Cartwright, Peter

CARTWRIGHT, PETER: American Methodist; b. in Amherst County, Va., Sept. 1, 1785; d. near Pleasant Plains, Sangamon County, Ill., Sept. 25, 1872. His parents removed to Kentucky while he was a child, and there he was "converted" in 1801; he was licensed as an exhorter in 1802, and spent eight years in the old Western conference, four in the Kentucky, eight in the Tennessee, and forty-eight in the Illinois. He is said to have received more than 10,000 members into the Church, baptized more than 12,000 persons, and preached more than 15,000 sermons. He was known as the "backwoods preacher," and it is reported that when moral suasion proved ineffective with the rough characters with whom he had to deal he was able and willing to quiet them by physical force. He was once a member of the Illinois legislature and was defeated for Congress by Abraham Lincoln in 1846.

Bibliography: He wrote several tracts, an Autobiography, ed. W. P. Strickland, New York, 1856, and Fifty Years a Presiding Elder, ed. W. S. Hooper, Cincinnati, 1872.