CHAPTER 35 HENRY BASCOM

CHAPTER 35 HENRY BASCOM

Bascom was emphatically a western man. Early taken to the head waters of the Allegheny, and reared amid the wild scenery of his forest home, his mind took its hue and coloring from those deep glens and craggy mountains; and the native bent which was given to his genius, from the sublime and picturesque scenes around him, grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength. But though reared in the west, and identified with its numerous interests, and its rapidly expanding prosperity, he was not contracted in his views. His mind seemed to have been framed upon the same grand scale, in which the Creator had constructed the broad prairies, and mighty rivers, and towering mountains of the west. The whole country, from where Atlantic surges wash the rocky, sterile shores of New England, to where the Pacific’s blue waters lave the golden sands of California, was his home, and he embraced the whole in his broad catholic sympathies. With him there was no north, no south, no east, no west; and in this respect his mind had a Websterian cast — massy, boundless in its sympathies and aims; or, like to that of the immortal Clay, whose friend he was during his whole life, he rose above all sectional views, soared beyond all sectional lines, and embraced his entire country in the arms of his benevolence. As Webster, and Clay, and Calhoun were types of a race of statesmen, which have passed away from the political world, so may we say of a Fisk, Olin, and Bascom, they were types of a race of preachers, which, as the rare products of an age that is passing, may take a century to produce their like again. We would not be sectarian, though we thus confine our comparison to the Methodist Church; and yet, for solid learning, deep piety, and sublime eloquence in the pulpit and on the platform, we know not their superiors in any age that is past, as exhibited in any of the Churches of the land. They may not have excelled in Biblical learning, or devoted piety, or pulpit eloquence, according to the standards of the great master minds of some other Churches, but, according to our judgment, none excelled them in a union of all these.

However pleasant and perhaps profitable it might be to indulge in such a train of thought, and pursue it so as to resolve, as far as possible, the distinguished traits which characterized these great minds into their elements, and thereby form an analysis for the study of the youth of the present day — a model upon which future character might be constructed — we must forego that pleasure, and proceed at once to the subject of our chapter.

There was something very remarkable in the youth of Bascom. Very soon after his conversion, which occurred at a campmeeting on Oil creek, he gave evidence, in the relation of his religious experience and prayers of a power and eloquence unusual to boys of his age. At one time he went from home to attend a quarterly meeting at Franklin. His singular appearance, with his fox-skin cap and rude backwoods dress, attracted the attention of every one present; but when, at love-feast, on Sabbath morning, he rose and spoke of his conversion and the love of a Savior, every heart was thrilled, and as the rough exterior sparkled with the light and fire of the soul within, the people wondered more at the boy than they had before been surprised at the rusticity of his appearance. On Monday morning, Mr. William Connelley, who was a merchant in Franklin, took him to his store and gave him a new hat and some other articles to fit up his wardrobe. Mr. C. was subsequently, for several years, a member of the Pennsylvania Legislature, and from some cause or other lost His property and became poor. Traveling in the west, he stopped in Cincinnati, and being destitute of means, among strangers, he called upon Dr. Elliott, in Cincinnati, and asked for the loan of a few dollars to take him home. The doctor promptly took out his wallet and handed him all he desired, saying, "Take that, brother, and welcome, for giving young Bascom a hat."

Soon after his father removed to the wilds of the west, and settled on the banks of the Ohio, nearly opposite to where the city of Maysville now stands, where he engaged with his family in farming pursuits. Many years afterward, while a professor of moral science at Augusta, he often visited the residence of his father, several miles above, on the Ohio side of the river. Here he has been seen with his coat off, and with mattock in hand, grubbing out the roots and briers of the soil. One season he prepared the soil and tended twelve acres of corn, at the same time attending to all his duties in College. In the year 1812, at a quarterly conference, held on the Scioto, not far from Portsmouth, in a stone house still standing, he was recommended to the Western conference, to be received into the traveling connection. That recommendation, written and signed by the Rev. Robert W. Finley, is now in the possession of Dr. Elliott, together with numerous other documents of olden time, pertaining to Methodism in the west. His peculiar talents as a preacher were early developed. He seemed at once to rise to eminence as a pulpit orator. The graces of oratory, which others gain, like Demosthenes, by a severe and tedious process, with him were gifts of nature, and not the product of education. We are strongly inclined to the opinion that the proverb "poea nascitur, non fit," applies with equal force to orators, though perhaps not to the same degree. Such was the case, we believe, with Bascom; he was born an orator, and to have cast his genius in any model would have destroyed his power. God makes but few such men. Towering up like Himalaya, or sublimely grand like Niagara, they stand out apart from their species to excite our wonder.

