Before becoming one of the best known preachers of the American frontier, Peter Cartwright was a young card player and horse-race gambler. That life changed course around the age of sixteen, on a night of conversion that he described as the moment he heard, deep within, that his sins were forgiven.
Born in 1785 in Amherst County, Virginia, he moved as a child to Kentucky, a rough, newly settled territory. With no formal schooling, he grew up amid gambling and frontier violence, an environment that would later help him understand the people to whom he would preach.
In May 1801, during a camp meeting (an outdoor service that gathered families for days on end) of the Second Great Awakening, Cartwright was converted. He was received into the Methodist Episcopal Church that same year and, shortly after, licensed as a lay exhorter.
In 1802 he took on his first preaching circuit, riding on horseback through isolated communities in Kentucky and Tennessee. He was ordained deacon in 1806 by bishops Francis Asbury and William McKendree, and elder in 1808. From 1812 on, he became a presiding elder, a position he would hold for more than thirty years, overseeing entire districts of the Methodist frontier.
Firm in temperament and direct in speech, Cartwright became known for not backing down from troublemakers who tried to disrupt his services, and accounts from the period record physical confrontations on more than one occasion. He preached bluntly against sin and irreligion, and also against other denominations and religious movements, such as Universalists and Mormons, a combative style that earned him, among fellow Methodists, a reputation for being overbearing in his role as presiding elder.
Because he rejected slavery, he moved in 1824 to Illinois, a free state; during the journey, he lost his daughter Cynthia, killed when a tree burned by the campfire fell on her while the family slept. Years later, by then a local politician, he ran for the United States Congress against Abraham Lincoln in 1846 and, in the final stretch of the campaign, spread the rumor that his rival was an unbeliever who denied the Scriptures, an episode he did not address afterward in his autobiography.
Cartwright helped found Methodist educational institutions, among them McKendree College, the Illinois Conference Female Academy (today MacMurray College), and Illinois Wesleyan University. In 1856 he published his autobiography, a vivid account of the life of a frontier preacher, an important source on the American religious revival of the period.
He died in 1872, near Pleasant Plains, Illinois, after more than sixty years of itinerant ministry. His example of going where the formal church had not yet reached still inspires those who bring the gospel to hard-to-reach places today, adapting the message without giving up the firmness of the faith.
