About Western Christian Advocate

Western Christian Advocate

The Western Christian Advocate was a weekly Methodist newspaper published in Cincinnati, Ohio, beginning in 1834, as an official paper of the Methodist Episcopal Church for its western conferences. It belonged to the family of Advocate newspapers through which the church held a rapidly spreading denomination together: the Christian Advocate in New York, founded in 1826, served general circulation, while regional Advocates were planted where a New York paper could not serve the frontier church in time. The Western, edited in Cincinnati by editors elected by the General Conference and produced through the Methodist Book Concern, reached a circulation of about 21,000 in the Old Northwest by 1852 and 33,787 in 1864. Its columns carried church news, obituaries, theology, temperance and education material, and — most consequentially for historians — a long, public argument about slavery that ran from its founding decade through the division of the church in 1844 and into the Civil War.

Why a Western Advocate Was Needed

Methodist historians explain the proliferation of Advocates by geography and transport. The papers were founded before railroads had bound the sections of the country together, and in the 1830s and 1840s the Methodists of the Ohio Valley and the West could not be served by a weekly published in New York City. If congregations on the frontier were to receive the stimulation and unifying influence of a church paper, it had to be printed in their midst. Cincinnati, the Queen City of the West, with its river trade, its printing trades and the western agency of the Methodist Book Concern, was the natural place.

The Western Christian Advocate was therefore established at Cincinnati in 1834, eighteen years before its Chicago counterpart, the Northwestern Christian Advocate, and more than two decades before the Central Christian Advocate in St. Louis. The Book Concern's strength made such regional papers possible where local resources alone would not have supported them, and in return the papers strengthened the denomination strategically, binding annual conferences, itinerant preachers and lay readers into a single informed public. A later account of Cincinnati Methodism noted that the Book Concern there ran multiple power presses, employed a substantial plant staff, and issued three weekly papers, a monthly magazine and hundreds of books and tracts — the industrial base from which the Advocate was produced.

Cincinnati and the Methodist Book Concern

The Advocate was not an independent commercial newspaper. It was an official organ, its editors elected by the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and its publishing was supervised through the church's book committees and agents. That status gave it authority: an editorial in the Western could be read in a log-cabin society in Indiana or Illinois as the considered voice of the connection, and its exchanges with other religious and secular papers carried Cincinnati Methodist opinion across the country.

Its contents followed the official-weekly pattern. It printed conference minutes and appointments, missionary and Sunday-school reports, sermons and theological essays, temperance and moral-reform material, family reading, and large numbers of obituary notices — the feature that makes its surviving files so valuable to genealogists today. Commercial archives of the paper, such as GenealogyBank's, cover the years 1834 to 1882 and are marketed precisely on the strength of those death and family notices, an indication of the paper's reach into ordinary Methodist households across the Old Northwest.

Early Editors: Thomas Asbury Morris and Charles Elliott

The paper's first editorial generation worked in the shadow of the slavery controversy inside Methodism. Thomas Asbury Morris, later a bishop, edited the Western in its earliest years from Ohio, and an editorial of November 20, 1835, in which he declared himself no friend of immediate abolitionism, is quoted in scholarship on the bishops and abolition. The Ohio Conference position that the paper published in 1835 held three points together: slavery was an evil, gradual and constitutional methods were the best weapons against it, and the abolitionist remedy was an evil worse than slavery itself. That formulation — antislavery in principle, anti-abolitionist in method — defined the paper's difficult middle ground in its first decade.

Charles Elliott became the editor most closely associated with the Western's combative years. Elliott, who had earlier edited in Pittsburgh, took the Western Christian Advocate in the mid-1830s and returned to prominence as its editor around the 1844 division; a Methodist historian of the schism names Thomas Bond in New York, Charles Elliott in Cincinnati and John B. McFerrin in Nashville as the editors of the leading journals whose intemperate press warfare helped make the division bitter. Elliott was no defender of slavery as an institution: he was widely known for published attacks on it, and his two-volume work on the sinfulness of American slavery, published in 1850, argued the case from Scripture, injustice and evil effects, together with discussion of emancipation and citizens' duties. A veteran editor of that reputation gave the Cincinnati paper weight in the national argument well beyond its subscription list.

The Division of 1844

In 1844 the Methodist Episcopal Church divided, North and South, over slavery — formally over the case of a slaveholding bishop, James O. Andrew — and the Advocate family divided with it. The Nashville Christian Advocate became the leading weekly of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, while the Western Christian Advocate remained with the northern Methodist Episcopal Church. The Western's own state illustrated the strain: Ohio Methodism bordered slaveholding Kentucky across the river from its publishing office, and its conferences included members with sharply different interests in the question.