We were forcibly struck with the saying of a grave divine, who had been listening with intense and thrilling interest to Bascom in one of his loftiest moods, and who, on being asked, after the sermon, what he thought of the man, replied, ’’I did not think of the man at all. My mind was wholly absorbed in the contemplation of the character of the God who created him." Exhibitions of greatness and power in nature invariably send us up to nature’s God. We wondered not at the saying of this grave and talented divine. Similar impressions have doubtless been elicited from others. Who that witnesses the tempest careering in majesty and leveling forests in its course, but has his thoughts transferred to the awful Being who "rides upon the whirlwind and directs the storm?" We once kneeled down on the verge of an overhanging cliff, and turned our ear to take in the full thunder of Niagara, as it rolled, a hundred feet below us, its everlasting bass, and such a sense of the majesty and power of God possessed us, as we were never conscious of before. We rose from our knees and shouted, "God!"

Father Taylor, of Boston, himself a child of nature, and boiling over with native eloquence and wit, was once listening to Bascom, as he was delivering one of his series of lectures on Infidelity, in Green-Street Church, New York. The old man eloquent stood by one of the pillars that support the gallery, and not far from the pulpit. As the lecturer proceeded, Father Taylor became more and more interested, and he was seen, unconsciously, to begin to raise his cane, elevating it gradually, as though he was indicating the orator’s progress. There he stood, like a statue slightly inclined, drinking in every word till he heard the last, when, with his cane finally extended at arm’s length above his head, he exclaimed, "Grand!’’

Blessed with extraordinary powers, and a brilliant native genius, all that he needed was an appropriate direction, and a cultivation correspondent thereto; and we most firmly believe that, in the order of Providence, he was thrown into the very sphere of life where he was fitted to move, with as much adaptation, in regard to his nature, as the planets are adapted to their appointed spheres. Had his genius been cramped by the laws of the schools, which are often about as useful in making an orator as a note-book would be to a nightingale, or as the laws of motion and sound would be to the dash and roar of Niagara, the thunder of whose anthem is the voice of nature, we might have had, and doubtless would have had, a Bascom polished with all the arts of elocution; but, like the nicely adjusted and exquisitely wrought automaton, there would have been a stiffness in his movements and although the precision which should mark them would indicate the wonderful power of art, still we would have had nothing but the mimic artificial man.

Nature is the fountain from whence the orator must draw his inspiration, and the field whereon he must develop his powers. As the eagle, who soars away from the homes and the haunts of man, to bathe his undazzled eye in the sunbeam, and pillow his breast upon the storm, so the child of genius must become familiar with Nature in all her aspects. One of the most eloquent divines, of the same school of theology to which Bascom belonged, discourses thus on this subject: "The orator must be much at home, that is, he must study himself; his own nature, and powers, and states of mind; and he must be much abroad, that is, he must go out and study Nature in all her moods.’’ It is said of Cole, the great artist, that he studied Nature instead of the great masters, and the result was, that he excelled all the artists of his day, in transferring natural scenery to the canvas. His "Garden of Eden," and "Voyage of Life," two of the greatest productions of his pencil, were conceived from nature. As all the lines of Nature are lines of beauty, so are all her movements, and he who would be truly effective and graceful as an orator must, follow no other copy.

