Nicholas Snethen, an American clergyman, born at Fresh Pond (now Glen Cove), Long Island, N. Y., Nov. 15, 1769, died in Princeton, Ind., May 30, 1845. In 1794 he entered the itinerant ministry of the Methodist Episcopal church, travelled and preached for four years in Connecticut, Vermont, and Maine, labored at Charleston, S. C, for a year or more, and thence was ordered, to Baltimore, where he attended the general conference in May, 1800, and took a prominent part in favor of limiting the episcopal prerogative, a delegated general conference (his plan for which was finally adopted in 1808), and a preachers' anti-slavery tract society, and against the future admission of any slaveholder into the church. He afterward travelled with Bishop Asbury as his private secretary. In 1804-'6 he was stationed in New York, whence he removed to his farm on Longanore, Frederick co., Md. By his marriage ho became the holder of slaves, whom he emancipated as soon as the law would permit (1820). From 1809 to 1814 he was again an itinerant, and was stationed successively in Baltimore, Georgetown, Alexandria, and on the circuit of his farm residence. While in Georgetown he was elected chaplain to congress.

In 1829 he removed to Indiana. He was the first to introduce camp meetings into Maryland and New York. In 1821 he began to write in favor of lay representation. The refusal of this right by the general conference in 1828, and the expulsion from the church of many of its advocates, led to the formation of the Methodist Protestant church, in which Mr. Snethen bore a prominent part, and in connection with which he continued to travel and preach after his removal to the west till a short time before his death. He published "Lectures on Preaching the Gospel" (1822), "Essays on Lay Representation" (1835), and "Lectures on Biblical Subjects" (1836). A volume of his sermons, edited by Worthington G. Snethen, was published in 1846.