Peter Cartwright, Legendary Frontier Preacher.

Peter Cartwright, Legendary Frontier Preacher. By Robert Bray. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2005. Pp. x, 314. $35.00, ISBN 0-252-02986-0.)

From the American Revolution to the Civil War, Methodism grew from a blip on the American religious radar into its largest Protestant denomination. This evangelical epoch coincided with the life span of one of Methodism's chief protagonists, Peter Cartwright, long the subject of Methodist folklore. This circuit-riding legend grappled with frontier hardships and sour Calvinists with equal tenacity. Robert Bray's Peter Cartwright, Legendary Frontier Preacher attempts a new description of this frontiersman who stood "somehow greater than all the church's prelates" (p. ix). Mainly a close reading of Cartwright's famous Autobiography (Cincinnati, 1856) supplemented with other evidence, Bray chronicles the self-conscious creation of a legend. He suggests that Cartwright's stories are best understood as "instances not of history or even, strictly speaking, of autobiography, but of narrative and dramatic self-fashioning, the reimagining of events long after they eventuated" (p. 40). This modern account of Cartwright's career emphasizes those "Legendary" aspects, trying to separate the true man from the created myth but still concentrating on the ever-heroic farmer/preacher.

From humble Kentucky roots, Cartwright grew up in a rapidly changing South actively struggling over its future identity. Coming of age in Rogues' Harbor amid the famous Kentucky Revival of 1799, Cartwright faced a choice between the lawless and ordering factions of the frontier. In one of his most provocative assertions, Bray claims the local context of the revival to be "part of the social war against the Rogues, a crusade to establish a redemptive civil religion in the community" (p. 26). Under his mother's influence, Cartwright put aside the signs of southern masculinity and connected with the Methodists, rapidly rising through the ranks of its traveling priesthood as he now plowed souls along with soil.

The book details the cost and context of the controversies throughout Cartwright's fifty years as a presiding Methodist elder in Illinois and his much briefer political career. Cartwright almost immediately became embroiled in the civil and ecclesial controversies troubling the nation. His initial struggles to enforce the rules of The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York, 1828) regarding slaveholding in the Tennessee and Kentucky conferences ultimately drove him from the region. His later attempts to use this same Discipline to mediate sectionalism in the larger church also proved unsuccessful, destroying the last vestiges of his influence in the slaveholding South and garnering him suspicion in the abolitionist Northeast. Only in his Illinois Conference did "King" Peter implement his brand of conservative leadership upon Methodist education and discipline.

While exhibiting deftness in analyzing Cartwright's narrative through contemporary documents and published works, Bray utilizes little recent scholarship. This lack of connection to a broader understanding of Cartwright's culture severely limits the book's usefulness. Although Bray links Cartwright to eminent political figures such as Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, the overall cultural context is thinly painted and often parochial. Interaction with basic texts in American religious history, such as Nathan O. Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989) or Christine Leigh Heyrman's Southern Cross: The beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997), would have sharpened the book's analysis and broadened its appeal.

While demythologizing its subject, Peter Cartwright, Legendary Frontier Preacher records the formative power of Cartwright's story in Methodism. The book's chief contribution is to spur readers to take up Cartwright's famous autobiography once again.

STEPHEN R. BERRY

Duke University