This Week in Texas Methodist History

Martin Clark Reports on Methodist Organization in Austin--February 18, 1840

Methodist layman Martin Clark of Tennessee reported to Littleton Fowler on a recent trip he made to the Congress of the Republic of Texas. Clark's purpose was to organize a Methodist society and Sunday School in the new capital of the Lone Star republic. He efforts met with great success. He was able to report that prominent Texan statesmen, even some who were not Methodist, helped the Methodist cause. The roll of the new society included Attorney General James Webb, Representatives Thomas Jefferson Rusk, James Riley and David Kaufman as well as ex-President Sam Houston. The politicians could not resist the opportunity to show off their oratorical prowess. Clark was so impressed by Rusk's oration that he wrote the following: His concluding sentence deserves to be written in characters of sunshine across the Heavens that the world might read it. "I would rather have it said of me when I have been gathered to the graves of my fathers that I had thrown my influence onto the scale of virtue & had acted as conservative to the morals & happiness of the rising generation than to have that halo of military glory that settles around my head of a Napoleon to his exile & his grave."