Bascom has been heard to say, in reference to the composition of his sermons, that a room was so contracted it had an influence upon his thoughts, and he could only think freely and grandly when out in the midst of nature, beneath her boundless skies and extended landscapes. It is said that an Indian mound, in Kentucky, is pointed out to the traveler as the spot whereon he composed some of his greatest sermons.

It is seldom we see the blessings of poverty, and yet we believe that the very curse pronounced on man in Eden, has been attended with the greatest blessings, and has wrought out the most incalculable good to man. Bascom’s father was poor, and in addition to this he had a large family to maintain by the sweat of his face. Had he been rich, the probability is that young Henry would have been sent to college, and then the idea of his being an itinerant preacher would have never been conceived. Having received but a limited education, at the early age of sixteen he entered the itinerancy as freshman, in one of nature’s colleges, in western Virginia. The records of the Church show us, that he was received into the ranks of the itinerancy in the year 1814, and went through his preparatory course in the wilds of Ohio, as the colleague of the Rev. Alexander Cummins; and after having completed his academical curriculum, he was sent out alone, the following year, to the wilder regions of western Virginia, to travel the Guyandotte circuit. We have already spoken of the grand and gloomy scenery embraced in this extensive circuit. Here he was subjected to all sorts of privation, toils, and hardship, but he endured all as a good soldier; and it was here, ascending the towering heights, or urging his way through the deep mountain gorges, or plunging into the rapid rivers and breasting their swelling tides, that his character as a preacher was developed. Frequently did he have to travel forty miles a day, through the unbroken solitudes of the wilderness, without rest, without food, and at night, in some lone cabin, would he pour out his full heart, in strains of Gospel eloquence, upon the rude and simple hearted backwoods hunters, collected from different and distant points to hear him. On one of his solitary journeys he was followed for several miles by a large panther, which threatened at every moment to spring upon him, and from which he was only rescued by reaching, at nightfall, the cabin of a settler. Here, when he had a few hours for rest, would he retire to the woods as his study, and amid the rocks and grand old trees, all standing as nature made them, untouched by the hand of man, he would prepare his sermons. This he would do by walking back and forth, forming his plans, selecting his words, constructing his sentences, and uttering them; which being done, he would lay them up in the capacious storehouse of his memory, to be brought therefrom at his bidding, with all the rapidity of thought. We believe that this custom, adopted from necessity in the woods — for in a region infested with rattlesnakes and panthers, it would not be safe to sit or recline — he transferred to the parlor and the garden, in towns and cities. At one time he ventured to recline, with his Bible, beneath the towering, outspreading branches of an oak, at one of his distant appointments, near the head waters of Elk river. He possessed, to a great degree, the power of abstraction, and it was not long till his soul was intently engaged in taking full draughts from the fountain of inspiration. In the midst of his spirit reverie he was aroused by the cry of a hunter, in tremulous tones, telling him, at the peril of his life, to lie still till he fired. Quickly glancing his eye in the direction from whence the voice came, he saw his friend, with his rifle elevated, and pointing toward the branches of the tree under which he was lying. Familiar as he was with backwoods life, Bascom saw that some terrible danger was hovering over him, and without the least perceptible motion of his body, he turned his gaze upward, when he saw on the branch of the tree, just over him, and not more than twenty feet distant, a huge panther, drawn up and just ready for a spring. It was a fearful, awful moment. The least motion on his part would have been the signal for a spring, and his fate would have been sealed forever. In that awful moment, when death seemed inevitable, with a self control and a courage truly wonderful, he continued perfectly quiet, till the keen crack of the rifle was heard, and the ferocious beast, pierced by the unerring aim of the backwoods hunter, fell lifeless by his side. At another time, while traveling this same circuit, he stopped, on his way to an appointment, at a log-cabin, recently erected by the road-side. Stopping for rest and refreshment, not long after dinner was ready, and he sat down with the family to dine. A lovely little child, about three years of age, which had attracted his attention by its innocent mirth and its gentleness, was playing before the door, while the family were engaged around the homely repast, when suddenly a heart-piercing cry was heard.

