This Week in Texas Methodist History August 4

Continuing with our series on the history of Methodism in my home church. . .

1844—the year our church was founded, Methodists faced their greatest crisis.   The General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, meeting in New York City, was roiled with the refusal of some northern conferences to accept the episcopal supervision of a slave-owning bishop, James O. Andrew of Georgia.   The parties were not able to compromise so Methodism was split into northern and southern branches that would not reunite until 1939.

John Wesley hated slavery and passed that hatred on to the denomination which he inspired, but as time passed, General Conferences made small accommodations to human slavery which eventually amounted to embracing the institution by most southern Methodists. 

Anti-slavery Methodists finally had enough!  They announced that they would not accept Bishop Andrew as the presiding officer at their annual conferences.  Methodist bishops have “general authority.”  That means that any bishop is authorized to conduct the annual conference of any annual conference. The split at the 1844 General Conference reverberated all the way down to Washington County and the newly formed town of Brenham.

Bishop Andrew presided over the Texas Annual Conference of December 1843, held at a campground in southwestern Walker County.   His time spent there earned him the friendship of many Texas Methodists.  Only six months later he was in New York City at the center of the dispute.  When the General Conference finally voted on the issue, only one delegate from the South voted with the North.  That one delegate was John Clark of the Texas Conference. 

At the next meeting of the Quarterly Conference of the Washington Circuit in August 1844 a resolution was introduced to condemn Clark’s vote.  The committee to write the resolution consisted of John W. Kenney, Enoch King, and Jabez Giddings.  They composed the resolution and submitted it for publication in the New York Christian Advocate. 

Clark had remained in New York upon the adjournment of the General Conference and took an appointment to a local church.  He sent for his wife and children who had stayed in Texas and never again set foot in Texas.  He decided to defend his vote and did so by replying to the letter in the New York Christian Advocate.

That reply touched off a barrage of letters back and forth between Clark and Robert B. Wells, the Brenham preacher.  Wells continued to condemn Clark for voting with the anti-slavery forces and Clark continued to defend that vote.

The exchange of letters might have been just one more insignificant tiff in the bigger picture were it not for Robert B. Wells.   Out of this exchange of letters Wells decided to start his on edition of the Advocate as a vehicle for the exchange of news items.  It took a while but in 1847 Wells brought out the Texas Christian Advocate and Brenham Advertiser as a weekly publication.  It lasted in Brenham only one year when Wells turned the operation over to his father-in-law Orceneth Fisher who moved it to Houston and dropped the “Brenham Advertiser” from the name. 

The newspaper had its ups and downs but by the 1880’s the Texas Christian Advocate had a circulation of over 10,000, putting it in the ranks of the most widely distributed publications in Texas—religious or secular.  The paper moved to Dallas in 1887 and went through several name changes until it published its last edition as the Texas Methodist Reporter in 2013. 

Brenham FUMC can thus claim to be the source of Methodist publishing in Texas and home to the first religious newspaper of any denomination in Texas.