Background
Henry Bidleman Bascom was born on May 27, 1796, in Hancock, Delaware County, New York, the son of Alpheus Bascom of French Huguenot stock and Hannah (Houk) Bascom of German ancestry.
Henry Bidleman Bascom was born on May 27, 1796, in Hancock, Delaware County, New York, the son of Alpheus Bascom of French Huguenot stock and Hannah (Houk) Bascom of German ancestry.
His parents were very poor, and it was only by the assistance of his mother's brother, after whom he was named, that he was enabled to attend school from his sixth to his twelfth year, at which time his education ended, so far as schools and teachers were concerned.
At an early age Bascom manifested unusual gifts for public speaking and leadership. He was given license to preach when he was only seventeen and the presiding elder immediately appointed him assistant to the pastor of the Brush Creek Circuit in bounds of which the country home of the Bascoms was located. When the Ohio Annual Conference met on September 1, 1813, Bascom was one of the ten young ministers "admitted on trial. " The Methodist circuits of those days embraced as a rule from twenty to thirty preaching places, each of which had preaching once a month. After spending three years on circuits in the Ohio Conference he was transferred to the Tennessee Conference (which at that time had within its bounds a considerable portion of Kentucky) and was appointed two years in succession to Danville, followed by two years at Louisville.
When the Kentucky Annual Conference was organized in 1820, and took over the Kentucky territory then held by the Tennessee Conference, he became a member of the newly established conference, but after preaching for two years on large circuits, he was transferred back to the Ohio Conference and was put in charge for that year of the Brush Creek Circuit where he had begun his ministry nine years before.
While pastor at Steubenville, Ohio, in 1823, he was, on the nomination of Henry Clay, elected chaplain to the Congress of the United States. During and following his residence in Washington, 1824-26, he traveled extensively and preached in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, making a profound impression by his oratory and drawing vast crowds wherever he went. He was next stationed for a short time at Pittsburgh and later at Uniontown, the seat of a newly organized Methodist school called Madison College, of which he was president from 1827 to 1829.
In 1832 he was elected professor of moral science in Augusta College, and was thereupon transferred from the Pittsburgh to the Kentucky Conference. Ten years later he was selected for the presidency of Transylvania University at Lexington, Ky. , which office he filled from 1842 until 1849, dividing his time after 1846 between duties in this university and his work on the new Southern Methodist Quarterly Review to the editorship of which he was elected by the General Conference of 1846.
At the meeting of the second General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, held in St. Louis in May 1850, when it was decided that only one new bishop was needed, he was elected on the second ballot by a large majority. He lived to preside over only one Annual Conference, the St. Louis, which met at Independence, on July 10, only six weeks after his ordination as bishop. Returning to his home at Lexington, he was taken ill in Louisville, where he died.
Henry was converted and joined the Methodist Church at fifteen years of age.
He had taken an active part in the trying struggle between the Northern and Southern delegates in the General Conference of 1844 over slavery, the outcome of which was the division of the Church. It was he who wrote, at the request of his fellow delegates from the South, the "Protest" of the southern representatives against the action of that Conference with reference to Bishop Andrew of Georgia, excluding him from the exercise of his episcopal office because his wife was a slaveholder.
Bascom possessed the elements that go to make a great orator. Whenever and wherever he preached, he easily and powerfully swayed vast audiences, but his type of oratory, though well suited to impress the typical American of seventy-five or a hundred years ago, would doubtless be accounted too florid, rhetorical, and emotional to impress in an equal degree an audience of the present day.
On March 7, 1839, when he was nearly forty-three years of age, he was married to Miss Van Antwerp of New York City, by whom he had two children.