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“A Canadian, then an English subject”: American Impressions of Egerton Ryerson

Egerton Ryerson was born to United Empire Loyalist parents in Charlotteville about a year after American Methodist Nathan Bangs established the Long Point circuit. More than twenty years later, when Ryerson was himself received on trial at Saltfleet in 1825, the young preacher found himself surrounded by Americans who, like Bangs, felt themselves called to spread the Methodist message not only in their own country, but also in British North America. Not including the six preachers received on trial that year, among them American-born Anson Green, almost 30% of the preachers in attendance were born, bred, and received on trial in the United States. Americans, then, were no strangers to the young Egerton Ryerson. And yet, later that summer, when Ryerson crossed the border into the United States for the first time in his life, he remarked in his journal, as though it came as a kind of revelation, that, “the manners of the people are not pleasant to me.” To describe Ryerson’s views of America and Americans as complex would be to understate the case. Contradictory might be nearer the mark. On the one hand, Ryerson often corresponded with American Methodists and more than once attended the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a Canadian delegate; he served as the emissary who personally solicited American Wilbur Fisk to serve as Canada’s first Methodist bishop; and he did not scruple to acknowledge the great debt he owed to Nathan Bangs for the degree to which Bangs’s Letters to Young Ministers of the Gospel had shaped and influenced him as a young