"My child! my child!" screamed the mother, and quick as thought all rushed to the door.

Father of mercies! what a sight was presented to that fond mother. A terrible panther had sprung upon that unconscious child and was ascending a tree with it in his mouth.

"The gun! the gun! quick, for God’s sake, the gun!" frantically exclaimed the father. But Bascom had seized it from the rack, and was already in quick pursuit. He fired, and the ball pierced the panther, and brought him to the ground with its victim; but, alas life had fled. Thus amid such wild scenes and daring adventures, the first years of our young itinerant’s life were passed. When the fame of the eloquent young preacher first reached our cars, we were traveling on the West Wheeling circuit, in another part of the conference. Though rumor spoke, with glowing tongue, of his matchless and enchanting power in the pulpit, and we were prepared, as we often have been before, by such exaggerated descriptions, to be disappointed when we should have the opportunity of hearing him, yet, when that the came, which it did at conference, where He was literally surrounded with a battery of critics’ eyes, in the persons of preachers, we were ready to say, after a long-drawn breath, when he had ended a most intensely-thrilling discourse, in the language of the Queen of Sheba, on her visit to Solomon, "The half had not been told us." Those who never heard him till after his soul had been caged in the cramped and narrow cell of scholastic study, and shorn of its freshness, strength, and power, by inhaling the atmosphere of a pent-up city life, can have but a faint conception of what he was, when he communed with nature and nature’s God, and breathed the pure air of the mountain, in the bright and palmy days of his itinerant life. In the expressive language of one who was intimately acquainted with him, "Those who heard him then will never forget the feelings that he produced. The deep, thrilling tones or a voice then unimpaired by hardship and overexertion, now melting into the soft, melodious accents of love, and now bursting forth in thundering denunciations of the world’s ungodliness, never failed to stamp upon the hearts of his hearers impressions lasting as life itself. At one moment his audience, moved by the charming pictures of his pencil, would be all radiant with smiles; at another, the pathetic, touching, and heart-moving scenes, which he would describe, would force tears of sympathy down the cheeks of the most obdurate; and then, in an instant, by the magic of his burning eloquence, he would make the whole congregation tremble, so wondrous, so real, so terrible was his Rembrandt-sketch of the doom of the impenitent. He controlled his audience at will.

Perfectly familiar with all the motives of the human mind, and all the impulses of the heart, he could cause his hearers to smile with joy, or weep with penitence, or tremble with remorse, at pleasure. No man possessed a more fruitful imagination. His descriptions fairly glittered with poetic gems. Touched by his master hand, every picture of life assumed the charm and glow of beauty, or glared with the most hideous deformity, just as it suited his purpose. I well remember a discourse on the vanities of life, delivered by him some years ago; and never did all the charms and attractions of this world appear so little and so worthless to me as on that occasion. His description of the dalliances of the world, the siren whisperings of Ambition, and the luring charms of Pleasure, surpassed in beauty and power any thing I remember to have heard from the lips of man. His power as an orator was, no doubt, greatly aided by his fine person, his open, manly, honest expression of countenance, and his keen, piercing black eye. That eye none could describe. A venerable citizen, who knew him well, has often told me that, while Dr. Bascom was preaching, he could never ’unfix’ his gaze from that earnest, soul-penetrating eye. ’Why,’ said he, ’whenever he was denouncing any mean passion, or secret, ungodly propensity, his dark, keen eye seemed to look right through me, and say to my self-condemned spirit; "Thou art the man."’

