Steve P. Holcombe, the Converted Gambler: His Life and Work

PREFACE

It has been thought and suggested by some of those having knowledge of Mr. Holcombe's history, that an account of his life and work in book-form would multiply his usefulness and do good. And since the narration of his experiences by himself has been of such great benefit to those who have been privileged to hear him, why may not others also be benefited by reading some account of his uncommon career?

It is hoped that it will be of interest to the general reader as a revelation and record of the workings and struggles of some human hearts and the wretchedness and blessedness of some human lives. It is a sort of luxury to read about and sympathize with wretchedness, as it is a joy to see that wretchedness turned to blessedness. It will show to those who are unwillingly the slaves of sin what God has done for such as they. It will possibly interest and encourage those who are engaged in Christian work. It may furnish suggestions as to practical methods to be pursued in working among poor and needy classes, whether in towns or cities. Even ministers of the Gospel may find encouragement and instruction in the experience of Mr. Holcombe's life and the methods and successes of his work.

What few letters of Mr. Holcombe's could be found are put in as showing phases of this interesting character that could be shown as well no other way, and some letters written to him are selected out of several hundred of like character to show how he touches all classes of people.

The "Testimonies" are from men who have been rescued under Mr. Holcombe's ministry, and will give some idea of the work that is being done. These are only a few of the men who have been brought to a better and happier life through Mr. Holcombe's efforts. If any should feel that there is a sameness in these testimonies, which it is believed very few will do, perhaps others will feel the cumulative effect of line upon line, example upon example.

The sermons or addresses are inserted because they have been the means of awakening and guiding many to salvation, and they may be of interest and possibly of benefit to some who have not heard Mr. Holcombe. They contain much of the history of his inner life in statements of experience introduced by way of illustration. They are given in outline only, as will be seen.

The book lays no claim to literary excellence. The position and work of the man make his life worth writing and reading apart from the style of the book.

The accounts here given of Mr. Holcombe's character and work are not written for the purpose of glorifying him. Many of these pages are profoundly painful and humiliating to him. But they are written that those who read them may know from what depths he has been brought, and to what blessedness he has been raised, through Jesus Christ, to whose name the glory is given and to whose blessing the book is commended.

August, 1888.

INTRODUCTION

The author of this volume, the Rev. Gross Alexander, Professor of Theology in Vanderbilt University, was surely the man to give to the world the Life of Steve Holcombe. The warm heart and clear head of the author, and the consecrated, self-denying life of the subject of the volume, assure the reader ample compensation for the time given to the book.

Mr. Alexander has known Brother Holcombe from the beginning of his Christian life, and tells the story of his fidelity to Christ and loyalty to duty as no other could.

I first met Brother Holcombe at Louisville, in the year 1882, when I was preaching in the church of his pastor, Rev. J. C. Morris. It was from Brother Morris that I learned of this consecrated layman. He often told me with joy of many incidents connected with the conversion and work of Brother Holcombe. My acquaintance with him soon grew into a warm friendship. It has always been an inspiration to me to talk with him, and a source of gratitude to me to know that I have his affection and prayers.

The work he is doing now in the city of Louisville, Kentucky, is very much like Jerry Macauley's work in New York City years ago. No man has experienced more vividly the power of Christ to save, and no man has a stronger faith in Christ's ability to save. Brother Holcombe's humility and fidelity have made him a power in the work of rescuing the perishing and saving the fallen. I have been charmed by the purity of soul manifested by him on all occasions, and his continual efforts to bring back those who have been overtaken in a fault. Hundreds of men who have felt his sympathizing arms about them and listened to his brotherly words have grown strong, because they had a friend and brother in Steve Holcombe, who, in spite of their failures and faults, has clung to them with a love like that which Christ Himself manifested toward those who were as bruised reeds and smoking flax.

Brother Holcombe, rescued himself by the loving hand of Christ, has extended the hand from a heart full of love for Christ and men, and has done his best to save all who have come under his influence.

This volume will be especially instructive to those who are interested in the salvation of the non-churchgoers of the great cities. For surely Brother Holcombe's Mission is a place where the worst sinners hear of Christ's power to save, and where they see, in Brother Holcombe himself, with his rich experience, one of the greatest triumphs of the Gospel.

I heartily commend this volume to all Christian people, because it tells of the life of a saved man. It tells also what a saved man can do for others, and it will inspire many hearts with sympathy for such work and prepare many hands to help in it. I heartily commend this book because it is the biography of one whom I love and whom all men would love, if they knew him in his devotion to God and duty. Brother Holcombe has frequently been with me in my meetings and in my private room; I have frequently been with him in his Mission, in his family circle, on the streets of the great cities, and he is one man of whom it may be said: "His conversation is in heaven." I frequently feel that my own life would have been more successful with such a fervent consecration to my work as Brother Steve Holcombe exemplifies.

