Guide to the Artemas Bullard Papers

Artemas Bullard, born in 1802 at Northbridge, Massachusetts, into a Congregationalist family, graduated from Amherst in 1826 and attended Andover Theological Seminary, 1826-1828, leaving in 1828 before completion of his work to become Secretary and General Agent for the Massachusetts Sabbath School Union. In 1830 he toured the West for this organization. In 1831 he was ordained by the Andover Association of the Congregational Church. From 1832 to 1838 he served as agent of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions for the Valley of the Mississippi, living in Walnut Hills, a suburb of Cincinnati and location of Lane Theological Seminary. In this capacity he traveled extensively from Detroit to New Orleans. In 1838 he accepted a call to the pastorate of the First Presbyterian Church, St. Louis, where he remained until his death in a railroad accident in 1855.

Bullard's interests were wide and through his travels, his correspondence and participation in the work of the voluntary societies and the judicatories of the Church, his influence was extensive, especially in Missouri where played a leadership role similar to an Episcopal missionary bishop. In education, he maintained a lifelong support for the Sunday School cause, ministerial education, the recruitment of teachers, both male and female, for the West. On a visit to the East in 1845 he recruited seminary students for Missouri, the most famous recruit being Frederick Starr, Jr. He corresponded with members of the faculties of Marion College, Illinois College, Hudson College, Western Reserve College and Marietta College and was a prime mover in the establishment of Webster College. In 1854 he was offered but he refused chairmanship of the New School Committee of Education.

Bullard was a staunch supporter of, and successful fund raiser for, the voluntary societies, and was a founder and secretary of the Missouri Home Missionary Society, auxiliary to the American Home Missionary Society. He was a leader in the temperance movement and city missions. He was influential in organizing church extension and church erection efforts of the New School Church and on his 1845 journey through the East raised funds for church building in Missouri. In 1850 he attended the World Peace Convention in Germany.

In the schism of the Presbyterian Church in 1837-1838, Bullard, like many Missouri clergymen and churches, tried at first to maintain a neutral or independent position between the two factions, but eventually he became an important leader of the New School Presbyterians, who in Missouri organized as a New School Synod in 1842.

Bullard opposed slavery, but was not an abolitionist. He was, however, accused of being one in Missouri, a state with a strong pro-slavery element.