The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 1725–1775 9781611477146, 9781611477153

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The First Great Awakening

The First Great Awakening Redefining Religion in British America, 1725–1775

John Howard Smith

FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Madison • Teaneck

Cover image: NPG 131, George Whitefield by John Wollaston, oil on canvas, circa 1742. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by John Howard Smith All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-61147-714-6 (cloth : alk paper) ISBN 978-1-61147-715-3 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Notes and Abbreviations

vii

Prefaceix Introduction: The Problem of the First Great Awakening PART I: “NO SMALL APPEARANCES OF A DIVINE WORK”

1 15

1 “Vital Piety”

17

2 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism”

39

3 “Communion Times”

65

4 “A Glorious Work of God’s Infinite Power”

85

PART II: “THE LATE REVIVAL OF RELIGION”

105

5 “Many Thousands Flocking to Hear Him Preach the Gospel”

107

6 “Blessed be God that Hath Done It!”

127

7 “Glorious Distraction”

149

8 “Unhappy Contention”

173

PART III: “METHINKS I SEE MIGHTY CITIES RISING ON EVERY HILL” 9 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master”

197 199

10 “A Salvation from Heaven”

225

11 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed”

247

12 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord”

271

v

vi Contents

Conclusion295 Selected Bibliography

305

Index335 About the Author

345

Notes and Abbreviations

A NOTE ON THE TEXT Quotations from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources have not been modernized in spelling or grammar, except where confusion might ensue. ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES WJE The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 26 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957–), Perry Miller, John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, gen. eds. NEQ The New England Quarterly WMQ The William and Mary Quarterly

vii

Preface

The First Great Awakening is one of the most important events in American religious, intellectual, and cultural history; one that has been analyzed since Joseph Tracy chronicled the revivals in 1841, yet comparatively few scholars have dared to craft a fully synthetic history of it. The last such attempt from the American prospective was made in 2007, and the time has come for a new history of the Awakening that builds upon long-established scholarship and incorporates the most recent work on the subject. The foregoing volume is the product of nearly ten years of research, of writing and thinking, of rewriting and rethinking, thus giving proof to Heraclitus’s fabled dictum (as paraphrased by Plato) that “ ”—“you cannot step twice into the same stream.” Each time I have come to this stream, it has been different, and each time I am never the same swimmer. I have incurred a great many debts as I have made my way through various projects that culminate in the foregoing work, and to name them all would take up too much precious space, but several must be acknowledged. Firstly, I want to extend my gratitude to the archivists and librarians at the many repositories, in Britain and the United States, in which I had the pleasure to work and linger. Their friendliness and efficiency make research a far more pleasurable endeavor than it is already. A number of friends and colleagues have read various aspects of the manuscript or discussed the project with me at some length. Kenneth P. Minkema and Harry S. Stout read and gave me valuable notes on my initial project proposal, and Jon Butler, Stephen A. Marini, Jessica Millward, Angela Lahr, Douglas Winiarski, Jane T. Merritt, and John A. Grigg read sections of the manuscript or commented on elements of it at various academic conferences. Some themes were introduced at an Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture spring colloquium in 2002, with particular thanks extended to Ronald Hoffman and Frederika Teute for their probing questions and constructive criticism. The late Rhys Isaac generously offered to make some notes on selected early ix

x Preface

chapter drafts after a wonderful conversation we had during a reception at the Omohundro Institute’s Thirteenth Annual Conference in 2007. It was during that same conference that I enjoyed a delightful, convivial Indian meal with Christopher Beneke and Thomas Kidd, where transpired a great exchange of ideas that set me down the interpretative path taken here. The late Edwin Scott Gaustad, whom I first met at an American Society of Church History conference in Santa Fe in 2000, read several early chapter drafts and research notes, and was most encouraging in my pursuit of a secular interpretation of the Awakening. This book’s strengths are largely the product of their insightful guidance, while its weaknesses remain entirely my responsibility. I am indebted to Texas A&M University-Commerce, which awarded me a generous Faculty Research Enhancement Grant that provided much-needed funds to complete my research. A semester-long Faculty Development Leave gave me time to complete and polish the manuscript. I have been privileged to enjoy the guidance and support of Farleigh Dickinson University Press and Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, particularly Harry Keyishian and Kalman Goldstein, who were instrumental in shepherding this project to final publication. Genevieve Shifke and Karen Ackermann skillfully guided the book down the last leg of its journey to press. Their hard work is most appreciated. Friends and colleagues have variously offered encouragement and support, which at certain key moments imbued me with renewed energy and initiative to proceed with the work and bring it to completion, to say nothing of helping me keep my wits sharpened through many conversations about the Awakening, American religious history, the writing process, and many things having nothing whatsoever to do with any of those subjects. Thanks to Sung Bok Kim, Candis Murray, Jeannine Chandler, Gary Loura, Christopher Beneke, William F. Kuracina, Chad King, Connie Meyer, and Jimmy Allen. Most of all I thank my wife, Erica, and our children, Iain and River, who opened the door to a richer and more meaningful life. They have had to endure many months of my being sequestered in my office as I finished and revised the manuscript, and did so with humbling grace. This book is dedicated to them. John Howard Smith Commerce, Texas

Introduction The Problem of the First Great Awakening

In 1967, the eminent historian of early American religion William G. McLoughlin wondered, “Is not the history of America the history of the pietistic impulse in various formulations?” To McLoughlin and his predecessors, there was little doubt that the answer is a resounding “of course,” but the decline of Neo-Whig American historiography since the 1960s gradually cast doubt upon not only the answer but also the validity of the question itself. That religion and religious sensibilities shape individuals, groups, and cultures cannot be denied, yet the extent to which they do so has been and continues to be hotly contested among American historians seeking to define and explain the political and social evolution of the United States. The purpose of this book is to reinterpret the First Great Awakening’s place in American history as a cultural and political watershed in order to describe how, in McLoughlin’s assessment, “this existential characteristic [the ‘pietistic impulse’] . . . became permanently embedded in our national character,” and whether or not it constitutes “our national conversion,” as H. Richard Niebuhr—following Herbert Levi Osgood—proclaimed. On another level, its purpose is to call into question what is meant by an “awakening” in the religious sense, and to offer a new definition of the “First Great Awakening” that is more in keeping with recent advances in scholarship.1  THE RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE OF BRITISH AMERICA The varieties of religious faith and practice in the early eighteenth-century British North American colonies occupied a very broad spectrum. New England was dominated by a Calvinist Congregationalism challenged by Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, and various Independent denominations such 1

2 Introduction

as the Baptists and Quakers. Within Congregationalism, fractures appeared and widened over divergent theologies, doctrines, and practices. The Middle Colonies were quite religiously diverse, as Dutch Reformed, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Baptists, and other Independent denominations and sects variously competed and accorded with one another. The southern colonies were the most homogeneous, with firm Anglican establishments checking attempts by other denominations to make significant inroads, though Baptists in Virginia, Quakers in North Carolina, and Presbyterians throughout had begun to assert themselves. Missionary outreach to various Indian tribes remained halfhearted and at best disappointing, while slaveholders generally resisted pressures to Christianize their human chattels and the slaves themselves tended to reject their masters’ religion. A heightened lack of public piety and personal religious devotion led many ministers to worry about spiritual declension, while the educated classes found themselves attracted to atheism, Deism, Unitarianism, and Universalism, thus confirming the clergy’s growing concerns. Church attendance and membership among white colonists appeared to shrink dramatically, unable to keep pace with the explosive population growth through natural increase and immigration from Europe. The spread of religious indifference, the popularity of “folk religion,” rampant sectarianism, and contentious denominational rivalries led some ministers to call for a renewal of what they believed to be the far greater spiritual devotion of the previous century. A growing chorus of criticism against the influence of Enlightenment rationalism on Protestant Christian theology, formalism in church services, and status consciousness and “worldliness” among the clergy of nearly all denominations also resulted in a movement to restore seventeenth-century piety and clerical dedication. In the early 1730s, Jonathan Edwards of Northampton, Massachusetts, adopted the “plain style” of sermonizing practiced by his forebears and reaped a harvest of souls by reemphasizing traditional Puritan Calvinist doctrines of innate human depravity, total inability, and God’s implacable omnipotence. The Tennents of New Jersey and Pennsylvania— William Sr., Gilbert, John, and William Jr.—likewise oversaw ecstatic revivals in the Raritan and Delaware valleys through similar means. These revivals are but a handful of other such events cropping up throughout New England and the Middle Colonies, and the “New Lights” who fomented this renewal of conservative Protestantism championed the devout layman over the “Old Light” established ministry, which mocked and criticized the revivalists as ignorant, self-deluded, or heterodox demagogues, or bluntly accused them of being con artists. The preaching tour of one Anglican evangelical, George Whitefield, in 1739–1740 drew enormous crowds in American seaboard cities from Savannah, Georgia, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, demonstrating revivalism’s appeal among the laity. Itinerant ministers began to appear,

Introduction

3

demanding their rights to preach without university training or governmental licensing, and the New Lights generally encouraged them as welcome alternatives to “hireling” ministers seemingly more concerned about their salaries and social status than with saving souls. Sharp divisions of opinion arose concerning religious “enthusiasm,” revivalism, clerical professionalism, and itinerancy, fueled by radical New Light and Old Light attacks upon each other in the pulpits and the press, resulting in rampant separatism and denominational schisms, the most famous of which was the sundering of the Presbyterian Church into rival synods in 1741. News of similar revivals in Europe broadcast by Thomas Prince, Sr., in his periodical, The Christian History, kept readers up to date on these extraordinary events between 1742 and 1745. The tides of revivalism, however, seemed to ebb after 1745, when the renewal of war between Britain and France occupied Americans’ attention and the evangelical fire seemed to have burnt itself out. New Light Presbyterians and Baptists found receptive audiences in the southern backcountry and among slave communities in the 1750s and 1760s, indicating that what Edwards called “a great and general awakening” had finally engulfed the South. Theological disputes sparked by the Awakening continued to be waged in New England and elsewhere, but the popular aspect of the Awakening had apparently declined and Christianity restored to the control of the professional ministry, which had recovered its former authority by the time the Seven Years’ War began in Jumonville’s Glen in 1754. Radical New Lights such as James Davenport of New London, Connecticut, had recanted their excesses and begun to settle into the clerical mainstream. The radical revivalist anti-intellectualism subsided, as the damage done by uneducated and theologically untrained itinerants led New Light elites to work toward the establishment of seminary colleges. Waning news of revivals forced Edwards to conclude tentatively that their decline represented hopefully only a temporary victory for “the enemy”—Satan. For all intents and purposes, though, the Great Awakening seemed to be over, eclipsed by new economic and political concerns leading to the American Revolution.2

HISTORIANS AND THE AWAKENING Historians have been striving to define and explain the First Great Awakening since the outbreak of a “Second” Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century. Shifting interpretative frameworks have created over the past two centuries a rich tapestry of opinion concerning the dynamics and significance of the eighteenth-century Awakening, responding to changes in historiography and scholarly trends. A few brilliant works stand as towering monuments

4 Introduction

to changing ideas about what the Awakening was and what it has meant to the formation of American identity, while others cast doubt upon those works, culminating in Jon Butler’s clanging announcement in 1982 that the First Great Awakening was nothing more than a nineteenth-century “interpretive fiction,” its later historians as having been duped by their forebears or become willing participants in some grand delusion—much as the Old Lights accused the New Lights of fraud and deception at the time of the revivals. So convincing has been Butler’s critique that others have similarly questioned the existence or the nature of the Awakening, even as they continue to discuss the revivals and use the nomenclature which Butler insists is misleading.3 Joseph Tracy first analyzed the eighteenth-century revivals in The Great Awakening (1841), being a centennial celebration of pre-revolutionary revivalism and the advent of what early nineteenth-century Jeffersonian evangelicals dubbed the “Second Great Awakening.” He characterized the First Great Awakening as the seminal event in the formation of a unified American consciousness prefiguring the American Revolution.4 A deeper interpretation emerged with the publication of Charles H. Maxson’s The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (1920), which located the roots of the Awakening in Pietism and evangelicalism as exported to New Jersey and Pennsylvania by Dutch and Scots-Irish immigrants. Herbert Levi Osgood saw in the revivals a crucible out of which the American identity was forged, “the first great and spontaneous movement in the history of the American people, deeper and more pervading than the wars.” V. L. Parrington set down a new orthodox interpretation of the “American Mind” in 1927 by characterizing the Awakening as a struggle between Puritan Calvinism and liberal Enlightenment rationalism, in which the latter prevailed and became the motive ideological force paving the road to the Revolution.5 Most studies of the Awakening appearing prior to the 1970s focus heavily upon New England, as well as identifying the Awakening primarily as a subject of intellectual history. Perry Miller argued that religion continued to be the core of American identity in his monumental two-volume The New England Mind (1939, 1953), while Edwin Scott Gaustad diminished the prominence of the New Light revivalist leaders in favor of focusing upon the theological dimension of the Awakening and its aftereffects. C. C. Goen emphasized the schismatic dynamics of what was a much broader and multilayered event, while Carl Bridenbaugh argued that religion and politics were intricately intertwined in the Awakening in ways that prefigured the Revolution.6 Alan Heimert extended this line of interpretation substantially in the highly influential Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966). The success of the First Great Awakening, he asserted, was nothing less than an American declaration of intellectual independence from Europe that made the American Revolution not only possible,

Introduction

5

but also inevitable. This proved a highly controversial argument, but one that gained credibility throughout the 1970s, boosted by work done by David S. Lovejoy, Darrett B. Rutman, J. M. Bumsted, Richard L. Bushman, and Cedric B. Cowing. Analyses offered in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and Harry S. Stout can be summed up in Gary B. Nash’s conclusion that the Awakening constituted “a profound cultural crisis involving the convergence of political, social, and economic forces,” encouraging a latitudinarian and antiauthoritarian spirit that significantly altered the dynamic between those in power and those subject to it.7 Without question, the boldest thesis about the Awakening was offered by Jon Butler, who contended that the Awakening was a nineteenth-century “creation,” and was essentially a nonevent. Joseph Conforti, building upon Butler’s critique, added that the First Great Awakening was invented “as a cultural production of the Second Great Awakening.”8 Despite such a determined effort to sweep the pieces off the chessboard, historians of the 1980s and 1990s largely ignored Butler’s dismissal of the First Great Awakening’s existence, even as they incorporated his broader assertion of a fundamentally antiauthoritarian religious culture into their works. Patricia U. Bonomi and Peter Eisenstadt forcefully countered that American popular religiosity had not declined or surrendered to secularism during the eighteenth century.9 The strength of Butler’s conclusions silenced unqualified adherence to Heimert’s interpretation, but the question Butler thought had been asked and answered still remains: had there been a First Great Awakening at all? Butler sounded the Awakening’s funeral bell by proclaiming it a nineteenth-century fantasy, but Frank Lambert transferred Butler’s interpretative framework back into the eighteenth century in Inventing the “Great Awakening” (1999). Defining “invention” in its eighteenth-century dual meaning (the “‘discovery of a thing hidden’” and “of fabricating or designing something new”), Lambert asserted that the Awakening was the creation of the New Light revivalists themselves. Here, the Awakening was, in Lambert’s opinion, “an early American culture war” that—apart from earlier revivalist episodes—was waged in the press, where it took the form of a political contest for spiritual leadership in the public arena. In essence, following Butler’s conclusions, Lambert asserts that “a rather ordinary occurrence in an obscure corner of colonial America grew into the Great Awakening” after the Revolution.10 Despite Butler’s revisionism, none have gone so far as he to deny the Great Awakening’s existence, variously interpreting revivalism, theological development, and sectarianism within a wide variety of contexts, and using the “Great Awakening” label with or without qualification to describe the event. A significant proportion of scholarship on the First Great Awakening is devoted to biographical studies of the principal figures in it: Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Tennents, primarily. These add

6 Introduction

considerable detail to the theological and ecclesiological issues suffusing the Awakening, as well as the dynamics of the contemporary debate over revivalism, religious “enthusiasm,” and ministerial identity.11 Works dealing with the European, especially Scottish and Scots-Irish, influences on American revivalism undertaken in the past thirty years have done much to deprovincialize the Awakening as scholarly consciousness of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World has grown, and religion has emerged as a more important facet in the construction of early European-American cultural and individual identity.12 Recent scholarship in the journal literature emphasizes the New Divinity’s roots in the theological arguments of the Awakening, its intercolonial nature, theological disputation, gender issues, and the Great Awakening’s mystical radicalism. This demonstrates the much needed turn toward reinterpreting the First Great Awakening as primarily a religious phenomenon and not as a political one, as Heimert and the majority of those who followed him have done. Thomas S. Kidd, in his 2007 survey of the Awakening, follows Tracy in asserting that this provided British America with a coherent identity defended in the Revolution, confirms Noll in his conclusions that evangelicalism was a galvanizing force for good in early American history, and supports Heimert in connecting the redefinition of ministerial authority vis-à-vis lay activism to the democratic forces that sparked the Revolution.13 While scholarly debates over theological and political issues raised by the Awakening dominate the twentieth-century historiography, a growing profusion of works devoted to other aspects of the revivals have broadened and deepened our understanding of the event since the 1980s. Partially eclipsing the Heimert thesis, this new view of the Awakening has enlarged to identify it as a transatlantic phenomenon as well as other parts of British North America.14 Other thematically oriented studies have further demonstrated the complexities of the Awakening to include media coverage of the revivals,15 gender issues,16 race consciousness, and African-American identity,17 as well as the Awakening’s effects upon American Indian societies.18 To the extent that an integrative approach to understanding religion in eighteenth-century America—particularly the Awakening—has been attempted, the overwhelming majority of scholars have, in Christopher Grasso’s assessment, fallen into “the old habit of seeing the mainland colonies as New England writ large.” This echoes Jack P. Greene’s lament that northern historians since the Civil War have established the broad interpretative paradigm that the North represents progressivism while the South was and remains an “aberration” congenitally inclined to retrogression. Thus, Puritanism and New England culture are interpreted as having provided the fundamental definition for American culture, as Sacvan Bercovitch averred, and the First Great Awakening as peculiar to New England and nowhere else. That similar and even simultaneous influences sparked revivalism in New England and elsewhere

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in the 1720s and 1730s has not been conclusively established, in spite of the prodigious evidence supporting the conclusion that far more connected and bound the British mainland colonies in the eighteenth century than divided them from one another.19

THE ARGUMENT Despite the attention devoted to colonial American religion, the First Great Awakening and various aspects of it, there have been few synthetic analyses of the phenomenon. W. R. Ward’s can be considered such a study, but it is essentially Eurocentric, treating the American revivals as a sideshow to the main event. Thomas S. Kidd focuses entirely on the colonial theater, and does so essentially from a contemporary evangelical perspective. The First Great Awakening is an attempt to assimilate more than a century-and-a-half of scholarship into a new synthetic history of one of the most heavily examined and debated, vaunted and maligned, magnified and diminished, exhilarating and frustrating events in early American history. Within a roughly chronological narrative of the Awakening in which the towering figures of Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Tennents make their appearances and are granted their rightful prominence, this work devotes greater attention to historiographically underrepresented segments of colonial American society: middle- and lower-class people, women, African Americans, and Indians. Rather than concentrate solely upon revivalism as most studies of the Awakening have in the past, theological debates, published sermonic literature, and newspaper accounts are equally treated in expanding the interpretative scope of the Awakening to emphasize its effects upon politics and society, as well as its temporal span. An impediment to the writing of a sufficiently thorough history of the First Great Awakening has been its identification as an overtly Protestant Christian phenomenon—one that is commonly thought to have been “great.” Such is understandable, given the work done by religious American historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for whom Christianity is the only true religion. But even for those more secularly or ecumenically inclined, the possibility that the Awakening might have involved religions other than Christianity is an alien one. The continued existence of African religious beliefs and practices within slave communities have variously been dismissed as virtually nonexistent, or as not having any significant role in the development of African-American Christianity as a direct consequence of the Awakening. A fundamentalist religious revival seized an important section of Indian Country starting in the late 1730s and running through the early 1760s, and

8 Introduction

though it shares much in common with the Protestant revivals in terms of origins and goals, because it forms the backdrop to Pontiac’s War and never produced a figure as noteworthy or venerated as Jonathan Edwards of George Whitefield, or sparked an extensive theological debate in print, it has been studiously ignored by historians of the Awakening. These oversights will be corrected in the foregoing work by devising a new, more expansive, and inclusive definition of a religious awakening to include non-Christian religions. There is no question as to the general effect of revivalist evangelicalism in fundamentally redefining the character of Protestant Christianity in British America. Considerable attention has been devoted to the separatism that attended the Awakening, most textbooks depicting the Awakening as having—along with the Enlightenment—a unifying influence upon the colonies prefacing the Revolution. The most recent works credit evangelicalism with, as Thomas S. Kidd declared, “open[ing] up unprecedented . . . opportunities for African Americans, Native Americans, women, the uneducated, and the poor to assert individual religious, and even social authority.” While there is some truth in this, such an assessment is far too optimistic, presumes a unity of purpose among evangelicals that did not exist, and is in no doubt as to the innate rectitude of Christianity. The First Great Awakening did not so much ensconce “the religion of the new birth as a permanent fixture” of American Christianity, as it established fractious sectarianism as its essential character. The use of the term “great” in this work, then represents an acquiescence to a historiographical tradition, and not the author’s judgment.20 Part I covers the roots of evangelicalism in Europe and British America in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Pietist movements and the outbreak of revivalism in Britain and the American colonies after 1700. The intellectual, social, economic, and political background in which these developments took place in the British Atlantic World sets the immediate scene for the spontaneous eruption of American revivalism in times of inordinate stress and anxiety. Part II examines the spread of revivalism during and immediately after George Whitefield’s celebrated tours of the colonies, the dynamics of popular revivalism, and the wider theological contention sparked by it, as well as the rampant divisions that redefined the character of denominations and communities. Part III covers the spread of evangelicalism in the 1750s and 1760s, as well as the impact of the Awakening upon notions of ethnic, racial, and American identity. Here, the nativist American Indian campaign for religious revival and reinvention is given its proper placement as part of a “greater” Awakening. The channeling of the Awakening’s energy into the Seven Years’ War effort figures heavily, as well as how the New Divinity theology growing out of New Light theology meshed with Lockean and Scottish Common Sense political philosophy to prepare the ideological ground upon which the revolutionaries stood in the 1770s.

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In sum, this work is a reassertion of the centrality of religion to the colonial American mentalité, as well as the fact that the First Great Awakening was a significant intercolonial and international religious phenomenon that did not fade with the apparent decline in New England revivalism in the decade immediately preceding the Seven Years’ War. In the chapters that follow, the traditional definition of an “awakening” is challenged, eschewing the idea that it was exclusively an event in the history of Protestant Christianity in British America. It is an attempt to confirm the qualified endurance of the Heimert thesis and reconcile it with a careful application of Butler’s interpretation of early American Christianity, but in a larger sense it is a response to McLoughlin’s burning question about the pietistic impulse in American history, which in the case of the eighteenth-century transition into modernity is answered here in the affirmative.

NOTES 1. William G. McLoughlin, “The American Revolution as a Religious Revival: ‘The Millennium in One Country,’” NEQ 40 (March 1967), 110; H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Willett, Clark, 1937), 126; Herbert Levi Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, 4 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924–25), 3:409–10. 2. Jonathan Edwards to James Robe, May 12, 1743, in Harry S. Stout, John E. Smith et al., gen. eds., The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 26 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957–), 16:134–35, 105–07, hereafter cited as WJE. 3. Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” The Journal of American History 69 (September 1982), 305–25. 4. Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (1841; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1969), 433; George Bancroft, History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the Continent, 6 vols. (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1967), 2:269; James H. Moorhead, “Between Progress and Apocalypse: A Reassessment of Millennialism in American Religious Thought, 1800–1880,” The Journal of American History 71 (December 1984), 534. 5. Charles H. Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1920), 2, esp. chaps. 2 and 4; Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, 3:409; V. L. Parrington, Main Currents of American Thought, vol. 1, The Colonial Mind, 1620–1800 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927). 6. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939); The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953); Edwin S. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper & Row, 1957); C. C. Goen,

10 Introduction

Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). 7. Cedric B. Cowing, The Great Awakening and the American Revolution: Colonial Thought in the 18th Century (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1971); Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), chaps. 18–20, 22, quote from p. 315; J. M. Bumsted and John E. Van de Wetering, What Must I Do to be Saved? The Great Awakening in Colonial America (Hinsdale, IL: Dryden Press, 1976); Mark A. Noll, “Ebenezer Devotion: Religion and Society in Revolutionary Connecticut,” Church History 45 (September 1976), 293–307; idem, “Observations on the Reconciliation of Politics and Religion in Revolutionary New Jersey: The Case of Jacob Green,” Journal of Presbyterian History 54 (Summer 1976), 217–37; idem, Christians in the American Revolution (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1977); idem, “The Reformed Politics of the American Revolution,” in One Nation under God? Christian Faith and Political Action in America (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1988); Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 34 (October 1977), 519–41; idem, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), part 4; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 204 ff; Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Alan Heimert and Perry Miller, eds., The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), “Introduction”; David S. Lovejoy, ed., Religious Enthusiasm and the Great Awakening (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969); J. M. Bumsted, ed., The Great Awakening: The Beginnings of Evangelical Pietism in America (Waltham, MA: Ginn-Blaisdell Publishing Co., 1970); Darrett B. Rutman, ed., The Great Awakening: Event and Exegesis (New York, 1970); Richard L. Bushman, ed., The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740–1745 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), xi; Nathan O. Hatch, “The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 31 (July 1974), 407–30; idem, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1976). For a thorough definition of civil religion, see Robert Bellah and Phillip E. Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1980); Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Gordon S. Wood, “Religion and the American Revolution,” in Stout and Hart, New Directions in American Religious History, 173–205, quotation from 181.

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8. Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried” and Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. chap. 6, quotation from p. 195; Joseph A. Conforti, “The Invention of the Great Awakening, 1795–1842,” Early American Literature 26, no. 2 (1991), 99–118; John M. Murrin, “No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculations,” Reviews in American History 11 (June 1983), 161–71. 9. Patricia U. Bonomi and Peter Eisenstadt, “Church Adherence in the Eighteenth-Century British American Colonies,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 39 (April 1982), 245–86; Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Frank Lambert, “The Great Awakening as Artifact: George Whitefield and the Construction of Intercolonial Revival, 1739-1745,” Church History 60 (June 1992), 223–46; idem, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Jon Pahl, Paradox Lost: Free Will and Political Liberty in American Culture, 1630-1760 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 10. Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 8, 10, 11. For his introductory foray into the specific debate over Butler’s conclusions, see “The First Great Awakening: Whose Interpretive Fiction?” NEQ 68 (December 1995), 650–59. 11. A fair sampling of the biographical literature must include Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (1949; repr., Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981); Stuart Henry, George Whitefield: Wayfaring Witness (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1957); Patricia J. Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton (New York: Hill & Wang, 1979); Harry S. Stout and Peter S. Onuf, “James Davenport and the Great Awakening in New London,” The Journal of American History 70 (December 1983), 556–78; Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, Son of Thunder; Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1991); Janet F. Fishburn, “Gilbert Tennent, Established ‘Dissenter,’” Church History 63 (March 1994), 31–49; Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity”; and George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). See also James R. Tanis, Dutch Calvinistic Pietism in the Middle Colonies: A Study in the Life and Theology of Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967) for a close interpretation of a lesser-known—though significant— figure in the Awakening. Ministerial identity is examined by J. William T. Youngs Jr., God’s Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700–1776 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Harry S. Stout, “The Great Awakening in New England Reconsidered: The New England Clergy,” The Journal of Social History 8 (Autumn 1974), 21–47; James W. Schotter, “Ministerial Careers in Eighteenth-Century New England: The Social Context, 1700–1760,” The Journal of Social History 9 (Winter 1975), 249–67; David Harlan, The Clergy and the Great Awakening in New England (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1980); and George

12 Introduction

Harper, “Clericalism and Revival: The Great Awakening in Boston as a Pastoral Phenomenon,” NEQ 57 (December 1984), 554–66. 12. For studies emphasizing the greater cultural, economic, and political ties between the American colonies and Europe, see John J. McCusker and Russell Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); David Hackett Fisher, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Philip Lawson, ed., Parliament and the Atlantic Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995). On the question of colonial, national, and personal identity, see Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrike J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 13. Allen C. Guelzo, “From Calvinist Metaphysics to Republican Theory: Jonathan Edwards and James Dana on the Freedom of the Will,” The Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (July 1995), 399–418; Rodger M. Payne, “New Light in Hanover County: Evangelical Dissent in Piedmont Virginia, 1740-1755,” The Journal of Southern History 61 (November 1995), 665–694; Ava Chamberlain, “The Grand Sower of the Seed: Jonathan Edwards’s Critique of George Whitefield,” NEQ 70 (September 1997), 368–85; Janet Moore Lindman, “Acting the Manly Christian: White Evangelical Masculinity in Revolutionary Virginia,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 57 (April 2000), 393– 416; Douglas L. Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport: Heavenly Visions and the Radical Awakening in New England,” , 3rd Series, 61 (January 2004), 3–46; idem, “Jonathan Edwards, Enthusiast? Radical Revivalism and the Great Awakening in the Connecticut Valley,” Church History 74 (December 2005), 683–739; Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 14. Ernest Stoeffler, Continental Pietism and Early American Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1976); Ned C. Landsman, “Revivalism and Nativism in the Middle Colonies: The Great Awakening and the Scots Community in East New Jersey,” American Quarterly 34 (Summer 1982), 149–64; idem, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683-1785 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–1760 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735– 1745,” American Historical Review 91 (October 1986), 811–32; Milton C. Coalter, Jr., Gilbert Tennent, Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986); Michael J. Crawford, “Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared,” Journal of British Studies 26 (October

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13

1987), 361–97; idem, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk, eds., Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 15. Lisa H. Smith, The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers: A Shifting Story (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2012). 16. Henry Bamford Parkes, “Sexual Morals in the Great Awakening,” NEQ3 (January 1930), 133–35; Cedric B. Cowing, “Sex and Preaching in the Great Awakening,” American Quarterly 20 (Autumn 1968), 624–44; Barbara Lacey, “Women and the Great Awakening in Connecticut” (PhD dissertation, Clark University, 1982); and idem, ed., The World of Hannah Heaton: The Diary of an Eighteenth-Century New England Farm Woman (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, “The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714–1796),” Church History 61 (December 1992), 408–21; Catherine Anne Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Susan Juster, “Sexual Politics: Gender and Authority in the Evangelical Church” (paper delivered at the American Historical Association, December 28, 1991) and Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 1600-1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Barbara Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion: 1800–1860,” in Mary Hartman and Lois Banner, eds., Clio’s Consciousness Raised (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Joan R. Gunderson, “The Non-Institutional Church: The Religious Role of Women in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 51 (December 1982), 347–57; Mary Beth Norton, “My Resting Reaping Times: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine’ Activities,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (Winter 1976), 512–29; Joseph A. Conforti, “Mary Lyon, the Founding of Mount Holyoke College, and the Cultural Revival of Jonathan Edwards,” Religion and American Culture 3 (Winter 1993), 68–89; Catherine A. Breckus, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 17. Joseph P. Earnest, The Religious Development of the Negro in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1914); George William Pilcher, “Samuel Davies and the Instruction of Negroes in Virginia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 74 (July 1966), 293–300; Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), chap. 14; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 128–129; Frank Lambert, “‘I Saw the Book Talk’: Slave Readings of the First Great Awakening,” The Journal of Negro History 77 (Autumn 1992), 185–98; Jon F. Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 55,

14 Introduction

80–84, 105, 120, 125–26; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 420–37; Erik K. Seeman, “‘Justise Must Take Place’: Three African Americans Speak of Religion in Eighteenth-Century New England,” , 3rd Series, 56 (April 1999), 393–414; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 307; Leigh Eric Schmidt, “The ‘Grand Prophet’ Hugh Bryan: Early Evangelicalism’s Challenge to the Establishment of Slavery in the Colonial South,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 87 (October 1986), 238–50; Allan Gallay, “The Origins of Slaveholders’ Paternalism: George Whitefield, the Bryan Family, and the Great Awakening in the South,” The Journal of Southern History 53 (August 1987), 369–94; Stephen J. Stein, “George Whitefield on Slavery: Some New Evidence,” Church History 42 (June 1973), 243–56; Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, chap. 5. 18. Anthony F. C. Wallace, with Sheila C. Steen, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); Charles E. Hunter, “The Delaware Nativist Revival of the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Ethnohistory 18 (Winter 1971), 39–49; William Simmons, “Red Yankees: Narragansett Conversion in the Great Awakening,” American Ethnologist 10 (May 1983), 253–71; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Jane T. Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in Pennsylvania,” 3rd Series, 54 (October 1997), 723–46; Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 19. Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 497; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, “Prologue”; Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). See also Arne Delfs, “Anxieties of Influence: Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch,” NEQ 70 (December 1997), 601–15. A recent analysis of the Awakening that takes the HeimertButler controversies into account is Robert W. Brockway’s A Wonderful Work of God: Puritanism and the Great Awakening (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2003), which perpetuates the long-standing interpretation of the Great Awakening as essentially a New England phenomenon. 20. Kidd, The Great Awakening, 323. A question that has never yet been asked is why the surge in religious revivalism in British America is called the Great Awakening, rather than the surge in scientific and philosophical endeavor occurring at about the same time, and which is commonly lumped in with the European Enlightenment. An early version of the thesis involved merging these phenomena together into a broadly redefined First Great Awakening, but to do so would have rendered the foregoing work much too large and unwieldy.

PART I

“NO SMALL APPEARANCES OF A DIVINE WORK”

Great things in England, Wales and Scotland wrought, And in America to pass are brought, Awaken’d souls, warn’d of the wrath to come In Numbers flee to Jesus as their Home. . . . —Weekly History (London), 13 November 1742

Chapter 1

“Vital Piety” The European Roots of American Revivalism

It was nothing short of terrifying. An earthquake and a subsequent series of aftershocks rocked New England on the night and morning of October 29–30, 1727, “attended,” according to Rev. Nathaniel Gookin of Hampton, New Hampshire, “with a Terrible Noise, something like Thunder. The Houses trembled as if they were falling; divers Chimneys were Crack’d and some had their tops broken off. . . .” Such a horrific event triggered conversion experiences for Abigail Aborn and her daughters-in-law, Elizabeth and Martha Aborn of Lynn End, who immediately sought church membership. “God has long been striving with me,” Abigail admitted, “but I have turned a deaf ear to his calls & Counsels and have hardened my heart in Sin.” Elizabeth professed, “yt I can truly Say yt It has been my earnest prayer to God for a long time yt he would better draw me to himself by his Mercy, or drive me home to him by his judgment.” Martha lamented that “I have exposed my Self to all misery both in this Life and yt which is to come and yt ‘tis but Gods Compassions fail not that I am not consumed.” However, each was roused to a renewed conviction of sin by, in Abigail’s words, “the late terrible & Surprizing Earth-quake . . . [through which] I was brôt to a Sight and Sense of my lost and undone Condition by nature. . . .” Indeed, the “Great Earthquake” of 1727 sent thousands of frightened New Englanders streaming into the meetinghouses in search of answers to what had caused it, as well as spiritual comfort to quiet their troubled souls. Applications for church membership and access to the sacraments spiked dramatically, with John Brown of Haverhill reporting that “since the Earthquakes, I have admitted and propounded 154 persons; 87 for the Lord’s Table, the rest for Baptism, or the Renewing the Baptismal Covenant.”1 The mysterious phenomena of earthquakes and storms—which in 1727 were thought to be natural in origin but as yet not understood beyond vague 17

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theories about chemical and thermal imbalances within the ground—were variously interpreted as “wonders,” as opposed to something natural and explicable that might nevertheless have spiritual import. Consequently, New England clergymen in 1727 and 1728 took swift advantage of the widespread disquiet and panic afflicting the region, producing blistering jeremiads castigating a backsliding population that the earthquake had been a “loud and awful call to reformation” from God, whose “tokens of his just displeasure” were not only limited to the trembling earth, but also included fierce storms and wildfires. The quake followed a series of fires caused, according to Benjamin Colman, by “the sultry and parching extream [sic] heat of the summer, of a long continuance, for many weeks together. This burning drought penetrated far into the earth, so that many wells and springs of water fail’d that never had before.” The resultant thunderstorms produced unusual episodes of intense lightning that destroyed trees and buildings and sparked fires that Cotton Mather likened to scenes that one could expect to witness during the Apocalypse.2 While not intended to herald the upcoming doom, the sermons took advantage of the anxiety in New England’s towns and villages to revive popular piety. Attempts at periodic revival had been made before, but these took place within the well-circumscribed bounds of sermons delivered in mid-week meetings, fast and thanksgiving days, election days, militia musters, and at executions. Spontaneous religious expression was generally frowned upon in New England, but in the aftermath of the earthquake and a later diphtheria epidemic, an upwelling of religious sensibility led to unprompted outbursts of “enthusiasm” in several New England churches that attracted the attention of Rev. Jonathan Edwards of Northampton, who witnessed the same curious dynamic in his own church in 1734–1735. What had begun as yet another resurgence of popular piety in the wake of disasters soon became something much more significant, with origins that lay much deeper than a collective spiritual angst accompanying the ephemeral panic caused by an earthquake.3 The First Great Awakening cannot be understood properly without its being recognized as a transatlantic phenomenon, the roots of which lie in Europe, with branches stretching across to North America. The advent of Pietism in Holland, Germany, and the British Isles, and their transmission to colonial British America mark a turning point in the history of Protestant Christianity, and are the source of a redefinition of Protestant theology, soteriology, and ecclesiology on both continents. The rising tide of the evangelical Awakening that subsequently resulted from this cross-pollination erupted from different circumstantial contexts but became specifically focused within a millenarian framework arising from the rapid pace of intellectual, economic, social, and political change. It is far more complex than a mere rejection of Newtonian science, Enlightenment rationalism, or theological Arminianism, and more than the incorporation of emotionalism as a component of piety.