The sermons contained in this volume will be read with interest. They are his sermons. They come from his heart, and they have reached the hearts of hundreds and thousands who have heard him gladly.

I bespeak for the book a circulation which will put it into the library of all pastors and into thousands of homes.

Cartersville, Ga., October 18, 1888.

LETTER FROM DR. JOHN A. BROADUS

I have read with very great interest the "Life of Steve Holcombe," and have carefully looked through the letters, testimonies and sermons to be included in the proposed volume, and I rejoice that it is to be published. Professor Alexander, who was Mr. Holcombe's first pastor, has written the life with the best use of his fine literary gifts, and with sound judgment and good taste. It is a wonderful story. I have long felt interest in Mr. Holcombe and his work, for after beginning his Mission he attended my seminary lessons in the New Testament through a session and more; but this record of his life warms my heart still more toward him and his remarkable labors of love. I think the book will be very widely read. It will stir Christians to more hopeful efforts to save the most wicked. It will encourage many a desperate wanderer to seek the grace of God in the Gospel. Such a book makes a real addition to the "evidences of Christianity." No one can read it without feeling that Christian piety is something real and powerful and delightful. Much may be learned from Mr. Holcombe's recorded methods and discourses, and from the testimonies of his converts, as to the best means of carrying on religious work of many kinds. The book will, doubtless, lead to the establishment of like Missions in other cities, and put new heart and hope into the pastors, missionaries and every class of Christian workers. It will show that zeal and love and faith must be supported by ample common sense and force of character, as in Mr. Holcombe's case, if great results are to hoped for. Many persons can be induced to read his brief outline sermons who would never look at more elaborate discourses. As to two or three slight touches of doctrinal statement, some of us might not agree with the speaker, but all must see that his sermons are very practical, pervaded by good sense and true feeling, and adapted to do much good.

Louisville, Ky., September 25, 1888.

CHAPTER I

Steve P. Holcombe, known in former years as a gambler and doer of all evil, no less known in these latter days as a preacher of the Gospel and doer of all good, was born at Shippingsport, Kentucky, in 1835. The place, as well as the man, has an interesting history. An odd, straggling, tired, little old town, it looks as if it had been left behind and had long ago given up all hope of ever catching up. It is in this and other respects in striking contrast with its surroundings. The triangular island, upon which it is situated, lies lazily between the Ohio river, which flows like a torrent around two sides of it, and the Louisville canal, which stretches straight as an arrow along the third. On its northeast side it commands a view of the most picturesque part of La Belle Riviere. This part embraces the rapids, or "Falls," opposite the city of Louisville, which gets its surname of "Falls City" from this circumstance. In the midst of the rapids a lone, little island of bare rocks rises sheer out of the dashing waters to the height of several feet, and across the wide expanse, on the other side of the river, loom up the wooded banks of the Indiana side, indented with many a romantic cove, and sweeping around with a graceful curve, while the chimneys and towers and spires of Jeffersonville and New Albany rise in the distance, with the blue Indiana "Knobs" in the deep background beyond. From this same point on the island, and forming part of the same extensive view, one may see the two majestic bridges, each a mile in length, one of which spans the river directly over the Falls and connects the city of Louisville with Jeffersonville, Indiana, while the other joins the western portion of Louisville with the thriving city of New Albany. Across the canal from the island, on the south, lies the city of Louisville with its near 200,000 population, its broad avenues, its palatial buildings.

In the very midst of all this profusion of beauty and all this hum and buzz and rush of commercial and social life, lies the dingy, sleepy old town of Shippingsport with its three hundred or four hundred people, all unheeded and unheeding, uncared for and uncaring. There are five or six fairly good houses, and all the rest are poor. There is a good brick school-house, built and kept up by the city of Louisville, of which, since 1842, Shippingsport is an incorporated part. There is one dilapidated, sad looking, little old brick church, which seldom suffers any sort of disturbance. On the northeast shore of the island directly over the rushing waters stands the picturesque old mill built by Tarascon in the early part of the century. It utilizes the fine water-power of the "Falls" in making the famous Louisville cement. Part of the inhabitants are employed as laborers in this mill, and part of them derive their support from fishing in the river, for which there are exceptional opportunities all the year around in the shallows, where the rushing waters dash, with eddying whirl, against the rocky shores of their island.

There are, at this time, some excellent people in Shippingsport, who faithfully maintain spiritual life and good moral character amid surrounding apathy and immorality. "For except the Lord had left unto them a very small remnant, they should have been as Sodom, and they should have been like unto Gomorrah."

