[n] The eighty dollars proposed for privates would not go far toward mending broken fortunes, or care for broken constitutions and crippled bodies.
At the Middletown Convention, Sept. 3, 1783, delegates from Hartford, Wethersfield, and Glastonbury met to denounce the Commutation Act. At its adjourned meeting on Sept. 30 fifty towns, a majority in the state, disapproved the Act in an address to the General Assembly, and called attention to the Society of the Cincinnati. At the last meeting, March, 1784, an address to the people of the state was framed which condemned both the Commutation Act and the Cincinnati.-- J. H. Trumbull, _Notes on the Constitution_, p. 18. Noah Webster, _History of the Parties in the United States_, pp. 317-320.
[o] Methodism was twenty-eight years old, when, in 1766, Robert Strawbridge introduced it into New York, and Philip Embury preached his first sermon in a sail-loft. In 1771, Francis Asbury, later Bishop Asbury, was appointed John Wesley's "Assistant" in America. In 1773, the first Annual Conference was held. Methodism rapidly spread in the Middle and Southern states. By the year 1773-74, the year's increase in members was nine hundred and thirteen; in 1774-75, ten hundred and seventy-three. The preachers traveled on foot or on horseback, preaching as they went; living on the smallest allowance; sleeping where night overtook them; and meeting often with grudging hospitality, suspicion, and, sometimes, open violence.
Methodism "began when Episcopacy was at its lowest point, both in efficiency, and in the good-will of the people." It agreed with Jonathan Edwards on the nature of personal religion, and separated from the Church of England in this, the Methodist's central principle of "conscious conversion" or "emotional experience." Later in New England, Wesley's missionaries united in Methodist societies many of the converts to the Edwardean theology.
At the opening of the Revolution, the whole body of Methodists were within the Church of England. Of the English missionaries only Asbury, Dempster, and Wharcott remained in America to carry on, with native preachers, the work of proselytizing. It was "the only form of religion that advanced in America during that dark period, and during the war, it more than quadrupled both its ministry and members." At the beginning of the war, it had eighty traveling preachers, beside local preachers and exhorters; a membership of one thousand, and auditors ten thousand. In 1784, there was a year's increase of fourteen thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight members, and of one hundred and four preachers to rejoice in the consecration of Bishop Asbury. In the November of that year, Bishops Coke and Asbury, organizing the "American Episcopal Church," in spite of Wesley's anathemas probably led out one hundred thousand souls as the nucleus of the new church.