“‘Yes,’ said I, ’about one of the biggest fools I ever saw in all my life.’...  Brother C. and I kneeled down, and both prayed.  She was as quiet as a lamb.”

Six months later, our preacher tells us, this woman was converted, and became “as bold in the cause of God as she had been in the cause of the wicked one.”

In 1823, Mr. Cartwright resolved to move across the Ohio, and selected Illinois as his new home.  The reasons which influenced his actions are thus stated by him: 

“I had seen with painful emotions the increase of a disposition to justify slavery.... and the legislatures in the slave States made the laws more and more stringent, with a design to prevent emancipation.  Moreover, rabid abolitionism spread and dreadfully excited the South.  I had a young and growing family of children, two sons and four daughters; was poor, owned a little farm of about one hundred and fifty acres; lands around me were high and rising in value.  My daughters would soon be grown up.  I did not see any probable means by which I could settle them around or near us.  Moreover, I had no right to expect our children to marry into wealthy families, and I did not desire it, if it could be so; and by chance they might marry into slave families.  This I did not desire.  Besides, I saw there was a marked distinction made among the people generally between young people raised without work and those that had to work for their living....  I thought I saw clear indications of Providence that I should leave my comfortable little home, and move into a free State or territory, for the following reasons:  First, I would get entirely clear of the evil of slavery.  Second, I could raise my children to work where work was not considered a degradation.  Third, I believed I could better my temporal circumstances, and procure lands for my children as they grew up.  And fourth, I could carry the Gospel to destitute souls that had, by removal into some new country, been deprived of the means of grace.”

It was the last reason, no doubt, that decided our preacher.  Men of his stamp were needed west of the Ohio.  Kentucky was becoming too old a State for him, and he felt that his true field of labor was still on the frontier, and thither he turned his steps.  Setting out first on horseback to seek an eligible location, he reached Sangamon County, Illinois, where he bought a claim on Richland Creek.  He then returned to Kentucky and wound up his affairs there, obtained a regular transfer from the Kentucky Conference to the Indiana Conference, which then controlled Illinois, and in October, 1824, set out for his new home in Sangamon County.  A great affliction overtook him on the way, in the death of his third daughter, who was killed by the falling of a tree upon their camp.  The affliction was made more grievous by the heartless refusal of the people in the vicinity to render them any aid.  “We were in great distress,” he says, “and no one even to pity our condition....  I discovered that the tree had sprung up, and did not press the child; and we drew her out from under it, and carefully laid her in our feed trough, and moved on about twenty miles to an acquaintance’s in Hamilton County, Illinois, where we buried her.”