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It is more than the environmental context of a Continental Europe ravaged by the religious warfare of deadlocked Catholicism and Protestantism in the seventeenth century, and more than the conflicts of imperial powers colonizing North America or the anxieties of colonists beginning to prosper in what had been a forbidding wilderness. It came as much from a previously extant tradition of revivalism as from the introduction of new ideas and practices.  “LIVING BLESSEDLY FOR EVER” Cotton Mather concluded in February 1715/16 that he and his wife needed to recommit themselves to devotional Christianity. Inspired by his reading of the works of a group of Pietist European theologians, chiefly Johann Ardnt’s True Christianity (1606–1609) as translated into English by Anthony W. Boehm, he resolved that he would read Arndt’s masterpiece chapter by chapter every morning as he and his wife lay in bed before finally rising for the day. He wrote in his diary that “It may not only be a Service to myself, but also greatly serve the Interests of Piety in my most excellent Consort, if I should choose, every Morning before I rise, to read a Chapter in my dear Arndt; and communicate unto her the principal Thoughts occurring on it.” Whatever may have been the effect upon Mrs. Mather, Cotton recorded that his daily readings had sparked an intense yearning within him for an “Elevation of the Mind in Prayer, which is in the Verus Christianismus, called Supernatural Prayer, . . . which with a Self annihilation will bring me on towards an Union with God.” This intensity of emotion in the ecstatic losing of oneself in God that became a defining trait of First Great Awakening revivalism reveals the roots of the Awakening in seventeenth-century Pietism.4 Simply defined, Pietism is an emphasis upon the emotional experience of “true” conversion to Christianity and durable faith in imitation of Christ, as opposed to an intellectual understanding of Christian doctrines and adherence to institutionalized practices. Scholars differ widely on specific aspects of Pietism, including its temporal and theological origins. The phenomenon of Pietism has generated debate among historians who disagree about what it means and where it originated, as well as whether it existed as a discrete movement at all. The mystical bent of early modern Pietism appears to owe much—if not actually harkening back—to various forms of medieval mysticism, further obscuring the question of its origins. The term “Pietist” was not used to identify those inclined to it before 1670, and so historians of religion have followed Johannes Wallmann in separating the Pietism that originated at the University of Halle in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

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from varieties of proto-Pietist and Pietist-like movements that emerged previously. Other scholars’ attempts to widen the chronological scope for Pietism by including those individuals and groups dismissed by Wallmann, or to ignore chronology in preference for more purely theological interpretations, have broadened the definition to such a degree that it becomes difficult to determine precisely what Pietism is, where it came from, and exactly who qualifies as a Pietist.5 Since the patristic age, Christianity has wrestled, Jacob-like, with the sometimes complimentary and at other times mutually exclusive twin powers of faith and reason. The Scientific Revolution, which had commenced in Renaissance Europe, began to unlock secrets of nature that had once been the province of faith, and the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and Sir Isaac Newton posed significant challenges to traditional Christian cosmology, derived as they were from Plato and Aristotle. The effort of theologians to reconcile a world rapidly falling within the bounds of freshly discovered natural laws, Copernican heliocentrism, and Newtonian physics, with one wherein God stops time, reverses the courses of heavenly bodies, and works other miracles in defiance of natural laws, became one of mounting urgency. Anti-intellectual reactions against a religion of the mind in favor of one of the heart had been characteristic of institutionalized Christianity since its foundation, and these took on greater appeal among people coping with an accelerating pace of change. Still others sought ways to reconcile faith and reason in the face of societal transitions and the stresses of multilayered conflicts that profoundly affected Protestantism. However, even though theological arguments certainly influenced the thoughts of those who founded the Pietist movement, pietism cannot be fully comprehended without recognizing its having arisen from the intense sturm und drang of the Counter-Reformation.6 Sixteenth-century Protestant theologians did not deny the power of reason to explain the natural world, but defended the doctrine that the superior truths of Christianity superseded reason, even if they were not necessarily contrary to it. Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) did not see why philosophy and theology should have an antagonistic relationship, and a steadily growing scholasticism resulted in a pan-Protestant tradition of reconciling “the internal and external evidences of revelation” by the late seventeenth century. Consequently, theology emerged as paramount among the sciences, and it was to pure theology that Dutch Reformed theologians turned as a remedy for the divisions wrought by the Reformation. Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), professor of theology at the University of Leyden, became attracted to rationalist ideas and repudiated the Calvinist insistence upon total inability of the believer to achieve salvation, as well as the notion of limited atonement. He attracted devotees who became known as the “Arminian” party which, though vehemently decried as “liars and deceivers” by the Synod of Dort (1618–1619), persistently grew in



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influence beneath the surface of doctrinaire Calvinism to become a subject of acrimonious contention for centuries to come.7 Dutch Reformed theologians, along with the French theologian and mystic Jean de Labadie (1610–1674), pioneered Protestant Pietism by variously emphasizing Christian devotional practice over spiritually deadening scholasticism. Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678), the first woman to matriculate at the University of Utrecht and a student of Reformed Calvinism, defended the right of women to the same access to education as men on the basis of their equal intellectual potential. She converted to Labadism late in life and finally declared her youthful intellectual precocity to have been a wasted period of vanity. Reason, she concluded, can never be an aid to piety on account of its incompatibility with revelation. In Labadism, she found a community that best resembled the pure Christian communities of the first and second centuries, wherein “all matters are carried out most equably with great joy, ease, and calm, out of mutual and truly Christian love.” Emphasizing communitarianism, Labadist mysticism and millenarian perfectionism uniquely drew adherents from a wide cross section of central European society, but their widely differing reasons for joining the Labadists, apart from a general dissatisfaction with orthodox Lutheranism and Calvinism, did not result in the galvanization of a coherent theology. Labadism’s fervent mysticism and obsessive millenarianism inspired a new emphasis in the Reformed churches on differentiating between the regenerate and the unregenerate that influenced American Puritanism, and their collegia attracted a wide variety of religious seekers and would-be mystics that transformed them from relatively sedate meetings into what can properly be termed revivals.8 A parallel movement harkening back to medieval mysticism, the collegia were small groups, mainly of Anabaptists, who gathered to indulge in free prophecy, apocalypticism, and an ecstatic form of imitatio Christi that bordered on perfectionism. While not specifically Pietistic, the Collegiants did have a direct influence upon the foundation of the Society of Friends in England and, indirectly, also in the formation of Methodism. The mysticism of the Collegiants fed into a movement that came to be known as theosophy, innovated by Valentine Weigel (1533–1588). Weigel emphasized the indwelling of the Spirit of God in the heart of the believer to the extent that he argued on behalf of an almost literal unity between God and the individual at the highest level of religious experience. In what would become a characteristic of Pietism, Weigel exhorted “true” Christians to put off worldly concerns in absolute surrender to God and the cultivation of the spiritual life. These ideas profoundly influenced Johann Arndt (1555–1621), the spiritual progenitor of the Lutheran Pietist movement, whose works emphasized mystical devotion to Christ and the Bible. “Once a Christian has freed himself from the allurements of the world,” F. Ernest Stoeffler summarized, once he

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or she “has died to the desires of the flesh, and is wholly committed to God in will and affection, a life on the highest ethical plain is a matter of course.”9 Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), surveying the human and material devastation of the early phase of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), interpreted it as the ultimate product of intellectual conflicts over superficial doctrinal differences among Catholics and Protestants, when all Christians should always have been united in fraternal love through the indwelling of Christ in the hearts of true believers. Böhme considered the physical and the spiritual to be one and the same, with love as the force binding the cosmos together, and that the sooner the Christians awakened to this truth, the sooner the world would be transformed by the power of love. Thus, the birth of Continental Pietism in the late seventeenth century declared the argument between reason and revelation to be a dead letter, when true life could only be discovered in the “vital piety” of the heart that calmed the spirits of a people traumatized by the experience of war. What the central European Pietists thought secondary to the reconstruction of German society became the essence of the parallel movement that was English Puritanism.10 Just as on the Continent, English Pietism arose as a response within the Puritan movement to persecution. The reign of Edward VI (r. 1547–1553) had been friendly toward Protestants, but his death eventually brought his devout Catholic half-sister Mary to the throne to begin a five-year reign marked by religious repression that compromised her support among English Catholics and sent the most fervent Protestants fleeing to the Continent. These “Marian Exiles,” motivated as much by their political principles as by those of their faith, listened despairingly to reports of immolations of those who dared to confront Mary’s Counter-Reformation that later inspired John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563), better known as the Booke of Martyrs. Consequently, they committed themselves to the absolute purification of the Church of England along Calvinist lines—hence the moniker “Puritans” applied to them by their opponents. One of those martyrs, John Bradford (c. 1510–1555), pioneered a form of English Pietism that owed much to his contacts with the Continental theologians. He persistently railed against the “sweet tunes, ditties, melodies, singing, playing, ringing, knocking, kneeling, standing, lifting, crossing, blessing, blowing, mowing, [and] incensing” prevalent in the Church of England under Henry VIII, and he devoted himself to stripping away what he considered the “popish” detritus of Catholic superstition. Imprisoned in the Tower of London almost immediately upon Mary’s accession, he passed his time writing works that propagated an intimate, personalized Christianity, wherein one must cultivate a direct, affective relationship with Christ. Although Bradford cannot be classified as a Pietist, his example became a model, which the later Puritan Pietists emulated through the turmoil of the Elizabethan and Stuart dynasties.11



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It strikes the student of Pietism and Puritanism that the latter inherently incorporated elements of the former and vice versa, insofar as the Puritan concerned himself or herself with the daily practice of piety, and thus satisfactory, precise definitions of both Puritanism and Pietism are elusive. Mysticism can be identified as a common characteristic to all Pietists, but so also is a rigorous methodical emphasis. Perry Miller characterized Puritanism as “Augustinian” in its interpretation of piety, but he concerned himself with underscoring its fundamental rationalism while downplaying its mysticism, which tends to have been conflated with a dour, single-minded fanaticism by their contemporaries and subsequent generations of students and critics. Not all Puritans were Pietists and not all Pietists Puritans. Jerald C. Brauer suggested an interpretative model for Puritan Pietism, which divides what is admittedly an amorphous and dynamic phenomenon into four types: nomism, evangelicalism, rationalism, and mysticism, bearing in mind that these types “participate in each other or are potentially possible through each other and cannot be isolated in any strict way.” Briefly summarized, nomism is an emphasis upon God’s law as set down in scripture and the necessity of obedience; evangelicalism is an emphasis upon God’s love that alters the soul in such a way as to engender complete, trusting submission and obedience to the Law; rationalism is an emphasis upon the power of humanity’s reasoning capabilities “to discern the nature and will of God as it is both revealed in the cosmos, within their own lives, and republished in full clarity in scripture”; mysticism is an emphasis upon an ecstatic “experience of union with the divine ground” of all being “which gives shape and content to . . . religious life, and it is the bedrock on which all else is built.” The individuals sketched below can be located within one of Brauer’s types, but only so long as it is recognized that any given Puritan theologian usually exhibited traits of more than one—hence the danger of typology.12 That Puritanism and what has come to be known as Pietism were mutually identical was a note struck by John Bradford in his last years, and it became a persistent theme in the works of subsequent Puritan theologians who conflated piety with intricate explications of the process of conversion, sanctification, and justification. William Perkins (1558–1602) defined theology as “the science of living blessedly for ever,” meaning that piety is applied theology while theology provided the intellectual underpinnings for piety. This distinction accounts for the strong attachment Puritan theologians developed for the logical treatises of Petrus Ramus, who argued that all arts (logic, grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, physics, and divinity) had a practical aim and that through the methods of technologia or technometria one found in theology the apex of the arts. The goal for anyone is to “live well”—eupraxia—and theology taught the highest eupraxia. Perkins divided the conversion process into ten distinct stages that demanded intense self-examination throughout,

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and he insisted that a true Christian’s life entailed one of constant spiritual struggle against fear, doubt, and despair as well as against Satan and all his hosts with their enticing, worldly temptations—a common theme appearing in the works of theologians and Christian mystics since St. Augustine. In order to wage that battle successfully, the Puritans emphasized the constant cultivation of godliness through strict observance of the divine law. Dubbed “precisionism” or “preciseness” by continentals, rules for living the godly life were variously expounded by Richard Rogers (c. 1550–1618), John Dod (c. 1549–1645), Nicholas Bound (d. 1613), and John Downame (d. 1652). There is no question, however, that the greatest expositors of Puritan precisionism were Lewis Bayly (c. 1575–1631) and Richard Sibbes (1577–1635), who bridged the gap between precisionism, mysticism, and the Biblicism characteristic of Continental Pietism.13 Bayly put forward a rigorous and precise rule for living the godly life in the Practice of Piety: Directing a Christian How to Walk that He May Please God (1611), which is replete with vivid imagery describing the worldly and otherworldly consequences for those who opt in favor of godliness as well as for those who refuse. Every part of the day and every action had to be infused with meditation upon the certainty of death and the bliss or torments of the afterlife, with every action dedicated to the glory of God and the development of one’s spirit. Recalling the allegory in the “Song of Songs,” Bayly exhorted his readers to “get forthwith the oil of piety in the lamp of thy conversion; that thou mayest be in continual readiness to meet the bride-groom.” Constant reading and rereading of the Bible formed the central core of Bayly’s method, which is consistent with the Biblicism propagated by William Teellinck and Johannes Koch, among other Pietists. However, Bayly did not advocate personal devotion to Christ, which he considered a variety of idolatry, but rather prayerful meditation upon God’s law and particularly strict observance of the Sabbath. Sibbes’s The Bruised Reed and the Smoaking Flax (1630) and A Breathing after God (1639) represent the mystical turn taken by some Puritan Pietists which, like their continental counterparts, encouraged an almost erotic love for Christ that longs for communion—unio mystica—between God and the devotee. Communion for Sibbes was only possible through continuous prayer, which provided the key to comprehending the Bible, the enormous spiritual significance of the sacraments as well as one’s conversion, and only through such discipline could the believer find inner peace and joy. Identical themes pervade the works of Joseph Hall (1574–1656), Francis Rous (1579–1659), Jeremiah Burroughs (1599–1646), Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680), Richard Baxter (1615–1691), and without question John Bunyan (1628–1688), whose The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684) represents a literary apotheosis within Puritan Pietism.14



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The theological apogee of Puritan Pietism was reached with the publication of two seminal works by Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667): The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) and its sequel The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651). The unifying theme in these works is that the Christian life (and death) is and must be beautiful, the essence of which “was sweetness, reasonableness, and implicit trust in a good God of whom all creation speaks to the devout spirit.” Blending the methodology of Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Pietie, the emphasis upon the sublimity of ceremonial eupraxia in the works of Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), and latitudinarian ideas gaining ascendancy during the Cromwellian Protectorate, Taylor’s aesthetic brand of Puritan Pietism attempted to salve the anxieties of Englishmen struggling to cope with profound religious and political conflict and change. It is consistent with orthodox Calvinism in an emphasis upon good works and eupraxia being inevitable products of true conversion, their external beauty emanating from the beauty within. However, by concentrating on the methodical cultivation of “holy living” and “holy dying,” Taylor deemphasized Calvinist doctrine as secondary to the development of a personal, ecstatic relationship with a God whose presence “fill[s] every place” and continually preparing for death, “every day knocking at the gates of the grave.” Nevertheless, Taylor’s works exerted enormous influence upon the continued development of Pietism and became required reading in both Europe and the American colonies.15 The “Pietist” label, however, was first applied to the German Lutheran founders of the movement, Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) and his disciple August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), who harnessed the individualism and populism of the Reformation to campaign for spiritual regeneration and social justice. Spener was exposed to English Puritanism as a youth and drew much of his theological inspiration from the works of William Perkins and Lewis Bayly and propagated his ideas in collegia pietatis organized for group biblical studies, wherein such “conventicles” he advocated greater individual social involvement and lay participation in church government. Christianity for Spener had to be essentially practical, concerned with individual and societal reformation rather than intellectual development, which had drawn in Lutheran theologians as much as it had their Dutch counterparts. In his highly influential Pia Desideria (1675), Spener allowed reason its utility in advancing human wisdom, which can discover natural laws, but he insisted that reason could never encompass the overarching “divine wisdom” that inherently defies earthly logic and confounds mere human wisdom. The plain, straightforward message of Christ’s teachings trumps the proud, empty intellectual calisthenics of the scholastics, who had become boastful and arrogant even as they maneuvered to gain power at the expense of the people. Once believers took within themselves the spirit of Christ, a miraculous transformation of the world

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would take place, eliminating all earthly distinctions that continually fostered inequality, poverty, war, and injustice, thus ushering in the Millennium.16 August Hermann Francke taught Greek and Oriental languages—later theology—at the newly founded University of Halle in Saxony and pastored the village church in Glaucha, a suburb of Halle. There, he experienced firsthand the utter misery of the people following the Thirty Years’ War: the dreadful poverty, hunger, physical and emotional degeneration, and above all, the orphaned and half-orphaned children, for whom he founded a school. This experience made him aware of how distant the churches had become from people’s lives, and under the mentorship of Spener he came to the conviction that the churches had been taken over by theologians arguing about questions that ultimately could never be conclusively answered, rather than by pastors ministering to the vital concerns of Christianity in the everyday lives of the common people. The Protestant churches had splintered into many denominations which wasted time and energy in fruitless doctrinal and theological disputation, effectively ignoring those in greatest need of spiritual guidance. At best this resulted in the creation of a clerical class which distanced itself from the people, and at worst justified religious warfare. The only solution was interdenominationalism that he hoped would result in a union of the Protestant churches. The other responsibility abdicated by the churches had been education, to which Francke dedicated himself, building a school for impoverished and orphaned boys in Halle that stressed literacy as well as ethical and spiritual values. The inculcation of these precepts, Francke believed, would forge weapons that could defeat poverty and ignorance and inaugurate an emphasis upon early education that became a hallmark of Pietism.17 Influenced by the writings of English Pietists from the Puritan tradition, Francke advocated the systematization of the Christian’s life along lines originally laid down by Perkins and Bayly. However, Francke is best remembered for the impressive charitable institutions he established in and around Halle, particularly the dispensary which produced and distributed medicines on a scale that prefigured the modern pharmaceutical company. He branched out to engage in extensive trading ventures that procured goods from as far away as China and generated enormous revenues that helped finance the Orphan House, the schools, the dispensary, and supporting institutions. Christianity for Francke was for naught if it did not have a social activist element, and the ultimate purpose of Francke’s charitable activities was the propagation of his brand of Pietism through the dissemination of Bibles and religious treatises cranked out by his own press in Latin, Greek, German, French, Dutch, English, and a variety of Slavonic languages. Thus, Halle became a hub of intellectual activity and exchange with links radiating out as far as Russia and America, while Halle proselytes fanned out across Europe propagating Franckean Pietism. While this cannot be construed as revivalism, it did



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provide a model for international evangelism that inspired eighteenth-century evangelicals to ponder the near possibility of ultimate Protestant union. The most direct line connecting European and American Pietism, however, ran through England, and its most prominent exponent was Cotton Mather.18 “GOD WILL VOUCHSAFE A MARVELLOUS EFFUSION OF HIS OWN SPIRIT” The Puritans of the 1620s were caught between a rock and hard place: suffering increasing intolerance from a Church they were committed to reforming and duty-bound to obey a hostile monarch—Charles I—who would eagerly harry or slaughter them out of England. The option of going to America became more attractive, and thus began the “Great Migration” of the 1630s. The Separatists, having left England for Holland, fretted over the gradual erosion of their cultural and religious identity in that country’s relatively liberal environment, and determined to migrate yet again—this time to what was vaguely called “New England.” Plymouth Plantation was far more to their liking than Holland and the “Pilgrims” prospered, attracting the interest of mainstream Puritans in England who had begun to ponder a radical new strategy for effecting the final reformation of the Church of England. Obtaining a charter from Charles I, John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Company affirmed their allegiance to the crown and to the Church of England, planning to establish a “holy commonwealth” that they were not at liberty to attempt in England. However, theological differences surfaced immediately, as the New England Puritans attempted to work out a satisfactory ecclesiastical polity. Ambiguities and confusion over Calvinist doctrines in New England led to heated debates over the “preparation” one (perhaps) underwent prior to election, which consisted of conviction and humiliation for sin, vocation, faith, justification, ingrafting (union with Christ), adoption (an infusion of Christ’s Spirit), sanctification, and finally glorification. All agreed that sinners could not prepare themselves for Grace, but the language of some implied a concession to Arminianism, which led Anne Hutchinson to accuse the New England clergy of apostasy and lack of spiritual authority. Roger Williams deplored New England’s doctrinal laxity in allowing the unregenerate to hear sermons, pray, and worship with the saints. The Cambridge Platform (1648) sought to settle these disputes, but new ones over the sacrament of baptism exercised New England minds vis-à-vis families consisting of both the regenerate and unregenerate. Thus began the controversy over the Synod of 1662 that resulted in the highly contentious Halfway Covenant. Church attendance and membership appeared to decline among second- and third-generation New Englanders, and a 1679 synod was convened to discuss

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a marked decline in manners and morals. Metacomet’s War (1675–1676) and the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1691–1693 raised further questions about the validity of the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” with which Increase Mather (1639–1723) and his son Cotton (1663–1728) wrestled.19 Cotton Mather is the link between Puritan and Continental Pietism and the faint stirrings of American evangelicalism, as he labored to merge the conservative Calvinism of his grandfather’s generation with Halle Pietism, to which he was introduced by his friend Edward Bromfield, founder of the Anglican Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK). Building fruitful correspondences with Francke, Anthony Wilhelm Böhme (d. 1725), and other European Pietists in the last two decades of his life, Mather grew in his conviction that Protestant union was a real possibility. However, European theologians and clergymen were nearly unanimous in their conviction that America was a land unknown to Christ, the “outer darkness” and the bulk of American Christians as the “worthless servant” mentioned in the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:30. Mather vehemently denied this in the general introduction to his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), his massive twovolume history of Christianity in New England. However, in a letter Mather sent to Francke fifteen years later he suggested that a spark might well have originated from Europe, but that the “Light” burned brighter and with a purer flame in New England. Mather worked energetically to make this point in his correspondence, sending as proof a copy of the Magnalia to Böhme in 1716 and proclaiming “American Puritanism, to be so much of a Piece with the Frederician Pietism, that if it were possible for the Book to be transferred unto our Friends in the Lower Saxony, it would find some Acceptance, and be a little serviceable to their glorious Intentions”—meaning Protestant union. Edward Bromfield put Mather in contact with Böhme and Francke in 1717, and professed to Francke that “there is not to be found a place in which true and genuine Christianity is more cultivated than here in New England.” He impatiently dismissed the traditional Christian belief that the West is the realm of the Antichrist and America as the “outer darkness” in a sermon that asserted that the English Puritan immigrants had brought light where there had been darkness and “a Principal Glory of it, has been the Purity of the CHRISTIANITY, which has been brought unto these Indians, in our Attempts to Christianize them.”20 Mather was certain in his belief that the Reformation had withered and become corrupted in Continental Europe, the established Protestant churches succumbing to the blandishments of power and persecuting “Christians who tried to reestablish true Christianity” in the same way the Roman Catholic Church harried Protestants through the campaigns of the Counter-Reformation. Mather saw in the works of the continental Pietists an identical conviction, fully confirmed in his reading of Böhme’s English translation of Pietas



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Hallensis (1707), Francke’s historical summary of German Pietism which notes these persecutions born of “Ignorance and Impiety” resisted by “some eminent Persons who boldly gave their Testimony against the Vices of the Age, and Corruptions of the Church.” However, “since Christianity hath been so unhappily Rent into many Sects and Parties,” European Protestantism had grown vulnerable, and only with the efforts of the German pioneers of Pietism could Christianity be saved by galvanizing Protestantism in the original evangelical spirit of the Reformation. As far as Cotton Mather was concerned, New England remained the last bastion of true Christianity and the Protestant Reformation. Mather’s explanation for this is a highly exaggerated spirit of ecumenism among the New England churches, which “kindly admit the adherents of all the different denominations to their communion and Eucharist, and grant them all ecclesiastical privileges. . . . There are Calvinists who admit Lutherans, Presbyterians who admit Episcopalians, Paedobaptists who admit Anti-Paedobaptists, whenever the light of sincere piety gleams among them.” This ecumenism to him indicated a processional adoption in America of the Evangelium Aeternum (“Eternal Gospel”) formulated in the thirteenth century by the Italian eschatologist Joachim of Fiore, which early eighteenth-century American and European Pietists agreed was being fulfilled in their time and would end with the true and complete union of all Christians. Such a hope also fed his millenarian beliefs. “We are got into the very Dawn of the Day, when God will vouchsafe a marvellous Effusion of His own Spirit upon many Nations, and REFORMATION, with all Piety, and Charity, shall gain the Ascendant, over those Men and Things, that for many Ages have been the Oppressors of it.” 21 German Pietism infused not just the Lutheran and Reformed churches, but also the Anabaptist sects scattered throughout Central Europe. Hutterites, Mennonites, the Unitas Fratrum (“United Brotherhood”), and various other groups generally referred to as the Wiedertäufer—or Täufer (Baptists) for short—struggled to find security, toleration, and sectarian cohesion through the fitful vicissitudes of the Thirty Years’ War period. William Penn (1644–1718), after recently being converted to English Quakerism, toured the Palatinate in southern Germany in 1677 to visit Anabaptist communities and, impressed by their pacifist quietism, invited them to emigrate to his newly founded colony of Pennsylvania when he received the charter for his “holy experiment” from Charles II in 1681. Those willing and able to do so readily accepted the opportunity to flee the religious strife, economic troubles, and political instability that persistently followed the Peace of Westphalia (1648) that ended the Thirty Years’ War, and led by the Mennonite Pietist Daniel Francis Pastorius (1651–1720), they established a settlement northeast of Philadelphia known as Germantown. Quickly becoming a locus for German and Dutch immigration, Germantown grew steadily after 1700, with the

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German population of Pennsylvania booming with a sudden influx of Palatine Germans migrating southward from New York, where they had originally been settled by the British government. While arising out of radical European Pietism, the American Mennonites strove to keep a low profile as “the quiet in the land,” reluctant to invite the persecution they episodically endured in Germany and had come to expect wherever they settled. Others who were not so inclined had fostered a steady undercurrent of apocalyptic expectation that persisted into the nineteenth century, which became a hallmark of the First Great Awakening. By far, the most significant infusion of European Pietism that laid the foundation for the Awakening in the Middle Colonies was that initiated by Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (1692–1747).22 The Dutch Reformed Church in America at the start of the eighteenth century was a denomination clinging precariously to cohesion. Still reeling from the sociopolitical aftershocks of the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664 and the subsequent pressures of Anglicization to which the Dutch merchant communities acquiesced, the Reformed congregations struggled with a crisis in identity. The clergy—known in Dutch as the dominies—had developed an alliance with the merchant communities built around a shared affluence that the clergymen were anxious to protect. This alliance inevitably led to bitter disputes between dominies and congregations over clerical salaries, compounded by external political disturbances and precipitated by the annexation of New York to the Dominion of New England (1685), the Glorious Revolution in England (1688–1689), and Leisler’s Rebellion (1688–1691). While Leisler’s Rebellion was a popular revolt against a further weakening of the Dutch cultural presence, ostensibly in the face of an expansionist French Catholic threat, the dominies consistently preached against it from their pulpits, with one pastor derisively referring to the rebels as “Boors and butterboxes.” The dominies were seen as ethnic and cultural traitors by their middle- and lower-class parishioners, and Dutch culture in New York gradually gave way to British identity in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. It remained quite vibrant in the neighboring colony of East Jersey in the 1720s and 1730s, however, despite significant influxes of Palatine Germans, English, Irish and Scots-Irish, as well as immigrants from New York and New England. It was into this milieu that William Bertholf (1693–1726) attempted to introduce Dutch Pietism to New Jersey, gaining support based on his appeal among the Leislerians, but it did not generate a significant following before the arrival of Frelinghuysen.23 Frelinghuysen emerged from a Dutch Reformed tradition heavily influenced by English Puritanism. Upon completion of his ministerial training, he took a pastorate in East Friesland, which was governed by the Elector Georg Albert, who subscribed to a brand of Pietism, emphasizing a rigorous praxis pietatis that likewise influenced Frelinghuysen through contact with Sicco



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Tjaden (1693–1726) and Johan Verschuir (1680–1737), who were nicknamed “the sanctimonians” (fijnen). Frelinghuysen consequently became the strictest of Pietists, believing that one must continually strive to cultivate the indwelling Spirit of God once conversion had taken place. For him, conversion was a total rebirth that completely destroyed the old person and created a new one, and that one who has been “born again” must struggle to achieve godliness despite all hardships and trials with which God constantly tests the elect. He demanded that one strive to achieve spiritual perfection in this life, even knowing that such an achievement was practically impossible, as those who come closest to it in faith would earn salvation. “It is both necessary and expedient for a Christian frequently to consider what he now is,” wrote William Teellinck in 1631, and Frelinghuysen grounded his Pietism in that admonishment. Only through an unflinching knowledge of the self could anyone begin to know God, beginning with the discovery of an inner vocation and an awareness “of the leading of God’s Spirit in their hearts.” He warned his congregations about the wrath of God toward those hypocrites who claim to know him and do not, as contrasted by the bliss experienced by those who have come to an “experimental” godliness. In one remarkable sermon, Frelinghuysen compared the believer’s search for Christ to Mary’s search for her risen son at the tomb: “O my Saviour, my precious lovely Lord Jesus, in fellowship with thee along can my soul find rest; O most lovely fair One, whose love along can quicken my soul, come close to my soul, turn again, my soul’s friend, my treasure, thou portion of my soul’s satisfaction.”24 Frelinghuysen’s Christocentric emphasis upon experimental Christianity was aimed at a godliness that veered toward perfectionism without crossing the boundary line ignored by the mystics. Nevertheless, the New Birth gave converts the power to perceive themselves almost as clearly as God did, conferring as it did, in the words of Frelinghuysen’s friend and colleague Eduard Meiners (1691–1752), “the wisdom of the understanding, of the rightness of the judgment . . . in the conformity of the operation of the soul with that of God.” The growing distaste for scholasticism in Dutch Calvinism, as the seventeenth century drew to a close, pushed Frelinghuysen and those in his circle increasingly away from it and toward mystical, evangelical Pietism. The heart of the believer must be oriented first toward conversion and rebirth, and then to the cultivation of holiness. Following the Puritan theologians who conceived of conversion as processing by discrete stages, Frelinghuysen spoke about the same process which for him centered on rigorous and anxious selfexamination. Introspection should lead to anxiety and then to despair, equating with the Puritan idea of “legall feare.” However, lest such anguish lead to suicide, he reminded his audiences that Satan eagerly waited to bring those lost souls to him who endeavors to take their own lives. Rather, this spiritual “strife is the way to salvation, for God leads his children through conflict to

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conquest.” Having finally acknowledged one’s lowly, debased state before God, one can come to true contrition and repentance of worldly sins to begin the upward journey to salvation. Even when one becomes assured of conversion, the process of introspection continues, for rebirth becomes “as a mirror in which to examine your condition and to see if the work of grace is wrought in you.”25 Frelinghuysen did retain Teellinck’s interpretation of the covenants, which was inherently rational: “Men must understand the conditions and terms of the covenant; the laws to which a member of the covenant is obligated.” Only those who have completely and contritely humbled themselves before God in light of their absolutely debased nature were worthy of being “Christ’s people, the ones who share in the covenant of God, heirs of salvation.” There is, however, a distinct hint of Arminianism in Frelinghuysen’s soteriology, and his High Calvinism demanded that he find some logical way through which to thread his theology in order to avoid seeming to preach in favor of means. He had accused the Arminians of idolizing freewill, but found himself in a precarious position encountered by so many orthodox Calvinists—of countenancing some element of merit to individual action in the process of salvation. At the very least, the recipient of grace has to accept it, which implies an intellectual and spiritual assent to be saved, not to mention the cultivation of holiness itself. However, he implied what has been called “double predestination,” meaning that not only election or damnation, but one’s “birth, place of residence, the course of his life and achievements, and his death” are also foreordained. What appears to be human effort is only the result of actions directed by God. Consequently, the convert may gain an assurance of his or her salvation, which is an act of faith that leaves the initial mental assent to the covenants far behind. Good works, which for the Arminians are a means to salvation, are for the Calvinists the product of faith, which Frelinghuysen defined as the act of putting one’s trust in God’s benevolence and mercy.26 Concerning sanctification and glorification, Frelinghuysen held to the Frisian Catechism (1718), which posited a two-part process of conversion that begins when “a convicted sinner first turns from Satan to God” and is completed when the convert “rises again from his daily stumblings, or even from a hard fall, and with repentance turns again to the Lord.” This belief would appear to allow for the possibility of falling from grace if, having taken “a hard fall,” the would-be convert did not at last turn back toward God. Frelinghuysen argued against such a possibility by stressing the need for constantly renewing one’s relationship to God in the practice of piety. Inspired by Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, Frelinghuysen viewed life as a constant trial to demonstrate one’s worthiness before God while beset with opportunities to turn back, with the most arduous test administered at the moment of death, which can be embraced only by the truly holy without fear or dread.