He possessed that indescribable power, that magnetic charm, if we may so term it, with which all true orators are gifted, and which never fails to move the souls of men. What he described was real, and men saw it and felt it as a thing of life. A deep, earnest soul, and resolute and brave, was Henry B. Bascom. We will relate an incident as illustrative of his character, which occurred when he was connected with Augusta College. He had crossed the river to attend a meeting. During his discourse in the evening, he took occasion to come down with terrific, scathing denunciation, upon the profane swearer. It is said that whatever citadel of vice or infidelity he attacked, so direct and powerful was his artillery, that he left nothing but the smoldering ruins. It being necessary for him to recross the river that night, it was agreed by a number of rough boatmen, who were writhing under his sermon, that they would ferry him over and retaliate upon him for his severity. Bascom entered the skiff, and they started from the shore. They had not proceeded far till they commenced a concert of oaths, horrid enough to make the cheek of darkness itself turn pale. There sat the preacher, wrapped up in his cloak, in the stern of the boat, apparently unconscious of what was transpiring. They became enraged at his stoicism, and raved and cursed like fiends from perdition, who had graduated in the dialect of the dammed. When they were nearing the Kentucky shore, one of them asked him if he was not a preacher. To this he responded in the affirmative.

"Why, then," said he, "don’t you reprove us for our swearing?’

"You may swear till you break your necks, for aught that I care," replied Bascom, fully conscious of their design to abuse and insult him.

One, who in later years heard Bascom, said of him as a preacher, "His delivery, naturally most eloquent, was injured, strangely as the assertion may sound, by being made to conform exactly to the matter delivered. It was his writing, in other words, that marred his delivery. Had he always spoken without writing, and formed the habit of easy, correct, extempore elocution, he would have been almost any thing that eloquence could have demanded." Had this friend known him in his early days, and been permitted to have heard him, he never would have spoken thus, because Bascom had formed the very "habit" of which he speaks, and had attained the high position for eloquence which such a habit secured. This criticism serves as an illustration of what we have already said; namely, that the systems of the schools, which, unfortunately, controlled him in after life, was what, to a great extent, destroyed his power as an orator. it was, in truth, "writing that marred his speaking;" but, notwithstanding all these disabilities, we aver that he had no superior in the world.

Other speakers may have excelled in the beautiful, or the pathetic, or the fanciful, but for sublimity and grandeur, either as it regarded matter or manner, we confidently believe he was without a rival. We have heard him when it was painful to listen; when the souls of his vast auditory, wrought up to the highest intensity by his awfully-sublime descriptions, seemed ready to burst with emotion. Nor yet was he wanting in the beautiful. We have been borne away by his eloquence, as on beds of violets, to soft elysian bowers, and have almost breathed the air and heard the songs of heaven. But we have a word more in regard to the knowledge and eloquence which is to be derived from the study of nature. In this age, when books and colleges are flooding the land, it would be well for us to call ourselves back a little to the study of nature, where we find "Books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones." An eloquent divine, at the head of one of our colleges, says, "How much better this unwritten knowledge than all written: it is unerring, adapted to each case. It was an experiment of modern times to restore a sick body by transfusing the blood of a healthy one into its veins; but it was unsuccessful, because the transfused current was not in a proper relation to the vessels which received it: it irritated and bloated the sinking system. Too much of our learning is of this kind — a transfusion of thought into channels unadapted to it, which only vitiates and puffs them up. The sick soul, like the sick body, must restore itself; its vital organs must be aroused to vigorous action before its streams can be enriched and purified.

"We in this land should be the last to complain of barrenness of mind; for the new world is around us. Alas! alas! we are thrashing over and over again the old world’s dry straw instead of thrusting the sickle into the new world’s green and waving harvest. These cloud-capt hills are strewn all over with legends ready to be bound into the bundles of Homeric odes and epics. These venerable woods stand thick with God’s own thoughts; they leap by us in every deer that crosses our path, and fall upon us in every descending leaf. New forms of human love, and sympathy, and sin, and suffering, look out from those cabin windows and burning brush-heaps, from yonder cane-brakes and the far-off wigwams. We have book-teachers enough. O for more bookless ones!"

We have absolutely been sickened at the stereotype process by which preachers have been made in our colleges. They are the merest casts from some model teacher, and every thing about them is an imitation; their very tone of voice and manner of delivery, to the pointing of a finger, or the shake of the head, and even the alamode of their dress and walk are all the most servile imitation. Nature is smothered to death, and buried beyond the hope of a resurrection. And yet we would not eschew books nor colleges. God forbid! We want them all, but we want natural men, whose flash and thunder in the pulpit come from the Bible and the great battery of nature. Though Bascom, in later years, had lost, to some considerable extent, the power of—

"Sending his soul with every lance he threw" yet he never lost the power to charm, and he never preached to an audience but that—

"Their listening powers Were awed, and every thought in silence hung, In wondering expectation.’’

