Morgan Rhees [Rhys]

Morgan Rhees [Rhys] (1760-1804) was born in Wales and admitted to Bristol Academy in 1786. He was ordained at Pen-y-garn in 1787 and became an itinerant minister. He was an admirer of the French Revolution, even opening a meetinghouse in Boulogne and founding a society for distributing the New Testament to French citizens in the early 1790s. When he returned from France he immigrated with a colony of Welsh people to America in 1794. William Rogers welcomed Rhees to Philadelphia, where his eloquent preaching attracted great crowds. He traveled widely in America, preaching wherever he went. In connection with Dr. Benjamin Rush, he purchased a tract of land in Pennsylvania, which he called Cambria, and formed a church there. Later he removed to Somerset, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1804. He was buried in Philadelphia. He married a daughter of Col. Benjamin Loxley, a distinguished officer of the Revolution. Like his countryman, Iolo Morganwg, Rhees promoted the recovery of the ancient Welsh bardic tradition. As Gwyn Williams describes him, Rhees was the “hammer of slavery, preacher of Sunday and Welsh schools, promoter of the John Canne Bible, missionary to the French, [and] editor of Wale’s first political journal in its own language.”  See William Cathcart, The Baptist Encyclopedia (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1881), 977; Gwyn A. Williams, The Search for Beulah Land: The Welsh and the Atlantic Revolution (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 53-80 (quotation above taken from p. 72).