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Given that holy living is such a demanding and ceaseless endeavor, only the most devout—the most precise in their striving for perfection despite its ultimate unattainability—could ever negotiate the narrow way to heaven, and only those relative few destined for salvation could begin, much less finish, the journey. One of the fundamental tenets necessary to keeping one’s feet on the narrow way was constantly to observe the Golden Rule and love one’s enemies. Another was a cultivation not just of spiritual humility, but also of material humility, shunning wealth and the things of the world. Frelinghuysen constantly preached against the rich and those who sought wealth, a conviction that resonated deeply within the Pietistic tradition. That this is so hard to achieve offers some indication of how few deserved salvation. Concentrating as he did upon the practice of piety, Frelinghuysen steadfastly avoided the millenarianism that ensnared most continental Pietists and became an obsession among American Puritans.27 In 1719, Frelinghuysen attracted the attention of Matthias Winterwyck, Willem Banker, and Bernhardus Freeman, who were involved in colonial ventures in New York, and they offered him a job ministering to Dutch settlements along the Raritan River in New Jersey, which he eventually accepted. His first years in America were turbulent, as he was unflinchingly critical of his colleagues for their apparent laxity and materialism. Ecclesiologically, he was unsurprisingly strict. Highly exclusive in admitting new church members, he was even more exacting about who might share in communion, perceiving church attendance, morality, and outward piety as insufficient signs of grace. Church membership, therefore, did not imply full conversion, and he barred those members from the Lord’s Table who had not offered further convincing professions of faith. In addition to regular church attendance, Frelinghuysen encouraged the meeting of “conventicles” (collegia) inspired by Spener’s example, where the faithful gathered outside church to discuss Biblical teachings, pray, and exhort one another. Such meetings were not to take the place of church attendance, and he was quick to correct those who came to conventicles yet were absent from church. The Dutch New Yorkers who settled the Raritan Valley were less than devout farmers, mechanics, and merchants, and Frelinghuysen set about to remind these contentious people of the errors of their ways, which caused him no small amount of difficulty in his career.28  Recalling the earthquake of 1727, Frelinghuysen noted that “an earthquake is an unusual effect of the power of God, serving to inspire with terror,” and that “it is employed as a symbol of the wrath of God.” He cited Cotton Mather’s jeremiad sermon The Terror of the Lord (1727) as a perfect

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example of the sort of “edifying and godly work” that should accompany such significant events. Indeed, it was a fear of God’s wrath intimated by the earthquake that drove Abigail, Elizabeth, and Martha Aborn to introspection and spiritual conversion, resulting in membership in the Lynn End Congregational Church. Their conversion narratives, as with many others presented throughout New England following the earthquake, are replete with the language of experimental Christianity of the sort propagated by European and colonial American Pietists. Martha Gowing avowed in her testimony to give her “self to God in an everlasting Covenant never to be forgotten, resolving to Love, fear and Serve him. I would joyn with this Chh. which I believe to be a true Chh of X. in Communion with you would I commemorate Xs dying Love in ye holy ordinance of his Supper.” It was exactly that sort of deep emotion that a new generation of Protestant clergymen hoped to inflame among a colonial population distracted from religion by an increasingly diversifying ethnic composition, democratizing political transitions, rising economic prosperity, the expansion of the consumer marketplace, and the intellectualism that had—in response to Enlightenment rationalism—come to dominate Protestant Christianity. While the theology of the revivalists was grounded in Pietism, which had incorporated Aristotelian and Neoplatonist elements, much of it derived from an anti-intellectual reaction against rationalism in religion. Likewise, the mysticism of the more radical Pietists struck chords among people for whom folk religious beliefs and practices brought a more palpable sense of the supernatural to their everyday lives.29

NOTES 1. Nathaniel Gookin, The Day of Trouble near, the Tokens of it, and a Due Preparation for it (Boston, 1728), 69 (emphasis in original); Kenneth P. Minkema, “The Lynn End ‘Earthquake’ Relations of 1727,” NEQ 69 (September 1996), 474, 484–85, 488, 491. See also Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 177–81; John Brown, appendix to John Cotton’s A Holy Fear of God, and His Judgments Exhorted To . . . (Boston, 1727). 2. Benjamin Colman, The Judgments of Providence in the Hand of Christ . . . (Boston, 1727), iv–vii [emphasis in original]; James Allin, Thunder and Earthquake, A Loud and Awful Call to Reformation . . . (Boston, 1727); Thomas Prince, Sr., Earthquakes the Works of God and Tokens of His just Displeasure . . . (Boston, 1727); Cotton Mather, Boanerges. A Short Essay to preserve and strengthen the Good Impressions Produced by Earthquakes . . . (Boston, 1727). 3. Maxine Van de Wetering, “Moralizing in Puritan Natural Science: Mysteriousness in Earthquake Sermons,” Journal of the History of Ideas 43 (July–September



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1982), 417–38. On the beginnings of the Northampton Revival, see chap. 4. The Puritans’ natural and spiritual explanations for “wonders” and otherwise mysterious events are covered in David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 2. 4. Cotton Mather, The Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. (New York: F. Ungar Co., 1957), 2:335–37; Brett Malcolm Grainger, “Vital Nature and Vital Piety: Johann Arndt and the Evangelical Vitalism of Cotton Mather,” Church History 81 (December 2012), 861–62. 5. Jonathan Strom, “Problems and Promises of Pietism Research,” Church History 71 (September 2002), 537–49; F. Ernest Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden: Brill, 1965). See also W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 57–63. 6. On the Counter-Reformation, see Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), esp. chap. 4. 7. Andrew Fix, “Radical Reformation and Second Reformation in Holland: The Intellectual Consequences of the Sixteenth-Century Religious Upheaval and the Coming of a Rational Worldview,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (Spring 1987), 63–80; Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical Pietism, 112–17. 8. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, 204–06, 227; Irwin, “Anna Maria van Schurman,” 58; Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical Pietism, 176–79. See also T. J. Saxby, The Quest for the New Jerusalem, Jean de Labadie and the Labadists (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987). 9. Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical Pietism, 200–12; George Becker, “Pietism’s Confrontation with Enlightenment Rationalism: An Examination of the Relation between Ascetic Protestantism and Science,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30 (June 1991), 139–58. 10. Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical Pietism, 212–14; J. M. Bumsted and John E. Van de Wetering, What Must I Do To Be Saved? The Great Awakening in Colonial America (Hinsdale, IL: Dryden Press, 1976), 28–29; Arlene Adrienne Miller, “Jacob Boehme: From Orthodoxy to Enlightenment” (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1971). 11. John Bradford, The Writings of John Bradford . . ., 2 vols., ed. Aubrey Townsend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1853), 2:40–48, 288; John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ed. George Townsend, 8 vols. (London: Seeley, Burnside, and Seeley, 1843–49), 8:227; I. Ross Bartlett, “John Foxe as Hagiographer: The Question Revisited,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26 (Winter 1995), 771–89; Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical Pietism, 41–49; William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), chap. 5; Alan Simpson, Puritanism in Old and New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 12–18. 12. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 3–63; Jerald C. Brauer, “Types of Puritan Piety,” Church History 56 (March 1987), 42, 44–45, 47, 51, 53. 13. Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press), 32; Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical

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Pietism, 24–70; Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises, Containing Such Direction as is Gathered Out of the Holy Scriptures . . . (London, 1603); John Dod, A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments with a . . . Catechism (London, 1607); Nicholas Bound, The Doctrine of the Sabbath, Plainly Laid Forth and Soundly Proved . . . (London, 1595); John Downame, The Christian Warfare, 4 vols. (London, 1609–18). See William Perkins, Workes, 3 vols. (London, 1608–31), 1:353–420, 635–44, 2:13; Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), 66–72 for details on the morphology of conversion. 14. James Fulton Maclear, “‘The Heart of New England Rent’: The Mystical Element in Early Puritan History,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42 (March 1956), 621–52; Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical Pietism, 71–73, 78–99. 15. Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical Pietism, 103–08; Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (London, 1650), 25; idem, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (London, 1651), 34. See also Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher, 1555–1626 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11, 106. 16. Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical Pietism, 228–43; Holifield, Theology in America, 398; Robert D. Preus, The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 2 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1970), 1:129–35; Philipp Jakob Spener, Pia Desideria, trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 56, 100; Johannes Wallmann, “Was ist Pietismus?” in Pietismus und Neuzeit: Ein Jahrbuch zur Geschichte des neueren Protestantismus (1974–), vol. 21 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994). 17. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, 61–63. 18. Carl Hinrichs, Preussentum und Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 83–88, 175. The term “revivalism” refers to what late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century Protestant clergymen believed to be a special outpouring of God’s grace that brought the spiritually dead to living faith in Christ and renewing the inner life of Christians who had grown lax and overconfident, as well as reviving the power and influence of the church over people. 19. Simpson, Puritanism in Old and New England; William K. B. Stoever, “A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven”: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978); Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984); Morgan, Visible Saints. The Cambridge Platform firmly ensconced Congregationalism as the system of church governance in Massachusetts rather than Presbyterianism, while the Halfway Covenant gave churches the option of admitting the infants of nonchurch members to the sacrament of baptism so long as one of their grandparents was or had been a church member. Williston Walker, ed., Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1960), 194–237; Richard P. Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil & the Godly: The Reforming Synod of 1679 and the Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679–1749 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World (Boston, 1693); Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), chap. 13.



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20. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 2 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), 1:27; Cotton Mather to Anthony Wilhelm Böhme, August 6, 1716, in Kenneth Silverman, ed., Selected Letters of Cotton Mather (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 215; Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, 274; Ernst Benz, “Ecumenical Relations between Boston Puritanism and German Pietism: Cotton Mather and August Hermann Francke,” The Harvard Theological Review 54 (July 1961), 160–62, Mather to Francke quoted on p. 166, sermon quoted on p. 168; Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 209–30, 275–76. 21. Cotton Mather, Le Vrai Patron des Saines Paroles (Boston, 1704); Une Grande Voix du Ciel à la France (Boston, 1725); Malachi, or the Everlasting Gospel Preached unto the Nations (Boston, 1717); The Tryed Professor (Boston, 1719); India Christiana (Boston, 1721); Manuductio ad Ministerium (Boston, 1726); Things to Be More Thought Upon (Boston, 1713), 86 ff.; Cotton Mather to Anthony Wilhelm Böhme, December 2, 1715, in Diary of Cotton Mather, 2:332–33, 479; August Hermann Francke, Manuductio ad lectionem Scripturae Sacrae (Halle, 1693); Psalterium Americanum (Boston, 1718); Cotton Mather, A Midnight Cry (Boston, 1692), 63; idem, Things to Be Look’d For (Boston, 1692), 26–34, 62–64; Howard C. Rice, “Cotton Mather Speaks to France: American Propaganda in the Age of Louis XIV,” NEQ 16 (June 1943), 198–233; Benz, “Ecumenical Relations,” 164–67, 169–70, 172–74; Richard F. Lovelace, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1979), 32–34, 58–61, 64–67; 114–15; Middlekauff, The Mathers, chaps. 15, 17–18. 22. Julius F. Sachse, The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: P.C. Stockhausen, 1899–1900), 1:73–75, 97–101; James Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 22, 42–64; Charles H. Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1920), 6–10; Elizabeth W. Fisher, “‘Prophecies and Revelations’: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine for History and Biography 109 (July 1985), 299–333; Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, 44–45, 51–52, 246–47, 251–53; Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 76–77; John B. Frantz, “The Awakening of Religion among the German Settlers in the Middle Colonies,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 33 (April 1976), 274–75. 23. Michael G. Hall, Lawrence H. Leder, and Michael G. Kammen, eds., The Glorious Revolution in America: Documents on the Colonial Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 132; Adrian C. Leiby, The Early Dutch and Swedish Settlers of New Jersey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), chap. 9; William A. Whitehead, ed., New Jersey Archives: Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, 1st Series, 37 vols. (Newark, NJ: Daily Advertiser Printing House, 1880–1942), 5:22; Randall H. Balmer, “The Social Roots of Dutch Pietism in the Middle Colonies,” Church History 53 (June 1984), 187–99. 24. James Tanis, Dutch Calvinistic Pietism in the Middle Colonies: A Study in the Life and Theology of Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (The Hague: Martinus

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Nijhoff, 1967), 11–37, 97–103; William Teellinck, De worstelinghe eenes bekeerden sondaers (Vlissingen, 1631), 162; Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, Drie predicatien (New York, 1721), 72; Een bundelken leer-redenen (Amsterdam, 1736), 138–39. 25. Eduard Meiners, Kort ontwerp van de leere der waarheid, 8. druk (Groningen, 1735), 42; Frelinghuysen, Een trouwhertig vertoog (New York, 1729), 22; Een bundelken leer-redenen, 112; Tanis, Dutch Calvinistic Pietism, 100–16. 26. Frelinghuysen, Een bundelken leer-redenen, 31; Drie predicatien, 25–26; Meiners, Kort ontwerp van de leere der waarheid, 34; Frelinghuysen, A Clear Demonstration of a Righteous and Ungodly Man (New York, 1731), 84; Drie predicatien, 7; Tanis, Dutch Calvinistic Pietism, 116–24. 27. Meiners, Kort ontwerp van de leere der waarheid, 84; Frelinghuysen, A Clear Demonstration, 82, 91–92; Drie predicatien, 8, 35; Een bundelken leer-redenen, 128–29; Versamelinge van eenige keur-texten (Philadelphia, c.1748), 31–32; Tanis, Dutch Calvinistic Pietism, 124–34. 28. Tanis, Dutch Calvinistic Pietism in the Middle Colonies, 42–73. See chap. 3, for more about Frelinghuysen and the beginnings of revivalism in New Jersey. 29. Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, Sermons . . . Translated from the Dutch (New York: Board of Publication, Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, 1857), 326; Minkema, “The Lynn End ‘Earthquake’ Relations of 1727,” 497–98.

Chapter 2

“Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” Reason and Faith in the Eighteenth-Century Market Revolution

Nicholas Trott became South Carolina’s chief justice in 1703, and he ascended the bench with the intention of transforming the colony into a godlier one by strengthening the influence of the Church of England. An aggressive Anglican, Trott devoted himself to eradicating heterodoxy, unbelief, and indifference to religion for which South Carolina was becoming infamous. Nowhere was this more obvious to him than in the precipitous decline in witchcraft prosecutions as the eighteenth century dawned. He knew that witches exist because no lesser authorities than the Old Testament writers and the Apostles explicitly stated that witches are real and are agents of Satan aligned with the Antichrist. “We live in an Age of Atheism & Infidelity,” he warned, “and some Persons that are no great Friends to Religion, have made it their Business to decry all Stories of Apparitions and of witches.” In Boston, Rev. John Barnard warned his audience in 1712 that, in the face of growing prosperity and material comforts, “we can’t make the World our greatest Business, but it will certainly be at the Expense of the Soul.” Conceding that one has to make a living and thus maintain the body, Barnard nevertheless admonished that “we are oblig’d as Men, and Christians, to such a just Industry in our proper Business, as we may rationally expect Worldly Gains from: But it means, our Loving the World above every thing else, and . . . He who thus Gains the World, undoubtedly Loses his Soul.” Trott and Barnard, two very different men living in two very different places, were reacting to sociocultural changes that to their minds jeopardized a shared idea of what had been and what should be.1 The context of the First Great Awakening is one of a confluence of influential streams of which Pietism is also one. It included the growth of rationalist “natural” religion that sought to “save the appearances” of Christianity by attempting to reconcile reason with revelation, harnessing advancing scientific 39

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discoveries to prove the truths of Christianity—called evidentialism—while maintaining a belief in providentialism. Such compromises between early modern Christianity and the Enlightenment advanced the spread of humanism, which in its own turn led to the growth of Deism, Universalism, and Unitarianism among the intelligentsia. It included the infiltration of popular religious beliefs which persisted among the laity, of long standing traditions of magic, folk medicine, astrology, alchemy, and occult practices stretching back deep into Europe’s and America’s pasts. Finally, it also included the influence of a demographic revolution, as the seventeenth-century period of stabilization passed into an eighteenth-century period of explosive population and economic growth and diversity, and democratizing provincial politics.  SOCIETIES IN TRANSITION Dramatic improvements in the standard of living fostered a steady “Anglicization” of colonial American societies in the eighteenth century, fueled by increasing economic stability and modest prosperity. The introduction of tea drinking to the American colonies in the early eighteenth century and its connections to gentility and inclusion within the empire fueled a craze for tea consumption among the middle and lower classes—including the purchase of china teapots, cups, saucers, silver strainers, and spoons—that one New Yorker deplored in 1734. “I am credibly informed,” he wrote, “that tea and china ware cost the province, yearly, near the sum of ₤10,000; and people that are least able to go the expence, must have their tea tho’ their families want bread.” These are not merely Franklin’s testament to his industry and a concerned observer’s complaint about ruinous consumption, but also reflections of an era of accelerated economic growth and diversification in the British mainland colonies in the eighteenth century. Throughout the colonies, signs of affluence became increasingly abundant. Importation of fine manufactured goods from Europe soared, starting a modest consumer revolution as a growing proportion of the population enjoyed rising rates of prosperity that made it possible for middle- and lower-class white Americans to collect the accoutrements of gentility. The overall standard of living steadily improved, and the colonists matched their economic maturation to a burgeoning political sophistication. Religion provided a key organizing principle in the seventeenth-century process of colonial stabilization, which appeared to become less essential by the 1700s.2 The population of New England grew over the seventeenth century through healthy immigration and natural increase, resulting in heightened



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and expanded economic activity—mainly fishing, shipping, timber, whaling, and naval stores production. The eighteenth century, by contrast, witnessed dramatic decreases in population growth because of epidemics and wars, though natural increase remained healthy. The New England countryside did not primarily consist of isolated farming villages populated by modestly successful yeoman and tenant farmers, but instead bore tightly interwoven networks of agricultural and cottage industrial production centers that are likewise connected to the cities of Boston and Newport. The total value of goods produced in New England steadily increased in the 1700s, with most exports going to the West Indies and smaller amounts to Britain and continental Europe. Despite a more even distribution of wealth, poverty was not unknown, and became a growing problem in the eighteenth century because of the decreasing availability of land arising from an adherence to partible inheritance. Powerful families often controlled towns and cities, but to the degree long assumed, as old families faced competition from arrivistes who rose from humbler beginnings. Economic success led to growing materialism, individualism, and social stratification that made New England more socioeconomically vibrant. Nevertheless, the old Puritan ideals of religious mission, communitarianism, and filiopiety did not wholly disappear, contrary to what the clergymen complaining about rampant declension said and wrote.3 Seventeenth-century Puritanism gradually gave way to more liberal theological and ecclesiological variations in the early years of the eighteenth century, blurring distinctions between Separatists, nonseparating Congregationalists, and Presbyterians. The revised charter of Massachusetts (1691) stipulated that “there shall be a liberty of conscience allowed in the worship of God to all Christians, except papists,” with Connecticut and New Hampshire following suit by 1708, but that did not preclude official support for Congregationalism in the form of ministerial taxation. All residents were taxed for the support of the established Congregational churches, regardless of whether or not everyone in a particular parish were attendees or members of those churches. Exemptions for Anglicans, Baptists, and Quakers, among others, were disallowed before the late 1720s, and the laws permitting exemptions required a convoluted application process. What was technically possible for New England’s dissenters tended to be practically impossible on the grounds that religious dissent undermined the established order and demanded suppression. The lone exception was of course Rhode Island, where there had been liberty of conscience for all Christians except Catholics since Roger Williams incorporated the colony in 1636. In spite of the efforts of minority sects and denominations, religious homogeneity remained New England’s overarching goal.4 The Middle Colonies developed most rapidly. Already a “patchwork society” boasting a wide diversity of European peoples in the seventeenth

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century, middle-colony ethnic and social pluralism increased in the eighteenth century at a pace that mirrored the rates of economic diversification and population growth. Pennsylvania became the Anglo-American bread basket, exporting nearly half of its total grain production by 1770, generated from tightly interconnected yeoman farming communities. Philadelphia quickly grew into an entrepôt to rival New York City and Boston by the 1730s, fostering the rise of a dominant merchant elite. This led to increases in the production of pig iron, livestock, and timber and naval stores, and fueled rapidly growing mercantile and shipping businesses headquartered in New York City and Philadelphia that further increased the Middle Colonies’ overall wealth. Steadily increasing demand for labor that was driven by this expansion resulted in disproportionate numbers of white indentured servants and African/African-American slaves living in the Middle Colonies. The Middle Colonies were consequently very affluent, though wealth distribution became increasingly uneven on account of the unusually high numbers of yeoman farmers, servants, and slaves. New York constituted the lone exception with its Hudson Valley manorial patroonships, but even these were far less feudal than had been supposed. Rather, they were capitalistic ventures benefiting landlords and tenants relatively equally. Ethnic diversity further complicated the patchwork character of the Middle Colonies; the original Dutch, Swedish, and English colonists were joined by Germans and ScotsIrish immigrants in the early eighteenth century.5 A marked religious pluralism mirrored the relative ethnic diversity characteristic of the Middle Colonies. The Dutch, English, German, Swedish, Scots, and Scots-Irish colonists supported Reformed (both Dutch and German), Lutheran, Anglican, Quaker, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches that dominated the region, but a heightened influx of Palatine Germans in the 1720s significantly increased the numbers of Anabaptist sects such as the Amish, Mennonites, and Moravians, among others. The Anglicans made the most notable progress after 1700, by which time the Church of England was nominally the established church in New York and New Jersey. According to Edwin S. Gaustad, by 1710 there were eleven Anglican churches in New York, while there were eight in New Jersey and an identical number in Pennsylvania. More impressive gains were made in subsequent decades, but before the Awakening, overall numbers remained low in comparison to the more dominant Quaker and Presbyterian denominations, and the establishment in New Jersey was particularly weak. Presbyterian strength and growth was far more remarkable, accelerated by the establishment of the Synod of Philadelphia in 1706 and the immigration of Scottish and Scots-Irish settlers over the next thirty years. The Reformed and Lutheran denominations enjoyed only moderate growth in the first half of the eighteenth century, while Quakerism began to show fractures between liberal and conservative reformist wings.6



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The Chesapeake colonies developed a relatively stable tobacco export economy that laid the foundation for poorer immigrants to break into staple crop production, and thus came to rival tobacco in overall export value by the 1750s. The lure of economic success bolstered the Chesapeake’s attractiveness to immigrants, who found themselves forced by necessity to settle further south and west, thus expanding and variegating the region’s economic base in the eighteenth century. Urban development remained retarded in light of the focus on staple and cash crop agriculture, the exceptions being Annapolis and Williamsburg, though the majority of the population continued to live in widely scattered hamlets that were little more than nodes for the collecting of tobacco and foodstuffs to be exported. A growing, diversified economy led to a steadily rising standard of living, with all levels of white society enjoying greater material comfort than their counterparts in Europe. This in turn led to significant investment in the building and improvement of the cities and towns, expanded infrastructure, and the public display of wealth among the elite that sought to mimic that of the rural English gentry. Demand for slave labor expanded with the economy, dramatically rising importations from Africa and the West Indies, increasingly narrowing opportunities for poor white workers and farmers. The growing exclusivity of slavery for manual labor, however, did allow for greater social solidarity among whites, with the lower classes readily deferring to their social superiors, who abandoned some of their competitive individualism to cultivate greater public-spiritedness and patronage. This still left considerable room for the creation of networks of intermarried elite families that increasingly controlled local and colony-wide politics in the eighteenth century, and who also gave themselves up to a luxuriousness that was much commented upon and criticized by outsiders. Sex ratios, so badly unbalanced throughout the seventeenth century, evened out considerably in the eighteenth century, and increased female life expectancy, creating what one scholar termed a “widowarchy” of high-ranking women who were valuable marriage partners and wielded greater authority than fathers in family affairs, which by comparison to New England were loose and freewheeling. This extended to Chesapeake society as a whole, where morals were relatively loose, crime more common (though less prosecuted and punished), and hedonism something of a virtue because of very weak ecclesiastical institutions.7 The Lower South, by contrast, was far more homogeneous in terms of its white population, which in the Lowcountry was dramatically outnumbered by slaves imported in rising frequency directly from Africa as well as from the West Indies, in most cases. The Carolina venture began as a colony of Barbados, and South Carolina—and later Georgia—developed a plantation society very similar to its Barbadian progenitors, while North Carolina more closely resembled its northern neighbor. Tobacco, rice, and indigo cultivation

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comprised the great bulk of the Lower South’s economic output, while naval stores, lumber, and livestock made up the rest. Concentrating on the production of agricultural surpluses, mercantile interests were very slow to develop, but Charleston and New Bern gradually came to physically resemble other Anglo-American cities by 1750, even if their populations were generally lower because of higher mortality rates and widely scattered land distribution dominated by large plantations. There developed in the Carolinas an extremely permissive society little concerned with prosecuting minor crimes or regulating social behavior, indicating the weakness of religious institutions. The ostentatiousness of Lower southern elites rivaled that of their Chesapeake counterparts, though by the 1750s they showed a similar interest in improving civic organs, infrastructure, and ornamental architecture. The high concentration of wealth among a relatively narrow proportion of Lowcountry families, coupled with high mortality rates, created a boon for the legal profession that flourished in the Lower South to a degree unmatched anywhere else in Anglo-America. Such are indicators that the Lower South moved very slowly toward greater coherence and social stability, even if it was outpaced by the Chesapeake and Middle Colonies.8 Anglicanism dominated the Chesapeake and Lowcountry colonies, but only in the most superficial of ways. It was the religion of the planter class, who controlled parish affairs through the vestries that collected ministerial taxes with which the parsons were paid, existing churches were maintained, and new churches built. Not all of any given vestry’s members were Anglicans or even church members, further hamstringing the collective authority of the clergy. Lacking an American bishop to ordain new clergy, those colonists seeking Anglican ordination were required to make the arduous round-trip journey to England to be ordained by the Archbishop of Canterbury, which inhibited the production of native American parsons. Those who came from Britain tended to be of relatively poor quality, or waning commitment after arrival, thus earning the southern Anglican clergy a somewhat inflated reputation for laxness and questionable morals. The parish system created enormous parishes that made it difficult for only the most dedicated of parsons to minister, while most preferred to look after their flocks in a more lackadaisical fashion. Sporadic efforts to challenge the authority of the vestries almost always ended in failure, with most of the clergy forced to accept relatively low salaries and widespread indifference from the laity. In the more remote parishes, trained clergy were a scarcity, with the gaps filled in by lay readers of dubious qualifications. By and large, what Commissary Christopher Wilkinson wrote in letters to the Bishop of London regarding Maryland’s rectors can be said of the southern Anglican clergy as a whole: “The faults & follies of some Clergymen are too gross to be excus’d or extenuated,” but most of them, under arduous circumstances, were indeed “free from any



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Scandalous crimes; & their diligence & industry in the discharge of their office is incredible.”9 Throughout the colonies economic growth and diversity led to the rise of a “middle class” in the 1730s and 1740s.10 Artisans and craftsmen became increasingly common fixtures in colonial cities and towns in the eighteenth century, producing a widening variety of quality finished goods despite British restrictions on such production. This fed a booming merchant community and consumer culture in every Atlantic seaboard city and entrepôt that hastened a process of “Anglicization” throughout the more densely settled areas. Private dwellings for all but the wealthy and enslaved evolved from single-cell houses to include additional rooms for sleeping, cooking, and entertaining, while the elites began to build elaborately decorated Georgian mansions and townhouses. Public buildings likewise became larger, more ornate, and grandiose as the cities grew and aspired to European standards. Clergymen, physicians, lawyers, and college professors established greater uniformity of training, rapidly expanding what had been a very thin professional class. For all this bustling and expanding economic activity, prosperity was by no means widespread, and although poverty as Europeans knew it was virtually nonexistent in America, it was not an uncommon feature of the social landscape and, when Indians and slaves are considered, distressingly prevalent. Wealth distribution became progressively more uneven as a slowly dwindling number of families commanded a growing proportion of a colony’s wealth. Nevertheless, massive emigration from Europe is testimony to the fact that economic opportunities for white settlers were fairly open and at least modest rewards achievable, while the increase in slave importations and expanding slave markets testify to agricultural and manufacturing expansion. The American diet improved across the board which, with improvements in hygiene, created healthier people with longer life spans. The higher standard of living established in eighteenth-century British America was one almost exclusively enjoyed by whites, the upper class of whom developed social institutions beyond the church that encouraged scientific inquiry, public and university education, political and civic involvement, and the arts.11 Advances in education and literacy expanded the market for books and pamphlets, which became less expensive, and consequently more commonplace as a means of transmitting information and exchanging ideas throughout the British Atlantic world. The most popular American titles included almanacs, chapbooks, Bibles, confessional literature, and histories, while in New England sermons and theological treatises also sold well. Newspapers became an increasingly ubiquitous feature in colonial cities, and by 1760 better than twenty daily and weekly newspapers were being printed in the Atlantic American entrepôts. The corresponding numbers for the British Isles are even more impressive, as dailies, weeklies, biweeklies, and triweeklies

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stood at seventeen in London alone and twenty-four in the provinces on the eve of the Awakening. The eighteenth-century newspaper, as Charles E. Clark notes, was equal parts “intelligencer, gazette, propagandist, advertiser, and literary journal all in one.” American weeklies and biweeklies primarily reprinted news that appeared in English and occasionally other European newspapers, as well as passing along gossip, disseminating political propaganda, moral and religious exhortations, and printing essays that are not dissimilar from modern editorials. Throughout the early 1700s, the bulk of a newspaper’s space was devoted to advertisements purchased by merchants, artisans, and individuals selling all manner of goods and services, or seeking public assistance in the recovery of lost or stolen property—usually runaway slaves and indentured servants. By the 1730s, however, newspapers aspired to greater heights of sophistication, catering to “a fine taste for Good Sense & Polite Learning.” Newspapers also generated a political forum that opened up beyond public and private spaces, allowing for greater popular participation from a better informed populace and consequently turned American politics in a Whiggish direction.12 THEOLOGICAL AND ECCLESIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS Ebenezer Parkman received ordination into the Congregational clergy on October 28, 1724, at Middleborough, Massachusetts—a day he described in his diary as marking his “Solemn Separation to the Work of the Gospel Ministry.” One can miss neither the irony nor the aptness of his use of the term “separation,” for Parkman’s ordination was more an initiation into an elite fraternity than the sending forth of a new man of God to minister to souls. Certainly he meant to convey his detachment from an ordinary world to pursue a vocation of the highest order, but it also conveys his consciousness of attaining a higher social status than many of those around him could hope to achieve. At one time, ordination sermons reminded the newly minted divine of his responsibilities to his parishioners and of his obligations to serve the faithful to the utmost of his abilities. In the seventeenth century, the laity had a voice in the ordination of ministers, but by 1700 that voice had become muffled and eventually stifled, as decisions on ordination lay entirely with the professional clergy. By 1730, ordination sermons most often warned about—in Eliphalet Adams’s acerbic terms—“Cavillers and Opposers” who, with “much Pride and Spirit and Self-Conceit . . . can’t relish such and such Doctrines, They can’t approve of such and such Practices, They don’t like such and such Orders or Methods of Discipline.” Thomas Clap likewise complained in 1732 that “some disaffected and uneasy Spirits . . . seem to envy the tranquile State of the Church; and are ready to take all Opportunities and



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Advantages, to stir up Opposition and Contention.” The ceremony of ordination evolved from one of Spartan simplicity to one of increasing elaborateness and overbearing solemnity. Much of the eighteenth-century clergy had thus drifted away from those among whom they were bound to serve, and the laity had come to realize that a subtle undercurrent of mutual antagonism poisoned relations between what had become two discrete factions. But professionalization was but one aspect of this phenomenon. The clergy’s mounting interest in theoretical theology was another.13 E. Brooks Holifield notes that until the mid-eighteenth century the overwhelming majority of American theological writing in America came from New England, where there existed a sufficiently dense population supporting “networks of conversation” and the technological infrastructure—“printing presses [and] easy means of transporting manuscripts to printers abroad”—to sustain a high level of intellectual exchange. Thus, New England Calvinists dominated the early development of American theology and set the track for the future evolution of Protestant Christian thought. Calvinism, despite its rigid predestinarian doctrine and presumption of innate human frailty, insisted that God accommodated that frailty—which includes finite reason— by utilizing both revelation and reason as instructive tools. Delicately balancing these two seemingly opposite media, Calvinist theologians struggled to maintain Christianity’s inherent practicality, particularly the uses of reason. However, it was the rigidity of Calvinism that kept some New Englanders away from the churches or from seeking membership and the sacraments, while the clergy’s theological contortionism put off the devoutly orthodox, sensitive as they were to even the slightest hints of Arminianism or some other heterodoxy. Congregationalist independency frowned upon councils and synods to set doctrines, yet they proved necessary in formulating the Cambridge Platform (1648), the Halfway Covenant (1662), and the Confession of Faith (1680). Critics of Puritanism characterized it as a gloomy theology devoid of true intellectual merit, and this the New England theologians were most anxious to disprove while also proving that their conception of Christianity was the most rational.14 The New England’s Puritan clergy believed that reason offered a guide to biblical revelation, deriving their ideas from Aristotelian scholasticism and Renaissance humanism. They saw the study of nature as being ultimately a study of God, but that science alone cannot fathom the mysteries of the cosmos without scriptural support. Scholastic disquisitions on reason versus revelation did not usually resonate with the people in the pews, and Calvinists in England had already been gradually softening their theology over the course of the seventeenth century. Continental Calvinists likewise retreated from rigid Calvinist doctrine and began to drift ever so slightly—in a way that influenced their British counterparts—toward Arminianism. They asserted

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that the proper exercise of reason could verify scriptural revelation without depending upon direct observation or empirical evidence. The power of human reason, in spite of its innate limitations, was analogous to that of God, and God had rendered the natural world knowable in order to make people use their minds. It was suggested that the believer could commune with God not only spiritually, but also mentally. The truths of Christianity and of salvation were not made known to the spirit first, but rather to the intellect, and he or she then could make a conscious decision to accept or reject those truths, in accordance with the doctrine of freewill.15 A growing interest in science, better known then as “natural philosophy,” also steered Puritan theologians, especially in New England, into investigating the inherent reasonableness of Christianity, only this time with an aim to reach out to people’s common sense. However, emphasis upon natural law and ethics in relation to Calvinist Christianity led to widespread confusion with Arminian doctrine, resulting in a controversy over New England clergymen being accused of preaching a covenant of works, when in fact they were in all likelihood “catholick” Calvinists who linked their theology more closely to moral virtue. Jonathan Edwards noted that at the time of the Northampton revival of 1734 there “began the great Noise that was in this part of the Country, about Arminianism, which seemed to appear with a very threatening Aspect upon the Interest of Religion here.” It has commonly been thought that the origins of the First Great Awakening lay, in part, in a widespread belief that Arminian theology had infiltrated New England’s Congregationalist clergy in the opening decades of the eighteenth century, and that Anglicanism’s influence was to blame for the spread of Arminianism. It can be argued that late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Calvinism had not shifted significantly onto Arminian ground, and that Cotton Mather was not exaggerating New England’s continued orthodoxy when he wrote in 1726 that “every one knows, That they [the churches in New England] perfectly adhere to the CONFESSION OF FAITH, published by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster.”16 However, the profusion of works critical of predestinarian doctrine in particular and of Calvinism generally most certainly exerted a corrosive influence at Harvard and Yale colleges, where the bulk of the younger clergy received their formal training. New England Calvinism may not have become explicitly Arminian, but it had conceded some theological ground, albeit subtly. Another challenge facing the New England Calvinists came from the wellsprings of the Enlightenment, which began to question seriously the idea of revelation as a valid source of knowledge that led to the rise of Deism, which is a sort of Christianity that relegates God to the position of a dispassionate, detached Newtonian architect of a cosmos with which he does not interfere. Deists questioned the rationality of trinitarianism and



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the validity of biblical revelation, and tended to diminish the usefulness of scripture apart from its literary merits. Deist writings made their way into the college libraries of Harvard and Yale where they were studied so that they might be refuted, but where they also exerted some influence. In defending Calvinism against Deism, New England Calvinist theologians and those who followed them insisted upon Lockean rationalism in religion, but refused to supplant reason for revelation, preferring to see the former as the handmaiden of the latter.17 The growth of rationalism in Protestant theology compounded an undercurrent of Arminianism in the Calvinist denominations that had resulted in an upsurge in clerical dismissals for heterodoxy in the opening decades of the eighteenth century. The clergy had already begun to worry openly about the erosion of their authority and a growing lack of respect from the laity, inspired largely by the sometimes rancorous debates over the Halfway Covenant in New England. The drive to recapture their slipping status largely accounted for the higher professional standards established throughout the colonies, as well as the distancing—whether intentional or not—of the clergy from the laity. The leading architect of New England’s clerical professionalism was Cotton Mather, whose Manuductio Ad Ministerium became the conscientious minister’s companion and guide. In light of being held to elevated standards, the clergy began to demand the respect and deference—and most importantly, the higher salaries—they believed had been denied them and that suited their new sense of rank, but which also further alienated these “faithful shepherds” from their flocks. Azariah Mather of New London, Connecticut, explained that he and his colleagues “plead not for Grandure,” yet “unless Ministers be Feared and can Keep up their Authority, and Live according to the Dignity of their Place, little good will be done by them.”18 “IRRELIGION, IMMORALITY, AND PROFANENESS” The Restoration of 1660 threw Puritan New England into a spate of anxious, confused introspection. A minor exodus of the more devout among the first and second generations to Cromwellian England in the 1640s was followed by reports that Old England’s Puritans had grown doctrinally lax and tolerant, refusing to execute Quakers or force Presbyterians into the stricter Puritan Calvinist fold. Those who could afford it emigrated back to New England, and after 1660 a thin stream became a flood known as the “Great Migration.” A palpable fear that the king might revoke New England’s charters began to sweep through Massachusetts and Connecticut. Interpreting this climate of anxiety and uncertainty as a divine chastisement

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for impiety and lack of clerical diligence, ministerial leaders responded to lay pressures to redefine the standards for church membership and access to the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. A synod in 1662 devised what became known as the Halfway Covenant, which allowed parents who had only publicly owned the church’s covenant without ever formally professing their faith—and providing that they were “not scandalous in life”—to have their children baptized. Those children would be expected to own the covenant themselves and eventually seek full membership on the grounds that God does not break up godly families. New England divided over the Halfway Covenant, with only about a third of the Congregationalist churches adopting the innovation before 1676. Another synod convened in 1679 to address the prospect of a reformation of manners that might restore New England’s first-generation piety and clarity of purpose, resulting in a 1680 Confession of Faith that reaffirmed the founding principles found in the Cambridge Platform.19 Hardly had the blood washed out into Casco Bay on the Maine frontier before new worries arose. Charles II not only was tolerating Quakers in England, but also, in 1679, had granted them a charter to found a colony in East Jersey, where some Puritan New Englanders had already settled, and later along and beyond the west bank of the Delaware River in 1681. Unease about the king’s Catholic sympathies, and Parliament’s discussions about a bill enacting religious toleration in England, raised concerns that the Church of England—which the Puritans insisted was a mere hair’s breadth away from Catholicism as it was—might soon be established in New England and dissenting Protestantism eradicated. Charles II and his councilors were thought to be engaged in a concerted plot to eliminate the true Church. The fears of the orthodox were later confirmed when Massachusetts’ charter was revoked in 1684, leaving that colony adrift in an ocean of political uncertainty that seemed to confirm the feverish Puritans’ direst predictions. In light of the magistrates’ being unable to maintain the federal covenant, the need for individual and collective spiritual revival became imperative.20 James II revoked the rest of the New England colonies’ charters as a prelude to creating the Dominion of New England in 1686–1687, which consolidated the colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey under a single charter and the governorship of the autocratic, aggressively Anglican Sir Edmund Andros. Waves of a re-enflamed, violent anti-Catholic sentiment washed over both Old and New England after James II’s accession. The Glorious Revolution (1688–1689) inspired Leisler’s Rebellion in New York against the Andros administration in 1689, and Massachusetts swiftly arrested Andros and his councilors, sending them to England for trial on charges of corruption and malfeasance.21



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The shock of war, economic distress, and political anxieties all served to convince reluctant clergy and laity to revisit their opposition to the Halfway Covenant, resulting in a dramatic increase in the numbers of churches adopting the relaxed membership standards as part of a renewal of purpose. For a time, the numbers of children admitted as halfway members rose sharply, then leveled off in the 1680s before declining in the wake of the Revolution Settlement. Most halfway members were content to remain in that nebulous state, the majority unsure of their conversion and thus unwilling to risk eating and drinking damnation at the Lord’s Table, while others did not believe more was truly required to earn them and their children places in Paradise. It was in the wake of this tentative turn of events that led to calls for collective spiritual regeneration supported by assurances that God continued to smile upon his chosen people in New England. In 1691–1693, this conviction was once again called into question by the bizarre events in Essex County, Massachusetts, centering on the witchcraft trials in Salem Town. Subsequent qualified mea culpas from Cotton Mather and Rev. John Hale mark the entire episode as a turning point in American intellectual history toward the Enlightenment, even as clerical credibility began to erode among the laity.22 The changes made to the theological landscape at the onset of the eighteenth century came about also as a reaction to pressures exerted by the laity in various conscious and unconscious ways. Institutional Christianity in the American colonies underwent the same process of fitful growth and stabilization that the colonial societies did, with the result that the Church of England and its Puritan critics dominated formal worship before 1680. However, with greater socioeconomic and political stability came radically increased immigration from Europe, rising birthrates and shrinking mortality rates, all of which dramatically altered the colonial American world of the early eighteenth century. Economic stability led to a growing prosperity and higher standard of living that distracted many colonists from a public piety exhibited by previous generations—at least that is what clergymen like John Barnard alleged in a chorus of jeremiad sermons decrying inattention to spiritual matters in preference for things material. The decades preceding the First Great Awakening are widely interpreted as a period of decline for institutionalized Christianity, as natives and newcomers shifted their attention to worldly concerns, while others became confused and indecisive when confronting new denominational and sectarian options before them. Even as there was impressive denominational and congregational growth in the early 1700s, clergymen from New Hampshire to South Carolina complained about declines in church attendance and membership, which the wise historian does not take wholly at face value. Ministers also worried about irreligion and what they assumed to be atheism, which must likewise be viewed askance.

