In the year 1865 the State meeting was held at Prairie City. Meantime,
however, a vigorous local district organization had been maintained
from the first in Northeastern Kansas. This year its annual meeting
was held at Leavenworth City, continuing from the first till the 4th
of June. In addition to the ordinary purposes for which this meeting
was held, it undertook to perfect the Missionary Society that had been
organized the preceding year at Tecumseh.
Among all the conventions held in Kansas, whether of State or
District, this must be regarded as the most notable:
1. It offers devout thanksgiving to the Lord for the return of peace
to the nation: "_Resolved_, That with hearts full of gratitude to
Almighty God, we hail the return of peace to our long distracted
country."
2. After seven years of labor, beginning in 1858, and ending in 1865,
notwithstanding the disorders of the period, this Convention is able
to give a tabulated report of seventy-nine churches organized in the
State with their bishops, deacons and evangelists, and having an
aggregate of 3,020.
3. It is able to report a missionary society, that in the eight months
intervening between the Tecumseh State meeting and the present
Convention, has collected and paid over to its four evangelists--J; H.
Bauserman, Pardee Butler, S. G. Brown and J. J. Trott--the sum of
$827.
4. The Convention was able to adjourn, full of hope and enthusiasm,
and to promise itself that it would do a still better work in the time
to come.
The names of the following persons appear as the accredited messengers
of the churches: Leavenworth--J. C. Stone, G. H. Field, S. A.
Marshal, H. Allen, J. T. Gardiner, Calvin Reasoner. Ottumwa--J. T.
Cox, Wm. Gans, J. Jenks, Peter Smith. Tecumseh--J. Driver, M. Driver,
A. J. Alderman. Americus--W. C. Butler, S. S. Chapman. Le Roy--S. G.
Brown, Allen Crocker. Little Stranger--J. H. Bauserman, S. A.
Lacefield, J. Adams, J. P. Bauserman. Iola--S. Brown. Nine Mile--N. D.
Tyler, J. T. Goode, H. Dickson. Garnett--J. Ramsey, H. Cavender.
Holton--E. Cope, J. P. Nichols, T. G. Walters, A. B. Scholes.
Pardee--Pardee Butler, N. Dunshee. Belmont--J. J. Trott. Monrovia--J.
N. Holliday, John Graves, Caleb May. Mt. Pleasant--Joseph Potter,
Thomas Miller, Joseph McBride, N. Humber. Olathe P. E. Henderson, John
Elston, Martin Davenport, Addison Bowen. Lanesfield--O. S. Laws, Wm.
Maxwell, H. C. Maxwell. Prairie City--H. H. Johnson. Buck Creek--C. M.
Short, Thomas Finch, Martin Stoddard. Grasshopper Falls--James Ritter,
S. Smith. Winchester--Cyrus Taylor, A. R. Cantwell.
But we wait for a period of seventeen years, then Eld S. T. Dodd, of
Topeka, is appointed by the Kansas Christian Missionary Society to
write a history of the work of the Christian Church in Kansas, which
he does in a tract of thirty-eight pages; and Bro. D., writing under
date of 1882, makes the following summary of the work done:
From 1856 to 1865 anything like church work was as good as
thrown away, except as affording temporary privileges.
Finally a time came when the clatter of arms and the
clatter of raiders were ended; railroads were built, and
emigration poured in from all States and nations, among
which were many Disciples of Christ, who should have been
builded into existing churches, or collected into new
ones; but many were permitted to drift along in
carelessness and irresponsibility until their identity as
members has been lost.
During the past five years there has been a general
awakening among our brethren, which has resulted in very
many new organizations and the possession of Atchison,
Topeka, Wichita, and several other strongholds.
Bro. Dodd makes report of the following State meetings as having been
held in Kansas:
In 1869, Grantville; in 1870, Le Roy; in 1871, St. George;
in 1872, Emporia; in 1873, Topeka; in 1874, Olathe; in
1875, Ottawa, in 1876, Manhattan; in 1877, Emporia; in
1878, Gates Center; in 1879, Emporia; in 1880, Manhattan;
in 1881, Salina; in 1832, Emporia.
To the above summary the writer will add the following list of the
earlier Territorial and State meetings:
In 1860, Big Springs; in 1861, Prairie City; in 1862,
Emporia; in 1863, Ottawa; in 1864, Tecumseh; in 1865,
Prairie City; in 1866, Ottawa; in 1867, Olathe.
To the above statistics we will append the following reflections:
1. Among the preachers that prominently appear in the first seven
years of our work, there are none remaining, save the writer of these
Recollections, Some are fallen out by the way. Elders S. G. Brown, Wm.
Gans, N. B. White, S. A. Marshal and Allen Crocker have died in the
faith and hope of the gospel. The name of J. H. Bauserman does,
indeed, appear, but he had only just begun his work; but having put
the armor on, he has never laid it off. The name of J. B. McCleery
does not yet appear on the minutes of our yearly meetings, still he
was already an evangelist. He had been in Ohio the friend and
companion of James A. Garfield, and soon came to be known as one of
the first pulpit orators of the State. The government, like death,
"loves a shining mark," and claimed Bro. McCleery for its service, and
he is now an army chaplain. The churches will never cease to regret
his choice, and yet he had a right to make it.
