BOOTH, WILLIAM (1829–1912), English evangelist, founder of the Salvation Army. William Booth was born on April 10, 1829, in Nottingham, England, the only son of the four surviving children of Samuel and Mary Moss Booth. The elder Booth, an unsuccessful building contractor, and his wife were no more than conventionally religious, but William, intelligent, ambitious, zealous, and introspective, was earnest about Christianity from an early age. He was converted at the age of fifteen and two years later gave himself entirely to the service of God as the result of the preaching of James Caughey, a visiting American Methodist revivalist. From the age of thirteen until he was twenty-two Booth worked as a pawnbroker's assistant, first in Nottingham and after 1849 in London. His zeal for souls and compassion for the poor drove him to preach in the streets. In 1852 he became a licensed Methodist minister. Although Booth had been forced by his father's financial ruin to withdraw from a good grammar school at age thirteen, he read avidly, sought instruction from older ministers, and developed an effective style in speech and writing. In 1855 he married Catherine Mumford, a woman of original and independent intelligence and great moral courage, who had a strong influence on him. They had eight children.
In 1861 Booth began to travel as an independent evangelist, sometimes appearing with Catherine, who publicly advocated an equal role for women in the pulpit. In 1865 the couple established a permanent preaching mission among the poor in the East End of London, in a place where Booth had conducted an especially effective series of meetings. This new endeavor, which soon included small-scale charitable activities for the poor, was known for several years as the Christian Mission. In 1878 the mission was renamed the Salvation Army.
The military structure suggested by the new name appealed to the Booths and to the co-workers they attracted to their work. Booth remained an orthodox Methodist in doctrine, preaching the necessity of repentance and the promise of holiness—a voluntary submission to God that opened to the believer a life of love for God and for humankind. A premillennialist as well, he was convinced that the fastest way to complete the work of soul winning that would herald the return of Christ was to establish flying squads of enthusiasts who would spread out over the country at his command. The General, as Booth was called, saw evangelism as warfare against Satan for the souls of individuals; the militant tone of scripture and hymns was not figurative to Booth and his officers, but literal reality. The autocracy of military command was well suited to Booth's decisive and uncompromising personality; and it appealed both to his close associates, who were devoted to him and who sought his counsel on every matter, and to his more distant followers, the "soldiers" recently saved from sin, most of them uneducated, new to religion, and eager to fit themselves into the great scheme.
William and Catherine were convinced from the beginning of their work in London that it was their destiny to carry the gospel to those untouched by existing religious efforts. To them this meant the urban poor. Their sympathy led them to supplement their evangelism by immediate and practical relief. They launched campaigns to awaken the public to the worst aspects of the life of the poor, such as child prostitution and dangerous and ill-paid piecework in neighborhood match factories. Soup kitchens, men's hostels, and "rescue homes" for converted prostitutes and unwed mothers became essential parts of the Army's program.
In 1890 William Booth published In Darkest England and the Way Out, which contained a full-fledged program to uplift and regenerate the "submerged tenth" of urban society. The heart of the scheme was a sequence of "city colonies" (urban missions for the unemployed), "land colonies" (retraining in agricultural skills), and "overseas colonies" (assisted emigration to one of Britain's colonies). The book also explained the existing programs and promised many new schemes in addition to the colonies: the "poor man's lawyer," the "poor man's bank," clinics, industrial schools for poor children, missing-persons inquiries, a "matrimonial bureau," and a poor-man's seaside resort, "Whitechapel-by-the-Sea." The Darkest England scheme, which was widely endorsed, represents an important turning point in public support for the Army.
Booth would not have claimed to be a saint in any conventional sense, and there are certainly controversial aspects to his life and work. Always overworked and chronically unwell, he often had strained relationships with his close associates, especially after the death of Catherine in 1890. Many of his statements about the Army overlooked the fact that much of its program was not original. He offered no criticism of the basic social and political structure that surrounded him, and his confidence in the desirability of transferring the urban unemployed to the more healthful and "natural" environment of the country was romantic and impractical. Yet the fact remains that Booth combined old and new techniques of evangelism and social relief in an immensely effective and appealing program. He displayed great flexibility in adapting measures to the needs of the moment, altering or eliminating any program, however dear to him, if its effectiveness diminished. He abandoned anything in the way of theology (such as sacraments) or social theory that might confuse his followers or dampen their zeal for soul winning and good works.
Guileless and unsentimental, Booth showed a rare and genuine single-mindedness in the cause of evangelism. His last public message, delivered three months before his death on August 20, 1912, is still cherished by the Army that is his most fitting memorial. The concluding words of the message were these: "While there yet remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight—I'll fight to the very end!"
See Also
Salvation Army.
Bibliography
William Booth and the early Salvation Army are gradually receiving attention from serious scholarship. Roy Hattersley, Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and Their Salvation Army (New York, 1999) is excellent on economic and social issues and is a good introduction. St. John Ervine, God's Soldier: General William Booth, 2 vols. (New York, 1935) and Harold Begbie, The Life of General William Booth, the Founder of the Salvation Army, 2 vols. (New York, 1920) held the field of serious biography until recently, and are still almost indispensable. William Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890; reprint, London, 1970) is important for an understanding of Booth and his work. The best biography of Catherine Booth is Roger A. Green, Catherine Booth: A Biography of the Cofounder of The Salvation Army (Grand Rapids, 1996). Commissioner Frederick de Latour Booth-Tucker, The Life of Catherine Booth, the Mother of the Salvation Army, 2 vols. (London, 1892), by Booth's son-in-law, remains an Army classic.
Edward H. McKinley (1987 and 2005)
