William Gannaway Brownlow - Religious Debates

Religious Debates

While Brownlow left the preaching circuit in the 1830s, he continued attacking critics of the Methodist faith until the Civil War. In 1842, he thwarted Landon Carter Haynes's attempts to join the Methodist clergy, arguing that Haynes was a "public debauchee and hypocrite." In 1843, J.M. Smith, editor of the Abingdon Virginian, accused Brownlow of having stolen jewelry at a camp meeting. Brownlow denied the charge, and accused Smith of being an adulterer. At a meeting of the Methodists' Holston Conference that year, Smith tried unsuccessfully to have Brownlow expelled from the church.

In the late 1840s, Brownlow quarreled with Presbyterian minister Frederick Augustus Ross (1796–1883). Ross had earlier "declared war" on Methodism in his Calvinist Magazine, published from 1827 to 1832. Although distracted by internecine conflict within the Presbyterian church for nearly a decade, he relaunched the Calvinist Magazine in 1845, and began attacking Methodism once again. Ross argued that the Methodist Church was despotic, comparing it to a "great iron wheel" that would crush American liberty. He stated that most Methodists were descended from Revolutionary War loyalists, and accused the religion's founder, John Wesley, of believing in ghosts and witches.

Brownlow initially responded to Ross with a running column, "F.A. Ross' Corner," in the Jonesborough Whig. In 1847, he launched a separate paper, the Jonesborough Quarterly Review, which was dedicated to refuting Ross's attacks, and embarked on a speaking tour that summer. Brownlow argued that while it was common in Wesley's time for people to believe in ghosts, he provided evidence that many Presbyterian ministers still believed in such things. He derided Ross as a "habitual adulterer" and the son of a slave, and accused his relatives of stealing and committing indecent acts (Ross's son responded to the latter charge with a death threat). This quarrel continued until Brownlow moved to Knoxville in 1849.

In 1856, James Robinson Graves, the Landmark Baptist minister of Nashville's Second Baptist Church, ripped Methodists in his book, The Great Iron Wheel, which used terminology and attacks similar to the ones Ross had used in the previous decade. Brownlow quickly fired back with The Great Iron Wheel Examined; Or, Its False Spokes Extracted, published that same year. He accused Graves of slandering an ex-Congressman, argued that Baptist ministers were mostly illiterate and opposed to learning, and charged that the Baptist religion was wrought with "selfishness, bigotry, intolerance, and shameful want of Christian liberality." He also mocked the Baptists' method of baptism, Immersion.