Bascom, Henry Bidleman [key], 1796–1850, American Methodist minister and college president, b. Hancock, N.Y. At the age of 17 he became a preacher in the Ohio Methodist Conference and was a frontier circuit rider. Bascom was chaplain (1824–26) in the U.S. Congress; president (1827–29) of Madison College, Uniontown, Pa.; professor (1832–42) of moral science at Augusta College, Augusta, Ky.; and president (1842–49) of Transylvania Univ., Lexington, Ky. He played an important role at the convention of 1844, which split the Methodist Church over the question of slavery and resulted in the organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1850 he was elected a bishop of that church. He is the author of Methodism and Slavery (1847).
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