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The notion that there was rampant irreligion and secularism among the laity—based on examinations of church records and the frustrated assertions of the clergy—offers a skewed perspective of an increasingly complicated American religious milieu.23 Profuse population growth in the early 1700s paralleled denominational expansion and diversity. The leading cities of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston grew at phenomenal rates. The overwhelming majority of settlers in most of the English colonies in 1700 were either English or of English descent, but after 1700 the proportion of nonEnglish immigrants profoundly increased to include Germans, Scots-Irish, Scots, and forcibly imported Africans and Afro-Caribbean slaves, among others. White settlers pushed steadily into the interior, in the central and northern colonies establishing towns and villages located increasingly distant from the urban centers. This led to a growing problem in that as natural increase and in-migration expanded the cities and towns, “outlivers” in the villages on the periphery found it difficult, and at times impossible, to travel to the nearest church, especially in winter. Lay preachers came to fill in the gaps left by a paucity of ordained clergy, but the “resacralization of the landscape after 1680,” in the form of a boom in church construction to accommodate new congregations, lagged behind population growth and furtive westward expansion. The problem was much worse in the South, where weak organization and discipline retarded Anglican Church growth in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. In New England, the innovation of the Halfway Covenant offered encouragement to liberal clergymen, such as Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, Massachusetts, and Benjamin Colman of the newly founded Brattle Street Church in Boston, who blamed ecclesiological and doctrinal inflexibility as factors exacerbating religious “indifference” or “irreligion.” By the time Stoddard’s grandson Jonathan Edwards took over the Northampton church in February 1728/29, the strict standards established by the Cambridge Platform in Massachusetts had been eroded.24 To some extent, this shift toward greater flexibility constituted a desperate attempt to rescue the original Puritan ideals upon which most of New England had been founded. Mounting pressure from England in favor of religious toleration—Parliament had passed a Toleration Act in 1689—culminated in the passage by the Massachusetts General Court of the Bill for the General Rights and Liberties in 1692, which guaranteed religious toleration and reaffirmed the nonseparating Congregationalists as a distaff part of the Church of England. A growing Anglicanization of New England ensued, reaching an early peak with the “Yale Apostasy” of 1722, and concern over the efforts of the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). The only answer for the Puritan clergy and laity was to find common cause with the Church of England, which also was concerned about religious



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decline. Nevertheless, despite relaxed standards for church membership and access to the sacraments, a marked majority of the laity contented themselves with halfway membership. This was not just a problem in the Congregationalist churches, but also a cause for worry for Anglican parsons such as Devereux Jarratt of Virginia, who noted that his parishioners feared approaching the Lord’s Table as “a dangerous thing to meddle with.” Meanwhile, the Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Baptist churches did not appear to have the same problem. It must be noted, however, that standards for church membership and access to the sacraments varied from denomination to denomination, and from church to church, thus all attempts to assess the general atmosphere— indeed the reality—of religious decline in the decades before the First Great Awakening are at best problematic. What can be recognized is that by the 1720s churchgoing became more of a social formality than a faithful exercise in personal and collective piety.25 To judge from the complaints of various clergymen and government officials about widespread religious indifference and licentiousness among the laity, one could conclude that religion was losing its grip upon colonial American hearts and minds. Governor Robert Hunter of New York issued a proclamation in 1712 decrying the “Irreligion, Immorality and Profaneness” among the people, citing unchecked “Prophanation of the Lord’s Day, Cursing and Swearing, Blasphemy, Drunkenness, Lewdness, and all other Immoral and disorderly Practices.” Thomas Prince, Sr., of Boston berated young people for their characteristic impieties, accusing them of “think[ing] as if you were not under any Obligations to be Religious in your Youthful Age.” Josiah Smith of South Carolina laid the blame for youthful impiety at the feet of their parents, who “have Connived at the faults of their Children; not Reproving them at all, or with such a visible indifference, as could leave no suitable Impression upon them.” In New Jersey, Gilbert Tennent wrung his hands over the “stillness of many about the concerns of their Souls, whose lives are not withstanding very broken and miserable, their indifference about heavenly Things, both in Speech and Practice[,] and in the mean Time their eager Pursuit of . . . worldly Treasures.” New England election sermons, in addition to the standard exhortations of civic leaders to godliness and judicious leadership, increasingly addressed issues of public impiety, licentiousness, and criminality between the 1680s and the 1720s. Indeed, there is something to these ministerial concerns. After 1700, crimes against property and violent crimes increased across the board, even as prosecutions for moral offenses declined due to a growing unwillingness to pursue the lattermost cases—another cause for worry among the clergy in itself. Yet another aspect of American popular culture frustrated the clergy throughout the colonies and inhibited greater public piety in the early eighteenth century, and that was the continued presence of occultism and “folk” religion.26

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FOLK RELIGION Amid the evolution of rationalist theology and the various controversies with which the churches grappled, clergymen, church councils, and associations frequently confronted fusions of magic and the occult with popular Christianity. Contrary to what it seems on the surface, Christian adherence among the early modern European laity was never universal, and faced augmentation by and competition from ancient folk beliefs. The best Christianity could ever do from the early Middle Ages forward was seek to replace pagan occultism with Christian liturgy or demonstrate parallels that encouraged syncretism. This was due, in part, at least to the inherent supernaturalism of Christianity and its rituals of baptism, communion, and funerary practices. Clerics were thus constantly competing with native folk traditions and customs which flourished in the countryside, but often found stubborn believers even among the educated and the elite. Astrologers continued to draw charts for farmers and artisans, as well as for clerics and monarchs, “cunning persons” brewed poultices for sick people of all classes, and the learned still dabbled in alchemy, studied “Hermes Trismegistus” and Paracelsus, and synthesized Jewish cabalistic practices.27 Although European immigrants to the American wilderness brought with them native folk religious beliefs and traditions, Jon Butler notes that the “colonizers’ aims to plant Christianity in America militated against the rise of occult religious practices,” while the alien landscape likewise “militated against the occult.” The land carried spiritual import only to the Indians, who were presumed either to be benighted heathens or instruments of Satan by the colonists. By the second and third generations of the late seventeenth century, however, the roots of a native Euro-American folk religious tradition, some of which borrowed from Indian and African American folklore, are evident in the work of “cunning persons.” While science provided some insight into the cosmos’ nature and workings and Christianity offered comfort where rational explanations were lacking, many resorted to traditional folk methods to cure illness, bring good luck, find lost objects and missing persons, and by drawing astrological charts interpret strange events and foretell the future. The popularity of magic and occultism was not limited to the common folk, however. The learned dabbled in alchemy and astrology, eagerly collecting works by alchemists, physiognomists, and astrologers such as Trismegistus and Paracelcus, demonstrating that the boundary between science and the occult could be all too murky. Much of this was also expressed in the publication of almanacs, which included diagrams of the human body with the various parts designated as ruled by the twelve zodiacal signs, as well as star charts to aid in determining the best times to plant various crops. While eighteenth-century skepticism and Enlightenment rationalism reduced the intelligentsia’s interest in magic



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and occultism, it did not have a similar effect at the popular level, where subtler expressions of it found their way into otherwise normal Christian practices. No survey of American folk religion would be complete, however, without taking into account the presence and influence of non-European elements.28 The religious systems of the Eastern Woodland Indian tribes, intermittently challenged by Euro-American missionaries, did not survive the process of colonization unaltered. The Jesuits in New France learned not to use too heavy a hand in denigrating native cultures, emphasizing that innocuous elements should be encouraged and incorporated into native Catholicism, since conversion to Christianity and ultimate Europeanization implied an almost total destruction of native cultures, consequently requiring a more gradualist approach. Significant barriers remained to be overcome, not the least of which was the extremely literal nature of native thought and the relative absence of abstractions, which complicated linguistic translation. The “Black Robes” found that the Indian attachment to totems and talismans heightened the crucial role played by crucifixes, medals, rings, rosaries, and relics, thus reinforcing their encouragement of syncretic Indian Christianity. When natives did convert, they rarely did so alone, but rather in pairs (husbandwife, sibling-sibling, parent-child[ren]) or family groups, which usually meant their alienation from the larger community and tribe. In areas where European diseases did the greatest damage, desperate Indians sought baptism more as a means of personal and community survival than genuine rejection of their native ways. Systematic efforts by the English to Christianize the Indians did not take place until after 1644 in New England and not until the end of the seventeenth century in other areas of Anglo-America, but all English missionaries shared the desire to “reduce” the Indians to civilization—meaning the destruction of their Indian identities and reconstruction along English lines. Unlike the Jesuits, the English did not bother to completely familiarize themselves with the Indian cultures in order to facilitate the process of cultural translation. This was due, in part, to the fact that English missionaries were settled ministers firstly, which severely limited their availability, and then only secondarily engaged in missionary activities, the latter of which was done quite haphazardly. Few ministers proved willing to do the work at all, and fewer Indians expressed any genuine desire to hear about Christianity, much less to convert.29 Enslaved Africans took their religions with them to the New World, adapting to multiethnic mixing and desultory attempts to Christianize them. The “slave religions” that developed outside the British sphere blended common West African elements with elements of Catholic or Protestant Christianity. However much Christianity shaped these religions, they retained strong undercurrents of West African beliefs and practices. Folk beliefs in magic and witchcraft remained, as well, interpreted by root doctors, conjurers, and

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priest diviners enlisted to help or to harm using their spiritual and pharmacological powers over the material and spiritual realms. While the episodic importation of new West Africans may have contributed to the survival of certain African styles and specific elements of slave religious belief and practice, it would be a mistake to assume that the slave religions descended directly from specific West African religions. Rather, they must be seen as syncretic reinterpretations of ancient and contemporary African American religions, strongly influenced by European and native American counterparts. The slaves of Anglo-America were surrounded by and commingled with whites, which inhibited the survival of African religious and cultural systems. The lone exceptions were the slaves who lived on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, as evidenced by their Gullah and Geechee dialects, respectively. Albert J. Raboteau notes that “even as the gods of Africa gave way to the God of Christianity, the African heritage of singing, dancing, spirit possession, and magic continued to influence Afro-American spirituals, ring shouts, and folk beliefs. That this was so is evidence of the slaves’ ability not only to adapt to new contexts but to do so creatively.”30 Atheism and religious indifference were also problems in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and America, and one not confined to intellectuals. Rather than indicating explicit anticlericalism, it signaled an indifference that was most dramatic in urban areas undergoing a process of secularization fueled by the rise of mercantile capitalism. The intelligentsia’s flirtation with alchemy and Jewish mysticism faded with the advance of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment rationalism, though Christian-Pagan syncretism maintained its grassroots popularity, as evidenced by the continued presence of “cunning persons” and astrologers well into the eighteenth century. Interest in the occult persisted, as evidenced by the reluctance of almanac publishers to exclude anatomies featuring astrological and herbal folk medicine, continued official and unofficial references to the popularity of cunning persons, as well as a brief fad for “rattlesnake gazing.” Colonial blasphemy laws contributed to the suppression of occult beliefs and practices, thus keeping them more or less underground and relegated to the margins of society; but difficulties in identifying blasphemy in benign folk religion rendered legal proceedings against it sporadic at best and ultimately ineffective. By the 1730s, any supposed connection of folk religion to Satanism or witchcraft largely vanished, replaced by elite condescension to lower-class superstition and middle- and lower-class acceptance of harmless traditions. A nuance of popular occultism thus informed the religious predilections of the BritishAmerican colonists, variously influenced by American Indian and African/ African-American beliefs and practices.31 



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The two decades or so preceding the First Great Awakening witnessed the British-American colonies taking their first confident steps into modernity. A rapidly increasing population through immigration and natural increase—though still predominantly British—exhibited greater ethnic and cultural diversity that translated into a higher degree of religious pluralism. Greater economic strength and vitality fostered a materialism that began to distract people from more overt spiritual concerns, and the introduction of alternative forms of Christianity likewise challenged the complacency of long-established denominations. In response to the eclipsing of their authority among the laity, the clergy pushed for greater professionalization and formalism in practice, which further alienated the pastors from their flocks. Church attendance waned, as did the numbers of communicants and those seeking church membership. Formal Christianity competed with folk religion and a nebulous popular occultism that ranged from explorations of astrology and alchemy among the learned elites down to the consultation of “cunning folk” and the maintenance of superstitious ideas by ordinary people. It was in this fertile ground that the seeds for revivalism germinated among the laity and a new generation of clergymen willing to challenge the tighter institutionalization of Protestant Christianity. Protestant Christianity in the British-American colonies in the first two decades of the eighteenth century ran roughly along two distinctive tracks. On one side there was Anglican Arminianism as espoused by the Church of England that dominated the southern colonies and had a significant presence in the Middle Colonies, while on the other side there was Calvinist Arminianism as espoused by the Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Dutch Reformed denominations prevalent throughout New England and the Middle Colonies. A smattering of other denominations, most of them Pietist and Anabaptist, adhered to stricter forms of Calvinism; and it was a fundamentalist, early seventeenth-century form of Calvinism that the revivalists who arose in the late 1720s and early 1730s sought to restore and hoped would redefine all of American Christianity.

NOTES 1. Nicholas Trott, “A Charge Delivered at the General Sessions . . . 1705/06,” in Louis Lynn Hogue, “An Edition of ‘Eight Charges Delivered at So Many Several General Sessions . . . [1703–1707] by Nicholas Trott’” (PhD dissertation, University of Tennessee, 1972), 142–63; John Barnard, The Hazard and the Unprofitableness, of Losing a Soul for the Sake of Gaining the World (Boston, 1712), 6, 9. 2. Esther Singleton, Social New York under the Georges, 1714–1776 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1902), 375; T. H. Breen, “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and

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Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 119 (May 1988), 73–104. 3. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 91–110; Douglas R. McManis, Colonial New England: A Historical Geography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 46–66, 86–122; Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), chap. 3. 4. Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–1715 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), chap. 3; David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 372–73; Bruce Tucker, “The Reinvention of New England, 1691–1770,” NEQ 59 (September 1986), 316–18; Alison G. Olson, “Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and the Question of Religious Diversity in Colonial New England,” NEQ 65 (March 1992), 93–116. 5. McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 189–208, 218–29; Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 110–43; James G. Lydon, “Philadelphia’s Commercial Expansion, 1720–1739,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 91 (October 1967), 401–18; Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), chap. 5; Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 4–43, 87–128, 129–280; Marianne Wokeck, “The Flow and the Composition of German Immigration to Philadelphia, 1727–1775,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 105 (July 1981), 249–78; Audrey Lockhart, Some Aspects of Emigration from Ireland to the North American Colonies between 1660 and 1775 (New York: Arno Press, 1976); Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 128–30, 196–98, 218–19, 223–24; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 124–40. 6. Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 35, 72–84; Edwin S. Gaustad and Philip L. Barlow, New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 16; Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), chap. 2. 7. McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 118–43, 217–21; Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776, 144–66; Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 37–43; Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 150–51, 175–78; Amy Smart Martin, “Common People and



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the Local Store: Consumerism in the Rural Virginia Backcountry,” in David Harvey and Gregory Brown, eds., Common People and Their Material World: Free Men and Women in the Chesapeake, 1700–1830 (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Research Publications, 1995); Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, chap. 4. 8. McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 137, 169–88, 217– 221; Harry Roy Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Historical Geography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 19–31; Robert L. Meriwether, The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729–1765 (Kingsport, TN: Southern Publishers, 1940); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 131–66; Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 119–96; Carville Earle and Ronald Hoffman, “Staple Crops and Urban Development in the Eighteenth-Century South,” Perspectives in American History 10 (1976), 53–55; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 141–51. 9. Gerald E. Hartdagen, “The Vestries and Morals in Colonial Maryland, 1692–1776,” Maryland Historical Magazine 63 (December 1968), 360–78; David C. Skaggs and Gerald E. Hartdagen, “Sinners and Saints: Anglican Clerical Misconduct in Colonial Maryland,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 47 (June 1978), 192–93; Joan R. Gunderson, “The Search for Good Men: Recruiting Ministers in Colonial Virginia,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 48 (December 1979), 453–64; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 58–65, 143–44; Sarah M. Lemmon, “The Genesis of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese in North Carolina, 1701–1823,” North Carolina Historical Review 28 (October 1951), 426–62; S. Charles Bolton, Southern Anglicanism: The Church of England in Colonial South Carolina (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 41–61; Christopher Wilkinson to the Bishop of London, Queen Anne County, Md., May 26, 1718, Fulham Papers, II, 250–51 (microform); Wilkinson to the Bishop of London, Queen Anne County, November 20, 1724, Fulham Papers, III, 45 (microform). 10. Konstantin Dierks, “Middle-Class Formation in Eighteenth-Century North America,” in Simon Middleton and Billy G Smith, eds., Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 99–108. 11. McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 248–55, 262–76, 278–330; Abbott Lowell Cummings, The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625–1725 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Dell Upton, “The Power of Things: Recent Studies in American Vernacular Architecture,” American Quarterly 35 (1983), 262–79; Edward A. Chappell, “Housing a Nation: The Transformation of Living Standards in Early America,” in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994); Kevin M. Sweeney, “HighStyle Vernacular: Lifestyles of the Colonial Elite,” ibid.; Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As Various as Their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans (New

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York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 88–94; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), chaps. 3–5; Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 321–30, 335–38, 379–86; Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 134–84. 12. Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974); Joel Perlmann, Silvana R. Siddali, and Keith Whitescarver, “Literacy, Schooling, and Teaching among New England Women, 1730–1820,” History of Education Quarterly 37 (Summer 1997), 123–28; Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 36–39, 127–28; Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6–9, 134–37, 141–43, 179–81, 185; Leonard W. Levy, Emergence of a Free Press (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1985), 37–45; Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 34–72. 13. Francis G. Walett, ed., “The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1719–1728,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings 71 (1961), 117–18; J. William T. Youngs Jr., “Congregational Clericalism: New England Ordinations before the Great Awakening,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 31 (July 1974), 481–82; Eliphalet Adams, The Gracious Presence of Christ with the Ministers of the Gospel, a Ground of Great Consolation to Them. . . . (New London, CT, 1730), 37; Thomas Clap, The Greatness and Difficulty of the Work of the Ministry. . . . (Boston, 1732), 16; Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 155–63. 14. George Selement, “Publication and the Puritan Minister,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 37 (April 1980), 219–41; John Norton, The Orthodox Evangelist (London, 1654), 2; E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 25–26, quotations from p. 26. 15. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 111–53; C. Fitzsimmons Allison, The Rise of Moralism (New York: Seabury Press, 1966), 54–56, 116–18; Gerald Gragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 61–86; Bryan G. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 91–94, 104–05, 215–16; Holifield, Theology in America, 31–34, 57–59. 16. Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God . . . (1738), in WJE, 4:148; John White, New England’s Lamentations (Boston, 1734), 16; Holifield, Theology in America, 80–84; John Corrigan, The Prism of Piety: Catholic Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9–31; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching



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and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 148–65.; Gerald J. Goodwin, “The Myth of ‘Arminian-Calvinism’ in Eighteenth-Century New England,” NEQ 41 (June 1968), 213–37. 17. Cotton Mather, Ratio Disciplinae Fratrum Nov-Anglorum. A Faithful Account of the Discipline Professed and Practised; In The Churches of New England (Boston, 1726), 5; Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 208–18, 221; David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 168–69; Holifield, Theology in America, 57–61, 69–78, 160– 61; Cotton Mather, Reasonable Religion: The Truth of the Christian Religion, Demonstrated (Boston, 1700); Reason Satisfied and Faith Established: The Resurrection of a Glorious Jesus Demonstrated (Boston, 1712); Increase Mather, A Discourse Proving that the Christian Religion is the only True Religion (Boston, 1702); Rose Lockwood, “The Scientific Revolution in Seventeenth-Century New England,” NEQ 53 (March 1980), 78; Mason I. Lowance and David Watters, eds., “Increase Mather’s ‘New Jerusalem’: Millennialism in Late Seventeenth-Century New England,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 87 (1977), 343–408; Reiner Smolinski, “Israel Redivivus: The Eschatological Limits of Puritan Typology in New England,” NEQ 63 (September 1990), 357–95. See also E. Graham Waring, ed., Deism and Natural Religion (New York: F. Ungar Publishing, 1967). 18. James W. Schmotter, “The Irony of Clerical Professionalism: New England’s Congregational Ministers and the Great Awakening,” American Quarterly 31 (Summer 1979), 148–68; Azariah Mather, The GOSPEL-Minister Described, by the IMPORTANT DUTY of his OFFICE (New London, CT, 1725), 26. 19. Williston Walker, ed., Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1960), 313–14; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England, 1628–1686, 5 vols. (Boston: William White, 1853–1854), 5:59–63; William Hubbard, Happiness of a People in the Wisdome of Their Rulers Directing and in the Obedience of Their Brethren Attending unto What Israel Ough[t] to Do. . . (Boston, 1676), 56, 59; Edmund S. Morgan, “New England Puritanism: Another Approach,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 18 (April 1961), 241–242; Richard P. Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil & the Godly: The Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679–1749 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press), 141–42. 20. Benjamin Keach, Sion in Distress, or the Groans of the Protestant Church, 3rd ed. (Boston, 1683), 2, 101–02; Robert G. Pope, The Half-way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 274–75; Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion & Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (1944; rev. ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 168–86. 21. Increase Mather, A Narrative of the Miseries of New England. . . (London, 1688) in William Whitmore, ed., The Andros Tracts: Being a Collection of Pamphlets and Official Papers Issued during the Period between the Overthrow of the Andros Government and the Establishment of the Second Charter of Massachusetts, 6 vols. (Boston: John Wilson & Son, 1868–1874), 2:5; Sheila Williams, “The Pope-Burning

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Processions of 1679, 1680 and 1681,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (January–June 1958), 104–18; John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Dan Beaver, “Conscience and Context: The Popish Plot and the Politics of Ritual, 1678–1682,” The Historical Journal 34 (June 1991), 297–327. On the origins of Pope’s Day in the American colonies, see Francis D. Colignano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), chap. 1 and Robert Emmett Curran, Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 241–42. 22. Pope, The Half-way Covenant, 231–32; Cotton Mather, Small Offers Towards the Service of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness (Boston, 1689); idem, The Wonderful Works of God Commemorated (Boston, 1690). 23. William Warren Sweet, “The American Colonial Environment and Religious Liberty,” Church History 4 (March 1935), 43–56; Sidney E. Mead, “From Coercion to Persuasion: Another Look at the Rise of Religious Liberty and the Emergence of Denominationalism,” Church History 25 (December 1956), 317–37; Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), xv–xvi, 181–82; Cedric B. Cowing, The Great Awakening and the American Revolution: Colonial Thought in the 18th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), chap. 1; Jon Butler, “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600–1760,” The American Historical Review 84 (April 1979), 317–18; idem, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 165–77. 24. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 88; Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 98–109. 25. David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 168–69; Stout, The New England Soul, 111; Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil, & the Godly, 190–209; Devereux Jarratt, The Life of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt (1806; reprint ed., New York: Arno Press, 1969), 102; Patricia U. Bonomi and Peter R. Eisenstadt, “Church Adherence in the Eighteenth-Century British American Colonies,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 39 (April 1982), 249–53. 26. Peter Charles Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 50–51; Douglas Greenberg, “Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America,” American Journal of Legal History 26 (October 1982), 293–325; Richard M. Brown, “The American Vigilante Tradition” in Hugh D. Graham and Ted R. Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 154–226; Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 27 (January 1970), 3–6; Robert Hunter, “By His Excellency . . . A Proclamation” January 12, 1711/12, Broadside, New-York Historical Society, New York; Thomas Prince, “The Great and Solemn Obligations to Piety,” in Cotton Mather et al., eds., A Course of Sermons on Early Piety (Boston, 1721), 13; Josiah Smith, The Young Man Warn’d: or, Solomon’s Counsel to His Son (Boston, 1730), 19; Gilbert Tennent, The Espousals, or A Passionate Perswasive to the Marriage with the Lamb of God, wherein the Sinners Misery and The Redeemers Glory is Unvailed in (New York, 1735), 41.



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27. R. W. Scribner, “Ritual and Popular Religion in Catholic Germany at the Time of the Reformation,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (January 1984), 47–77; Christopher Hill, “Puritans and ‘The Dark Corners of the Land,’” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 13 (1965), 77–102; Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Beatrice Goldfarb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 131–46, 455–64; Hugh Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (London: MacMillan, 1967), 90–192; Glyn P. Jones, “Folk Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Wales,” Folk Life 7 (January 1970), 60–74; Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978), 270–86; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971); Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, chap. 1. See also Allen G. Debus and Michael T. Walton, eds., Reading the Book of Nature: The Other Side of the Scientific Revolution (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1998). 28. Frederick C. Drake, “Witchcraft in the American Colonies,” American Quarterly 20 (Winter 1968), 694–725; Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 22–27, 32–39, 47–56; Marion B. Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977); Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 67–71, 74–83. 29. James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 6. 30. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. (1978; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 1, quotation from p. 92; Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 130. This is examined in greater detail in Chapter 9. 31. Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment, 47, 137–67, 263; Raymond P. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 515–16; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 570–83; Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 83–97; David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), chap. 5.

Chapter 3

“Communion Times” Scots-Irish Conventicalism in the Middle Colonies, 1720–1740

Around the time of the Act of Union that joined Scotland to England in 1707, Rev. John Willison stood before a hushed audience at his parish in Crawford and reminded them that Scottish Presbyterianism had confronted many foes who sought to eliminate it and establish Anglican episcopacy in its place. Not the least of these enemies were the Stuart monarchs who, in their campaign to merge the kingdoms of Scotland and England, persecuted those who clung to the Kirk established by their grandfathers. In their devotion to the founding Covenants, these radical Presbyterians—the “Covenanters”—were hounded all over southern Scotland and northern Ireland, many of them tortured and slaughtered, culminating in battlefield defeats to the English army in 1666 and 1679. However, the Presbyterianism, to which Willison and Scotland adhered, retained much of the Covenanters’ militancy and zeal, even if it had been steadily compromised by English cultural imperialism and political influence leading to national union in 1707. Others before him recalled in gory detail the horrors suffered by these martyrs, but Willison preferred to conclude simply that the current generation lacked the fortitude of its immediate ancestors. “These are precious seasons,” he admonished in reference to the cycle of revivals centering around communion, “which our fathers sometimes would have prized at a high rate, when they were put to seek their spiritual bread with the peril of their lives, because of the sword in the wilderness.” The more radical Ebenezer Erskine (1680–1754) raised a battle cry against the widespread indifference, atheism, superstition, and hypocrisy that he argued had forced the spirit of God to abandon Scotland. What was required was a proper revival of religion through “the preaching of the word, and displaying the glory of Christ therein . . . a simple proposal of the gospel, an opening of the mysteries of the kingdom.”1 65

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The radical Celtic Presbyterian revivals of the seventeenth century constitute a significant stream that fed into the First Great Awakening, particularly in its North American theater. Covenanters from Scotland and Northern Ireland carried their unique sort of covenantal revivalism to New England and the Middle Colonies of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which later sundered the American Presbyterian churches as the Awakening reached an apex in 1741. It was along the Raritan Valley that the astonishing careers of William Tennent, Sr. and his sons were made. Consequently, a survey of the origins of revivalism in Scotland and Ireland is warranted, as well as its transmission to the American colonies that imparted to the Awakening an unprecedented— and controversial—enthusiasm.  “FIERY SPIRITED MEN” Ripples of Martin Luther’s reform movement lapped over Scotland soon after its inception in 1517. Scotland’s Parliament moved quickly to prevent Lutheranism’s influence, passing laws criminalizing the printing and possession of Luther’s books or otherwise promulgating Lutheran ideas. King James V (r.1513–1542), though he recognized the need for Catholic reform, read reports of the Peasants’ Revolt in the German principalities in the 1520s, and resolved not to allow such anarchic radicalism to destabilize his country. He silently encouraged dissent and admonished bishops that if they resisted his program of moderate reform, they would be sent to England to be dealt with by his uncle, King Henry VIII, whose impatience with the clergy had become legendary. An example was made of Patrick Hamilton (1503–1528), a priest from St. Andrews, who composed a number of theological treatises supporting Lutheran theology, and for which he was arrested, convicted of heresy, and burned at the stake. The death of James V in 1542 made his infant daughter, Mary, Queen of Scotland under the regency of Mary of Guise. The Catholic factions moved quickly to tie Scotland diplomatically to France, while the Protestants urged reconciliation with England in order to complete the process of reformation. The reformers were split into two competing factions: a moderate wing that took the gradualist approach and a radical wing under the leadership of the exiled John Knox (1505–1572), who had studied under John Calvin in Geneva. Upon Knox’s return to Scotland in 1559, Mary of Guise barred anyone from acting in a ministerial capacity without a bishop’s authority, which the radical reformers ignored. With French interference looming on the horizon, Knox negotiated with the English government to secure its support, and in



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October 1559, the lords, sympathetic to Knox, suspended their allegiance to the regent queen.2 After Mary’s death in June 1560, Knox’s party, the Lords of the Congregation, drew up The Confession of Faith Professed and Believed by the Protestants within the Realm of Scotland abolishing Roman Catholic doctrine, mandating the transfer of church monies from the state to the support of the ministry, promoting basic education, and establishing relief for the poor, which the Scottish Parliament ratified in August. Knox and three colleagues then drew up the First Booke of Discipline, which vested authority in consular bodies—presbyteries—rather than individual higher clergymen. When Mary Queen of Scots arrived from France to assume her crown, she pledged to leave the Protestant reforms unaltered, and maintained the ban on masses even as she privately practiced her Catholic faith. Knox, from his pulpit and in personal debates with Mary, stubbornly defied her authority and railed against what he perceived as her religious hypocrisy. Dogged by Knox and his allies, as well as by personal scandals, Mary abdicated in 1567 in favor of her young son, the future James VI of Scotland and James I of England, and the acts of 1560 were confirmed, establishing Presbyterianism as the official religion. King James VI, upon his ascension to the English throne in 1603, nevertheless upheld the validity of Episcopal Church governance in a preliminary effort to merge the churches of England and Scotland together. Initially, he yielded to the Moderates and left Presbyterianism undisturbed, but later took remote control of the General Assembly by promoting the election of commissioners obliged to him through patronage networks. For several years, he was successful in managing Church affairs, but in 1600 his handpicked commissioners refused to rubber-stamp his scheme to subordinate the Church to the Assembly. He then resorted to the reestablishment of episcopacy, which inflamed Presbyterian radicalism.3 While generating some degree of confusion and protest among the people, the reintroduction of bishops sharing authority with the presbyteries went relatively smoothly, since most of the nobles supported episcopacy. Exhausted by conflict and instability, most Presbyterians uneasily accepted the new system while a minority maintained their resistance. James exacerbated matters by punishing stubborn clergy and forcing the creation of estates for the bishops. Those “fiery spirited men,” who resisted James’s effort to merge the Church of England with the Kirk of Scotland, sparked a popular revival movement that—despite its political nature—was a direct forerunner of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. Radical clergy began holding outdoor “conventicles” throughout southern and western Scotland, as well as Ulster, Ireland, attracting throngs of emotional audiences composed of crofters, laborers, and artisans. The culmination of their efforts was a celebrated revival at Shotts in western Scotland in 1630, lasting several days.

