Henry Bidleman Bascom

Christianity • Protestantism Henry Bidleman Bascom (1796–1850) was an American Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, elected in 1850.

He also distinguished himself as a circuit rider, pastor and Christian preacher; as chaplain to the U.S. House of Representatives; and as an editor, a college academic, and a denominational leader.

Of French Huguenot and Basque ancestry, Henry Bidleman Bascom was born 27 May 1796 in Hancock, Delaware County, New York.

Henry Bascom joined the Methodist Episcopal Church in western Pennsylvania in 1811 after his family migrated to the frontier area.

Although with little formal education, Bascom was found to be a good speaker with knowledge of the Bible; he was licensed to preach in 1813 at the age of seventeen and was received on trial by the Ohio Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

Bascom worked hard as a frontier circuit rider, traveling to scattered settlements across a wide territory.

In 1832 Bascom was hired as professor of moral science and belles-lettres at Augusta College, an early Methodist school in Kentucky.

Bascom was selected as chairman of the commission appointed to settle the differences between the two branches of the Church, but it did not reunite until 1939, long after the end of the American Civil War.

He published a book in defense of the Southern church, entitled Methodism and Slavery; with Other Matters in Controversy between the North and the South; Being a Review of the Manifesto of the Majority, in Reply to the Protest of the Minority, of the Late General Conference of the Methodist E. Church, in the Case of Bishop Andrew (1845; available free on line at Google Books).