And yet, Shippingsport was not always what it is now. Time was when it boasted the aristocracy of the Falls. "The house is still standing," says a recent writer in Harper's Monthly Magazine, "where in the early part of the century the Frenchman, Tarascon, offered border hospitality to many distinguished guests, among whom were Aaron Burr and Blennerhasset, and General Wilkinson, then in command of the armies of the United States." He might have added that Shippingsport was once honored with a visit from LaFayette, and later also from President Jackson. But in other respects also Shippingsport was, in former years, far different from what it is to-day. In business importance it rivaled the city of Louisville itself. In that early day, before the building of the canal, steamboats could not, on account of the Falls, pass up the river except during high water, so that for about nine months in the year Shippingsport was the head of navigation. Naturally, it became a place of considerable commercial importance, as the shrewd Frenchman who first settled there saw it was bound to be. Very soon it attracted a population of some hundreds, and grew into a very busy little mart. "Every day," says one of the old citizens still living, "steamboats were landing with products and passengers from the South, or leaving with products and passengers from Kentucky and the upper country." The freight which was landed at Shippingsport was carried by wagons and drays to Louisville, Lexington and other places in Kentucky and Indiana. This same old citizen, Mr. Alex. Folwell, declares that he has seen as many as five hundred wagons in one day in and around the place. There were three large warehouses and several stores, and what seems hard to believe, land sold in some instances for $100 per foot.

The canal was begun in 1824, the first spadeful of dirt being taken out by DeWitt Clinton, of New York. During the next six years from five hundred to a thousand men were employed on it. They were, as a general thing, a rough set. Sometimes, while steamboats were lying at the place, the unemployed hands would annoy the workmen on the canal so that gradually there grew up a feeling of enmity between the two classes which broke out occasionally in regular battles.

In 1830, when the canal was finished, the days of Shippingsport's prosperity were numbered. Thenceforth steamboats, independent of obstructions in the river, passed on up through the canal, and Shippingsport found her occupation was gone. The better classes lost no time in removing to other places, and only the poorer and rougher classes remained. Many of the workmen who had been engaged in building the canal settled down there to live; unemployed and broken-down steamboatmen gravitated to the place where they always had such good times; shiftless and thriftless poor people from other places came flocking in as to a poor man's paradise. Within easy reach of Louisville, the place became a resort for the immoral young men, the gamblers and all the rough characters of that growing city.

Such was the place to which Steve Holcombe's parents removed from Central Kentucky in 1835, the year of his birth; and, though coming into the midst of surroundings so full of moral perils, they did not bring that strength of moral character, that fixedness of moral habit and that steadfastness of moral purpose which were necessary to guard against the temptations of every sort which were awaiting them.

The father, though an honest and well disposed sort of man and very kind to his family, was already a drunkard. His son says of him: "My poor father had gotten to be a confirmed drunkard before I was born, and after he had settled at Shippingsport, my mother would not let him stay about the house, so that most of his time was spent in lying around bar-rooms or out on the commons, where he usually slept all times of the year." It is not surprising that as a consequence of such dissipation and such exposure he died at the early age of thirty-three, when his son Steve was eleven years old. Dead, he sleeps in an unmarked grave on the commons where formerly he slept when drunk and shut out by his wife from his home.

Mrs. Holcombe, the mother of Steve, a woman five feet ten inches in height and one hundred and ninety pounds in weight, was as strong in passion as in physical power. "When aroused," says her son, "she was as fierce as a tigress and fearless of God, man or devil, although she was a woman of quick sympathy and impulsive kindheartedness toward those who were in distress, and would go further to help such than almost any one I have ever known." She was a woman of more than ordinary mind, though entirely without education. In the government of her children she was extremely severe. "Though my father," says Mr. Holcombe, "never whipped me but once in my life, and that slightly, my mother has whipped me hundreds of times, I suppose, and with as great severity as frequency. She has, at times, almost beaten me to death. She would use a switch, a cane, a broom-stick or a club, whichever happened to be at hand when she became provoked. She whipped me oftener for going swimming than for anything else, I believe. If I told her a lie about it she would whip me, and if I told her the truth, she would whip me."

From neglect and other causes little Steve was very sickly and puny in his babyhood, so that he did not walk till he was four years old; but from the beginning his temper was as violent as his body was weak, and from his earliest recollection, he says, he loved to fight. At the same time he had his mother's tenderheartedness for those who were in distress. Once a stranger stopped for a few days at the tavern in Shippingsport, and the roughs of the place caught him out on one occasion and beat him so severely that he was left for dead; but he crawled afterward into an old shed where little Holcombe, between five and six years old, found him and took him food every day for about two weeks.

The boys with whom he associated in childhood were addicted to petty stealing, and he learned from them to practice the same. When about seven years old his mother, on account of their poverty, provided him with a supply of cakes, pies and fruits to peddle out on the steamers while they were detained in passing the locks of the canal. Instead of returning the money to his mother, however, he would often lose it in gambling with the bad boys of the place, and sometimes even with his half-brothers, so that he seldom got home with his money, but always got his beating.

