Notwithstanding this opposition Dow continued to work with his usual zeal.  About 1804 he was very busy, speaking at from five hundred to eight hundred meetings a year.  In the year 1805, in spite of the inconveniences of those days, he traveled ten thousand miles.  Then he made ready to go again to Europe.  Everything possible was done by the regular church to embarrass him on this second visit, and when he arrived in England he found the air far from cordial.  He did succeed in introducing his camp-meetings into the country, however; and although the Methodist Conference registered the opinion that such meetings were “highly improper in England,” Dow prolonged his stay and planted seed which, as we shall see, was later to bear abundant fruit.  Returning to America, the evangelist set out upon one of the most memorable periods of his life, journeying from New England to Florida in 1807, from Mississippi to New England and through the West in 1808, through Louisiana in 1809, through Georgia and North Carolina and back to New England in 1810, spending 1811 for the most part in New England, working southward to Virginia in 1812, and spending 1813 and 1814 in the Middle and Northern states, where the public mind was “darkened more and more against him.”  More than once he was forced to engage in controversy.  Typical was the judgment of the Baltimore Conference in 1809, when, in a matter of difference between Dow and one Mr. S., without Dow’s having been seen, opinion was given to the effect that Mr. S. “had given satisfaction” to the conference.  Some remarks of Dow’s on “Church Government” were seized upon as the excuse for the treatment generally accorded him by the church.  In spite of much hostile opinion, however, Dow seems always to have found firm friends in the State of North Carolina.  In 1818 a paper in Raleigh spoke of him as follows:  “However his independent way of thinking, and his unsparing candor of language may have offended others, he has always been treated here with the respect due to his disinterested exertions, and the strong powers of mind which his sermons constantly exhibit."[2]

His hold upon the masses was remarkable.  No preacher so well as he understood the heart of the pioneer.  In a day when the “jerks,” and falling and rolling on the ground, and dancing still accompanied religious emotion, he still knew how to give to his hearers, whether bond or free, the wholesome bread of life.  Frequently he inspired an awe that was almost superstitious and made numerous converts.  Sometimes he would make appointments a year beforehand and suddenly appear before a waiting congregation like an apparition.  At Montville, Connecticut, a thief had stolen an axe.  In the course of a sermon Dow said that the guilty man was in the congregation and had a feather on his nose.  At once the right man was detected by his trying to brush away the feather.  On another occasion Dow denounced a rich man who had recently died.  He was tried for slander and imprisoned