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Nevertheless, the constant undercurrent of resistance and criticism within the clergy and the laity forestalled anything more than an uncomfortable truce with episcopacy, and sustained internal debates over the issues of church government and its relationship to secular authority. When King Charles I and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, attempted to introduce the Book of Common Prayer into Church practice in 1634, a firestorm of popular and clerical protest led to the total rejection of episcopacy. The Confession of Faith of the Church of Scotland, better known as the National Covenant, appeared in 1638 and was signed by over 300,000 Scots the following year.4 Events in Ulster take on a greater importance at this juncture, for those Presbyterian clergy opposed to the presence of Anglican bishops in Scotland, as well as the “Prescopalian” church government there, established new ministries when they resigned or were expelled from their pulpits in the 1610s. A trickle of radical Presbyterian clergy from Scotland began to lay the foundation for revivals identical to those then going on in Scotland. The Six-MileWater Revival of 1625 followed a standard pattern for the Ulster and Scottish revivals, which became an annual tradition in southern Scotland: marathon preaching, heady emotionalism, charismatic excesses, and scorn from Anglican and liberal Presbyterian observers. Ulster threatened to explode with radical Presbyterianism, and the Anglican authorities struggled in vain to quench the fires of religious zealotry before they lost control. Relations between Scotland and England worsened during the English Civil War (1642–1645) on account of Oliver Cromwell’s high-handed treatment, and a faction of radical Presbyterians emerged and signed their own “Solemn League and Covenant” in 1643. These “Covenanters” offered the future Charles II their support in exchange for his subscription to the National Covenant in 1651, at which point he was crowned “King of the Scots” at Scone. Such actions doomed Cromwell’s efforts to unite England and Scotland, even as religiopolitical fractures continued to compromise the Scottish Kirk. Irish émigrés living in southern Scotland began returning to Ulster in the mid-1650s, where Presbyterianism experienced steady growth and stability until the Restoration in 1660.5 Charles II expressed a desire to heal the divisions in the Scottish Church, but only as a delaying tactic while he consolidated his authority in England. It was well known that he advocated episcopacy, and anxiety among the radical “Covenanters” ran high. He shepherded an act through Parliament that criminalized the making of leagues without royal permission, which precluded any renewal of the Solemn League and Covenant. This was followed by the annulment of his subscription to the National Covenant and an attempt to restore episcopacy in Scotland by revoking all legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament between 1640 and 1660. The outraged Covenanters rebelled, left the established church, and resorted to “conventicles” in the countryside, with their ministers preaching in the open air, much as in the



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revivals earlier in the century. Laws banning conventicles and to enforce religious conformity were passed over Ulster in 1664, 1665, and 1674 but —only superficially enforced by sympathetic Anglo-Irish elites and passively resisted by the Scots-Irish. Armed rebellion followed in the south and southwest of Scotland between the Covenanters and Anglo-Scottish forces between 1661 and 1688, in which Covenanter bands were usually routed while suspected Covenanters were flushed out and executed. Compounding an atmosphere of underlying religious mistrust, there developed a zone of ethnic and religious hatred and intermittent partisan warfare along the Anglo-Scottish border, the inhabitants of which perceived the world in sharply dualistic terms defined by feuding and bloodshed.6 The publication of John Locke’s Letters Concerning Toleration in 1689, along with the English Parliament’s passing the Act of Toleration, fostered schismatic movements, and tensions between the various religious factions continued to build underneath the seemingly placid surface of the first several years of the Revolution Settlement. When the 1707 Act of Union formally united the kingdoms of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, outrage and violence erupted throughout Scotland, where the clergy had to swear an Oath of Abjuration in 1712 compelling them to “support, maintain, and defend the [Hanoverian] succession of the Crown.” Approximately one-third refused to take the Oath, and a flood of petitions inundated the Scottish Parliament protesting the Union, coming mostly from the southwest, and several presbyteries accused the commission of “national perjury” for endorsing the Union with a nation that had broken the covenants. There was significantly less concern in Ulster, where Presbyterians had enjoyed much freer hands and the Union was seen as furthering the campaign of eradicating Catholicism in Ireland. The Act of Union did recognize the coexistence of the separate and independent Churches of England and Scotland, the former catholic and Arminian, the latter Calvinistic and Presbyterian. Disputes soon arose between the radical, moderate, and liberal factions within Scottish Presbyterianism over Arminian and Calvinist theology. An anonymously authored work, The Marrow of Modern Divinity (1645), became very popular among the radicals, and elements of both factions triggered a secessionist movement that resulted in the establishment of a “Secession Church” in 1737.7 The Covenanters’ travails and sacrifices long lingered in the collective memory of both Scottish and American Presbyterians. The later beneficiaries of this legacy reveled in recounting the dedication of their predecessors and disparagingly chided themselves that they could not measure up to these giants and martyrs of their history. One such American legatee in early nineteenthcentury Kentucky, James McGready, would describe, in sometimes gruesome detail, “the sufferings of the people of God in Scotland” under the late Stuart rule. He would vividly paint scenes of secret conventicles “in thickets

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and desert places,” the harassment cruelly meted out to them by chuckling dragoons, the dank, soul-crushing prisons, and tortures nearly too horrifying to describe, of hapless victims who endured having “their thumbs screwed off—their legs put into iron boots and wedged until the bone was shivered to pieces.” Consecrated through repetition and enlargement, the trials and tribulations of the Covenanters became enshrined within an ennobled, sanctified Presbyterian past. The “communion times,” being highlights in the violent struggle for religious liberty and a testament to valiant Covenanter fortitude, were lovingly enfolded in a revered Presbyterian history.8 Eventually, Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians were able to celebrate their sacramental seasons unmolested in the eighteenth century. The legacy of the Covenanters had been vindicated in the massive annual outdoor conventicles marked by marathon extemporaneous preaching and excessive popular enthusiasm. One Anglican critic sneeringly commented upon the “strange Pomp” of the proceedings and “long Harangue[s] . . . supplied from the stores of the Extemporary Spirit” indicative of the sacramental seasons. The eighteenth-century historian of Scottish Presbyterianism, Robert Wodrow, chronicled “those fair-days of the Gospel” in Analecta: Or, Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences, wherein he noted at Earlston in 1688 “there were one thousand Communicants, several thousands hearing, and twelve Ministers.” According to Wodrow, one could expect “vast confluences” of the faithful willing to travel great distances to attend throughout every communion season. Apologists insisted that these were not riotous festivals, but devoutly solemn occasions inundated with the spirit of God, “the great Master of Assemblies,” according to George Wemyss. Even as Central European Pietism was making its way across the Atlantic in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, so also was radical Scots-Irish Presbyterianism.9 “SOUNDNESS OF PRINCIPLE, CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE, AND PIOUS PRACTICE” Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen could hardly believe it. Two fellow Dutch Reformed clergymen serving the churches of the Raritan Valley of New Jersey published a formal complaint (Klagte) against him for excessive zealotry and overweening strictness in judging applicants for church membership, the fitness of members to take communion, and even the converted status of his colleagues. His actions appeared to the plaintiffs to be random and often unjustified, as when he denied communion to Jan Teuniss’s wife without reason, yet selected a widely suspected fornicator and adulterer to be a deacon of his church. He seemed to hold a certain Claas Haagman in



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unwarranted contempt and refused to administer any sacraments to those related to him by blood or marriage, and had said that he would only administer the sacraments at his pleasure. He unaccountably favored a close friend, Jacobus Schuurman, who was not a church member, with access to the Lord’s Table, and was regularly seen publicly “embracing and kissing” him, clearly implying a homosexual relationship. The complaint, submitted to the ruling Classis of Amsterdam in late 1725 by Dominie Henricus Boel and his brother Tobias Boel, whom Frelinghuysen apparently discountenanced as “natural ministers” rather than properly orthodox, contained over two dozen such complaints, of which the Classis accounted seventeen as actionable.10 Informing Frelinghuysen of the Klagte the following year, the Classis warned him that he was accused of sowing “great divisions and estrangements in your churches” and that he was developing a reputation for “a very dictatorial spirit” consistent with “those, who under pretext of better church discipline, have separated themselves from the communion of the Reformed Church.” Therefore, he was advised, “do all in your power to prevent further estrangements; and to do whatever tends to peace and edification,” and avoid “zeal without knowledge.” Frelinghuysen and two of his supporters similarly implicated in the Klagte—Dominies Bernardus Freeman and Cornelius van Sandvoort—were to send formal answers to the charges, at which point a judgment would be rendered. Frelinghuysen signaled a seeming disrespect for the Classis by taking a full year to compose a response, in which he accused the Boels and his other enemies of mendacity, and point by point refuted the seventeen charges with lengthy explanations. Anyone who had a problem with his holding Christians to high standards of piety and morality, he wrote, were godless wretches ill-suited for the ministry. He was also clear that he never showed an inappropriate affection for Shuurman or anyone else under his care, dismissing what was clearly an implicit charge of apparent homosexuality. The Classis was emphatically dissatisfied with his answers, which they determined to be “unseemly, bitter, vulgar” and “injurious.” It rebuked him for excommunicating church members for no greater crime than opposing his ministry, and without submitting the paperwork to the Classis for confirmation. However, as New Jersey was a British colony and could not enforce a ruling from a foreign nation’s ecclesiastical council, the Classis could not render a final judgment other than to exhort Frelinghuysen to humility, circumspection, and obedience, lest he be further suspected of being a schismatic. This did not settle the disputes, and the experience precipitated the first of a series of mental breakdowns for Frelinghuysen, from which he would emerge more determined than ever to enforce theological and behavioral strictness for himself and those to whom he ministered.11 Unlike New England’s first tentative revivals prior to the 1720s, those in New Jersey and Pennsylvania emerged from the transplantation and

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merging of the religious cultures of central European Pietism, represented by Frelinghuysen, and Lowland Scottish/Scots-Irish revivalism as epitomized by the Tennent family. Frelinghuysen was a stern and demanding man, who either inspired one to a reinvigorated faith and discipline or angered and offended with his precisionism and perfectionism. He concluded that the bulk of the Reformed ministry in New Jersey were unregenerate “hirelings” supported by a Classis of Amsterdam concerned more with its income than with its spiritual mission, and he supported the efforts of other pietistically inclined dominies to declare themselves independent of the Classis’ authority. He eventually built up a support base among the culturally conservative Dutch and immigrant farmers and artisans of the Raritan Valley, buttressed in his efforts by Gilbert Tennent (1703–1764), who arrived in New Brunswick as that town’s new Presbyterian minister in 1726. Tennent soon impressed Frelinghuysen with his devotion and became his colleague and protégé. Gilbert’s father William Sr. and his brothers William Jr. and John soon drifted into Frelinghuysen’s orbit, imbibing Dutch Pietism from its single greatest exponent in the colonies. As Gilbert related to the evangelical chronicler Thomas Prince in 1744: “When I came there [New Brunswick] . . . I had the pleasure of seeing much of the fruits of [Frelinghuysen’s] Ministry; divers of his Hearers with whom I had the Opportunity of conversing, appeared to be converted Persons, by their Soundness of Principle, Christian Experience, and Pious Practice.” Frelinghuysen’s success was by no means unqualified, but his diatribes against the wealthy and higher ecclesiastical authority won over many who had originally opposed him. What began as a protest against clerical materialism was energized by subsurface radical and millenarian Pietism, and soon became an evangelical revival that launched and essentially defined the First Great Awakening.12 Prior to its official consolidation in 1702, New Jersey was composed of the colonies of East Jersey and West Jersey, the former initially part of the Dutch colony of New Netherland before the English conquest in 1664 and populated increasingly by Puritan migrants from Long Island and southern New England, the latter by the Dutch after their conquest of New Sweden in 1655. Despite their effective merger as a consequence of the creation of the Dominion of New England in 1686, East Jersey hewed closely to a Calvinist New England identity, while West Jersey maintained a distinctly Dutch and Reformed identity. However, an influx of Scots and Scots-Irish immigrants to East Jersey in the late 1600s, and again in the early 1720s, many of them Quakers, diversified eastern New Jersey’s religious landscape. A history of animosity between the Scottish and English immigrants and their immediate descendants permeated the colony’s politics, exacerbated by land disputes between English settlers and East Jersey’s Scottish proprietors. This played out significantly in the Keithian Schism, which



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erupted between English and Scottish Friends over a variety of theological arguments that also divided Friends in Britain at the same time, and precipitated a minor exodus of Scottish East Jersey Quakers to the Anglican and Presbyterian churches.13 According to Ned C. Landsman, a steady drift toward Presbyterianism among eastern New Jersey’s Scottish settlers was largely an expression of nationalism, with deep roots in the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century. In Scotland, Presbyterianism maintained its greatest strength and influence over the southernmost shires that had so long been the scene of violent contests with the English, and constituted the wellspring of dozens of historical ballads that were lovingly preserved by the Scottish Americans. Conversely, Anglicanism, English Calvinism, and Quakerism thrived in the more remote Lowland shires little touched or affected by border bloodshed. Nevertheless, Scottish Presbyterianism was characteristically nationalist in nature. It was just this sort of militant Covenanter Presbyterianism that was transplanted to northern Ireland in the mid-1600s, and then carried to the Middle Colonies a little over fifty years later. Consequently, when the East Jersey Scots found themselves confronting ethnic antagonism, they opted to cleave to their national church. It is in this contentious, though fertile, soil that the Tennent family gained notoriety.14 William Tennent, Sr. (1673–1746) grew up in Linlithgowshire, hard by Edinburgh in southern Scotland, and studied theology at the University of Edinburgh. Upon completing his degree in 1695, he received his licensure for the ministry from the Church of Scotland shortly thereafter and emigrated to County Down in Ulster, where he was licensed by the Presbyterian Church of Ireland in 1702. It was during the spring and summer of that year that he courted and married Katherine Kennedy, whose father Gilbert had been a Church of Scotland minister expelled from his pulpit for nonconformity in 1662, and was famous for his outdoor conventicles. William and Katherine welcomed their first child, Gilbert, in February 1703. The established Anglican Church of Ireland ordained Tennent as a deacon in 1704 and two years later the Bishop of Down, Edward Smith, promoted Tennent to presbyter. The apparent repudiation of his dissenting roots has been explained as the product of family tensions with a branch of the Tennent family entwined with the Anglican gentry in Ulster, but it is clear that his ties to the established Church were at best tenuous and uncomfortable. He never managed to gain his own parish in the time he lived in Ulster, and by 1718 he had resolved to reaffirm his sympathies with the dissenting Presbyterianism that had originally shaped him in Scotland, such reaffirmation taking the form of a list of complaints based on various theological and liturgical differences that also serves as an explanation for his decision to move his family to Pennsylvania in September 1718. His wife’s cousin, James Logan, a native of County

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Armagh in Ulster and a member of Pennsylvania’s provincial council, had written to Tennent of the tolerant religious climate, which inspired him to undertake the move across the Atlantic.15 He promptly applied to the Presbyterian Synod of Philadelphia for membership, which required an explanation of his reasons for leaving the Anglican Church that he boiled down to his rejection of church “government by Bishops, Archbishops, Deans, Archdeacons, Canons, Chapters, Chancellors, [and] Vicars” as “wholly antiscriptural.” Finally, he reaffirmed his Calvinism by castigating Anglicanism’s Arminian theology. The Synod was skeptical, but following a lengthy debate granted him membership only after he was given “a serious exhortation to continue steadfast in his now holy profession.” In November, Tennent accepted an offer from the parish of East Chester, New York, which had previously been ministered intermittently by John Bartow, a missionary from the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, who refused to surrender his influence on the congregation, which was divided between those who supported Tennent’s hire and those who were inclined toward Bartow’s ministry. Tennent asked Logan to intervene on his behalf with Gov. Robert Hunter, who was known to be suspicious of Anglican Church power in the colony; but he had just been recalled and replaced by William Burnet, a fervent supporter of the SPG and a natural ally of the colonial assembly’s High Church faction. Logan could make no headway with Burnet, and Tennent opted to leave East Chester in 1720 rather than exacerbate the parish’s divisions, moving his family to Bedford to assume a pastorate there, though his tenure proved just as controversial and short lived.16 In 1722, Tennent was considered as a candidate for rector of Yale College, but when the College instead chose Elisha Williams in 1726 Tennent moved once more, this time to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he had been invited to assume the pastorate at Neshaminy. He began to think that his difficulties in securing a stable pastorate stemmed from the Synod’s wandering away from true apostolic Christianity, which he believed was rooted in the same emotional center that Pietism rediscovered. Recalling his formative years in Ireland, and doubtless inspired by his father-in-law’s example, Tennent set about creating an informal training center for evangelically inclined Presbyterian clergy and laymen housed in a small log cabin on his property. Measuring approximately 400 square feet, sneering critics dubbed it the “Log College,” which Tennent adopted as an honorific. He began by training Gilbert and his younger sons William, Jr., and John, along with a few other “students,” and in his seminars indicted the Presbyterian Church in America as one infected with worldliness and an emphasis upon style over substance, of matter over the spirit, of intellectualism over emotionalism. Here marks the emergence of evangelical—“New Side” as opposed to the established



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“Old Side”—Presbyterianism and the beginnings of a schismatic dynamic so common to the Awakening.17 The communion season was a time of spiritual renewal, of self-examination, and reflection upon Christ’s redemption of the elect. William Tennent, following the template of the Scottish holy fairs, emphasized the believer’s need for preparation prior to approaching the Lord’s Table. Initially, the communicant must ponder his or her own sins and just what s/he truly believes. Good works were central to Tennent’s understanding of the Christian faith, but only if they are grounded in correct belief, which must be centered on meditation upon “what God hath done for us in Christ Jesus; how God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses to them.” Although Tennent regarded the new birth experience as fundamental to his conception of regeneration, the logical contemplation of how God refurbishes the individual was a crucial element of the experience. The failure to observe traditional communion seasons was, to Tennent’s mind, the fault of the ministers and not of the laypeople, too many of whom alike approached the Lord’s Table “only [out] of a sense of duty or official obligation.” Those ministers who did so “may come to the Lord’s Supper . . . [and] celebrate it as a minister, and yet not eat it as a sincere Christian.”18 Gilbert was certainly influenced by his father’s sharp theological opinions and professional difficulties, and—after a brief flirtation with medicine— enthusiastically joined him in setting up the Log College and in completing his younger brothers’ ministerial education. He had received his M.A. in 1725 from Yale College without the ordinarily prerequisite bachelor’s degree, having apparently been educated at the undergraduate level by his father and allowed to enter Yale by a special dispensation. He shared with his father an unwavering conviction that too many professed Christians only accepted Christ with the mind instead of the heart, and that those who partook of communion did so more out of a sense of obligation or as a means toward some temporal end than for the spiritual benefit, and far too many who thought themselves converted were in fact unconverted. Whether through Satan’s trickery, self-delusion, or—more distressingly—willful mendacity, the ranks of God’s people had been infiltrated by goats in sheep’s clothing infected with one variety or another of unbelief. This assurance of the prevalence of unbelief may have led to his abrupt decision in late 1726 not to honor a commitment made to minister the Presbyterian Church in New Castle, Delaware, and to accept an offer from the one in New Brunswick, New Jersey, instead. The latter was an unchartered town on the south bank of the Raritan River by the ferry crossing, and the prospect of tending the souls of a more varied group of English, Dutch, and Scots-Irish colonists may have been more attractive to Gilbert. New Castle filed a protest with the Synod of Philadelphia, and with Gilbert busy in New Brunswick it fell to his father to

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represent him at the hearing. The Synod accepted William’s explanation of his son’s abrupt decision, but reproved the younger Tennent in abstentia to exercise “more caution and deliberation in his future proceedings.”19 Frelinghuysen was apparently wary of Tennent when the young man arrived to assume his pastorate in 1727, as the newcomer appeared to be aligned with members of his congregation who filed the complaint against him. But Tennent sent Frelinghuysen a “kind Letter” easing his mind as well as “excit[ing] me to greater Earnestness in ministerial Labours.” Tennent had heard about Frelinhuysen’s efforts among congregations that were variously resistant to his stringency, and so braced himself to face similar resistance. Somewhat contrarily, he seemed incapable of rousing anything out of his congregation, neither pious fervor nor discomfiture, and this precipitated a minor spiritual crisis that consigned him to what he thought might well be his deathbed in 1728: “I was then exceedingly grieved that I had done so little for God, and was very desirous to live one half Year more if it was his Will, that I might stand upon the Stage of the World as it were, and plead more faithfully for his Cause,” he prayed. Granted what he was sure was a reprieve, he chose to begin by working more closely with Frelinghuysen. They guest preached in each others’ churches and led joint services in which Frelinghuysen preached in Dutch and Tennent in English. Frelinghuysen patronized Tennent’s church by soliciting donations among his parishioners toward its support, and in time Tennent became Frelinghuysen’s accepted substitute whenever the dominie was ill or had to be away on other business.20 Milton J. Coalter, Jr., in his biography of Gilbert Tennent, speculates that his association with Frelinghuysen, who had become infamous for his “untempered, combative candor,” enhanced a similarly aggressive edge to Tennent’s professional demeanor and personality; but it is more likely that these traits were inherited from his father, and that Gilbert’s friendship with and professional development under Frelinghuysen simply encouraged the young minister’s doctrinal strictness and impatience with what he perceived to be folly or opposition. What is abundantly clear is that they shared a Pietistic orientation. Both agreed that the process of conversion was a tumultuous one involving a spiritual rebirth that could be every bit as traumatic and exhausting as physical birth. Tennent certainly shared with Frelinghuysen the story of how shortly after his brothers John and William, Jr. moved into Gilbert’s house, in New Brunswick to assume their ministries in 1728, William fell gravely ill. John also declined somewhat, but was more distressed spiritually, and spent a week with Gilbert struggling with the weight of his sins. Gilbert offered “encouraging supports” from the Scriptures, but after some time locked in self-seclusion in his room deep in prayer, John collapsed into unconsciousness and seemed to be at death’s door, but the next morning he emerged elated with “a great alteration in his countenance,” having been



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assured by Christ that “he would give me a Crumb” of mercy. William, however, had fallen into a coma that lasted several days. The family, presuming that he was about to die, called in a physician when they thought that he had indeed passed away, but the doctor detected the faintest signs of life that the family rejected as a misperception. He had certainly died, they insisted—he was no longer breathing and had gone pale as a sheet. The doctor instructed the Tennents to put off funeral arrangements until he could attempt to revive John, and they were offended by the doctor’s insistence upon working on what obviously appeared to be a corpse, but when drops of an elixir were applied to his patient’s tongue William suddenly awoke, gasped, and then fell back into a brief unconsciousness. He later awoke on his own and, while suffering from a temporary amnesia, was nursed back to health by Gilbert and their sister. William recounted an incredible spiritual journey equivalent to a modern near-death experience, in which an angel conducted him to an assembly “of happy beings surrounding the inexpressible glory,” and with whom he wished to remain. The angel informed him that it was not his time and that he had to return to the realm of the living, at which point he awoke completely transformed by this vertical apocalyptic experience. His health was somewhat shattered thereafter, as he oftentimes could not exert himself physically for more than an hour or so, and would become completely exhausted after an impassioned sermon, and had to be supported by his brothers.21 Inspired by William’s and John’s experiences and by Frelinghuysen’s influence, Gilbert oversaw a revival at his church later that year, where the congregation was “generally affected about the State of their Souls,” and after a particularly effective sermon, “they fell upon their Knees . . . in order to pray to God for pardoning Mercy: Many went Home from that Sermon; and then the general Inquiry was, what shall I do to be saved?” Over the next four years, Gilbert and his brothers, along with Frelinghuysen, went on to foster other revivals in New Jersey, and an especially impressive one on Staten Island that began in the midst of Gilbert’s sermon on Amos 6:1, in which “the SPIRIT of GOD was suddenly poured down upon the Assembly” and members of the congregation began fervently crying out “under the Impressions of Terror and Love.” The Tennents did not have long to celebrate their evangelical successes, however, as in early 1732 John’s health precipitously declined, and he died in April of that year. His loss was considered to have been the greater, for the strength of his preaching abilities and the emotional fervor he was able to elicit from his audiences had begun to collect the patina of legend. William Jr. disapproved of vocal emotional outbursts during church services, though he did believe that the excitement of emotions among members of an audience was a good thing, but he assumed his brother’s pastorate at Freehold and maintained the revival there. He became more ascetic after his brother’s death, and given to long periods of prayerful meditation, seeking ecstatic

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visionary experiences in solitary jaunts into the woods. One such episode happened while he was thinking about Christ’s death, during which “his views of glory, and the infinite majesty of Jehovah, were so inexpressibly great as entirely to overwhelm him, and he fell, almost lifeless, to the ground.” The elders of his church went looking for him, and carried him, weakened and near delirious, to his church, where he delivered “the most affecting and pathetic address that the congregation had ever received from him.”22 “POOR BABES LIKE NOT DRY BREASTS” Samuel Blair, recently arrived at New Londonderry, Pennsylvania, in 1739, following his graduation from the Log College, joined a Scots-Irish community that zealously maintained its ethnic and religious identity. The very naming of the village, after the city of the same name in Ulster, indicated its essentially conservative nature. The population carried in their hearts and minds the history of the Covenanter cause and a militant resistance to cultural Anglicization, then reaching an apex of influence throughout the American colonies. Blair, himself an Ulster native, reverenced the memory of his religious forebears and—when he answered a call to minister the Presbyterian church at nearby Fagg’s Manor—he expected to face a congregation steeped in the same stew of zealous piety. Instead, he found that the “Nature and Necessity of the New Birth was little known or thought of,” and “in publick Companies, especially at Weddings, a vain and frothy Lightness was apparent in the Deportment of many Professors: and in some Places very extravagant Follies, as Horse-running, Fiddling and Dancing.” They might have resisted Anglicization in terms of identity, but the prosperous among them had eagerly embraced the ongoing consumer revolution that treasured “the Baubles of Britain.” In part, to remedy this situation, Blair began his own evangelical academy modeled on his alma mater.23 While away in the spring of 1740 to confer with ministers in the New Brunswick Presbytery, Blair had arranged for “a neighbouring Minister who seemed to be earnest for the Awakening” to serve Fagg’s Manor in his absence, and this unknown itinerant preached a sermon that deeply affected the congregation. Informed of these hopeful signs upon his return, Blair embarked on a rejuvenated campaign of impassioned sermonizing in the late spring and summer of 1740 that was a true revival. “Our Sabbath Assemblies soon became vastly large,” he exulted, where members of the audience “would be overcome and fainting; others deeply sobbing, . . . others crying in a most dolorous Manner.” Blair had learned from the Tennents the great value of extreme emotion, but he had also learned to distrust it somewhat. At the very least, loud outbursts made it difficult for others to hear his voice, and



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so he “advis’d People to endeavor to moderate and bound their Passions, but not so as to resist or stifle their Convictions.” This would explain his apparent tolerance for “some strange unusual bodily Motions” that overcame the more affected members of Blair’s audiences, but he continued to admonish his parishioners against thinking that true faith came through “extraordinary Ways, by Visions, Dreams, or immediate Inspirations.”24 Blair was fascinated by the physical manifestations of the newly converted and the spiritually revived, and seemed to be confused as to his thinking about them. At times, he would declare his conviction that in most cases “the Effects of their Soul Exercise upon their Bodies . . . were purely imaginary,” and that such people were merely “pleasing themselves just with an imaginary Conversion of their own Making.” At other times, however, he admitted that “a Quivering . . . or a Faintness” overwhelming members of his audiences must be indicative of true conversion, which he would judge by compelling those converts to give “a pretty rational Account” of their progress toward salvation. Reflecting on the Fagg’s Manor revival in 1744, both in his own account and in letters to Thomas Prince reprinted in The Christian History, he admitted that many of his converts had fallen back into their sinful and impious ways, but reminded his readers that there were just as many incidences of genuine conversion. As proof, Blair offered several accounts of individual converts who serve as luminous examples of enlivened spirituality and true piety. The failures he ascribed to his own shortcomings, but he also noted that most of his fellow clergy were even more gravely lacking in ministerial ardor and perseverance, either because of a lack of spiritual gifts or because of an outright opposition to the Awakening. For Gilbert Tennent, the problem was even graver than Blair suspected.25 Gilbert Tennent diagnosed the affliction that weakened the Christian ministry in a scathing sermon, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry (1740), in which he damned all antirevivalist clergy as “Pharisee-Teachers,” “hypocritical Varlets,” “Swarms of Locusts,” and—in a particularly acerbic bit of race-baiting—“moral Negroes.” In what was supposed to be the dedication of a new church in Nottingham, Pennsylvania, Tennent advised the congregation that, in their search for a minister, they carefully screen their candidates for signs that they were motivated by worldly concerns and material desires. This, he assured them, animated the bulk of the region’s ministers, and that therefore they were not actually converted to true Christianity. It hardly needed reinforcement that unconverted ministers who gave communion to the unwitting cast not only themselves into hell, but those hapless communicants as well, and so with the stakes so high, the people have an obligation to seek out truly “Godly Persons” to be their spiritual guides. Unconverted ministers, he reminded his audience, are like nonlactating women presuming to feed infants: “Poor Babes like not dry Breasts.”26

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Tennent’s prescription for what true Christian laypeople should do when pastored by the unconverted was positively revolutionary. Proper gospel ministers should, like his father, establish evangelical academies like the Log College to produce more honestly converted ministers. These seminaries would supply godly clergy to places most in need of them, and pious believers must finance and sustain all such “Private Schools of the Prophets.” Next, Tennent propounded the right—nay, the obligation—of congregants to travel any distances necessary to attend to those ministers, whether established or itinerant, who would best nurture their faith and souls. Such thinking could only have come from a confluence of the Lockean and eighteenth-century market-oriented environment of British America. Tennent posited the existence of a religious marketplace, where the value of the spiritual goods on offer was judged jointly by a minister’s colleagues and by the throngs of Christian consumers seeking good counsel. False or unconverted ministers, Tennent averred, would be driven from the field, leaving only the truly converted clerics to guide the faithful faithfully. “If the Ministry of natural [unconverted] Men be as it has been represented,” Tennent declared, “Then it is both lawful and expedient to go from them to hear Godly Persons.” Revivalist clergy routinely employed the analogy of wet and dry breasts to distinguish converted from unconverted ministers. The new convert especially, they said, was as delicate and helpless as an infant, and the demands of maintaining collective spiritual wellbeing meant that there can be no balking at crossing the “Parish-line.” Thus, Tennent defended not just the right of ministerial itinerancy, but also—and most controversially—the right, again the obligation, of congregants to attend another church if they doubted their pastor’s orthodoxy or—worse still—his very conversion. Tennent heavily implied that opposition to the awakenings betrayed a lack of conversion, and thus The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry “was like a dry wind to a smoldering fire.”27 Even though the Tennents’ theology had much in common with English Puritanism, the East Jersey awakenings they sparked were firmly grounded in Scottish and Scots-Irish revivalism, as epitomized in their interpretation of the conversion experience. Scottish Presbyterian revivalism considered the New Birth a lengthy, often lifelong, process closely monitored and guided by a minister. The Tennents, wary of the idea of sudden conversion, noted that the initial groundswell of conversions at Freehold did not culminate for several years after they started in the late 1720s. They were deeply skeptical of hyperemotional conversions that did not involve an understanding of what conversion truly meant, and thus they followed a method of first preaching “conviction and conversion” sermons intended to force listeners to comprehend their sinfulness and their total inability to earn salvation. They would then shift their emphasis to “laying open the way of recovery,” but only when



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satisfied that would-be converts had reached an understanding of their true spiritual condition and the necessity of regeneration. Converts nevertheless faced months of doctrinal instruction and probing interrogations about their experiences of conversion. Gilbert Tennent explained that he routinely visited parishioners in their homes, “examining them one by one as to their experiences, and telling natural people the dangers of their state . . . and those that were convinced, to seek Jesus.”28  Thus the First Great Awakening earnestly began in New Jersey as a direct result of the theology of Pietism, translated through the prism of William Tennent Sr.’s absorption of the Ulster Scots’ revivalist “sacramental seasons,” and filtered through the association of Gilbert Tennent and Theodorus Frelinghuysen. The overwhelmingly Presbyterian colonists, many of them having immigrated from Northern Ireland and southern Scotland and others whose parents could fondly recall the pious festivities of the “communion times,” readily adopted their transplantation to New Jersey. Earlier in the 1700s, Francis Mackemie could only with great difficulty establish a presbytery from among the scattered churches along the Raritan and Delaware valleys, but by the early 1730s the introduction of sacramental seasons afforded the Scots-Irish settlers the opportunity to define themselves in a colonial context marked by ethnic, racial, and religious diversity. At a point when the Synod of Philadelphia had achieved stability and respectability as a dominant presence in the Middle Colonies, the increasingly harsh critiques of the Tennents soon put the Presbyterian Church at odds with these evangelical heirs to the Covenanters.29 The middle colony revivals of the latter 1720s and 1730s mark the beginning of the First Great Awakening in British America, though the Tennents are not generally as well known as leading figures in it the way George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards are. Those historians who would diminish the revivals as sporadic and disconnected are either missing or willfully ignoring the evidence that Whitefield, Edwards, and the Tennents were closely connected to each other, as well as being part of a vast network of evangelicals who enthusiastically propagated the revivals using the new apparatuses and ideology of mercantilism, as well as the rhetoric of liberal political philosophy. Whitefield was particularly keen to take advantage of the growing ubiquity and power of the press to advertise both himself and revivalism. Edwards, being more conservative, nevertheless took to the presses to advocate evangelicalism and defend it from its critics in an unprecedented storm of publication that constitutes the greatest period of American intellectual ferment before the political debates presaging the American Revolution.

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NOTES 1. John Willison, “Five Sacramental Sermons,” in W. M. Hetherington, ed., The Practical Works of the Rev. John Willison (Aberdeen: Mackay, Bachelor and Co., 1817), 326; Robert Simpson, Traditions of the Covenanters; or, Gleanings among the Mountains (Edinburgh: John Johnstone, 1846), 399–402; Ebenezer Erskine, The Standard of Heaven Lifted up against the Powers of Hell, and Their Auxiliaries (1730) in The Whole Works of Ebenezer Erskine, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1793), 2:99–101, 91. 2. Gordon Donaldson, The Scottish Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 53–65; Stewart Lamont, The Swordbearer: John Knox and the European Reformation (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 99–110. 3. Donaldson, The Scottish Reformation, 144–48; Lamont, The Swordbearer, 116–17, 123–26; Maurice Lee Jr., Government by Pen: Scotland under James VI and I (Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 1980), 20–23. 4. Lee, Jr., Government by Pen, 62–70; idem, The Road to Revolution: Scotland under Charles I, 1625–1637 (Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 1985), 130–31, 200–16; Donaldson, The Scottish Reformation, 144–48; John Livingston, A Brief Historical Relation of the Life of Mr. John Livingston Minister of the Gospel (n.p., 1727), 8–9; Robert Wodrow, Analecta: Or, Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences; Mostly Relating to Scotch Ministers and Christians, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Maitland Club, 1842–1843), 1:271; Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 21–32. 5. F. D. Dow, Cromwellian Scotland, 1651–1660 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979), 9–12, 39–42; Julia Buckroyd, Church and State in Scotland, 1660–1681 (London: John Donald Publishers, Ltd., 1980), 7–11; Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–1760 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 22–37, 47–49; John M. Barkley, A Short History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (Belfast: Publications Board, Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 1960), 6; W. D. Bailie, The Six Mile Water Revival of 1625 (Newcastle, Co. Down: Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland, 1976). Westerkamp implies that Scottish revivalism was an Ulster ScotsIrish import, when the evidence suggests a simultaneous development. See also David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973); idem, Revolution and CounterRevolution in Scotland, 1644–1651 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), and Walter Makey, The Church of the Covenant, 1637–1651 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1979). 6. William Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977) , v–vi, 142–65; Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 50–71; Dow, Cromwellian Scotland, 268–70; Julia Buckroyd, Church and State in Scotland, 22–30, passim; Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity, 62–68. 7. Arthur Fawcett, The Cambuslang Revival: The Scottish Evangelical Revival of the Eighteenth Century (London: Banner of Truth, 1971), 14–15, 19–21; J. H. S.



