyterian minister. The quarterly meetings of West Virginia Methodists, however, had long been marked by assemblages of circuit riders, local preachers, class leaders, and communicants, often numbering in the hundreds, and by an emotional uplift produced by spirited preaching, love feasts, and the singing of Methodist hymns. It was but a short step from the quarterly gathering to the camp meeting, which in Methodist hands assumed the flavor of a great religious crusade.
The Methodist Protestant Church. Although West Virginia Methodists did not experience the fragmentation of the Baptists, they did not entirely escape disruption within their ranks. As early as 1792 discontent was voiced over the power and life tenure of the bishops, the lack of lay representation in the General Conference, and the arbitrary assignment of ministers and other church officials. Years later, several reformist ministers circulated a petition called Mutual Rights and were expelled from the church. At the Baltimore Conference in 1827 discontented elements drew up a new petition for presentation to the Pittsburgh Conference the following year and called for reinstatement of the expelled ministers.
Despite eloquent pleas by such leaders as Henry Bascom, who had begun his ministry on the rugged Guyandotte Circuit of West Virginia, and Asa Shinn, a prominent Methodist leader in the northern part of the state, differences between church authorities and reformers remained unresolved. Several congregations dominated by reformers severed their connection with the Methodist Episcopal Church and in November 1830 officially established the Methodist Protestant Church. In West Virginia support for the reformers centered largely in the Monongahela Valley. The chief congregations were at Fairmont, under Thomas Barns, a brother-in-law of Shinn, and at Hacker Valley, under John Mitchell and David Smith. In 1855 West Virginia members numbered 3,036 of whom more than half were in the Morgantown, Pruntytown, Evansville, Jackson, and Braxton circuits. The Greenbrier Circuit, the largest in southern West Virginia, had seventy members.
The Presbyterians. Considering the fact that about half of the five hundred Presbyterian churches in the colonies in 1776 were in areas from which West Virginia settlers were drawn, the state might well have become predominantly Presbyterian. In fact, during the early 1780s Presbyterianism seemed to take on new life in the Eastern Panhandle. Moreover, Presbyterians were in the vanguard of intrepid ministers who crossed the Allegheny Mountains to carry the gospel to the frontiers. In 1775 John McMillan visited the Greenbrier and Tygart Valley settlements. In 1783 John McCue organized three congregations in the Greenbrier region. Other missionaries began to appear in the Kanawha, Monongahela, and upper Ohio valleys.
Unfortunately, the structure and philosophy of the Presbyterian Church was ill adapted to the requirements of frontier areas. Lacking both the flexible organization of the Methodists and the local orientation of the Baptists, it suffered a distinct disadvantage. In 1800 nearly all of its twenty-two congregations were in the Eastern Panhandle, the Northern Panhandle, and the Greenbrier Valley. As late as 1830, ten large counties of northcentral West Virginia, with a population of sixty thousand, had no settled Presbyterian minister with the exception of Asa Brooks, the pastor of the church at French Creek.
Without doubt, the greatest handicap to the Presbyterians in increasing their numbers lay in their insistence upon an educated ministry. Men such as John McElhenney at Lewisburg, Henry Foote at Romney, and Henry Ruffner at Charleston also had to spend as much time in teaching and administering academies in their respective towns as in strictly religious endeavors. Encumbered with educational baggage as well as insistence upon trained ministers, the Presbyterian Church found itself unable to keep pace with advancing settlements in the manner of the Methodists and Baptists.
The Episcopal Church. Even less a proselytizing denomination than the Presbyterians was the Episcopal Church. In 1840 West Virginia had only eleven Episcopal churches west of the Allegheny Mountains. Most of them were in larger towns such as Charleston,