What Grattan said of the Irish orator, may with equal appropriateness be said of Bascom: "When young, his eloquence was ocean in a storm; when old, it was ocean in a calm; but whether calm or storm, the same great element, the sublimest and most magnificent phenomenon in creation.’’ But there were other traits of character, concerning which we must be permitted to allude in our sketch. Stern and sedate, as one might think, wrapped up in the solitude of his own thoughts and feelings, he possessed a heart filled with the kindliest sympathies. He was quite as ready to "Feel another’s woe," and to hide another’s faults, as many who have considered him selfish and indifferent. It is not always those who have the most feeling that give evidence of it in their manner. Some hearts are like fountains on the surface, always seen — open to the gaze of all —others are like fountains hidden among the rocks, yet clear, transparent, full, and free. A frown may sometimes be on the brow, and the tearless eye indicate no feeling, when the heart is ready to break with tenderness; and then, again, we have seen smiles spread over the countenance, when stormy passions raged within. God looks at the heart and we are to judge no man from appearance.

Indeed, one of Bascom’s faults, if it were a fault, was almost invariably to take the part of the oppressed, or to choose the weaker side of almost any question, without duly weighing the merits thereof. His error, however, in this respect, was pardonable. To pursue a man to "the bitter end," because of a difference of opinion, and, with bigotry and prejudice, question his motives and condemn his actions, was never the character of Bascom. He was above it, as far as the towering Alps, which bathes its pure summit in the light of heaven, is above the clouds and mists that creep along its sides and encircle its base, and we pity the man who could pursue so noble a spirit, or breathe an unworthy suspicion over his memory. But he was independent; and we hesitate not to say, that, had it not been for his rare and commanding talents, he never would have been regarded, by the majority of the Church, as sufficiently safe to have been intrusted with any prominent ecclesiastical position. Never was man, from the very commencement of his ministerial career, through all its periods, down to the very close almost of his eventful life, more stoutly, bitterly, pertinaciously opposed, than was Bascom. Providence itself seemed to frown upon him, as he struggled with the hardest fortune all through life. But why was this? We have thought his mighty spirit required such severe discipline to school it for heaven. Like Schiller, he literally passed through storm, and tempest, and fire, to heaven, and yet, like Elijah and Daniel, he went unscathed. He rose, however, despite of all opposing obstacles, to the highest summit of human greatness, and to the occupancy of the most distinguished posts of honor and trust in the gift of that branch of the Church to which he belonged. From a President of Madison College, and professor, in Augusta, he was promoted to the Presidency of Transylvania University. When the literary department of that institution ceased, he was elected editor of the Southern Quarterly Review, and finally a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, which distinguished office he held when he died.

Much might be said of this great man in Israel, who has been taken from our midst. We are sorry we could not do the subject more justice. Had it not been that our sketches of western preachers would have been incomplete without a notice of one who grew up in our midst, and filled the country with his fame, we would not have undertaken it. What we have written is almost entirely from personal recollection, not having a single scrap of material within our reach. We are aware that his life has been written and published, but, with all our efforts, we have not been able to procure a copy; and we had delayed writing this sketch till this late hour in the composition of our book, hoping to have some data from which to draw, to enable us to give a more satisfactory outline of the life and character of that wonderful man but we have been disappointed. We hope our readers will regard it as a slight tribute to the memory of one whom we regarded as the greatest of American pulpit orators.

He is gone. Our Bascom is no more. The light that shone, kindled from God’s altar, in that intellect, which was clear as an angel’s, has not gone out; it has only ceased to shed its radiance and glory upon the earthly sphere. In yonder heaven, undimmed, it shines forever.