Hannah Dow: Answering the Master’s Call
Sitting on a shelf in the National Association of Free Will Baptists Historical Collection is a thin, bound copy of Hannah Dow’s personal journal from 1843 until 1847. I stumbled across it one day while looking for something else but found myself drawn into this young woman’s story as I scanned through the opening pages.
Hannah came to faith during the nineteenth century through the ministry of northern Free Will Baptists (the Randall Movement).[1] Three years later, at the age of eighteen, she found that God was calling her to a life that she could never have imagined. She answered that call and bent her shoulder to a work in which many have taken part, including Laura Belle Barnard, who gathered many of Dow’s personal letters and donated them and her journal to the Historical Collection. I think you’ll find her story as interesting as I did.
Early Life and Conversion
Hannah Gould was born on March 15, 1825, in Wilton, Maine, a small mill town situated in the western lakes and mountains region about thirty-five miles northwest of Augusta. In the 1820s, Wilton was a small town of about 1,200 residents, and it has grown little in the intervening years.
We don’t know much about Hannah’s youth, but some details can be gleaned from her journal. She was an outgoing young woman who attended the local school and, perhaps, was even friends with young Sylvia Hardy (the Giantess of Maine).[2] Hannah loved her family dearly and may have attended a local Free Will Baptist church during her childhood.[3]
Free Will Baptists spread through New England through the work of Revolutionary War veteran Benjamin Randall. He gathered the first northern Free Will Baptist church in 1780 at New Durham, New Hampshire. Converted through the preaching of George Whitfield, Randall adopted the emotional revivalism of the First Great Awakening and preached evangelistic sermons throughout New Hampshire and Maine. By the 1820s, Free Will Baptists were prominent in Wilton. At least two, and perhaps even three, Free Will Baptist churches were in the small town.
Even though Hannah grew up in both a Christian home and cultural atmosphere, she spent her early adolescence seeking the “pleasures of the world.”[4] However, at the age of fifteen, she came under heavy conviction: “I felt myself a lost and wretched sinner. I felt that I deserved no mercy, and that it would be just [of] God to cast me off forever.”[5]
Stricken with guilt, Hannah began seeking forgiveness in deeply emotional prayers. She asked her parents to pray for her and cried out to God for mercy. Only after this extended emotional experience was she convinced that the Lord had heard her prayer and forgiven her.[6] Five months later, Elder William Badger (1804-65) baptized her, and Hannah joined the First Free Will Baptist Church of Wilton.[7]
Randall Movement Spirituality
Sunday worship was an all-day affair for Hannah. Most Sundays began with a 5:00 a.m. prayer meeting at the vestry. She then attended highly emotional preaching services in the local church or at the courthouse at 10:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Finally, she concluded her Sundays with a prayer meeting at 6:00 p.m.[8]
In addition to these busy Sundays, most weeknights were also filled with emotionally charged prayer meetings focusing on “complete consecration to God,” reaching the “heathen” with the Gospel, or some other theme.[9] Hannah attended non-Free Will Baptist services and prayer meetings from time to time, but she always expected high emotion. After one prayer meeting with some Baptist missionaries in 1843, she complained of the formality of the gathering and longed instead for the “power” of religion.[10]
Her conversion account and emphasis on emotion reflect the influence of Romanticism on Christianity during the nineteenth century. After the French Revolution, Europeans and Americans began responding to the Enlightenment’s myopic focus on reason by overemphasizing emotion and vivid spiritual experiences.
Romanticism led Christians disproportionately to emphasize emotion in their theology and ecclesiology. Rather than accepting a simple profession of faith, churches began requiring prospective members to provide detailed accounts of extreme conversion experiences. By the mid-eighteenth century, this emphasis on emotion dominated American Christianity. In fact, the heyday of revivalism, the Second Great Awakening, was beginning to sweep the United States just as Hannah was coming to adulthood.
Hannah, like many nineteenth-century Christians, questioned the authenticity of religious services that weren’t emotionally charged. The temptation to fall into this mindset had caused Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) to write against the excesses of revivalism.[11] On a positive note, though, Romanticism also emphasized evangelism, resulting in the modern missions movement.
Marriage and Missions
In 1841, at the age of sixteen, Hannah began teaching classes of twenty and thirty schoolchildren, enjoying it thoroughly.[12] Yet she was still in school herself. During the winter of 1842, Hannah’s teacher was James C. Dow.[13] James had spent the previous year under the instruction of Free Will Baptist minister Silas Curtis at the Biblical School at Parsonfield Seminary in Parsonfield, Maine.[14] Over the next year, Hannah and James grew close, becoming, in her words, “all we had to each other.”[15]
They decided to marry in 1843. However, a week before the wedding, James returned home from a trip to Dover, New Hampshire, to tell Hannah that he intended to go to India as a missionary. The Freewill Baptist Foreign Mission Society was planning for him to leave within a year.[16]
This left Hannah with a major decision. God had called the man she was marrying to the mission field, but had He called her? “The question is,” she wrote, “shall I go or not?”[17] She made her decision quickly. “Yes I will go, I will give up all. I will sacrifice home friends and everything connected with them, and go into a heathen land and spend my days. May the Lord go with me and make me a blessing to the heathen.”[18]
Hannah didn’t intend to return home, and her family took the news hard. “They little expected the sad news that I was . . . to leave them forever.”[19] Despite their sadness, they supported her as she began preparing to leave. On June 25, 1843, a Methodist minister joined Hannah and James in marriage in her father’s home.[20] After the wedding, they moved one hundred miles away to Dover, New Hampshire, where James pastored a Free Will Baptist church for the next year.