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Burleigh, A Church History of Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 200, 287–308; John McKerrow, History of the Secession Church (Edinburgh: A. Fullerton, 1854), 11–17, 73ff. 8. James McGready, The Posthumous Works of the Reverend and Pious James M’Gready, Late Minister of the Gospel in Henderson, Ky, ed. James Smith (Nashville, TN: J. Smith,1837), 317; Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 41. 9. John Sage, The Fundamental Charter of Presbytery, as It Hath Been Lately Established, in the Kingdom of Scotland, Examin’d and Disprov’d (London, 1695), 370–71, 373; Clydesdale Synod Records, April 6, 1697, October 4, 1705, National Archive of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1:170, 2:48; Wodrow, Analecta, 1:20–21, 178, 4:4; George Wemyss, “The Preface to the Reader,” in John Spalding, ed., Synaxis Sacra; Or, A Collection of Sermons Preached at Several Communions; Together with Speeches at the Tables, both before, at, and after that Work (Edinburgh, 1703), preface unpaginated; Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 44–45. 10. Hugh Hastings, ed., Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York, 7 vols. (Albany: James B. Lyon, 1901), 2351–56; Herman Harmelink III, “Another Look at Frelinghuysen and His ‘Awakening,’” Church History 37 (December 1968), 427–28; Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 28. 11. Hastings, Ecclesiastical Records, 2362–63, 2402, 2413–14; Harmelink, “Another Look at Frelinghuysen,” 428–33. 12. Thomas Prince, Sr., ed., The Christian History, Containing Accounts of the Revival and Propagation of Religion in Great-Britain and America, 2 vols. (Boston, 1744–1745), 2:15; James R. Tanis, Dutch Calvinistic Pietism in the Middle Colonies: A Study in the Life and Theology of Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 68–70. 13. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 170–73. 14. Ned C. Landsman, “Revivalism and Nativism in the Middle Colonies: The Great Awakening and the Scots Community in East New Jersey,” American Quarterly 34 (Summer 1982), 155; idem, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 176–77. 15. Milton J. Coalter, Jr., Gilbert Tennent, Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 2–3; Janet F. Fishburn, “Gilbert Tennent, Established ‘Dissenter,’” Church History 63 (March 1994), 31–32. 16. John M. Barkley, “The Presbyterian Church in Ireland: Part I,” Journal of Presbyterian History 44 (December 1966), 258–59; Guy S. Klett, ed., Minutes of the Presbyterian Church in America 1706–1788 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1976), 34; Thomas C. Pears Jr., ed., Documentary History of William Tennent and the Log College (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1940), 15, 18; Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, 3–4. 17. Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, 4, 11; W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 269–73; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 31. 18. Thomas C. Pears Jr. and Guy Klett, eds., “Documentary History of William Tennent and the Log College,” Journal of the Department of History of the

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Presbyterian Historical Society 28 (March 1950), 48, 78, 83; Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 58–59. 19. Minutes of the Presbyterian Church in America, 68; Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, 9–12. 20. Prince, The Christian History, 2:293; Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, 16–18. 21. Gilbert Tennent, “A Prefatory Discourse to the following Sermons with Relations of some Memoirs of the Author’s Conversion and Character,” in John Tennent, ed., The Nature of Regeneration opened, and its absolute Necessity, in order to Salvation, demonstrated. . . . (London, 1741), iii–viii; Elias Boudinot, Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend William Tennent (Philadelphia, 1827), 12–21; Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, 18–19, 38–40. 22. Gilbert Tennent to Thomas Prince, August 24, 1744, in Prince, The Christian History, 2:294–95; Archibald Alexander, Biographical Sketches of the Founder, and Principal Alumni of the Log College (Princeton: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), 182–86; Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, 40. 23. Alexander, Biographical Sketches, 267; Samuel Blair, A Short and Faithful Narrative, of the Late Remarkable Revival of Religion in the Congregation of NewLondonderry (Philadelphia, 1744), 8, 10. 24. Blair, A Short and Faithful Narrative, 12, 14–15; Prince, The Christian History, 2:246–48. 25. Blair, The Works of the Reverend Mr. Samuel Blair (Philadelphia, 1754), 344–45. 26. Gilbert Tennent, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry (Philadelphia, 1740), 2, 8, 11, 18–19; Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, 64–67. 27. Tennent, Danger of an Unconverted Ministry, 16, 18–19, 21; Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, 64–67; Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 49–50; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 60. 28. Landsman, “Revivalism and Nativism in the Middle Colonies,” 150–51; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 61. 29. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 227–55.

Chapter 4

“A Glorious Work of God’s Infinite Power” Jonathan Edwards and Revivalism in New England, 1734–1741 Jonathan Edwards had become one of the most famous “New Light” ministers in all of New England when he mounted the pulpit at the congregational church in Enfield, Massachusetts, on July 8, 1741, to deliver what has become the most famous sermon of his career. Revivalist energies had been running high throughout the region, and his colleagues invited him to fan the flames of the “new birth” in Enfield, which so far exhibited little evidence of having been affected by revivals in the surrounding towns, most notably Suffield. The ground had been prepared by Joseph Meacham and Eleazar Wheelock in the two days leading up to Edwards’s appearance, with their sermons having generated extraordinary emotional outbursts among members of their audiences. Meacham impelled some people to run about “screeching in the streets,” while Wheelock’s sermon “considerably affected” others. A town that had until then appeared to be immune to the Awakening seemed primed to receive at last an infusion of God’s spirit, but as the citizens gathered in the meetinghouse to hear Edwards, Wheelock noted with exasperation that the “thoughtless and vain” audience “hardly conducted themselves with common decency.” However, as Edwards began with his keynote from Deuteronomy 32:35, “Their foot shall slide in due time,” he appeared to catch them at a perfect moment to remind complacent sinners that they are always subject to God’s judgment.1 Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in spite of some efforts to distance the extremity of its rhetoric from its author, is a fairly typical Calvinist sermon of the early eighteenth century, its theme a familiar one to anyone who regularly attended New England churches of the time. One could emphasize the ecstatic joys of salvation and heaven, but according to regular Calvinist opinion, such was unlikely to leave deep enough an impression on an audience to effect a change in their dispositions toward their souls. Better to focus 85

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upon the fragility of life and the likely certainty of damnation and hellish torment. God is “dreadfully provoked,” he reminded the “thoughtless and vain” Enfieldians, and his anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of his wrath in hell, and they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that anger, neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold ‘em up one moment; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up; the fire pent up in their own hearts is struggling to break out; and they have no interest in any mediator, there are no means within reach that can be any security to them.

By now, some members of the audience had become visibly upset, others were weeping. Pressing his advantage, Edwards described the “exquisite horrible misery” that awaits the damned before finally yanking his audience toward Christ, who “has flung the door of mercy wide open, and stands in the door calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners. . . .” The sermon had its intended effect, and the Awakening finally came to Enfield.2  JONATHAN EDWARDS OF NORTHAMPTON Solomon Stoddard could have cited very good reasons to deny the young Timothy Edwards permission to marry his daughter, Esther. The Edwards family had been mired in scandals both horrid and salacious, on account of Timothy’s mother’s marital infidelities and obvious mental instability. Her sister had been convicted of infanticide, while a brother ax-murdered another sister. Richard Edwards, exasperated and almost financially ruined by his wife’s antics, successfully sued for divorce in 1688. In spite of a checkered family background, their son, Timothy, had been attending Harvard College in preparation for the ministry in 1686, but the weight of the family’s disgraces must have adversely affected the young man, who suffered expulsion for serious breaches of discipline. Richard’s fortunes improved quickly after the divorce, with a stable new wife and a noteworthy career as a lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut, while Timothy meticulously continued his theological studies with a private tutor. In 1694, Harvard granted him both a B.A. and an M.A. for the quality of his expertise, and he moved to Northampton to teach school. There he met Esther, and found himself standing before her father, nervously awaiting his answer. He had just been invited to assume the pastorate of the church at the newly incorporated town of East Windsor,



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just across the border in Connecticut, and Stoddard could not but admire the way his daughter’s suitor had overcome a difficult start and rose so quickly. Permission granted, Timothy and Esther settled into a nice new house and started one of the most famous families in New England’s religious history.3 Jonathan, their only son, started life during a period of considerable anxiety in western New England, gripped as it was by the conflict between France and Britain known as Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713). Lurid tales of frontier Indian raids, such as the one that struck Deerfield in 1704 that claimed the lives of a few of his relatives among the Williams family, flew about like startled sparrows. One cousin, Eunice Williams, taken captive by the Kahnawake Mohawks, lived with them for so long that she assumed a Mohawk identity and converted to Catholicism, never to be “redeemed.” Timothy served as a military chaplain for a brief period when Jonathan was very young, after which he became a very accomplished pastor to his East Windsor flock, and a very strong formative influence on his son. For his part, Jonathan grew into a studious and pious—if occasionally undisciplined—boy, rigorously educated and groomed for a ministerial career, attending the new college near New Haven that soon became Yale College. Receiving his B.A. in 1720 and the M.A. in 1722, Jonathan accepted temporary preaching positions in New York City and Bolton, Connecticut, before a three-year stint as a tutor at Yale before accepting his grandfather’s offer to assist him at Northampton in 1726. Shortly afterward, he fell in love with and married the lively and intelligent Sarah Pierpont, who proved herself more than a mere “helpmeet” to her husband.4 As revivalist fervor was beginning to enliven middle-colony Presbyterian churches by 1729, Jonathan assumed his grandfather’s pastorate. The Lynn End Earthquake two years earlier did not do much damage along the Connecticut River valley, but it nevertheless sparked a small, short-lived revival in Stoddard’s church, with around twenty anxious men and women testifying to conversion and obtaining membership, but Edwards—serving as his grandfather’s assistant—saw “nothing of any general awakening.” Upon taking over the pulpit, Edwards worried about an onset of spiritual complacency in the final years of Stoddard’s tenure, particularly among the younger members of his congregation who notably paid scant attention to the state of their souls. It was, as Edwards put it, “a time of extraordinary dullness in religion: licentiousness . . . greatly prevailed among the youth of the town; they were many of them very much addicted to night-walking, and frequenting the tavern, and lewd practices.” He set about trying to reverse so many of his parishioners’ courses toward hell by dwelling on the themes of hypocrisy and complacency in his first sermons as Northampton’s full-time pastor. “You pretend to be Christ’s friend,” he admonished in one of these sermons, “or else why do you come here? . . . You are like Judas and the other disciples in that respect, that

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you appear as disciples; . . . you profess to forsake all and to follow him; . . . [yet] you betray your Lord.”5 Nobody railed against the same “Atheism & Infidelity” that had so worried South Carolina’s Nicholas Trott in 1703 as did Edwards, who concluded that his grandfather’s relatively liberal position on access to the sacraments led directly to a general lack of concern for the things of the spirit. The growing prosperity of eighteenth-century New England certainly encouraged a more worldly attitude, and Edwards ruefully commented upon how Northamptonites were given to presenting “a flaunting appearance in their buildings and apparel and way of living, many going far beyond their condition or what would be suitable for them[.]” This led to ubiquitous indiscipline, indebtedness, lasciviousness, and behaviors among the young that he found positively Sybaritic, and which their parents no longer seemed motivated to curtail. Writing as though he were living in the midst of a William Hogarth print, he excoriated the sexual liberalism he seemed to find everywhere: “[T]here is not a country in the Christian world, however debauched and vicious, where parents indulge their children in such liberties as company-keeping as they do in this country. . . .” Everywhere in town “multitudes . . . throng public houses from day to day,” getting drunk and reveling in debauchery that seemed no longer to besmirch anyone’s reputation. “Formerly, things were accounted such a wound as a person never could get over as long as he lived,” but Edwards stood amazed that “now they are so bold and impudent, that they are not ashamed to hold up their heads.” He had his work cut out for him if he were to bring the town back to its lost piety.6 Stoddard had since 1690 practiced what was known as “open communion,” meaning that he believed that the bread and the wine rather than being merely the seals of grace accessible only to the Elect, could also act as the means to grace for those who lived upright and pious lives, and were of stainless repute. He found the strict limitation of access to the Lord’s Table to be an elitist practice that diluted the clergy’s influence on a community and served more to turn prospective Christians away from Christ. While New England had gradually stepped away from compulsory church attendance originally pronounced by the Cambridge Platform, Stoddard advocated a return to that particular dictate, insisting that “If a Christian live in a Town where there is a church, he is immediately bound to join with that church; and that church is bound to him to govern him.” This is not to say that membership was easy to acquire in Stoddard’s church, as in fact his policy of open communion meant that membership was markedly more difficult to acquire. However, since the adoption of the Halfway Covenant in 1662—which Stoddard endorsed—many “halfway” members who had been baptized as children opted against applying for full membership, either out of a sense of spiritual inadequacy or out of simple complacency. By the 1720s, New England



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church membership appeared to decline in proportion to natural population increase and immigration.7 Edwards assumed his pastorate at a time of some political instability and fractiousness in the town, which to some extent was affected by more colony-wide tensions elicited by the governor’s office changing hands four times between 1728 and 1730. Civility appeared to decline in the town, and Edwards sighed that “there is so much contention amongst the leaders.” Being Stoddard’s maternal grandson, as Edwards could well have expected, carried some benefits, not the least of which was the support of his mother’s wealthy and powerful family, which—along with most of the other Connecticut Valley “river gods”—controlled the area’s politics. The young minister regularly inveighed against vice and political strife in the town, much in keeping with what was expected of ministers, and nobody seems to have found fault with Edwards’s routine cants about the steep decline in public and private morals. Stoddard had done the same thing and was well and affectionately regarded, and Edwards’s apparently gentler demeanor garnered him his congregation’s goodwill. His father, Timothy Edwards, heard from Jonathan’s father-in-law, Benjamin Pierpont, “that the people of Northampton seem to have a great love and respect for him, and that they take great content in his ministry.” In addition to chastising his flock for negligence of their Christian duties and worldliness, Edwards was keen to reestablish a tradition of regular corporate revival initiated by Stoddard in the 1680s.8 Stoddard had been a strong believer in the power and necessity of corporate revival, and presided over several “covenant renewals” in his church throughout his tenure. One area in which this growing belief in corporate revival is evident is that of hymnody. Early seventeenth-century psalm-singing among the Independents in England and the Congregationalists in New England reflected congregationalism’s individualism, with psalms sung unaccompanied and in rough unison according to highly simplified tunes “lined out” by the divine or an elder acting as a precentor. Individual members of the congregation were free to sing whatever tune they wished and embellish certain phrases at random, resulting in an oftentimes raucous dissonance leading to a campaign in New England to establish a standardized, more aesthetically pleasing “regular singing” to Puritan hymnody in the opening decades of the eighteenth century. A controversy erupted between the clergy who led and pushed the Regular Singing movement and the laity who resisted it based on a devotion to the liturgical practices of their parents and grandparents. Calvinist simplicity demanded an unembellished, stripped-down hymnody which discouraged more capable singers from vainly attempting to outperform their fellow churchgoers, and accompaniment on instruments was expressly forbidden as unnecessary, vainglorious, and redolent of baroque Catholic embellishments. However, as the New England societies matured, a more

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sophisticated aesthetic sensibility began to chip away at the old hymnody, even as the Puritan orthodoxy of John Winthrop and Richard Mather faded. But it was not simply a matter of aesthetics, as keen theological justifications existed for both “orthodox” hymnody and the Regular Singing movement. Conservatives—among whom a minority of the clergy could be found— echoed John Cotton’s argument extrapolated from Calvin’s that the text of the psalms demanded primacy over the manner of their singing, the aim being spiritual edification, whereas secular and instrumental music aroused only the emotions. The push for Regular Singing reflects the emerging cosmopolitanism of early eighteenth-century New England, connected as it was to a larger Anglo-European Atlantic World exposing New Englanders—and the BritishAmerican colonists in general—to Pietist, baroque, and rationalist influences. Defenders of Regular Singing, among whom stood Cotton Mather, argued that the mathematical precision of music and harmony reflects the harmony of nature as designed by God. Just as Mather hoped to read the Bible in such a way as to tap into the emotions of its writers, so also melodious singing of psalms can do the same for the original psalmists, which leads to greater piety and spiritual devotion. Indeed, Mather reminded his readers, it is mandated in the Old Testament in Psalm 33, which dictates that one should “Praise the Lord with harp” and “Sing unto him a new song; play skillfully with a loud noise.” The composition of new hymns was thus cautiously endorsed by those adhering to the Regular Singing movement.9 While the singing controversy certainly reflects continental European Pietist and rationalist influences, it was yet another bone of contention between the clergy and laity. The ninth edition of the venerable Bay Psalm Book included for the first time “some few directions for Ordering the Voice” in the form of written music, so as to avoid idiosyncratic singers’ “Squeaking above, or Grumbling below,” and put there obviously at the direction of the Boston clergy. In response to a chorus of squeaking and grumbling from their parishioners against the “New Way” came the defenses of Regular Singing penned by Thomas Symmes, Cotton Mather, and Thomas Walter, followed by others until Regular Singing triumphed in the 1740s. The decision whether or not to adopt Regular Singing remained up to individual communities and churches, and it was clearly a warmly debated issue, as evidenced by the numerous town and church records in which it is chronicled all over Massachusetts and Connecticut. Treatise after treatise was published in defense of Regular Singing, a clerical society for its promotion was founded in Boston, and numerous sermons and petitions were delivered and circulated both for and against it in the 1720s and 1730s. For his own part, Edwards generally supported Regular Singing, but definitely within certain limits. Hymnody could be a powerful aid to revival, he agreed, but could just as easily turn into a distraction. Better to be genuinely devout and tone deaf, than be a vain songbird.



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Also, hymn-singing to his mind had its prescribed place: in church or in the home, but not out in the streets where it might cause a disturbance.10 Edwards strongly believed in the justness of the social order, reflected in the conventional wisdom of the existence of a hierarchical “great chain of being” that begins with God and proceeds downward through the ranks of angels, human beings, animals, plants, and minerals at the bottom. He located the source of Northampton’s political turmoil to the all too common sin of envy that perennially threatened societal stability by leading those of a lower rank to aspire to higher rank. He suspected that those who sowed seeds of political strife out of a professed concern for the common weal were concealing their own selfish ambitions to advance themselves by attempting to tear down those above them. He deplored the high rate of turnover in the governor’s office and of the scrabbling of place-seekers changes in government generated during the first years of his pastorate, and the efforts of inexperienced “new men” to oust the older and more qualified gentlemen who traditionally held office in town, county, and province. Recalling Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), which likened the state to the family, Edwards noted that “to be changing the persons in whose hands is the administration of the government” is ill-advised when one considers “what confusion it would make in a family to have the heads and governors of it changed once in two or three years. It would be the way utterly to ruin the children and servants of a family.” And in the “family” that was his church, Edwards exercised a degree of paternal imperiousness intended to bring the rambunctious youth to heel, and enjoyed some success. As Edwards’s flock grew accustomed to his austerity, he noted with satisfaction that the steady diet of admonition issuing from his pulpit brought the younger members of his audience to “a sensible amendment of these evils,” and that by 1733 “shewed more of a disposition to hearken to counsel, and by degrees left off their frolicking, and grew observably more decent in their attendance on the public worship, and . . . manifested a religious concern. . . .” It was the first stirrings of what Edwards later called “a great and general awakening” in New England.11 Edwards set the seal on a growing conviction among the younger generation of New England ministers that the conversion experience need not be a long, drawn out process fraught with the “legall feare” and “soul sickness” that elder ministers—including Stoddard—believed marked the genuine conversion. As set down by the English theologian William Perkins (1558–1602) and generally accepted by the first-generation New England Congregationalists, conversion and grace involved a ten-step process that began with attendance to the Word of God, passed through an awareness of one’s sins, which brings on a lifelong despair at one’s transgressions against God and recurrent battles with doubt, and eventually ends with grace. Solomon Stoddard preached that in most cases one does not achieve grace until near death, and

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then only after lingering through each stage for many years at a time. Timothy Edwards, who embraced revivalism at East Windsor, questioned the necessity of such a lengthy “preparationism,” and his son, Jonathan, dispensed with it altogether. Boiling the process down to three broader stages, Edwards confessed that his own conversion moved quickly through the initial steps, and “that my conviction of sin” had been, and remained “exceedingly small, and faint,” whereas for others it was thought to be so enormous as never to be overcome—hence the despair that trapped many a sinner and barred the way to heaven forever. While he preached standard preparationism to his congregation, he had begun to believe that true conversion could happen every bit as quickly in some as it did slowly for others. Events in his church soon confirmed Edwards in his thinking.12 REVIVAL IN NORTHAMPTON AND ELSEWHERE “A Certain Person in Northampton” noticed that his wood pile was getting low and asked his son to take an ax into a nearby forest to replenish their supply of firewood. The boy refused, and an argument erupted between them that grew heated. “At length His Father told Him that unless He was ill, He would [p]ut forth his Authority, and make Him go,” at which point the boy fled into a barn, where he began making “an hideous Mourning and Noise that [a]larm’d the Neighbours.” They suggested to the baffled man that he call for their pastor, Jonathan Edwards, to come out to see what he could do. Edwards arrived a short while later and went into the barn to see what appeared to be afflicting the boy, but the moaning and groaning did not abate. Finally, Edwards counseled the father “to forebear urging his [S]on, telling Him that He was under some extraordinary Influence of the [S]pirit, and was getting through,” meaning that the man’s son was undergoing conversion. Timothy Cutler, the Anglican rector in Boston, relates this story in a letter to Bishop Edmund Gibson of London accompanying a copy of Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God that chronicles the Northampton revival of 1733–1734, as a more or less typical occurrence in what Cutler—an acerbic critic of religious “enthusiasm”—considered to be nothing more than a flurry of “whimsical Appearances and fantastic Shows.” Basing his informal report upon four-year-old hearsay, his relation of this and other instances of “in[j]udicious Zeal” in Edwards’s parish was, in his opinion, largely the product of a wave of popular apocalyptic anxiety ignited by the “visionary” exhortations of one M. Louis Hector Piot de l’Angloiserie, a French tutor at Harvard who, along with others, “propagate[d] gross Corruptions in Religion.”13 Cutler took special notice of the effect of “imaginary Religion” upon women, who in Edwards’s and others’ parishes had begun to gather in



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meetings that to him were nothing more than pointless crying parties. While Edwards took pains to refute any notion that the people of his town were aflame with apocalyptic expectation in A Faithful Narrative, he interpreted his cultivation of a general reformation of manners, a pronounced interest in spiritual concerns, spontaneous and scheduled religious gatherings outside of church, and the heightened emotions elicited by his sermons and exhortations to be signs of genuine revival. The fact that women began to figure more prominently in accounts of conversion was nothing to be dismissed. The death of “a young married woman, who had been considerably exercised in mind about the salvation of her soul before she was ill . . . seemed to have satisfying evidences of God’s saving mercy to her before her death,” greatly influenced a subsequent “solemnizing of the spirits of many young persons: and there began evidently to appear more of a religious concern on people’s minds.” In December of 1734, Edwards was surprised to be consulted by “a young woman, who had been one of the greatest company-keepers in the whole town,” and her amazing moral turnaround constituted “a glorious work of God’s infinite power and sovereign grace.” In many ways, this early, extended Northampton revival established a blueprint for the First Great Awakening, and the publication of A Faithful Narrative was intended to serve in that capacity.14 Historians note that from the 1680s onward the churches’ membership rolls, especially in the northern colonies, became increasingly dominated by women. This “feminization” of American Protestant Christianity in the eighteenth century has been ascribed to the steep ascent of consumerist materialism, coupled with a concomitant Enlightenment secularism in which men found in Newtonian physics and capitalist economics a better “language and theoretical framework for explaining the universe” than religion, leaving women in a position to wield some measure of power in the churches. While this is truer of the latter end of the century than the beginning, it is more accurate to say that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries women were more prominent in the reestablishment of extramural religious meetings that had been a mainstay of early New England religious life. Women exercised an astonishing degree of authority in these meetings, which recalls the persecuted forerunner of such gatherings, Anne Hutchinson, as the degree of mastery that earned her excommunication and expulsion in the 1630s became more acceptable a hundred years later. As the clergy reasserted their authority in the first two decades of the new century, laymen’s prominence in church affairs greatly declined. As Marilyn J. Westerkamp put it, while men shifted their interest to seeking “real political and social power, laymen left the church to women under the care of a male pastor.” At Northampton, Edwards encouraged his younger parishioners to gather informally to discuss their faith and theology, and soon after the adults formed their own prayer

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circles so that by the end of 1734 several groups were meeting regularly at one another’s homes for “social religion.” Edwards was solicitous toward his female parishioners, though careful to remind them not to step outside their traditional roles.15 The sustained revival that began in 1734 gathered momentum in the next year, and at the end of May 1735 Edwards summarized it in a letter to Benjamin Colman, assistant pastor of Boston’s Brattle Street Church, who had heard about the commotion and asked for an accounting. In it, Edwards described the revival at Northampton, as well as similar incidences of “remarkable religious concern” in Pascommuck, New Hadley, Sunderland, Deerfield, Hatfield, [West] Springfield, Northfield, Longmeadow, and Old Springfield in Massachusetts, as well as New Haven, Guilford, Lyme, Coventry, Bolton, and Lebanon in Connecticut. Everywhere, the same dynamic evident in Northampton was on display in the other towns: “persons . . . seized with concern are brought to forsake their vices, and ill practices; the looser sort are brought to forsake and to dread their former extravagances. Persons are soon brought to have done with their old quarrels; [and] contention and intermeddling with other men’s matters.” He was especially pleased to see that the revivals had begun to heal divisions within churches, particularly those that set ministers at odds with their congregations. As for Northampton, Edwards declared that “This town never was so full of love, nor so full of joy, nor so full of distress as it has lately been.” Edwards went on to note the broad scope of the revivals, of how they particularly affected children and young people, but also brought “many old people, many above fifty and several near seventy, that seem to be wonderfully changed and hopefully newborn.” While he recognized that “There have been . . . many odd and strange stories that have been carried about the country of this affair,” he obviously saw nothing wrong with the converted and near-converted having visionary experiences of “Christ shedding blood for sinners, his blood running from his veins, and of Christ in his glory in heaven and such like things.” Rumors and reports impelled fellow ministers from other towns to visit Northampton and, according to him, were favorably impressed by the ingenuous nature of the revivals, and of the sincerity of all concerned.16 In Stoddard’s heyday, the revival seasons predominantly netted female converts, but the greater participation of women in public and private religiosity clearly had a positive effect upon Northampton’s men, as by the spring of 1735 Edwards reported that over 300 citizens had been saved and brought into church membership, almost as many of them men as women. What had begun with young people soon encompassed the whole town, astonishing Edwards by “the universality of it, affecting all sorts, sober and vicious, high and low, rich and poor, wise and unwise.” Colman, acting on the solicitations of the eminent English Dissenter ministers Isaac Watts and John Guyse,



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suggested to Edwards that he enlarge the letter into a formal account for possible publication, which Edwards completed as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God in December 1736, and that Colman forwarded to Watts and Guyse in London. Watts estimated that the Northampton revival was an event unprecedented in its scale and importance “since the Reformation . . . perhaps since the days of the apostles,” and that it must be printed for wide distribution. Thus, the manuscript was rushed to the printers and hit London bookstore shelves in the early spring, receiving what Watts described in a letter to Colman as a rapturous reception. A deluge of inquiries about the veracity of Edwards’s account briefly led Watts to wonder if the author had exaggerated or magnified the event in his own mind, though Colman assuaged those concerns with a flurry of testimonies from Edwards’s colleagues confirming many of the most important elements of the Narrative. John Wesley, who had just undergone a conversion experience himself, obtained a copy and made it required reading among members of the emerging Methodist movement, of which George Whitefield was a part.17 Another noteworthy aspect of this early Northampton revival was the unusually high number of older people who experienced conversion and had “a new song put into their mouths.” The conversion of middle-aged parishioners, particularly those over forty, was a comparative rarity before 1734, but Edwards saw fit to record that “all sorts—young men and maids, old men and little children” had felt God’s saving grace in their hearts. The revival of 1734–1735 netted fifty older converts, the large majority of them male, and for Edwards this was cause for great rejoicing, as he shared the prevailing conventional wisdom of the time that presumed that older unregenerate men—being hardened by worldliness and a naturally higher degree of obstinacy—tended to be most resistant ministerial solicitation. This does seem to be substantiated by the data on church membership applications, which shows a preponderance of female applicants and successful bids for church membership.18 It pleased Edwards to hear that A Faithful Narrative was proving an inspiration to similar revivals in England, but the peak of spiritual reform reached in 1735 had begun again to give way, as Edwards put it, to “an overcarefulness about, and eagerness after the possessions of this life” and the resumption of political discord. A minor disaster that befell the Northampton church in the late winter of 1736–1737 now became in Edwards’s mind an omen of this decline. On the morning of March 13, 1737, as Edwards had begun his sermon, he and the rest of the congregation were startled by a sound like “an amazing clap of thunder”—the packed balcony at the back of the building had suddenly collapsed. Dozens of people lay atop and beneath splintered timbers, and shocked bystanders were terrified and aggrieved by the “dolorous shrieking and crying” of the injured. Convinced that many

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must have perished, rescuers were amazed to see that while many had been scratched and bruised, nobody had been seriously injured. Certainly this was a potent demonstration of God’s mercy, and “so dangerous and surprising an accident” should have served as a warning to those who had been recently awakened, Edwards thought, but rather, “it has had in no wise the effect that ten times less things were wont to have two or three years ago.” Here, Edwards realized that corporate regeneration did not necessarily mean a lasting change, but would require a constant, vigilant management, and could not be left to regular “seasons of grace.”19 REDEMPTION AND HISTORY The balcony collapse simply reinforced the already recognized need for a new meetinghouse, the old one clearly showing signs of literally falling apart in other places, and the new church already under construction reflected the region’s prosperity of the late 1730s. Out went the austere simplicity of the typical New England meetinghouse and in came the new standard of eighteenth-century architecture heavily influenced by the British Georgian style. The high steeple was the most prominent symbol of Northampton’s development into a regional capital with a more diverse population, and the more conservative members of the congregation—Edwards certainly included—were uncomfortable with what they saw as ostentatious display. The decision to move the town’s governmental functions away from the church and into another new building, a “town house,” signified a separation between the sacred and the secular spaces that became a hallmark of colonial British America in the eighteenth century. A community that had from its foundation understood that church and state existed to support each other in the maintenance of a moral order had now to adjust to relegating the spiritual and the temporal to separate spheres, and this could not be accomplished without some discomfort. The conduction of civil affairs in the meetinghouse allowed for strong clerical influence, but after 1737 the future of that once critical, balancing influence was left in doubt.20 As the new church reached completion, a seating committee had to determine how families and individuals would be arranged in the box-shaped pews, benches, and the balcony. Traditionally, congregants were separated by gender and rank, men sitting on one side of the church and women across the center aisle on the other, with young people, visitors, and slaves (if allowed) in the balcony. However, by the 1720s, churches had begun allowing men and women to sit together, and Northampton decided that families would be allowed to sit together, while singles remained segregated. Having decided that, the pricklier issue of which families would get the choicest pews



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unsurprisingly inflamed longstanding family and political rivalries. As elsewhere in the established churches throughout the colonies, family seating was assigned according to rank and wealth, which in the early eighteenth century became increasingly entwined. A higher degree of social mobility meant that some families had slipped in rank while others had risen, and decided how to rate one family in comparison to others proved tricky and contentious. Edwards repeatedly admonished his fellow townspeople that they should never “seek after an high seat in God’s house” instead of “seeking eminent holiness,” but he also acknowledged that social rank was a function of social order. Eventually, a seating chart was drawn up and accepted by the congregation, but not without ruffling some feathers, and scattered dissatisfaction found expression in other, more familiar arenas.21 Hoping to quell the renewal of sociopolitical wrangling and maintain the momentum of the 1734–1735 revival, Edwards preached a series of sermons aimed at those who preferred to “leave off the laborious parts of religion.” Known collectively as the Charity sermons, after the title of the first sermon in the series, Charity and Its Fruits, they exhorted the wayward Northamptonites to cultivate a greater sense of humility and communal accord. The series is grounded in Edwards’s reading of I Corinthians 13:1–8, best summarized in verses 4-5: “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil.” Arguments over rank and privilege, church pew ownership and proximity to the pulpit, and wealth as a measure of one’s family or oneself threatened infinitely more than town harmony. In the final sermon of the series, Edwards reminded his audience that Northampton should strive as much as possible to emulate an Augustinian city of God, itself being an allegorical emulation of heaven, which is “a world of love” where there is “not the least remainder of any principle of envy to be exercised towards any . . . who are superior in glory, no contempt or slight towards any who are inferior,” and there is “no string out of tune.”22 Another concern addressed in the Charity sermons was the growing popularity of humanist philosophy and the attenuated Christianity known as deism. First given coherent definition in John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), deism posited a God who created an entirely self-sustaining, mechanistic universe operating according to discoverable natural laws and never requiring divine maintenance or intervention. The miracles in the Bible, according to the deists, were either misunderstood natural phenomena or allegorical inventions. Jesus Christ is recast as a morally and ethically enlightened human being, not any literal son of God, whose great contributions to human thought are the Beatitudes and his ethical sayings. The removal of God from an active role in the course of history precluded belief in a future

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Millennium, wherein the saints would rule the world, and replaced it with a belief that there would come a future age characterized by the emergence of a universally enlightened, more humane humanity. Edwards noted that the progress of Christ’s kingdom had of late been hampered by Satan’s assault upon true (Reformed) Christianity through “the prevailing of licentiousness in principles and opinions.” The growth of deism and atheism, at least as Edwards defined the latter broadly, led him to lament in 1739 that “never [has there been] such a casting off the Christian religion and all revealed religion, never any age wherein was so much scoffing at and ridiculing the gospel of Christ . . . as there is at this day.” He decided to apply himself to proving that history unfolds according to a divine plan.23 The flurry of revival in 1735 and the Charity sermons impelled Edwards toward a deeper consideration of how God’s redemptive love—the purpose of God’s creating the cosmos and humanity, as Edwards had put it—operated in history, a theme he touched upon in a sermon he had been invited to deliver in Boston in late March 1739. This was the first of thirty sermons delivered between then and August that were collected by his son, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., and published posthumously by the Scottish clergyman John Erskine as A History of the Work of Redemption (1774). In them, he painstakingly led his audience on a tour of human history, particularly emphasizing the biblical chronicles and the history of Christianity, to prove that the flow of events followed courses designed by God, of which the history of Northampton and of its late revival were a key part. History, according to Edwards, consisted essentially of the battle of Satan against God, and of how God consistently defeated Satan at key points in time while allowing Satan small, seeming victories that pointed the way toward a greater defeat. In so doing, Edwards hoped to convince the fractious members of Northampton’s citizenry to recognize their vanity and the triviality of their disharmonious enterprises when the goal for all should be concord and brotherly love. However, in the end, as often as life appears to be “mere jumble and confusion,” from a high vantage point one could see how the flow of history is analogous to various streams that eventually come together “at one mouth into the same ocean.” By emphasizing that religion and politics must be woven together in such a way as each supports the other, Edwards hoped to end the town’s political strife by encouraging its leaders to more pious civic behavior, and infuse the revival with new life.24 The History of the Work of Redemption cannot be fully understood without also understanding that, although he denied that the revival of 1734–1735 was sparked by popular apocalypticism, he strongly believed that “the sabbath of the world” was near at hand, and since 1723 had been compiling private notes on how historical events fit into an overtly apocalyptic framework. The “Notes on the Apocalypse,” from which he hoped to create a



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larger definitive analysis, was strongly influenced by his interpretation of the English biblical exegete Moses Lowman (1680–1752), whose A Paraphrase and Notes on the Revelation of St. John (1737) Edwards carefully analyzed. Lowman, like many apocalypticists, believed that the specific numeration of days and years in the Bible yielded clues to a calculation for the dawning of the Millennium in the future. Based on his reading of major historical events and his analysis of the Book of Revelation, Lowman concluded that of the seven vials prophesied by John of Patmos to be poured out in the time before the Parousia, the first five had already been poured and that the sixth—the one that dries up the River Euphrates and destroys “the spiritual Babylon” (Rome)—was soon to be emptied. Edwards concluded that the Northampton revival was a sign of an imminent infusion of God’s spirit upon the world and the emptying of the sixth vial that would eventually destroy the Catholic Church. Although he differed with Lowman on which events corresponded to the seals, trumpets, and vials that marked the unfolding of history from Christ’s resurrection until the Second Coming, especially in terms of fixing dates to key future events, he agreed with Lowman that the “Invasion of the Papal Dominions,” announced by the pouring out of the sixth vial, involved the revival that had begun in the Northampton church and seemed to be spreading throughout New England.25 Apocalypticism, being an essential feature of Christianity, was of particular cruciality to Calvinists in both Europe and the Anglo-American colonies. Since the founding of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, it was generally believed among pious New Englanders that theirs was a pivotal role in preparing for the Millennium and the return of Jesus Christ.26 Edwards perceived the revival at Northampton as an important signpost on the road to human redemption, but his millenarian enthusiasm drew sharp rebukes from colleagues who worried that he was stirring up an unseemly fanaticism. Timothy Cutler reported to an English correspondent in 1735 that at Northampton “Conversions are talked of, ad nauseam. . . . Sadness and horror seize them, and hold them for some days; then they feel an inward joy . . . and this takes up for the present the thoughts and talk of that country.” The suicide of Joseph Hawley II, Edwards’s uncle and a prominent fixture of Northampton society, in June seemed to underscore an atmosphere of religious anxiety pervading the town and the surrounding area. Edwards assured his parishioners that Hawley had long suffered from “deep melancholy” and that “the devil took the advantage and drove him into despairing thoughts,” to which all godly souls are prone at moments of weakness. In a letter to Benjamin Colman, Edwards chalked Hawley’s death up to Satan’s “rage” at “this extraordinary breaking forth of the work of God.” In spite of his efforts to sustain the spiritual fervor of 1735, Hawley’s death and a subsequent rash of suicides effectively dampened revivalist energy, even

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as it seemed to have thrown Edwards himself into what he thought was a bodily breakdown. An extended sojourn to New York City and northern New Jersey, during which he wrote anonymous treatises supporting radical revivalism as well as publishing A Faithful Narrative, restored his sense of physical and mental well-being, but a nagging spiritual inadequacy persistently troubled him.27 “Once, as I rid [sic] out into the woods for my health, anno 1737” Edwards related in a “Personal Narrative” written in 1740, he dismounted and began “to walk for divine contemplation and prayer.” After a short time, he was dazzled by a vision “of the glory of the Son of God. . . . The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent, with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception” that left Edwards rapt “in a flood of tears,” an “ardency of soul” that lasted for the better part of an hour. The epiphany left him “emptied and annihilated” for a short span, after which he then felt his soul become “full of Christ alone; [prepared] to love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to serve and follow him, and to be totally wrapt up in the fullness of Christ; and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity.” Edwards candidly admitted to his struggles with doubt and despair in the “Personal Narrative,” and his own experience with a faith and devotion that was frequently tested informed his sermons to a wavering congregation at Northampton.28 The restoration of Edwards’s faith in the rising tide of God’s spiritual outpourings came from the successful renewal of missionary outreach to southern New England’s Indian communities. The Christianization of the Algonquian tribes of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and surrounding areas had at best been attempted in an inconsistent and haphazard fashion in the seventeenth century, but the outbreak of Metacomet’s War in 1675 and the Second Indian War of the 1680s effectively ended the campaign. Revivalistminded ministers in New England began investigating the possibilities of renewing the missionary work in the early 1730s, soliciting funds from contacts in England, and around Northampton Edwards’s brother-in-law, Samuel Hopkins, spearheaded the effort. Hopkins sought out Solomon Stoddard’s son, Col. John Stoddard, and Rev. Stephen Williams, pastor at Longmeadow, both highly knowledgeable about the local tribes. Stoddard often served as an ad hoc Indian agent for the colonial government, and Williams—who had been taken captive when Wabankis raided his boyhood town of Deerfield in 1704, with whom he lived for over a year—had a fluency in a few Algonquian languages, positioning them well for the endeavor. Benjamin Colman, Hopkins, and Edwards secured approval from Massachusetts’ Commission for Indian Affairs and Gov. Jonathan Belcher to establish a mission among the Housatonic Mahicans living in the Berkshire Mountains west of Northampton in the late summer of 1734.29



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Through connections in England, Yale tutor John Sergeant and Timothy Woodbridge, great-grandson of the missionary John Eliot, were appointed to lead the mission and the school, respectively. Successful treaty negotiations with a handful of regional tribes at Deerfield in the late summer of 1735 were capped by Sergeant’s ordination ceremony, attended by Hopkins and Williams, during which the Housatonics formally accepted him as their minister. The work went surprisingly well, generating interest in evangelical Christianity from neighboring tribes and, more importantly, increased funding from donors throughout England and New England. A village nestled in ceded Housatonic land was incorporated as Stockbridge in 1737, to be populated by a mixture of Christian Indians and New Englanders, the latter serving as exemplars for the Native residents. News of the 1735 treaty and the success of the mission town gave encouragement to the revivalists that Christianity in New England, and perhaps worldwide, had turned an important corner leading directly to the Millennium, and that their efforts could only expand and deepen. Nevertheless, revivalist zeal had begun to flag through 1738.30 In February 1739/40, anxious to keep the wilting seedlings of revivalism alive and growing, Edwards wrote a letter to the celebrated Anglican evangelical parson, George Whitefield, who had just arrived in the colonies and was in Georgia, inviting him to preach at his church: “I apprehend, from what I have heard, that you are one that has the Blessing of Heaven attending you wherever you go: and I have a great desire . . . that Such a Blessing as attends your Person and Labours may descend on this Town.” Expressing his amazement that “one raised up in the Church of England” could “revive the mysterious, spiritual, despised, and exploded doctrines of the gospel” there, he hoped that Whitefield might preach from his pulpit and perhaps also consent to a private meeting in his home. “[W]hat has been heard of your Labours and Success has not been taken notice of more in any place in New-England than here, or received with fuller credit,” Edwards pronounced, and assured Whitefield that should he come, “we shall hear you with greater attention.” Other ministers cultivating revivals throughout the colonies were extending similar invitations, and the results constituted for Edwards “a great and general Awakening.”31  As Edwards concluded his powerful sermon at Enfield, with his audience visibly shaken by vivid admonitions and reminded of the prospect of salvation for truly penitent sinners, he could not resist one last resonant warning: “The wrath of almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over [a] great part of this congregation: let everyone fly out of Sodom. Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.”

