Welsh Journals

Calvinistic Methodists had been among those immigrants who had left Wales since the turn of the nineteenth century and settled in New York, especially Oneida and Lewis Counties, different parts of Ohio and increasingly in the coal mining and iron producing parts of Pennsylvania. By 1850 there were estimated to be tens of thousands of Welshmen and their families in the United States. Calvinistic Methodism was the largest of the four main Nonconformist denominations. Since its secession from the Anglican body in 1811, the Calvinistic Methodist movement or 'Connexion', already Presbyterian in organization, had grown closer to the other Reformed churches. By the 1840s, under the influence of its principal theologian and thinker, the Edinburgh-trained Lewis Edwards, it was beginning to see itself as a branch of the international Reformed family. What had been once a renewal movement within the eighteenth-century Anglican Church in Wales had, within a century, developed into the largest of the Nonconformist denominations of a markedly Presbyterian kind.7 The one Calvinistic Methodist leader who was intent on moulding the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists in America into a definite religious organization was William Rowlands (1 807-66) .8 A contemporary of such giants of the Welsh pulpit as John Elias, John Jones of Tal-y-sarn and Henry Rees9 and in many ways their equal, he arrived in New York city in 1836 in order to pastor the Connexion's church there. Like his three compatriots he was a powerful orator: 'We have no qualms in claiming that he was the greatest preacher that the Welsh nation has seen in America' .Yet he was also fired with the conviction, drive and ability to weld the disparate congregations, seiadau (fellowship meetings) and preaching stations then spreading into Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota and Missouri, into a formal religious body. 'He was an excellent administrator and his one controlling vision was to organize the Calvinistic Methodists of America into a body comparable in discipline and order to that in Wales' In order to facilitate this development he undertook an extended tour of the Welsh communities of New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania in 1837 and began publishing Y Cyfaill o 'r Hen Wlad ('the Friend from the Old Country'), the first Welsh language monthly magazine to appear in America, to disseminate news and spiritual uplift but more importantly to reinforce a sense of identity, unity and purpose among his co-religionists throughout the land. The celebrated and arduous six-month preaching tour undertaken by Henry Rees and Moses Parry a year later was masterminded by Rowlands as part of his plan to consolidate denominational witness among the ever expanding colonies of immigrant