They soon began training for their work in India by meeting with Eli Noyes.[21] Noyes and his wife, Clementina, were part of the first Free Will Baptist missions work in India, working alongside Jeremiah and Mary Phillips, as well as Amos Sutton (an English General Baptist missionary).[22] This group began working 250 miles up the Mahanudi River from Cuttack in the Sambhapur district where 15,000 people lived, only one of whom was European.[23]
However, fevers soon struck the missionaries; both families lost infants to disease, and Mary Phillips died soon thereafter. The Noyeses relocated to Balasore where they worked with children orphaned by famines and rescued from child sacrifice, but they returned to America in 1841.[24]
Two years later, the Noyeses began training the Dows to take their place in Balasore. Eli spent several days with James, teaching him about missions and India. Clementina bought fabric for Hannah and explained how to make the appropriate clothing for their destination.[25] Eli even preached James’s ordination service in Dover while Hannah remained with Clementina in Hallowell, Maine.[26]
Finally, on November 18, 1843, the Dows set sail from Boston, Massachusetts. They spent the first week of the voyage so seasick they were unable to eat.[27] The Dows were at sea for 143 days, or roughly four and a half months, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and finally docking in Calcutta, India, on May 7, 1844.[28] When they arrived in country, they spent their first months working in Balasore but soon moved to Midnapore to take over an abandoned General Baptist work.[29] After nearly four years of service, they were forced to return to New England because James had been extremely sick for six months.
Conclusion
In many ways, Hannah Dow represents a distinctly nineteenth-century, northern Free Will Baptist spirituality. She lived in a New England that was still primarily rural and covered with Free Will Baptist churches. A daughter of revivalism living in the midst of the most euphoric time of revival in American history, she understood and communicated much of her religious experience through emotion.
Still we can relate to, and are inspired by, several aspects of her story. Hannah was absolutely committed to follow God’s will for her life. At first, she thought that meant marrying a New England Free Will Baptist pastor and schoolteacher, settling down less than one hundred miles from the small mill town where she grew up, and becoming a respectable New England wife and mother. But when God changed those plans, Hannah didn’t balk. She heard the call of the Master and responded with everything she had. Her ready obedience is a challenge to us all.
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[1] Some debate exists concerning the spelling of “Free Will” in the north (Free Will or Freewill). I use “Free Will” in most cases because Hannah Dow spelled it that way. However, where a proper name was spelled “Freewill” (e.g., the Freewill Baptist Foreign Mission Society), I have followed the official spelling of the title.
[2] Only a year older than Hannah, the seven-foot-tall (eight-foot according to P.T. Barnum) Sylvia traveled the world with the Barnum and Bailey Circus as the Maine Giantess.
[3] Some evidence suggests that they could have been Methodists, but further research needs to be done to reach a firm conclusion either way.
[4] Hannah G. Dow, Hannah G. Dow (unpublished journal, 1843-47), “Introduction,” from National Association of Free Will Baptists Historical Collection. In several places I have modernized the language used by Dow in order to facilitate easier reading.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] See G. A. Burgess and J. T. Ward, Free Baptist Cyclopaedia: Historical and Biographical, “Badger, Rev. William” (Boston: Free Baptist Cyclopaedia Co., 1889), 31-32; Dow, “Journal Introduction,” 2.
[8] Dow, “July 3, 1843,” 7.
[9] Ibid., “July 1, 1843,” 7; Ibid., “August 6, 1843,” 8.
[10] Ibid.,, “November 30, 1843,” 16.
[11] The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2 (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004); and Treatise Concerning the Religions Affections (1746), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004).
[12] Ibid., “Introduction.”
[13] H. Dow, “Introduction.”
[14] G. A. Burgess and J. T. Ward, Free Baptist Cyclopaedia: Historical and Biographical, “The Biblical School,” (Boston: Free Baptist Cyclopaedia Co., 1889), 53.
[15] H. Dow, “Introduction.”
[16] Ibid., “June 17, 1843,” 5.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid., “June 20, 1843,” 5.
[20] Ibid., “June 25, 1843,” 6.
[21] Ibid., “ July 23, 1843,” 7.
[22] See G. A. Burgess and J. T. Ward, Free Baptist Cyclopaedia: Historical and Biographical, “Mission in India” (Boston: Free Baptist Cyclopaedia Co., 1889), 428; G. A. Burgess and J. T. Ward, Free Baptist Cyclopaedia: Historical and Biographical, “Noyes, Rev. Eli D.D.,” (Boston: Free Baptist Cyclopaedia Co., 1889), 490-491.
[23] Burgess and Ward, “Mission in India,” 415.
[24] Ibid. 416.
[25] James C. Dow, James C. Dow to Hannah G. Dow, August 25, 1843. Letter. From National Association of Free Will Baptists Historical Collection, Correspondence of J. C. and Hannah Dow, Missionaries to India.
[26] H. Dow, “September 22, 1843,” 11.
[27] Ibid., “November 25, 1843,” 16.
[28] Ibid., “May 7, 1844,” 66.
[29] Burgess and Ward, “Mission in India,” 420.
March 15, 2017
Thank you for introducing me to Hannah Dow. I had never heard of her and I love biographies.of great men and women of the faith. So wonderful
to learn more about our heritage as Free Will Baptists.
March 29, 2017
Thank you very much for your readership and kind comments. I’ve enjoyed being introduced to Hannah myself, and look forward to doing more research in the future.
March 22, 2017
Thanks so much Phillip for this inspiring article, and for introducing me to a historical FWB character I have never heard of before. Your article is also very helpful in understanding the mindset of early American FWBs that seems to still exist among modern FWBs. Enlightening!
March 29, 2017
Thanks a lot for your readership and kind comments. I’m glad this was helpful and interesting. Yes, I agree there are still some elements of nineteenth century revivalism in some Free Will Baptist churches.