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From 1734 through 1740, many in his flock at Northampton and throughout New England took his warnings seriously and fled from spiritual negligence and moral torpor, while others slipped back into comfortable indolence. The return to corporate revival which had been a staple of late seventeenthcentury New England Calvinism under Edwards’s encouragement established a pattern for revivalism that was replicated throughout the region in the 1730s, even as a nearly identical process was developing in New Jersey and Pennsylvania under the guidance of Gilbert Tennent. Word of revivals in England led by Whitefield sparked great interest from ecumenically inclined clergymen throughout the colonies, who invited him to come and preach to their congregations. Whitefield’s preaching tours between 1739 and 1741 established the First Great Awakening as a fully intercolonial, Anglo-American Atlantic phenomenon.32

NOTES 1. Stephen Williams, diary, July 8, 1741, quoted in George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 220; Wheelock quoted in Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Utley, 1818), 2:145. Enfield was annexed by Connecticut in 1749. 2. Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), WJE, 22:409, 411, 416. 3. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 22–24. 4. Ibid., 12–18, 34–112. 5. Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God (1734) WJE, 4:146; The Threefold Work of the Holy Ghost (1729), WJE, 14:429–30; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 124–29. 6. Edwards, Sin and Wickedness Bring Calamity and Misery on a People (1729) WJE, 14:501–02; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 130–31. 7. Solomon Stoddard, The Doctrine of Instituted Churches Explained and Proved from the Word of God (London, 1700), 8; E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570– 1720 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 208–20; Ralph J. Coffman, Solomon Stoddard (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 81. 8. Edwards, The Threefold Work of the Holy Ghost, 430; Timothy Edwards to Anne Edwards, September 12, 1729, in Kenneth P. Minkema, “Preface to the Period,” WJE, 14:13–14; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 130–32. 9. John Cotton, Singing of Psalmes a Gospel-Ordinance (London, 1647); Thomas Symmes, The Reasonableness of Regular Singing, or Singing by Note. In an Essay to Revive the True and Ancient Mode of Singing Psalm-Tunes . . . the Knowledge and Practice of Which is Greatly Decayed in Most Congregations (Boston, 1720); Cotton Mather, The Accomplished Singer (Boston, 1721); Thomas Walter, The Sweet Psalmist of Israel (Boston, 1722); Cyclone Covey, “Puritanism and Music in Colonial



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America,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 8 (July 1951), 378–88; Robert Stevenson, Protestant Church Music in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), chap. 3; Joyce Irwin, “The Theology of ‘Regular Singing,’” NEQ 51 (June 1978), 176–92. 10. The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, of the Old & New-Testament: Faithfully Translated into English Metre. For the use, Edification and Comfort of the Saints in publick and private, especially in New-England (Boston, 1698), 419; Mather, The Accomplished Singer, 22–23; Symmes, The Reasonableness of Regular Singing, 10–12; Jonathan Edwards to Benjamin Colman, May 22, 1744, in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd Series, 10 (1896), 429; Irwin, “The Theology of ‘Regular Singing,’” 191; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 143–45. 11. Edwards, Envious Men (1731), WJE, 17:101–20; The State of Public Affairs (1732), WJE, 17:354; A Faithful Narrative, 146–47; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 148–50. 12. Kenneth P. Minkema, “The Edwardses: A Ministerial Family in EighteenthCentury New England” (PhD dissertation, University of Connecticut, 1988), 213–17; Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” WJE, 16:802. 13. Timothy Culter to Bishop Edmund Gibson, May 28, 1739, in Douglas C. Stenerson, “An Anglican Critique of the Early Phase of the Great Awakening in New England: A Letter by Timothy Cutler,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 30 (July 1973), 485–87; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 158. Cutler, once a promising young Congregationalist minister, was a key figure in the infamous “Yale Apostasy” of 1722, in which he and a few other tutors at Yale College converted to Anglicanism. 14. Stenerson, “Anglican Critique,” 484–85; Edwards, A Faithful Narrative, 148. 15. Richard D. Shiels, “The Feminization of American Congregationalism, 1735– 1835,” American Quarterly 33 (Spring 1981), 46–62; Elaine Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 62–64; Charles Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 137–43; Edwards, A Faithful Narrative, 148; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 155–56. 16. Jonathan Edwards to Benjamin Colman, May 30, 1735, WJE, 4:100–03, 104, 107–09. 17. Edwards, A Faithful Narrative, 157; Isaac Watts to Benjamin Colman, February 28, 1737/38, WJE, 4:36; Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 147, 149; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 170–73. 18. Edwards, God Amongst His People (1735), WJE, 19:469; Cedric B. Cowing, “Sex and Preaching in the Great Awakening,” American Quarterly 20 (Autumn 1968), 629–30. 19. Edwards to Colman, May 19, 1737, WJE, 16:67, 68; Edwards to Colman, March 19, 1737, WJE, 16:65–66; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 184–85. 20. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 185, 189. 21. John R. Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts, from Its Settlement in 1654, 2 vols. (Northampton, MA: Press of Gazette Printing Co., 1898, 1902), 2:73–75; Edwards, The Many Mansions (1737), WJE, 19:734–36; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 186–89.

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22. John F. Wilson, Introduction to A History of the Work of Redemption, WJE, 9:21; Ava Chamberlain, “Brides of Christ and Signs of Grace: Edwards’ Sermon Series on the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins,” in Stephen J. Stein, ed., Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 10; Edwards, Heaven is a World of Love (1738), WJE, 8:368, 371, 375; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 190–92. 23. Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688–1791 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 257–77; Edwards, “Sermon Twenty-Four,” WJE, 9:437–38. 24. Edwards, “Sermon 29,” WJE, 9:520; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 191––95. 25. Stephen J. Stein, Introduction to Edwards, “Notes on the Apocalypse,” WJE, 5:55–59; idem, “A Notebook on the Apocalypse by Jonathan Edwards,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 29 (October 1972), 623–34; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 196–99. 26. Early American millennialism was of the postmillennialist variety, meaning that God directed human history toward progressively higher states of spiritual and intellectual development, reaching perfection when all of humanity had converted to true Christianity, inaugurating the thousand-year reign of the saints before Christ’s. Some held to an opposite, “premillennialist” view that humanity’s intellectual progress masked hastening spiritual decline and that only Christ’s return could launch the Millennium. This view gained ground in the 1850s, and after the Civil War came to dominate American millennialism. See Paul S. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 75–76, 81–84, 90–100. 27. Timothy Cutler to Zachary Grey, June 5, 1735, in John Nichols, ed., Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols. (London, 1822), 4:298; Trumbull, History of Northampton, 2:79–81; Edwards to Colman, May 30, 1735, postscript of June 3, 1735, WJE, 16:58; Edwards, A Faithful Narrative, 205–07; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 161–69, and chap. 10. 28. Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” WJE, 16:801; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 185. 29. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 173–74. 30. Samuel Hopkins, Historical Memoirs Relating to the Housatonic Indians (Boston, 1753; repr., New York: William Abbatt, 1911), 15–18, 43–45; Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 13–49; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 174–75. For details about the Williamses of Deerfield, see John Putnam Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 31. Edwards to George Whitefield, February 12, 1739/40, WJE, 16:80–81; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 202–05. 32. Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 418.

PART II

“THE LATE REVIVAL OF RELIGION”

The Alteration in the Face of Religion here is altogether surprising. Never did People show so great a Willingness to attend Sermons, nor the Preachers greater Zeal in Diligence in performing the Duties of their Function. Religion is become the Subject of Most Conversations. No Books are in Request but those of Piety and Devotion; and instead of idle Songs and Ballads, the People are every where entertaining themselves with Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs. —Pennsylvania Gazette, 12 Jun. 1740

Chapter 5

“Many Thousands Flocking to Hear Him Preach the Gospel” George Whitefield, The Grand Itinerant

On November 8, 1739, Benjamin Franklin joined a gathering crowd in front of Philadelphia’s courthouse, expecting to confirm his suspicions that the reputed ability of the celebrated English evangelist George Whitefield to draw immense crowds to hear his preaching was little more than hype. He had read the reports in British newspapers of crowds of thousands, even tens of thousands, converging wherever the “Grand Itinerant” was scheduled to preach, and assumed that the numbers had been deliberately exaggerated, while nevertheless reprinting them in the Pennsylvania Gazette. He published Whitefield’s journals and sermons, recognizing a hot commodity, but he also detected solid learning and a refreshing ecumenism in them. He noted Whitefield’s arrival in the colonies in his Autobiography, and that although he had initially been courteously received by some fellow clergymen, was later “oblig’d to preach in the Fields” on account of “the Clergy taking a Dislike to him.” The general climate in Philadelphia, as elsewhere throughout the colonies during Whitefield’s tour, was one of greatly increased religiosity. “It was wonderful to see the Change soon made in the Manners of our Inhabitants,” he wrote, “from being thoughtless or indifferent about Religion, it seem’d as if all the World were growing Religious; so that one could not walk thro’ the Town in an Evening without Hearing Psalms sung in different Families of every Street.” He approvingly considered Whitefield’s scheme to establish an orphanage in the newly founded colony of Georgia, which had been first populated by people Franklin believed to be “of i[n]dolent & idle habits, taken out of the Gaols, who being set down in the Woods, unqualified for clearing Land, & unable to endure the Hardships of a new Settlement.” He wrote to Whitefield to suggest that the orphans be brought to Philadelphia at much less expense than building an orphanage in Georgia, but he was politely rebuffed, and Franklin decided not to contribute to the scheme. Here was a humane and 107

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honest man, Franklin concluded, but one who preached as much in hopes of generous donations to the collection plate to finance his charities as to save souls for God.1 Whitefield stood at the top of the courthouse steps and began his sermon characteristically in soft and even tones, but as he proceeded he grew louder and more emotional, his already high voice growing higher in pitch as he reached the peroration. Franklin was astonished to find that the many reports of the Grand Itinerant’s oratorical skill were accurate—perhaps downplayed—as he noticed crowd members’ reactions. On a subsequent occasion, Franklin attended another of Whitefield’s sermons. As it neared its conclusion, “I perceived he intended to finish with a Collection & I silently resolved he should get nothing from me.” However, as Whitefield continued and was eliciting fervent emotional reactions from many in the audience, Franklin’s resistance melted away: “I had in my Pocket a Handful of Copper Money, three or four silver Dollars, and five Pistoles in Gold. As he proceeded I . . . concluded to give the Coppers. Another stroke of his Oratory made me asham’d of that, and determin’d me to give the Silver; & he finish’d so admirably, that I empty’d my Pocket wholly into the Collector’s Dish, Gold and All.” Franklin had heard critics suppose that Whitefield only preached to enrich himself or aggrandize his reputation, but Franklin “never had the least Suspicion of his Integrity,” deciding that Whitefield “was in all his Conduct, a perfectly Honest Man.” Franklin was doubtful about Christianity’s claims, but he could respect a good theologian and admire a man who appeared to be genuinely devoted to the betterment of mankind. At the sermon preached from the steps of the courthouse, Franklin decided to walk down Market Street toward the Delaware River, and made it to Front Street before he could no longer hear Whitefield’s voice. Calculating that a person takes up 2 square feet of space and assuming that a typical audience would be spread out in front of Whitefield in a semicircle, Franklin concluded that thirty thousand people could manage to hear the evangelist’s sermons so long as the audience remained silent—as Franklin observed that auditors tended to do during his sermons—and therefore decided that the newspaper accounts from Britain were not exaggerations. The printing of Whitefield’s works generated profit for both Franklin and Whitefield, who became friends for the rest of their lives.2  THE “HOLY CLUB” The Church of England was not immune to this climate of heightened religiosity, as “Methodists” emerged from a group of Oxford University theology



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students led by John Wesley (1703–1791), his brother Charles (1707–1788), and George Whitefield (1714–1770). Whitefield was born to a family of innkeepers and wine merchants in Gloucester, England, and educated at the Crypt School in Gloucester, where he showed an enhanced aptitude for public speaking and the dramatic arts. Originally supposing that he was destined for a life in business like his father and elder brother, George began to consider a career as a dramatist or an actor, but an intense visionary experience sparked by his reading of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (c. 1418) sent him into a deep contemplation of entering the priesthood. Likewise, pushed by his family to pursue something more socially acceptable, his brother James headed a group of benefactors who managed to secure George a place at Pembroke College of Oxford University to study theology. As he came from a lower-class background and was unable to pay for his tuition, he entered Oxford as a servitor, where in return for free tuition, he worked as a servant to upper-class students. There, he developed a friendship with fellow divinity students John and Charles Wesley, and James Hervey (1714–1758), who drew inspiration from continental European and English Pietists’ practices of “holy living.” This tight circle of friends gained notoriety as the “Holy Club” for their performance of a regimented form of daily devotional activity that eventually came to be known as Methodism. Waggish critics might have applied the label as a sign of their scorn, but the group’s members wore the label as a badge of honor.3 George, who indulged in bouts of self-doubt and pious asceticism as a teenager, brought on mainly by an unfocused, directionless “shifting from place to place” under the guiding influence of the Wesleys, underwent an even more intense, Augustinian spate of spiritual doubt leavened by a sincere conviction of his unworthiness for salvation. The Wesleys suggested that he read a selection of Puritan theological works, chiefly Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man (1677), which led George to a realization that he had not yet been genuinely converted. This, in turn, led him to an assurance that he was destined for damnation in hell, and it was at this low moment of deep despair that the Wesleys reminded George that it is precisely at such moments that God makes saints. Convinced that his vanity was the root of his personal evil, he foreswore decent clothing and neglected his hygiene and appearance. He fasted to the point of near starvation and became seriously ill, requiring an emergency return home to convalesce under his family’s watchful care. It was while lying in his sickbed that he suddenly became aware of the pouring out of God’s grace upon his undeserving head, and he felt the total transformation of his soul that denoted true conversion. Scougal had written that “true religion was union of the soul with God,” and George believed that he had finally experienced it. He returned to Oxford, his theological studies, and to the Holy Club with a renewed spiritual vigor that impressed his friends, tutors, and

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even those who scoffed at the Holy Club’s asceticism and rigor. Whitefield and the others distinguished themselves in their work among Oxford’s poor and indigent, which after graduation led him and the Wesleys to travel to Georgia on a missionary outreach to the debtors and criminals who made up much of the new colony’s founding population. The demanding nature of the Wesleys’ missionary zeal alienated most of Georgia’s leaders and settlers, precluding any chance of real success, and shortly before Whitefield’s arrival in the late summer of 1738 they left bitterly disappointed. Whitefield rolled up his sleeves and spent three months restoring the mission and the Methodists’ reputation, mainly through the foundation of the Bethesda Orphanage and raising money for the enterprise.4 Upon his return to England, Whitefield’s piety and charity work led the Bishop of Gloucester to ordain him three years before canon law stipulated, and only a year after becoming a deacon. John Wesley urged members of the Holy Club to think of new and unconventional ways of conveying the gospel to the unregenerate, and soon after his ordination Whitefield embraced the outdoor conventicle model and wandering itinerancy to some early success. Itinerancy necessarily entailed ignoring standards of professional conduct within the Church of England to prevent clergy from “poaching” in others’ parishes, as well as the nonordained or the untrained from preaching in public at all. Whitefield particularly favored spontaneous preaching in London’s parks and in farmers’ pastures in the country, and Wesley slowly embraced the practice in light of the fact that receptive audiences could be easily found. Lacking a parish of his own, Wesley asserted that “all the world [is] my parish” and that he looked upon it as his solemn “duty to declare unto all that are willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation.” While Wesley’s and Whitefield’s Church of England colleagues admonished them for treading uninvited into others’ parishes and expressed discomfort with public preaching, considering it novel, there was nothing particularly new or innovative in their methods. Public preaching and itinerancy were commonplace in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, but relatively unknown in England, and so from an Anglican point of view the Holy Club’s methods were indeed radical.5 Whitefield proved to be especially effective in drawing crowds and holding their attention in his extemporaneous preaching, which clearly benefited from his theatrical training and natural inclinations toward the dramatic. He freely and unabashedly castigated his fellow clergymen for indolence in the delivery of their sermons and, in some cases, in other aspects of their spiritual duties that carried thinly veiled accusations of spiritual deadness that offended some colleagues who refused to open their pulpits to him. He advocated for a more affective preaching style that opened hearts as well as minds to the Christian message, and in this he directly echoed the new generation of New England Calvinist clergymen, such as Jonathan Edwards, who argued at the same time



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for a return to the “plain style” that typified early seventeenth-century Puritan sermonic style. His first outdoor sermon he gave was in Kingswood, hard by the seaport city of Bristol in December 1738, to a small crowd he identified as “poor colliers . . . sheep having no shepherd.” In a blush of youthful hubris, Whitefield described the occasion in a manner in which he compared himself to Jesus of Nazareth delivering his first and most famous public sermon: “I went upon a mount, and spake to as many people as came unto me.” This first audience he estimated at “upwards of two hundred,” but as he refined his technique and gained a reputation as a powerful speaker, he numbered the members of his later audiences in the thousands and tens of thousands.6 As an evangelist, Whitefield was able to indulge his dramatic inclinations in developing a flamboyant and affective preaching style. His high-pitched voice he learned to project expertly, and observers reported that he could be heard at considerable distances. He also advocated an extemporaneous preaching style rather than depending on notes, as was more usual, and against loading sermons with theological jargon and complex concepts. During his further theological studies, he parted company with the Wesleys when he embraced the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, convinced that Arminianism granted too much power to people and too little to God. Faced with mounting opposition from the Church of England, he began to tour Britain more fervently, preaching to huge crowds, allegedly to twenty thousand people in Bristol on one occasion. Encouraged by like-minded colleagues, he embraced the beginnings of a transatlantic Protestant revival. Whitefield gained notoriety for his evangelism and open-air revivals both in England and the American colonies, while John Wesley, under the influence of German Moravians in the newly founded colony of Georgia and Camisards7 in England, instituted a type of primitive Christianity that gradually separated it from the Anglican Church in the 1750s.8 The success of Whitefield’s outdoor revival preaching owed as much to his clever exploitation of the newly booming print market as to his charismatic presence and style. While there was nothing new in the publication of sermons in and of themselves, John Wesley and other members of the Holy Club arranged for his sermons to be published, in addition to a series of excerpts from seminal works of “Practical Divinity” supportive of their theology. Devoid of “unimportant . . . sentiment and superfluous language,” this “Reader’s Digest of theology for the masses,” according to Frank Lambert, simplified Christian truths in print even as Whitefield was doing the same in his revival preaching. Whitefield also published his sermons, but was quick to realize the potential of the newspaper as a promotional tool. Throughout Britain, economic growth led to the rise of a middle class in the 1720s and 1730s. This fed a booming urban merchant community and consumer culture in the major cities and entrepôts, in which a hunger for information matched

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the hunger for material goods. Advances in education and literacy expanded the market for books and pamphlets, which became less expensive and consequently more commonplace as a means of transmitting information and exchanging ideas throughout the British Atlantic world. Newspapers became an increasingly common part of urban life, and also trickled into the countryside to include the rural gentry and the semiliterate yeomanry. As the market for print matter expanded and diversified, prices for books, newspapers, and pamphlets lowered to make them widely available to a reading public. Newspapers were easily procured, and venues where newspapers were read aloud or in common at coffeehouses and taverns allowed even the illiterate to be a part of a communications revolution.9 Whitefield learned about the potential of newspapers as promotional tools through a London businessman, William Seward, who had recently been converted after attending one of the evangelist’s revivals. Already well acquainted with how newspaper advertisements enhanced retail profits by luring customers into shops, Seward advertised Whitefield’s upcoming appearances, effectively becoming the Grand Itinerant’s publicist. Beginning in the spring of 1739, ads for upcoming revivals appeared in London’s major newspapers as well as on handbills and broadsides posted throughout the city. Not only were future revivals advertised, but glowing reports of Whitefield’s prior appearances peppered London’s daily and weekly papers, in which Seward used Whitefield’s own optimistic and likely exaggerated calculations of crowd sizes, most famously the 20,000 alleged to have attended his appearance at Kennington Common and the 50,000 at Hyde Park (Whitefield guessed 80,000). Although Whitefield admitted that this advertising blitz “chagrined” him, the campaign obviously worked, as the numbers of people attending Whitefieldian revivals swelled in the summer of 1739. Certainly, he had some cause to be apprehensive about his press coverage; however, as the Church of England’s newspaper of record, the London Weekly Miscellany devoted almost an entire issue on May 12, 1739, denouncing Whitefield and his techniques: Immediately after his ordination to the priesthood; without a license from any bishop; contrary to all the rules of the Christian Church; contrary to the canons and constitution of our own Church, which so lately gave him his orders; contrary to the laws of the land,—he goes strolling about the kingdom, . . . preaching doctrines different from those which he subscribed before the bishop, with an unparalleled degree of vanity and vainglory; extolling himself, and, with the most unchristian spirit of censoriousness, undervaluing and blaming the established clergy.

The Weekly Miscellany again devoted nearly another issue, on May 26, disparaging not just Whitefield, but also the Wesleys, who were implied to be



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fiendish masterminds coercing Whitefield, “this unfortunate young man,” into breaking with Anglican theology and doctrine for their own nefarious purposes. In the end, however, the editorialists concluded that Whitefield was nothing more than a self-serving “mountebank”: Is he compelled by military force, or by the violence of the people, to mount the stage? On the contrary, does he not put out bills in the daily papers, and invite people to assemble together contrary to law? I know of no force but an internal one—an impetuous impulse, from a degree of pride and vanity that is equalled by nothing but his weakness and folly.

The fact that a newspaper was used to attack Whitefield and his unique brand of evangelicalism demonstrates the power of the popular press that Seward and Whitefield had proficiently harnessed.10 American newspapers quickly picked up the stories of Britain’s evangelical revivals in the early summer of 1739 and reprinted them, spreading accounts of Whitefield’s revivals up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Whitefield likewise read the London printings of Jonathan Edwards’s Faithful Narrative, and found confirmation that he and like-minded young clergymen had begun a process of “awakening” hearts and minds to Christianity on a level unreached since the vaunted days of the Apostles. Edwards’s account inspired Whitefield to pen a brief autobiography, A Faithful Narrative of the Life and Character of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, which debuted as Seward’s publicity campaign peaked in high summer. This was quickly, and rather awkwardly, followed by the publication of a hagiographic and mostly fictionalized biography of Whitefield bearing almost exactly the same title, written by an overly enthusiastic supporter. Here, the newly invented George Whitefield is portrayed as a latter-day St. Augustine: born to wealth and privilege, he is depicted as having been a lighthearted dabbler in the folly and debaucheries of the day before his world-shattering conversion that sent him to Oxford University, where he is credited with founding the Holy Club and the Wesleys relegated to being his protégés. Whitefield edited his journals into a single volume that hit the print shops soon after that, with the result that in the summer of 1739 he was arguably the most famous man in the British Atlantic World. Evangelical ministers in the American colonies, including Edwards, took notice and contemplated inviting this electrifying young man to preach to their flocks.11 Mere weeks after English newspapers began conveying reports of the Whitefieldian revivals, the May 22 and June 19 issues of the New-England Weekly Journal published brief accounts of the revivals at Kingswood, Moorfields, and Kennington, along with the inflated crowd estimates. Whereas Whitefield noted in his Journals that the crowd at Kingswood numbered

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approximately 200, by the time the Weekly Journal printed the story the crowd had ballooned to an amazing 10,000. Newspapers in other colonial seaport cities faithfully reprinted the Journal stories throughout the early summer, sparking intense public discussion and debate, mainly concerning the huge audience estimates. In response to skeptical inquiries that so many people could possibly hear a speaker out-of-doors, one prorevivalist submitted to the Weekly Journal an intricate mathematical proof originally appearing in the London Gentleman’s Magazine that since the size of the available space at Moorfields was 2,287 square yards, and since nine people can stand comfortably together in a space of one square yard, then Whitefield’s audience could have been 25,443. Others were quick to produce their own exacting calculations to prove that the total had to be at best half such exaggerated numbers, usually by pointing out that people would not willingly pack together so tightly if not forced to do so. Revivalists emphasized the prodigious numbers of people flocking to hear truly converted ministers as proof that something extraordinary and significant was taking place, while critics persisted in their skepticism, usually from an already ingrained sense of opposition to the revivalists’ seemingly radical methods. Edwards and other revivalist clergy who read excitedly about Whitefield’s preaching put their evangelical communications network—concentrated between England and New England—into higher gear, increasing the volume of letters passing back and forth throughout the colonies and across the Atlantic Ocean. Some correspondents sent Whitefield effusive invitations to preach in their churches, prompting him and Seward to plan a colonial preaching tour for the fall of 1739.12 New England’s Calvinist clergy, who read the newspaper accounts of the English revivals and discussed them with their correspondents, could not miss what they thought to be an obvious connection between them and the Edwardsian revivals preceding Whitefield’s debut a few years later. Their primary contact points in England were John Guyse and Isaac Watts of London, who had shepherded the publication of Edwards’s Faithful Narrative, and eagerly confirmed the newspaper accounts of Whitefield’s endeavors. The lines of communication stretching across the Atlantic constituted what Susan O’Brien calls “a transatlantic community of saints” that formed after the Restoration in 1660 out of concerns that the Church of England was drifting inexorably back toward Catholicism. Dissenting ministers in England shared news and information essentially to defend against infringements upon their rights as guaranteed by the 1689 Act of Toleration, and New England’s Dissenters offered moral and financial support. However, since most English Dissenters deeply mistrusted the rising tide of Anglican evangelicalism and never respected Celtic Presbyterian revivalism, a redefined evangelical community was formed in the 1730s. In the months before his arrival in America



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in 1739, George Whitefield became the gravitational center of this new community of saints, which saw in the Calvinist revivals in England and New England “a Time of General Awakenings.” The center of that community in New England was Benjamin Colman and Jonathan Edwards, who circulated copies of Whitefield’s letters to Colman to Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches throughout the region. In New Jersey, Gilbert Tennent read about the English revivals and found much that was consonant with his own and his father’s work, and some hope that the Anglican Church could eventually turn away from episcopacy and toward Presbyterianism.13 “PEDLAR IN DIVINITY” Mr. Whitefield is a man of a middle Stature, of a slender Body, a fair Complexion, and of a comely Appearance. He is of sprightly chearful Temper, acts and moves with great Agility and Life. The Endowments of his Mind are very uncommon; his Wit is quick and piercing; his Imagination lively and florid; and as far as I can discern, both are under the Direction of an exact and solid Judgment. He has a most ready Memory, and I think, speaks entirely without Notes. He has a clear and musical Voice, and a wonderful Command of it. He uses much Gesture, but with great Propriety: Every Accent of his Voice, and every Motion of his Body, speaks, and both are natural and unaffected.

So wrote an anonymous observer of Whitefield’s sermon at Elizabethtown, New Jersey, in a letter appearing in the New York Gazette. This is the first glimpse the American colonies received of the great evangelist whose coming had been anticipated for over three months. William Seward accompanied Whitefield to the colonies, arranging in advance for newspapers in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia to print accounts of his appearances as well as his planned itinerary so that potential audiences might know when and where to catch him. Altogether, Whitefield’s 1739–1740 tour of the colonies consisted of three legs that took him back and forth throughout the Middle Colonies and the South most heavily, and New England on the third leg. He preached 347 sermons in the span of just over seven months in total, the rest of his time spent traveling and—in the winter of 1739/40 and the summer of 1740—resting and meeting with other clergymen. The publication of the first volume of his Journals preceded his arrival by over a year, with newspaper coverage of his activities rising in frequency as his American debut drew closer. By the time his ship, the Elizabeth, arrived at Lewes (sometimes called “Lewis Town”), Delaware on October 30, 1739, Whitefield was already a celebrity, insofar as one could exist in the eighteenth century.14 Whitefield and Seward disembarked from the Elizabeth for a short respite before their ship proceeded up the Delaware River to arrive at Philadelphia on

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November 2. Although Pennsylvania was a Quaker colony, its liberal stance on religious toleration allowed the Presbyterian Church to become dominant in the colony since the influx of Scots-Irish immigrants in the 1720s. Philadelphia in the early eighteenth century quickly became a most important colonial entrepôt, second only to New York City and just ahead of Boston, and is as noteworthy as New York for its racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. This made it a logical first place for Whitefield to formally begin his American tour, though he could expect little cooperation from the city’s Anglican parsons or the majority of the Presbyterian clergy. He did assist in Sunday services at the Anglican Christ Church, in spite of the hostility harbored by rector Archibald Cummings. Soon after Whitefield’s arrival, Benjamin Franklin sought subscriptions in the November 15 issue of the Philadelphia Gazette to underwrite the publication of Whitefield’s “journals and sermons in 2 volumes,” which generated so many pledged subscribers that by the time the books came off the presses in May 1740 there were not enough copies to go around. Only “those Subscribers who have [already] paid or who bring the Money in their Hands” would get dibs on copies from the first printing until a second printing could be produced. Thousands of copies were sold in what historian C. William Miller surmised to be the first of Franklin’s “large business ventures and certainly a lucrative one.” Seward clearly thought in the same terms, though the profits generated from donations and passing the collection plate were intended for the Bethesda Orphanage. Whitefield’s arrival caused a significant stir among clergymen of all stripes in the colonies, especially those who fervently supported and opposed revivalism.15 Although Whitefield expected a mixed reception, he nevertheless made a point of seeking out the region’s most influential clergymen, conferring with Anglican parsons, Presbyterian and Baptist ministers, as well as Quaker elders. He was not looking for any formal or informal permission to preach in the open air, as he increasingly preferred, but rather was testing the atmosphere. Who would invite him to borrow their pulpits, who would bar him from theirs, and—more importantly—how would ordinary people greet the news of his arrival and show interest in attending his appearances? This would help determine his itinerary, which was open-ended. On the early evening of November 8, he held his first outdoor sermon, preaching from the Court House steps to an audience he estimated at 6,000. For his next sermon the following night, he gauged to have been attended by 8,000, meaning that in two days an average of more than half of the city’s population turned out to see and hear him, such rousing success boding well for the tour overall. Allowing for the exaggeration of audience tallies that as much as one-third of a city’s population—though by English standards a total population of 13,000 made Philadelphia little more than a town—attended his first two appearances indicates just how receptive the colonists were to revivalism, whereas



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the overwhelming majority of established religious leaders opposed it to one degree or another.16 William Tennent, Sr. reached out to Whitefield soon after his arrival, sketching out the progress of his and his sons’ work in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and praising the Englishman’s ecumenism. Equating the difficulties the Tennents had been having with the Synod of Philadelphia to the same troubles endured by evangelical Presbyterians in Scotland and Northern Ireland, Whitefield wrote in his journal that “we . . . stand as it were alone like Elijah, and though they [their critics and opponents], like the priests of Baal, are many in number, yet I do not doubt but the Lord will appear for us . . . and make us more than Conquerors.” Shortly after, Whitefield met with the Tennents at New Brunswick, which was mutually enjoyable and enlightening, during the course of which Gilbert offered to accompany Whitefield to New York City. In that more staunchly Anglican colony, Whitefield routinely ran afoul of rectors and parsons whose pulpits he sought to borrow, and so Tennent used his connections to secure Ebenezer Pemberton’s permission to preach at his Presbyterian meetinghouse. At Elizabethtown, New Jersey, there was a similar argument with the Anglican rector there, and Tennent facilitated Jonathan Dickinson’s offer to open his pulpit to Whitefield. Although the revivalist used this particular occasion to attack “both Ministers and People among the Dissenters” for spiritual complacency and apostasy, which bothered Dickinson, he could hardly fail to admire the Englishman’s sermonic style and spiritual magnetism. Tennent’s preaching met with enthusiastic approval from Whitefield, who dubbed him “a Son of Thunder.” In a letter sent to Whitefield in December, “It seems as if Emanual, to whom a Bow, a Crown is given, wou’d ride upon the Steed of his Gospel, to the Spreading of his gracious Conquests over stubborn Sinners through the Nations.”17 Baffled that fellow Anglicans in the colonies—which had apparently seemed so well disposed to revivalism—showed as much resistance and outright hostility to evangelicalism as did the Anglican leadership in England, Whitefield concluded that the Church of England’s clergy generally “do not preach or live up to the truth as it is in Jesus. . . . [the Church’s] prophets prophesy lies,” a stinging criticism unlikely to change their opinions of him except to dim them. He and Gilbert Tennent enjoyed standing on a great deal more common theological ground, and the more enthusiastic responses from the throngs at his outdoor sermons impelled Whitefield to avoid pulpit preaching throughout most of his yearlong tour. Accompanying Tennent back to New Brunswick in November, Whitefield delivered a sermon attended by Theodorus Frelinghuysen, whom he called “a worthy old soldier of Jesus Christ . . . the beginner of the great work which I trust the Lord is carrying on in these parts.” William Tennent, Sr. and Gilbert then took Whitefield

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to Neshaminy to see the Log College, which he compared favorably to “the school of the old prophets” as opposed to Harvard and Yale, which he dismissed as merely “glorious without.” Following his brief inspection, he preached in the nearby yard to what he judged to be 3,000 people. He summarily dismissed the Tennent’s enemies as “carnal ministers” who had never been converted, providing inspirational material for what would become Gilbert’s most famous—and most controversial—sermon. He returned to Pennsylvania to preach at Philadelphia and Germantown in the final week of November, commenting in his Journals upon how positively he was received by earnest seekers of Christian truth.18 The fervently emotional nature of Whitefield’s preaching and audience responses either deepened a supporter’s confirmation of the itinerant’s spiritual powers, or hardened an opponent’s convictions that he was a deluded “pedlar in divinity” addicted to popular adoration. While many clerical observers of Whitefield’s preaching reacted along a spectrum ranging from wide-eyed amazement to tight-lipped antagonism, ordinary people tended to respond to his rhetoric and delivery with a level of excitement considered inappropriate to mid-eighteenth-century worshipful decorum, but which readily came to typify evangelicalism as it was redefined in the First Great Awakening. Advocates of revivalism tended to avoid publishing detailed descriptions of the goings-on at Whitefieldian revivals, while opponents liberally wrote lurid accounts emphasizing the most outrageous incidents of “enthusiasm.” Such reports usually employed the same censorious language laden with class consciousness, coming as they usually did from established clergymen. Whitefield was routinely depicted as “infatuat[ing] the common People,” preaching doctrines “inconsistent with true Religion,” and “subversive of all Order and Decency, and repugnant to common Sense.” Clergymen who opposed the revivals rejected some aspects of Whitefield’s theology, but what they found most objectionable was his latitudinarian ecumenism. As he related it in his Journals, soon after his conversion he realized that, in true Pietist fashion, “the partition wall of bigotry and sect-religion was broken down in my heart; for as soon as the love of God was shed abroad in my soul, I loved all of whatsoever denomination, who loved the Lord Jesus in sincerity of heart,” and this formed the keynote to his itinerant ministry. This did not mean that he did not have theological and ecclesiological differences with fellow clerics, but his egalitarianism extended to the “common People,” which elitist clergy found most dangerous.19 Anxious to inspect the development of the Bethesda Orphanage in Georgia, Whitefield declared his intention to journey southward, and preached a final sermon in Philadelphia to a crowd estimated—again optimistically—at 10,000. Prior to his departure, Whitefield and Seward sent out a flurry of letters to advertise the evangelist’s coming as well as excoriating slave owners



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for neglecting their bondspeoples’ spiritual well-being. He also kept up his withering critiques of the bulk of the Anglican clergy—especially its highest leadership past and present. This infuriated South Carolina’s Anglican Commissary, Alexander Garden, who closed his parishes’ churches to Whitefield and summoned the evangelist to answer for himself upon his arrival in Charleston. Whitefield left Philadelphia for Wilmington, Delaware, at the end of November, and by arrangement with Gilbert Tennent’s brother, Charles, preached under a large tent erected next to the Whiteclay Creek meetinghouse to a reported crowd, again, of 10,000 that braved a cold December rain. He then crossed into Maryland, stopping in Cecil County, populated largely by Scots-Irish Presbyterians and culturally identical to southeastern Pennsylvania. Accustomed to enormous success thus far, Whitefield doubtless was taken aback when only forty people attended his appearance at Joppa. His interactions with the leisurely planters and somewhat spiritually indifferent yeomanry led him to conclude prematurely that the colony “seems to be a place as yet unwatered with the true Gospel of Christ.” “I cannot say,” he wrote, “I have met with many here who seem truly to have the fear of God before their eyes.” At Annapolis, he was cordially received and earned the patronage of Governor Samuel Ogle, as well as the support of Rev. James Stirling, the rector of St. Anne’s Parish. Nevertheless, his initial impressions changed little as he left Maryland for Williamsburg, Virginia. The urban gentry’s wives and daughters, brimming with “vanity [and] false politeness, . . . are wedded to their Quadrile and Ombre,” and while “Sterling wept . . . and earnestly begged my prayers,” he “will not frighten the people with harsh doctrine,” preferring instead “to prophesy smooth things.”20 Reaching the Virginia capitol a few days after leaving Annapolis, Whitefield and his entourage toured the College of William and Mary, met warmly with the colony’s Anglican Commissary, James Blair—who also founded the College—and then Whitefield preached at Bruton Parish Church to a near capacity crowd that included a handful of the local gentry. Moving on to North Carolina, he stopped at Bath to preach at the Anglican church to an audience of a seemingly paltry one hundred, but he was reminded by his hosts that the usual worship services rarely attracted more than twenty-five or thirty congregants, largely on account of its having no regular priest. Strangely, instead of blaming the established church for neglecting the town’s souls, as he was usually more inclined to do, he blamed the people themselves, saying that “God was angry with them, because He had sent a famine of the Word among them.” Nevertheless, unable to resist the urge to accuse his fellow Anglican clergy of spiritual indolence, he commented that the irregular ministrations of Bath’s priest were indicative of the all too common condition of parsons and ministers being ignorant of the true nature of Christianity. “Most that handle the law know not what they say, nor whereof they affirm.”

