This Week in Texas Methodist History April 17 General Conference Meets in New York City April 1844 The Methodist Episcopal Church’s 1844 General Conference which met in New York City in Apirl, has been the subject of more historical scholarship that any other mid-19th century General Conference. Most of that scholarship has been focused on the North-South split over slavery that set in motion the events that led to the formal creation of the Methodist Episcopal Church South two years later. The sectional denominations did not reunite until 1939. In addition to the conflict over slavery, the General Confeernce also had to consider all the other General Confernce business, and some of those actions involved Texas. The Texas Confernce had been founded in December 1840 and was less than 4 years old in April 1844. Its comparative small membership entitled it to only two delegates. Those delegates were Littleton Fowler, one of the original commissioned missionaries who arrived in Texas from Alabama in 1837. The other was John Clark who had been recruited from Illinois by Bishop Morris in the fall of 1841 and joined the Texas Conference in December of that year. Fowler had chosen to travel to New York via the river system available at the time and made a special effort to stop off in Cincinnati to console the parents of William O’Connor one of the six Ohio preachers Fowler had recruited in 1842 for Texas. O’Connor died soon after his arrival in Texas and is buried at Marshall. Fowler wrote several letters home from his travel and also from New York that are preserved in the Fowler Collection at SMU. One of them records his lunch visit in New York with Schuyler Hoes whom he had known in Texas because Hoes was employed as a agent of the American Bible Society. Hoes returned to upstate New York appalled by the slavery he had seen in Texas. Clark became famous as the only delegate from the South to vote with the Northern delegates on the issue of slavery (or more precisely the legality of a bishop owning slaves). His vote spurred such vituperative condemnation that he feared for his life if returned to Texas so he prudently stayed in the North, eventually ending up back in Chicago. The defense of his position, published in the New York Christian Advocate, prompted the Brenham Preacher, Robert B. Wells, to found a newspaper to respond to Clark. That paper was the earliest Methodist journalistic effort in Texas. A lay woman from Texas, Lydia McHenry, travelled all the way to New York City to watch the proceedings from the gallery. Although none of her letters home from New York survive, a letter she wrote en route does survive in the Chicago Historical Soceity---it was from Washington D. C, where she stopped to visit her cousin, U. S. Representative John Hardin. Hardin served one term, then turned the seat over to his friend Abraham Lincoln who also served one term in the U. S. House of Representtives. The most direct action the General Conference took which dealt with Texas was splitting the Texas Conference into the Western Texas Confernce and the Eastern Texas Conference (later renamed the Texas and East Texas Conferences). The dividing line would be the Trinity River. That decision in 1844 is the reason the Metroplex is divided between two United Methodist Conferences with Dallas in the North Texas and Fort Worth in the Central Texas Confernce. Two bishops were elected---Edmund Janes (1807-1876) and Leonidas Hamline (1797-1865). Janes became one of the most influential bishops of the 19th century because of his 32 year tenure as bishop. Hamline retired from active episcopal duties in 1852 because of poor health, but is better known because of Hamile Univversity in St. Paul, Minesota. It was customary for the youngest bishiops to be assigned the more arduous episcopal visitation schedule so Janes drew the assignment of presidng over the next session of the Texas Conference. He travelerd to St. Augustine where he had to assign preachers to one of the two confernces that now existed in Texas. There were many tears shed as preachers said goodbye to their collegeagues appointed to a difference conference than their own. Janes also presided over the vote of whether to participate in the movement to created a Southern brnch of the denomination. The journal reports that the vote was unammous, but when Bishops Janes left, he took with him his nephew, Lester Janes, who had been serving as the president of Wesleyan College in San Augustine. As you see, there was lots going on at the 1844 General Confernce besides the slavery dispute.