Abel Morgan Sarjent

Abel Morgan Sarjent (1764-1839) was an early American preacher, probably born in Maryland, who ministered as a Universalist before founding his own millenarian sect, the Halcyon Church, in 1802 in what is now Mason County, West Virginia. He traveled through western Virginia, western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky preaching and debating, and he issued a religious periodical and numerous tracts; his movement admitted women to the ministry, and he was an early opponent of slavery who aided people escaping enslavement. The Halcyon movement peaked around 1807 and dissolved within roughly a decade, and Sarjent died in Indiana in 1839.

An early investigation of the endless-misery doctrine by Abel Morgan Sarjent, the independent Baltimore universalist whose Free Church hymnbook of 1814 is also cataloged in this collection. Sarjent's little movement ran outside the New England denomination entirely — evidence of how many separate springs fed American universalism in the early republic. No digitized copy has been located on the Internet Archive; the PDF scan comes from Google Books, and the HathiTrust catalog record is also linked in this book's metadata.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)

An obscure early hymnbook printed for A. M. Sarjent for the use of "the Free Church," cataloged by the Library of Congress under the Universalist churches subject heading. Little is recorded about Sarjent or the congregation; the book survives as a trace of the small independent universalist societies that existed alongside the organized denomination in the early republic. No digitized copy has been located on the Internet Archive; the scan is held by HathiTrust (see the catalog record linked in this book's metadata).

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)