Modeled directly after John Wesley's British publication, the 1789 American imprint of The Arminian Magazine marks the first official magazine produced by the newly formed Methodist Episcopal Church in America. Under the direction of Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, the church's first two bishops, the magazine served as a tool to unify a scattered frontier ministry and establish a cohesive denominational identity in the early Republic.
During this period, Coke and Asbury led a strong antislavery crusade within the denomination, and the volume served as a prominent venue for publishing early moral critiques of human bondage before Southern sectional pressures forced later compromise. Notably, the August 1789 issue included the poem "On the Death of a Child, Five Years of Age" by Phillis Wheatley, elevating Black intellectual and literary achievement within mainstream religious print.
Published in Philadelphia, the same year the U.S. Constitution took effect, the magazine also contains Asbury and Coke's formal Address to George Washington, which affirmed Methodist loyalty to the new constitutional republic, &c. and also the printed reply of President Washington.
Inscribed on the title page, "Charles Callaway, his Book, Bought of Philip Cox, Ap. 13, 1790. Price 10/"
A fine association copy linking two early American Methodist itinerant circuit riders who were instrumental in establishing the denomination's distribution network in the post-Revolutionary period. Philip Cox was a British-born Methodist preacher appointed by the Virginia Conference and Bishop Francis Asbury in 1789 to serve as the church's first official "travelling book steward," or colporteur. In this role, Cox rode extensive horse circuits carrying saddlebags loaded with Methodist literature to sell directly to regional preachers, society leaders, and parishioners, making him the primary field operative for John Dickins's newly established Methodist Book Concern in Philadelphia. Charles Callaway was a fellow Methodist itinerant minister in Virginia who bought the volume directly from Cox while both were actively traveling and preaching across the mid-Atlantic circuit.
Exceptionally scarce, with no examples at auction in the last 50 years we can trace, and no examples noted available in the trade at the time of cataloging.
