'Logical' Luther Lee and the Methodist War Against Slavery

Luther Lee, D.D. (1800-1889), one of the founders of Wesleyan Methodism, was a nineteenth-century reformer and an ordained minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Lee is known to most Methodist historians as a Methodist Episcopal minister who deserted the church that had brought him to spiritual birth and ordination. Wesleyan Methodist church historians know him as the first president of their denomination, an editor of their periodical, and unfortunately, a traitor who betrayed and then subsequently walked away from the church he had helped to establish. His significance to American history has not heretofore been observed.

Paul Leslie Kaufman (B.A., Allegheny Wesleyan College; M.A., Baltimore Hebrew University; M.Th., Antietam Biblical Seminary; S.T.M., Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg; Th.D., Antietam Biblical Seminary; Ph.D., Kent State University) is professor of church history and academic dean at Allegheny Wesleyan College. He was a teaching fellow at Kent State University, has served as adjunct professor of history at Malone College for many years and currently is adjunct professor of church history at Ashland Theological Seminary. He has presented numerous papers on abolitionism and the Methodist Episcopal Church at Western Reserve University, Syracuse University, and Cleveland State University. He is an ordained minister in the Wesleyan Methodist Church, and a member of Phi Alpha Theta and the Wesleyan Theological Society. He resides at Quincy Hall near Salem, Ohio, with his wife, Pearl.