Scholarship on Methodism and the coming of the Civil War treats the denominational editors as political actors in their own right. Editors of the mass-circulation church papers had to avoid open party endorsements that would alienate readers, the argument runs, but that did not stop them addressing moral questions — temperance, Roman Catholicism and above all slavery — that carried immediate political significance. One often-cited judgement on the Western under a later editor was that some contemporaries thought the paper more influential than the entire board of bishops. Whether or not that was literally true, a weekly read by tens of thousands of families, in a denomination of more than a million members before the split, was one of the largest opinion-forming instruments in the Old Northwest.

Matthew Simpson's Editorship

The Western's best-documented editor is Matthew Simpson, who took the paper in Cincinnati in 1848 and edited it until his election as a bishop in 1852. Simpson came to the desk after work as a college president in Indiana, and his biographers devote a distinct phase of his life to his years as a church editor through a national crisis. He arrived to find a paper with about 12,000 subscribers and an estimated 50,000 readers, its columns dependent on exchanges clipped from other papers and on obituary notices, and he appealed to readers to send short original articles in a plain hand.

Simpson's editorship was contentious in two directions at once. Within the church he permitted a controlled, extended argument in the Advocate over pewed churches and pew rents — a live dispute about whether Methodism was compromising its discipline for the favour of the rich — and managed to draw criticism from Ohio readers who thought him too friendly to pewed churches and from New England readers who thought he printed false representations against them. Nationally, his editorial treatment of the Fugitive Slave Law caused, in a contemporary phrase preserved by historians, a flutter among lesser politicians, and the paper circulated in Indiana as widely as any political sheet. As bishop after 1852, Simpson wrote on the tragedy of the Methodist division and on the national division, opposed slavery and secession, became president of Garrett Biblical Institute in 1859, and stood close to President Abraham Lincoln during the war — a later career that has kept attention fixed on his Cincinnati editorial years as its rehearsal.

Circulation and the Advocate Family at War

The figures that survive show a large and growing paper. The Western reported a circulation of 21,000 in the Old Northwest in 1852, at a moment when its overcrowded columns were already being cited as a reason the upper Mississippi Valley needed an official paper of its own — a demand met by the Northwestern in Chicago and the Central in St. Louis. By 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, the Western's circulation was reported at 33,787, ahead of the Northwestern Christian Advocate at 25,000 and the Central Christian Advocate at 8,204.

During the war, the Christian Advocates collectively were influential agencies for support of the Union cause and the abolition of slavery, and the General Conference of 1860 had taken care to elect strong antislavery editors. The Western's wartime file therefore belongs to the history of Northern public opinion as well as to church history. Later editors continued the succession: Stephen Mason Merrill, elected a bishop in 1872, was editor of the Western Christian Advocate at the time of his election, a reminder that the Cincinnati editorship remained, decades after Simpson, a recognised step to national leadership in the denomination.

What the Paper Published Beyond Editorials

To read only its slavery editorials would be to miss most of the paper. A weekly number served a scattered denomination with practical intelligence: where preachers were appointed, which missions needed support, what the Sunday-school and tract societies were doing, which members had died and what could be said of their lives. It carried material on education, including the Methodist colleges rising in Ohio and Indiana, on temperance organisation, and on the German Methodist work that Cincinnati also served through Der Christliche Apologete, founded in 1839 under William Nast — a sister enterprise of the same Cincinnati Methodist publishing world that produced the Ladies' Repository monthly from 1841.

That mixture is why the paper is cited so widely outside denominational history. Scholars of the Civil War era use it for Northern Methodist opinion; historians of Indiana, Ohio and Illinois use it for local church and community news unavailable elsewhere; and family historians use its obituary columns, preserved in newspaper archives covering 1834 onward, to reconstruct households across the Old Northwest. Few single titles serve so many different kinds of inquiry.

Place Among Early American Methodist Newspapers

Reference works on early American Methodist newspapers list the Western Christian Advocate among the first official publications of the General Conference, published in Cincinnati expressly to serve the needs of the church as it spread westward with the frontier. That concise description captures its historical role. It was not the first Methodist paper — the New York Christian Advocate, Zion's Herald and others preceded it — but it was the first great western organ of the connection, and for the middle decades of the nineteenth century it was the printed centre of Methodism between the Appalachians and the Mississippi.

Its editors — Morris in the anti-abolitionist 1830s, Elliott in the schism years, Simpson on the road to the episcopacy and to Lincoln's circle, Merrill a generation later — map the denomination's own movement from gradualism, through division, to wartime antislavery Unionism. To study the Western Christian Advocate is therefore to study how a church newspaper could be at once a pastoral bulletin, a theological journal, a political force and a community archive, and why contemporaries credited it with influence rivalling that of the bishops who nominally governed the church it served.