2. The facts do not bear out the remark of Bro. S. T. Dodd, that
"from 1856 to 1865 anything like church work was as good as thrown
away." With seventy-nine churches organized, and with upwards of three
thousand church members in the State, work could scarcely be said to
be "as good as thrown away."
3. Notwithstanding, the facts bear witness that there were grave
imperfections in our work. After a heroic battle, fought under
insuperable difficulties, and when there was every promise of still
more brilliant triumphs, the cause went into an eclipse, from which it
emerged only after many years of disaster.
From and after the year 1875, the churches spread themselves over a
territory of two hundred miles in width and four hundred miles in
length, and a great number of men became responsible for the good or
the evil that should come on the cause of primitive and apostolic
Christianity. It is probable that since the period of which we are
speaking, 100,000 Disciples have located somewhere in these Western
Territories. If the church should now undertake to make inquisition
for these church members, and make inquiry into their present
condition, temporal and spiritual, the story of their wants and woes
would be full of pathetic eloquence.
Since the days of the apostles an enthusiasm never has been known
greater than that which was felt by the men who, under God, are
responsible for this Reformation. In the beginning of the present
century the missionary spirit among Christians was dead, and their
zeal was wasted in disgraceful squabbles over inoperative and
metaphysical opinions, or over modes of church government of which the
Bible knows nothing.
The Protestant sects were divided into two hostile camps, known as
Calvinists and Arminians. The Calvinist dogma was that Jesus died
only for the elect, who were chosen in a by-gone eternity; that all
men are spiritually as dead and helpless as was the cold dead dust of
the earth out of which Adam was created, but that God will quicken
into a new life dead sinners who are of the elect, and will give them
evidence of their acceptance by the joyful emotions which he will
create in their hearts. And so the supreme interest of men centered in
this, that they were to seek in their own hearts those raptures and
ecstasies that were evidence that they had experienced this spiritual
change. The Arminians gloried in a free salvation. Christ died for
all. But they demanded identically the same evidence of pardon
demanded by the Calvinists, and men found it just as hard to get this
Arminian evidence of pardon as to get the experience that assured them
that they were of the elect, according to the gospel of Calvinism; and
so it game to pass that this lethargy of Christians over missionary
work, and these wranglings over human opinions, had, before the
Revolutionary War, covered the American colonies like a blanket with
the spirit of infidelity. The corruption of Christianity by the Roman
Catholic Church issued in the atheism of the French Revolution, and
has created the infidelity of modern European nations; so like causes
had precipitated a similar result in America. Men were groping as the
blind grope in darkness, and then came, during the first half of the
present century, the proclamation of primitive and apostolic
Christianity. Alexander Campbell, John Smith, Jacob Creath and Samuel
Rogers in Virginia and Kentucky, and Walter Scott, the Haydens and
John Henry in Northeastern Ohio, made the people understand that the
plan of salvation is as simple as the primer of our childhood; that it
is all comprehended in this, that we must bow to the authority of
Jesus, that we must believe in him and keep his commandments, and that
the whole story is told in the four gospels and in the Acts of the
Apostles with such simplicity that he that runs may read, that he that
reads may understand, and that he that understands may act.
Alexander Campbell has said that a persecution made up of defamation,
proscription and slander may be as hard to hear as that which issues
in bonds and imprisonments; and this these early Disciples had to
bear. But the world was ripe for reformation, and the cause spread
like fire on the prairies.
Those who originally planted these churches in Kansas were, in large
part, men and women who had drawn their inspiration directly from the
founders and leaders of this Reformation. To some of them it had been
given to sit at the feet of Alexander Campbell. Others had listened to
John Smith, and had been magnetized by the inimitable wit and wisdom
of that marvelous man, and their hearts had drawn heroic courage from
his heart. Others still had been captivated by the boyish and
unstudied drollery of Walter Scott, only to be swept away by a
whirlwind of passionate appeal and terrible invective, or to be melted
with the tenderness of his portrayal of the love of Jesus. And all
these came to Kansas bearing a great cause in their hearts, and
determined to build up here such churches as they had left behind
them. But this was not all. Here were not only people among the most
refined, well informed, and pious in the nation, but here were those
who had been born in a storm of religious fanaticism, and could only
live in a whirlwind of excitement. These were the "big-meeting"
Christians. There were also those whose truthfulness was doubtful,
whose business methods were questionable, who could, on occasion,
indulge in coarse and vulgar jokes and smutty jests, and whose
religion scarce kept them outside the grog-shop. Added to all this,
there were many whose hearts were yet bleeding with wounds they had
received in that terrible struggle out of which the nation had just
emerged. And now, afflicted with poverty, drouth, grasshoppers and
starvation, we were left an agglomeration of heterogeneous materials,
to fight our own battle as best we might. We might hope for help from
the Lord, but not from our brethren in the older States. They were too
busy debating the divine plan of missionary operations to help us.
The reader may well believe that the writer of these Recollections did
not find himself carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease while
this was going on, nor did he find himself reposing on a couch soft as
downy pillows.