At eight years of age he played cards for money in bar-rooms with grown men. At ten he began to explore those parts of the river about the falls, in a skiff alone looking for articles of various kinds lost in wrecks, that he might get means for gambling. This, together with the fact that his hair was very light in color, gained for him the distinction of the "Little White-headed Pirate."

In 1842 Shippingsport was taken into the city of Louisville, and a school was established, which he attended about three months during this period of his life, and he never attended school afterward. The brown-haired, black-eyed little girl who afterward became his wife, attended this school at the same time. Her parents had lately removed to Shippingsport from Jeffersonville, Indiana. They were people of excellent character and were so careful of their children that they would not allow them to associate with the children of Shippingsport any farther than was necessary and unavoidable. But, notwithstanding these restrictions, their little Mary saw just enough of Steve Holcombe in school to form a strange liking for him, as he did also for her – an attachment which has lasted through many and varying experiences up to the present. At that time he had grown to be "a heavy set little boy," as Mrs. Holcombe describes him, and was "very good looking," indeed, "very handsome," as she goes on to say, "with his deep blue eyes and his golden hair." She did not know that she was in love with a boy who was to become one of the worst of men in all forms of wickedness, and as little did she know that she was in love with a boy who was to become one of the best of men in all forms of goodness and usefulness. Nor did he foresee that he was forming an attachment then and there for one who was to love him devotedly and serve him patiently through all phases of infidelity and wickedness, and through years of almost unexampled trials and sufferings, who was to cling to him amid numberless perils and scandals, who was to train and restrain his children so as to lead them in ways of purity and goodness in spite of the father's bad example, who was to endure for his sake forms of ill treatment that have killed many a woman, and who was in long distant years to be his most patient encourager and helper in a singularly blessed and successful work for God and the most abandoned and hopeless class of sinful men, and to develop, amid all and in spite of all and by means of all, one of the truest and strongest and most devoted of female characters. A singular thing it seems, indeed, that an attachment begun so early and tested so severely should have lasted so late. And yet it is perhaps at this moment stronger than ever it was before.

Notwithstanding young Holcombe's lack of religious instruction and his extraordinary maturity in wickedness, he declares that at times he had, even before his tenth year, very serious thoughts. He says:

"I always believed there was a God and that the Bible was from God, but for the most part my belief was very vague and took hold of nothing definite. Hence, nearly all my thoughts were evil, only evil and evil continually. I am sure, however, that I believed there was a hell. When a child, I used to dream, it seems to me, almost every night, that the devil had me, and sometimes my dreams were so real that I would say to myself while dreaming, 'Now this is no dream; he has got me this time, sure enough.' I remember that one text which I heard a preacher read troubled me more than anything else, when I thought about dying and going to judgment. It was this: 'And they hid themselves in the dens and rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne.' I always had a fear of death and a dread of the future. The rattling of clods on a coffin filled me with awe and dread. When I thought about my soul, I would always say to myself, 'I am going to get good before I go into the presence of God; but now I want to keep these thoughts out of mind so I can do as I please and not have to suffer and struggle and fight against sin – till I get consumption. When I get consumption I will have plenty of warning as to death's approach and plenty of time to prepare for it.' But I had gotten such an admiration for gamblers and such a passion for gambling that I had a consuming ambition to become a regular blackleg, as gamblers were called in those days. I made up my mind that this was to be my business, and I began to look about for some way to get loose from everything else, so I could do nothing but gamble, with nobody to molest or make me afraid."

It is hard enough for a boy to keep from doing wrong and to do right always, even when he has inherited a good disposition, enjoyed good advantages and had the best of training. But our little friend, Steve Holcombe, poor fellow, inherited from his father an appetite for drink and from his mother a savage temper. To balance these, he had none of the safeguards of a careful, moral or religious education, and none of those sweet and helpful home associations which follow a man through life and hold him back from wrong doing.

Thus unprepared, unshielded, unguarded, at the tender age of eleven years he left home to work his own way in the world. No mother's prayers had hitherto helped him, and no mother's prayers from henceforth followed him. No hallowed home influences had blessed and sweetened his miserable childhood and no tender recollections of sanctified home life were to follow him into the great wicked world. On the contrary, he was fleeing from his home to find some refuge, he knew not what, he knew not where. He was going out, boy as he was, loaded down with the vices and hungry with the passions of a man. He did not seek employment among people that were good or in circumstances encouraging to goodness, but just where of all places he would find most vice and learn most wickedness – on a steamboat. One knowing his antecedents and looking out into his future could easily have foreseen his career in vice and crime, but would hardly have predicted for him that life of goodness and usefulness which now for eleven wonderful years he has been leading.