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Freeborn Garrettson was born on 15 Aug 1752, near the mouth of the Susquehanna, in Maryland, of which state his grandfather, Garrett, had been one of the first settlers. His parents, John and Sarah (Hanson), were well-to-do. Both had died by the time he was twenty-one, and the management of the household numbering a score, white and black, had passed to him.
Garrettson received a good elementary education.
Though Garrettson fought against the call, Garrettson finally became an itinerant preacher, joined the Baltimore Conference of 1776, and for more than fifty years went hither and thither making converts and establishing churches.
From 1775 to 1784, he traveled in Maryland and neighboring states. Conscientiously opposed to oaths and war, though loyal to the American cause, he refused to take the oath of allegiance and was subjected to much physical violence, and once was imprisoned.
Undaunted he pursued his course when other Methodists went into retirement. Thomas Coke, on his arrival in 1784, found him “all meekness and love, and yet all activity. ”
He was the “arrow” that went through the South summoning the preachers to the “Christmas Conference” of 1784, at which the Methodist Church in the United States was organized, and he himself was ordained.
Here he volunteered for missionary work in Nova Scotia, where, in the face of diverse hardships, he labored from the spring of 1785 to that of 1787, exerting an influence there “almost equal to that of Wesley in Europe and Asbury in the United States”.
Upon his return, Wesley requested that he be made superintendent of the Methodist societies in Nova Scotia and the West Indies. For reasons unknown, and much to his astonishment, the Conference refused. The remaining forty years of his life were years of almost incessant travels, as presiding elder, Conference missionary, or preacher at large.
Garrettson was a mystic who dreamed dreams and heard voices to which he attributed divine origin. His religious state, fostered by the Church of England, did not satisfy him, and coming under the influence of Robert Straw- bridge, Francis Asbury, Daniel Ruff, and others, in 1775, after long inner agitation, he experienced a genuine Methodist conversion.
Aggressively opposed to slaveholding, Garrettson issued in 1820, A Dialogue Between Do-Justice and Professing-Christian, in which he favors colonization, and suggests legislation providing for gradual emancipation.
The Garrettsons established a home on the east bank of the Hudson at Rhinebeck, which became a famous resort for Methodist preachers. Asbury, who frequently visited it, called it “Traveler’s Rest. ”
His success as a preacher was due to his earnestness, sincerity, and directness of appeal, rather than to oratorical gifts, for he had a harsh, high-keyed voice, and was colloquial in manner.
Quotes from others about the person
“Brother Garrettson, ” wrote Asbury, “will let no man escape a religious lecture that comes in his way. ”
On June 30, 1793, Garrettson married Catharine Livingston, daughter of Judge Robert R. Livingston, head of a noted and wealthy New York State family.
