Francis Asbury has been a long-neglected figure in American religious history. Although the guiding force for the largest religious movement in U. S. history and a major influence in American culture, he features rarely in general histories of American religion, overshadowed by more erudite, quarrelsome, or showy performers. He is barely mentioned in Sydney Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972). In histories of Methodism, he often appears as a somewhat bureaucratic figure, admired for his diligence and indefatigableness rather than his brilliance. Only three significant biographies have been published since his death: Herbert Asbury's anti-Methodist A Methodist Saint (New York: Knopf, 1927); L. C. Rudolph's pro-Methodist Francis Asbury (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966); and Darius L. Salter's recent America's Bishop (Nappanee, Ind.: Evangel, 2003); and none of these are based on substantial archival research.
In his new and definitive biography, John Wigger describes Asbury as “the people's saint, an ordinary person who chose to do extraordinary things” (4). Asbury, he argues, communicated his vision of a Methodist future in four ways: through his piety, through his ability to communicate with average Americans, through his understanding of American popular culture, and through his command of Methodist organization. Written with grace and empathy, American Saint portrays a man driven by one singular cause—the salvation of souls the Methodist way—and overcoming multiple challenges that would have defeated a lesser person. As Wigger shows, Asbury was a powerful individual: religiously devoted, scripturally committed, mentally strong, consistently serious but with a workingman's humor—a true artisan-preacher. Whether or not he was always right is open to question, but he had a visionary's understanding of the big picture and the long road. What he did not have was a college education, an attention-grabbing ego, or the drive to see his words in print.
Wigger traces Asbury's life from his birth in the village of Handsworth in England's West Midlands in 1745, through his teenage years as a young evangelist and metalworking apprentice, to his appointment on John Wesley's American “circuit” in 1771. He was consistently second-ranked to other British preachers before and after the Revolutionary War, but, while he spent the war in virtual seclusion, his determination to stay in the United States marked him for early leadership in the Church during years rife with disagreements over the Methodists' relationship to the Church of England and the adoption of sacramental powers. With the creation of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1784, Asbury became the first of two ordained bishops—the title reflecting the Methodists' certitude that they were the true heirs of the first Christians. For the next thirty-years Asbury led a sometimes fractious and always demanding body of preachers; his chief chosen responsibility was appointing rising numbers of young itinerants to circuits throughout the nation, as well as the myriad concerns of any new clerical organization in the new republic: establishing discipline and a clear order of hierarchy, coping with the impact of marriage on preachers' commitments, determining the future of slavery and of African Americans in church, establishing an academy for preachers' sons (a failure), and establishing a publishing house (a huge success). In addition, typical only of the Methodists, Asbury traveled thousands of miles every year to preach and meet with fellow believers. During most of this time, he suffered from a bewildering assortment of ailments, leading in the long run—he died in 1816 at the age of seventy—to his death from congestive heart failure. He owned no property and had no family, having left his mother and father in England long before. He never married, and he believed that the greatest threat to his Church was the acquisition of wealth.
Wigger writes with a sure narrative style and compelling wit. His research on his chosen focus—Asbury and the preachers he knew in his lifetime—is wide-ranging. But his reliance on prosopographical method that bears some resemblance to William B. Sprague's Annals of the American Pulpit (New York: Robert Carter, 1857–1869) leaves sections of American Saint lacking in tension and removed from the larger historical and historiographical context. The many ideas in Gary B. Nash's work on African preachers, Catherine A. Brekus's on Methodist women preachers, as well as Christine Leigh Heyrman's Southern Cross (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1997), Cynthia Lynn Lyerly's Methodism and the Southern Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Wigger's own Taking Heaven by Storm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), and my The Methodists and Revolutionary America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), rarely inform the text. Yet collectively these studies provide a dynamic reinterpretation for Methodism's triumph, including its countercultural appeal to women and black people; its challenges to slavery's hegemony in the South, especially in its early “revolutionary” years when Methodism briefly redefined the meaning of mastery; the movement's careful distancing from political disputes; its ethnic diversity; and its missionary drive. In a number of areas, American Saint covers ground that will be familiar to readers of these other works without adding much to the story.
What Wigger has accomplished is to show exactly what it took to run a massive and far-flung movement like the Methodists, and the ordeals Asbury endured to make this happen. He presents Asbury as a master of administration—one who especially admired George Washington, another managerial genius of enormous tenacity. While this focus may inadvertently remind us of why Asbury is among the least known of American religious figures—administrators are seldom heroes to those who report to them—Wigger shows clearly that for the many thousands of Americans seeking a spiritual and ordered existence, Asbury was a hero like no other, living a life closer to that of Jesuits of seventeenth-century New France than his fellow Protestant ministers of the new republic. We can be grateful for Wigger's sensitive portrait of a Christian who until now was among the most elusive in American religious history, but who inspires awe for his subtlety, his austerity, and his humility.