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At a Christmas service in the colonial capitol of New Bern, he observed that the congregation seemed only to go through the motions of proper worship without understanding the meaning and significance of any of it, though a later sermon that afternoon drew a respectable crowd that responded with the more usual tearful effusions of emotion and spiritual hunger Whitefield was accustomed to seeing at his revivals. “I looked upon it as an earnest of future and more plentiful effusions of God’s Spirit in these parts,” he noted optimistically upon continuing on toward South Carolina in January.21 Passing through South Carolina and into Charleston (then called Charles Town), the largest colonial city south of Philadelphia, Whitefield accepted an invitation from Rev. Josiah Smith, an Independent Congregationalist, to preach at his meetinghouse. The city remained on edge because of a smallpox epidemic a little over a year before that had only subsided before an outbreak of yellow fever in the months just before Whitefield’s arrival in America. Fear of death by disease was compounded by the minor explosion of the Stono Rebellion that September, a slave insurrection that erupted in St. Paul’s Parish twenty miles south of Charleston. Rising tensions over Anglo-Spanish relations were worsened by rumors of slave and Indian insurrections to be undertaken either independently or in conjunction with a feared Spanish invasion of Georgia and South Carolina. Consequently, anxiety levels were very high when news of war between Britain and Spain that September, and the mildly bloody, though easily suppressed, Stono Rebellion broke out. It was in this jittery and war-fevered city that Whitefield hoped to continue his ushering of souls to the “second birth.” Whitefield reminded the audience at his Charleston debut that the “Divine judgments lately sent amongst them” resulted from their growing addictions to material goods and luxuriant living that might feed their bellies and their vanities, but did nothing but starve their souls. While the congregants sat politely and listened attentively, they were obviously unmoved by admonitions that they had long been used to hearing from Smith, even if the warnings came from the famous George Whitefield. One exception was Hugh Blair, a planter who took seriously Whitefield’s admonitions that slaves were human beings with souls in need of saving, and went about establishing a school for them along with another convert, William Hutson. The enterprise came to naught as much from Blair’s erratic nature as from his neighbors’ determined resistance. Then, Whitefield met in tense cordiality with Alexander Garden and, not surprisingly, they came to no meeting of the minds. Later, Garden resolved that he would suspend Whitefield from the ministry, which Whitefield airily dismissed as having no more force of effect than a papal bull, though he pledged to meet with his antagonist a second time after his visit to Georgia.22 Soon after their first meeting, Smith published an anonymous laudatory essay in the South-Carolina Gazette that aimed barbs at the effeteness and



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concomitant impiety of South Carolina’s planter gentry. Whitefield’s “Composures seem’d not to[o] much calculated to acquire the Reputation of a Man of Letters,” he wrote, his sermons not filigreed with “Beauties and Ornaments of Language,” but rather plainspoken and replete with “divine Warmth and Zeal.” Whitefield preached simple gospel truths, Smith argued, his aspect like “the Great Judge, cloathed in Flame and adjudging a guilty World to penal Fire.” Smith finished with an accusatory note wishing “Success to Mr. WHITEFIELD’S publick and repeated Censures upon our BALLS and MID-NIGHT ASSEMBLIES,” of which the city’s elite should be ashamed, given the recent misfortunes. Smith marveled that the colony’s Anglican clergy “dare[d] to Shew . . . Indifference to it; . . . that Religion and Virtue can thrive under the Shadow of a Theatre.” The following week, another anonymous author penned an echo of support for Whitefield, in which he expressed dismay that, in the wake of the pestilence and the Stono Rebellion, Charles Town would carry on with such frivolities. “Sure, said I, the Clergy at last will be alarm’d at the Impiety, and the Artillery of Heaven must play from every Pulpit in the Town.” When it did not, “Laicus” asked a parson (“Clerus”) about their silence, who with an air of resignation admitted that such “modish Practices” were too deeply entrenched a part of high society for “Arts and Persuasion” to remove. According to Clerus, “Custom . . . has a kind of magick Sovereignty over the Passions, insensibly creep[ing] into the Esteem of the best People, and where it has fix’d its Empire, fortifies the Soul against Reason . . . [and] extinguishes all Regard to the great Solemnities of Religion.”23 Frustrated with the spiritual indolence of his white audiences, Whitefield began preaching to gatherings of slaves and free blacks in Philadelphia, and once in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, stepped up his efforts to Christianize African Americans. He chastised slave owners for not allowing slaves to attend church with them, and—as he had in Philadelphia—argued that slaves should be taught rudimentary literacy so that they could read the Bible. While in the Middle Colonies, Seward spent £2,200 of donated funds to buy land outside Philadelphia that would be the campus of a school for slaves and free blacks called “Nazareth,” but the scheme never advanced beyond the planning stage. Another school for blacks in Philadelphia was begun under the auspices of Robert Bolton, who converted his dancing school into an “academy” for slaves, but it floundered, as well. Whitefield freely admitted curious slaves into his lodgings wherever he happened to be, and rebuked anyone who tried to turn slaves away from his outdoor sermons. Such philanthropy should not be confused with any antislavery sentiment in Whitefield, who believed that the British enslavement of Africans in America constituted a preparatory step in the eventual Christianization of Africa. He never questioned the rectitude of slavery, confining any reservations about it

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to appeals to humane treatment that presaged planter paternalism later in the century. This did not insulate him from indirect blame for a slave conspiracy to burn down New York City in 1741, almost a full year after his first preaching tour. One night, as they were approaching Charleston in January 1740, Whitefield’s party twice came upon gatherings of unsupervised slaves that unnerved them enough to lead Whitefield to thank God for allowing them to proceed unharmed. Nonetheless, Whitefield’s entrée into the South marks the beginning of a more deliberate effort toward the Christianization of African Americans, who in due course made substantial contributions to the First Great Awakening.24 A war of anonymously written words erupted in the South Carolina newspapers in the wake of the essays by “J. S.” and “Laicus,” as well as the news about Whitefield’s outreach to the colony’s communities. “Arminius” defended the Anglican establishment there by mounting an initial ad hominem attack upon Whitefield, whom, he charged, “assumes the Character of an Apostle” and espoused a theology tainted by “old and exploded Doctrines of Calvinism.” Whitefield’s uncharitable censoriousness, “Arminius” complained, was little more than a cloak-concealing doctrinal “Weakness, Ignorance, and Rashness,” and he would do well to remember that “not only the censured but Censurers must all appear before the Judgment Seat of Christ; where they who judge without Mercy will receive Judgment without Mercy.” “J. S.” returned to defend Whitefield and himself against “Arminius” in subsequent issues of the Gazette, while others took up the anti-Whitefield critique throughout the remainder of 1740. A sustained dispute about the Awakening simmered for the next few years in the newspapers, in which the argument between the pro-revivalists and anti-revivalists staggered between explicitly theological concerns and a debate over social standing, wealth, and materialism as they affected the colony’s religious climate, with an occasional foray into sneering North-South sectionalism. All in all, it never amounted to much more than a tempest in a teacup, neither side undisputedly claiming the higher ground, and Charles Town’s high society never seriously challenged to reform.25 In February, Whitefield moved on to oversee the development of the Bethesda Orphanage. The trustees had offered him some money to finance his traveling expenses, but he turned them down on account that, between Seward’s personal wealth and generous donations from his audiences, he did not need their money. In fact, he somewhat tersely reminded them, he had enough money to finance Bethesda by himself and that they needed only to administer its allocations and otherwise heed his instructions. This rankled the trustees, who—egged on by Garden—demanded a thorough accounting of Whitefield’s finances, and also began an argument over the land upon which Bethesda sat. It had been purchased by Whitefield a few years earlier,



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but Garden argued that it belonged rather to the trustees and that Whitefield had no authority to dispose of the land in any way. Whitefield bristled at any suggestion that he profited personally from his fund-raising activities on behalf of the institution or that the land had ever left his possession, and replied that the orphanage existed entirely because of his hard work and that he retained “a right to the sole disposal of it.” Whitefield ultimately satisfied the trustees as far as fund-raising and the collection of quitrents was concerned, but the two sides did not reach a consensus on whether or not he had the right to will the land to any heirs. Whitefield and Seward saw to the publication of their side of the dispute, which earned Whitefield the sympathy and support of middle-class colonists especially.26 Upon returning to Charleston in March, Whitefield dutifully brought himself to stand before Garden and dispense with the Commisary’s accusations personally, and accounts of this “trial” were reported in many major newspapers. Standing—according to historian Harry S. Stout—“like Stephen before an unconverted Paul and the Jewish Sanhedrin,” Whitefield listened to Garden rain scorn and invective upon him for his heterodoxy, his headlong attacks upon the Church’s bishops and archbishop, and—most damning of all—the cult of personality that he and Seward cultivated around him. As Whitefield noted in his journal, “I pitied, I prayed for him; and wished, from my soul, that the Lord would convert him, as he once did the persecutor Saul, and let him know it is Jesus whom he persecutes.” A local newspaper went on to report that the Grand Itinerant “recommended submission to authority, and love to enemies, in such a manner that he allay’d the resentment of the People against his Persecutors, . . . and remov’d strong prejudices conceived against him by many who never before heard him.” Garden’s campaign took on the odor of a Catholic inquisition that worked to enhance Whitefield’s popular appeal and fame, given how gracefully he deflected Garden’s criticism. He enjoyed greater success at various Dissenter churches throughout the late spring and early summer, where some audience members crumbled into pious sobs under the force of his rhetoric, but the majority remained as kindly patronizing as had the mixed crowd in Josiah Smith’s church. The largest audience he could attract at any one appearance in the South was 1,000 in Charleston. “It grieves me,” he concluded upon leaving the city, “to see people . . . ignorant of the one thing needful” for their salvation. He was bound for Boston and the long-awaited tour of New England.27  Benjamin Franklin, in spite of his own religious skepticism, endorsed Whitefield’s career as an evangelist in the colonies, and played no small role

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in making him one of the most famous men in the colonies. Whitefield’s American tour in 1739–1740 also marks the First Great Awakening’s advent as a transatlantic phenomenon. What had been a light epistolary flurry among like-minded revivalist clergy between the colonies and across the Atlantic in the early 1730s became a blizzard at the end of the decade on account of Whitefield’s activities. A loose network of evangelicals grew larger and tighter with the sharp upswing in revivals in the wake of Whitefield’s tour, but the greatest effects were found not just in the surge in newspaper accounts of revivals in the colonies and Britain, but also in the fact that people from across the socioeconomic spectrum responded to and displayed religious “enthusiasm” on an unprecedented scale. This heartened the spirits of the revivalists and their allies, while it troubled the minds of established clergymen who perceived a genuine threat to the authority they had worked so hard to regain in the first decade of the century.

NOTES 1. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 105–06; Pennsylvania Gazette, November 15, 1739. See also Frank Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits and Piety: The Friendship of Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 50 (July 1993), 529–54. 2. Franklin, Autobiography, 106–8; Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits and Piety,” 545–46. 3. George Whitefield, The Journals of George Whitefield (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1960), 41–42, 52–58; Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1991), 9. 4. Whitefield, Journals, 159–60; Stout, Divine Dramatist, 12. 5. Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 94–95. 6. Whitefield, Journals, 216. 7. The Camisards, also known as the “French Prophets,” were a millenarian Huguenot sect from the southern French province of Languedoc. Famous for their enthusiasm, the Camisards during worship often fell into trances, spoke in tongues, and were also notable for their inclusion of women as “prophets,” who most often were the ones who experienced the charisms. See Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Wesley later retreated from Camisard beliefs in preference for particular aspects of Moravian theology and practice. 8. See Richard P. Heitzenrater, Mirror and Memory: Reflections on Early Methodism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989). The Wesleyans, being more beholden to Moravian influence than Whitefield had been comfortable with, grew rapidly in England throughout the 1740s and 1750s, as well as in the American colonies.



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See Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 16–38. 9. Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 41–45, 49–51, 55–66. 10. The Weekly Miscellany (London), May 12, 1739, May 26, 1739; Whitefield, Journals, 87; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 99–100. 11. Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 100–02. 12. The New-England Weekly Journal, May 22, 1739, June 19, 1739; Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1739; The New-England Weekly Journal, November 13, 1739; Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” American Historical Review 91 (October 1986), 815–20; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 105–07. 13. O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints,” 815–16; New-England Weekly Journal, November 27, 1739. 14. New-England Weekly Journal, December 4, 1739; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening”, 116. The unidentified author of the letter is presumed to be Ebenezer Pemberton. 15. C. William Miller, Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Printing, 1728–1766: A Descriptive Bibliography (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974), 85; Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits and Piety,” 530; idem, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 52–55. 16. Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 47. 17. Gilbert Tennent to George Whitefield, December 1, 1739, in Three Letters to the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield (Philadelphia, 1739), 11; Whitefield, Journals, 347; Milton J. Coalter, Jr., Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 59–63. 18. Whitefield, Journals, 346, 350, 353–55; David C. Harlan, “The Travail of Religious Moderation: Jonathan Dickinson and the Great Awakening,” Journal of Presbyterian History 61 (Winter 1983), 417. 19. Boston Post-Boy, June 23, 1740; Whitefield, Journals, 52. 20. Whitefield, Journals, 361–64; Archibald Alexander, Biographical Sketches of the Founder, and Principal Alumni of the Log College (Princeton, NJ: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), 249–50; George Whitefield to Mr. N—––, December 8, 1739, in John Gillies, ed., The Works of the Rev’d George Whitefield . . . with a Selection of Letters Written to His Most Intimate Friends . . ., 2 vols. (London, 1771), 2:135; Timothy Feist, “‘A Stirring among the Dry Bones’: George Whitefield and the Great Awakening in Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine 95 (Winter 2000), 388–408; Stout, The Divine Dramatist, 108–09. The quadrille was a popular twocouple dance, while “Ombre” was a Spanish-derived card game similar to whist. 21. Whitefield, Journals, 377; David Morgan, “The Great Awakening in North Carolina, 1740–1775: The Baptist Phase,” North Carolina Historical Review 45 (July 1968), 265–70. In the absence of a bishop in the colonies, a Commissary held

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authority over Anglican parishes in groups of two or three colonies bordering one another. Blair oversaw Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, while Garden oversaw South Carolina and Georgia. 22. Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 308–26; Whitefield, Journals, 400–1; Stout, The Divine Dramatist, 111. 23. South Carolina Gazette, January 12, 1740, January 19, 1740. 24. Whitefield, Journals, 382–83; Stout, The Divine Dramatist, 107–08. See Chapter 9, for more about the New York slave conspiracy and its connection to the Awakening. 25. South Carolina Gazette, January 26, 1740, February 2, 1740, February 9, 1740; Fred Witzig, “The Great Anti-Awakening: Anti-Revivalism in Philadelphia and Charles Town, South Carolina, 1739–1745” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2008), 147–66. 26. Stout, The Divine Dramatist, 109–10. 27. Whitefield, Journals, 384–85; Charleston Mercury, August 14, 1740; Stout, The Divine Dramatist, 111.

Chapter 6

“Blessed be God that Hath Done It!” Revivalism Ascendant, 1740–1745

Nathan Cole could not spur his horse hard enough through the crisp October morning to get him and his wife, Anne, to Middletown where the celebrated George Whitefield was scheduled to preach in less than two hours. The thirtyyear-old Cole, a prosperous yeoman farmer, learned from a neighbor while working in his fields of the evangelist’s appearance, and, as Cole related it in his journal, “I dropt my tool . . . and ran home to my wife[,] telling her to make ready quickly to go. . . .” They lived in Kensington, and needed to cover a distance of about twelve miles, which typically would have taken approximately two hours for anyone riding at a normal pace. Together, they ran their horse to near exhaustion, Nathan occasionally hopping off to run until he “was much out of breath” before “mount[ing] my horse again. . . .” As they approached Middletown, Nathan noticed “a Cloud or fogg rising . . . and this Cloud was a Cloud of dust made by the Horses feet,” as others similarly hastened to the church. Indeed, a great crowd of people converged on Middletown, just as they had in every city and town Whitefield visited during his preaching tours of 1739–1741 to, again as Cole put it, “hear news from heaven.” The Coles made it to the meetinghouse just as Whitefield ascended the pulpit, and Nathan recalled finding the younger man “almost angelical . . . Cloathed with authority from the Great God.” Whitefield delivered a sermon that changed Nathan’s life, one that “gave me a heart wound; By God’s blessing: my old Foundation was broken up.”1 In common with many who underwent New Light conversion, Cole strove with his wounded heart and troubled mind on the subjects of predestination and the doctrine of election for nearly two years after he hastened to Middletown to hear the “Grand Itinerant.” In quiet moments while smoking his pipe, brooding on the seeming injustice that some who appeared unregenerate might in fact revel in heavenly bliss while the apparently godly may 127

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nevertheless be cast into eternal hellfire, Cole confessed that “hundreds of times [have I] put my fingers into my pipe . . . to feel how fire felt.” The New Lights compared conversion to experiencing the trauma of birth a second time, this time spiritually and, in ways, more painfully. As did some who endured the “New Birth,” Cole experienced a mystical vision, and it was in the midst of his spiritual striving that “God appeared unto me and made me [cringe] . . . I was shrinked into nothing.” However, “My heart was broken; [but] my burden was fallen of[f] my mind; I was set free, my distress was gone.” Although undoubtedly a rapturous vision, the God who appeared before Cole was as awesome and terrible as manifested before Old Testament prophets. This was the incensed deity that Jonathan Edwards warned his audience at Enfield dangled not only their souls over hellfire by a spider’s fragile thread, but also one possessing an infinite capacity for mercy, and it was this mercy Cole believed he had been granted and which offered him such relief.2 New Englanders had been steadily devouring newspaper accounts of Whitefield’s ongoing tour through the colonies, public interest and pious expectation of his coming from the faithful generated by Benjamin Coleman and Jonathan Edwards, and the enterprise fervently supported by the prorevivalist Massachusetts governor Jonathan Belcher. The throngs Whitefield grew accustomed to seeing at his appearances in the Middle Colonies, and to his frustration only intermittently came to see him in the South, were back again as he traveled through New England in the autumn of 1740, usually accompanied by sympathetic clergymen and most often by Belcher himself. Whitefield had come at precisely the most opportune time to stoke the brightening coals of revivalism into a conflagration of evangelical energy that shifted the epicenter of the First Great Awakening northward from the Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania-New Jersey to New England. There, a wave of division swept over New England, splintering Congregationalist and Baptist churches into New Light, Old Light, and Moderate factions that led to the establishment of new churches and denominations.  “MANY ARE FLOCKING TO HIM, AND PRESSING INTO THE KINGDOM OF GOD” Whitefield arrived at Newport, Rhode Island, on September 14, 1740, and there to welcome him stood a small committee headed by Nathaniel Clap, pastor of the town’s Congregational church. Starting at Clap’s meetinghouse, where Whitefield once more experienced the success that largely eluded him



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in South Carolina, he and his entourage proceeded to Boston. The city had lately been suffering from a further series of misfortunes that significantly increased the ranks of the impoverished and destitute. Once in town, Whitefield visited Timothy Cutler, former Yale “apostate” and Anglican Commissary, and soon enough they locked horns on the subject of Whitefield’s ecumenism. Cutler denied that Dissenters could claim valid ordination, while Whitefield countered that he veritably discovered “regenerate souls among the Baptists, among the Presbyterians, among the Independents, and among the Church folks . . . all born again in a different way of worship.” Unlike Alexander Garden, who thought of Whitefield as a dangerous adversary, Cutler was somewhat won over by Whitefield’s modest charm and they were able to part amicably. Whitefield then made appearances at the Old South Church, the Brattle Street Church, the Old Brick Church, and the New North Church between September 20 and 22, each of them well attended by many thousands, according to the newspapers. At the New South Church, on the afternoon of the 22nd, so many people crowded onto the balcony that the wood began to crack loudly under the weight and, fearing that the gallery was about to collapse, panicking attendees rushed for whatever safety they thought they could find. Some leapt from the balcony while others managed to escape the impending disaster by trampling anyone in their way, resulting in five deaths and many more injured. Whitefield wanted to cancel his appearance, but the remainder of the audience insisted upon hearing him, and so he led the crowds outside to hear a sermon about the fragility of human life.3 He left Boston to tour Roxbury, Cambridge, and Charlestown. Touring Harvard College, he lamented the popularity among the students and faculty of “bad books” written by deists, and sharply criticized them for their apparent worldliness and intellectual hauteur, heavily implying a lack of true conversion in any of them. While this certainly won him no admirers among academics, it did endear him to the tradesmen and workers who routinely made up the bulk of his audiences wherever he went. On September 27, he preached before his largest audience yet, reportedly 15,000, and here Whitefield recorded a triumph. “Oh, how the word did run,” he exulted. He was received rapturously—so enthusiastically in fact that he confided in his journal that the Common had been transformed that day into “the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.” As at all of his appearances, a collection plate was passed around the crowd, most of the money earmarked for the Bethesda Orphanage, and raked in several hundred pounds from the audience on the Common. Newspapers were encouraged by Seward to mention Whitefield’s need for money for Bethesda, and the outpouring of money surpassed even the most optimistic expectations. All in all, he raised £3,000 from his stops in New England. He delivered sermons at return engagements at Old South and Brattle Street on September 28, and after a private meeting with Governor

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Jonathan Belcher, conducted a special session with “a great number of negroes” who specially requested the meeting.4 Jonathan Edwards had fallen into one of his periodic bouts with depression in the week preceding George Whitefield’s arrival in New England. In a letter to Eleazar Wheelock, Edwards lamented that his congregation had once again lapsed into spiritual torpor. “It is a sorrowfully dull and dead time for us,” he wrote, “and I know not where to look for help but to God. O dear Sir! earnestly pray for us.” Edwards ascribed this nadir on what he insisted were his own chronic shortcomings as a minister, what he called his “barrenness and unprofitableness.” He hoped that God “would bless Mr. Whitefield’s coming here for good to my soul, and the souls of my people.” Northampton was not the only place where the pinpoint flame of revival seemed to be guttering out. Across the Connecticut River at Hadley, Whitefield noted that “lately the people of God had complained of deadness and losing their first love.” However, upon reminding his audience “what God had done for their souls formerly, it was like putting fire to tinder. The remembrance of it caused many to weep sorely.” The long-awaited meeting of Edwards and Whitefield happened when Whitefield stepped off the ferry from Hadley on October 17, and after an enthusiastic but perfunctory greeting, the fast new friends proceeded immediately to Edwards’s church for an afternoon sermon. That evening, Whitefield held a private service in Edwards’s home where he was lodging, and the next morning participated in the Edwards’s usual family devotions. Edwards then asked Whitefield to give some light instruction and spiritual encouragement to his daughters, which evidently helped Sarah, Jerusha, Esther, and Mary turn a spiritual corner. Writing to Benjamin Colman several months later after the New Year, Edwards exulted that “The winter has been a time of the most remarkable and visible blessing of heaven upon my family . . . all our children that are capable of religious reflections have been under remarkable impressions, and I can’t but think that salvation is come into my house..”5 The Edwardses made as deep and positive an impression upon Whitefield, who wrote of Jonathan and Sarah in his journal that “A sweeter couple I have not yet seen.” He was definitely smitten with Sarah, whom he found to be “adorned with a meek and quiet spirit,” speaking “solidly of the things of God, and [being] such a helpmeet to her husband.” Smarting from the recent rejection of a marriage proposal to a woman back in England, his encounter with Sarah Edwards renewed the young man’s hopes that God “would be pleased to send me a daughter of Abraham to be my wife.” The Edwards children were similarly impressive, Whitefield approvingly noting that they “were not dressed in silks and satins, but plain, as become the children of those who, in all things, ought to be examples of Christian simplicity.” The Friday sermon was only a prelude to the more anticipated



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Sunday morning sermon, and after a short trip to Hatfield on Saturday, he returned to prepare for two scheduled sermons at Edwards’s meetinghouse. In the five sermons that he delivered, Whitefield lived up to his vaunted reputation, “extraordinarily melt[ing]” members of the congregation during every sermon and reducing Edwards to tears each time. The effect of the English evangelist on not just his congregation, but also his entire family, could not have been more positive. As a result of his visit, reported Edwards to Whitefield, “Religion is become abundantly more the subject of conversation; other things that seemed to impede it, are for the present laid aside. I have reason to think that a considerable number of our young people, some of them children, have already been savingly brought home to Christ.” Not only did Whitefield’s visit lead many, especially youths who had been in a “Christless state” before, to be “greatly revived,” but also Edwards himself felt a reinvigoration of his own evangelistic skills. Capitalizing upon the gains thus far made, he rained admonitions down upon his congregation. The “Great part of you pretend to have been converted a few years ago,” he told them, “and if it was so, what was [sic] you converted for? What did [God] call you to?” However, even as Edwards found himself transitioning to a greater degree of sermonic theatricality under Whitefield’s influence— of which Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is but one example—he did sound a note of caution about “sudden conversions” elicited by evangelical preaching, attended at times by what he took to be “great imprudences and irregularities.”6 If indeed the people of Enfield had been, as the early nineteenth-century Connecticut historian, Benjamin Trumbull, described them, “impious” and “caloused,” “blasé” and “peculiarly stubborn,” then Edwards effectively roused them from their spiritual deadness. According to Stephen Williams, who was in attendance, “before ye sermon – was done there was a great moaning – & crying out throughout ye whole House – what shall I do to be Savd – oh I am going to Hell . . . so yt ye minister – was obligd to desist – [the] shrieks & crys – were piercing & Amazing. . . .” At times, Edwards found it difficult to proceed to the end of the sermon, so overwrought had the audience become. Upon its conclusion, Williams reported, “Amazing & Astonishing – ye powr [sic] [of] God was Seen – & Severall Souls were hopfully – wrought upon yt – night & oh ye cheerfullness & pleasntness of thier [sic] countenances. . . .” After delivering the sermon at Enfield, concerned that audiences would waste time and energy fixated upon the doleful content of the sermon, Edwards jotted down some notes that detailed six steps for seeking salvation for the benefit of those who came to him for spiritual counsel. So powerful was Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God as an “awakening sermon” that it became a mainstay of his repertoire as he fielded increased invitations to preach throughout New England between 1741 and 1745.7

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The revival of deep religious sensibilities continued throughout 1741, and nothing gratified Edwards more than the fact that so many of the savingly affected were young people. Throughout the summer of 1741, he invited groups of children to his home for informal conversation and instruction, and to his surprise they organized their own prayer meetings and fasts. Remarking on these extramural gatherings attended by parishioners of all ages, Edwards approvingly noted in a letter to Thomas Prince that “It was a very frequent thing to see [my] house full of outcries, faintings, convulsions, and such like, both with distress and also with admiration and joy.” Edwards managed to sustain the charismatic energy of this second Northampton revival until late autumn, with the nature of the conversions differing significantly from those of 1734–1735. These later revivals “were frequently wrought more sensibly and visibly; the impressions stronger, and more manifest by external effects of them,” and that this was all the more amazing on account of their taking place “more frequently in the presence of others . . . where the appearances of what was wrought on the heart fell under public observation.” Edwards’s embrace of behavioral excesses marks an important departure from what previous generations of American clergy would have thought appropriate. Enlightenment-era Christianity conceived of itself as imminently rational, religious truths operating primarily upon the mind before effecting a change of the heart, and thus most clergymen expected their audiences to maintain a sober decorum during church services. Revivalist preachers like Whitefield and Edwards, however, advocated for the opposite: that Christianity changes the heart before it acts upon the mind.8 As Whitefield proceeded downriver into Connecticut, he continued to create a stir and draw impressive crowds. At East Windsor, Whitefield’s preaching reversed the spiritual decay of Samuel Belcher, a saddler. Although he was the son of Joseph Belcher, the minister of the Congregationalist Church in Dedham, Massachusetts, he admitted to having grown “Cold and Dull” in his religious sentiments. Whitefield’s arrival marked the onset of a spiritual crisis lasting half a year. When “Whitefield p[re]ached here, . . . I was Greatly effected [sic] with his preaching both here and att Hartford,” Belcher wrote. Although he soon slipped back into an inattention to spiritual matters, he was eventually revived yet again, this time by Eleazar Wheelock and Benjamin Pomeroy, who preached at East Windsor at the invitation of its minister, Timothy Edwards. Various itinerant New Lights accompanied Whitefield at various points in his travels through the region, and he enjoined them to follow up his visits to stoke “the divine fire.” Once again, Belcher became painfully aware of his sins and the danger of damnation, “but God was pleased to enable me to Cry mightily unto him in the bitterness of my Soul for mercy in and through Jesus Christ.” As he prayed and meditated upon the condition of his soul, “I felt my Load Go of[f] and my mouth was Stopt and I Could



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not utter one word for Some time and I felt as if my heart was Changed.” Whitefield, Wheelock, and Pomeroy accomplished what not even Belcher’s own father could not—a new birth of his spirit.9 Jonathan Edwards, who managed to keep his public millenarian enthusiasm in check throughout his career to this point, had been so encouraged by news of Whitefield’s successful progress through the colonies that as early as February 1739/40 he began to exult that “the dawning of a day of God’s mighty power and glorious grace” was at hand. In the wake of Whitefield’s moving on to New York, Edwards dared to offer a more overtly eschatological interpretation of the revivals. “‘Tis not unlikely that this work of God’s Spirit . . . is the dawning, or at least a prelude, of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in Scripture.” In what must have been a herculean logical effort, Edwards linked the revivals to other events described in British and American newspapers, nuggets of information mentioned in private correspondence, explorations of prophecies in theological treatises, and his own interpretation of the prophetic books in the Bible into a chain that leads from the Book of Revelation to the colonial Awakening. Carefully avoiding the eschatologist’s pitfall of making specific predictions of exactly when the events in the Book of Revelation would transpire, Edwards nevertheless made it clear that he believed that the revivals were preparing the ground for the Millennium, if not actually being the faintest first rays of the millennial dawn. More radically energized New Lights were much less cautious, however, and Edwards faced an uphill battle in restraining their zeal, which sorely threatened to ruin the credibility of the New Lights in particular, not to mention the revivals at large. Most New Lights shared Edwards’s cautious optimism about the future of Protestant Christianity in the colonies, and labored to collect as much evidence as possible to legitimize their perception of events.10 The behavioral excesses of the more radical New Light preachers and their adherents confirmed for cautious revivalists, and more particularly for Old Light critics such as Charles Chauncy that such evangelicalism threatened public order. It has been suggested that the government of Massachusetts cultivated revivalism at a time when renewed war with France loomed on the horizon, and that currying divine favor might avert disaster. However, while Gov. Belcher indeed fervently supported the New Lights and patronized them as best he could, he was a much disliked governor often at loggerheads with the assembly, mainly over fiscal policy, but also on account of his support for radical revivalism. Belcher stood firmly in the minority as an evangelical proponent, his fellow magistrates across the board standing somewhere on the continuum of Old Light opinion. This is hardly surprising, given that critiques against clerical authority and advocacy for itinerancy easily bled into similar challenges to political authority. A pattern that emerged when German peasants, inflamed by Lutheran rhetoric against

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bishops and popes, rose up against the landed aristocracy in the 1520s threatened to play out again in the colonies, as the strength of one’s opinion on revivalism determined whether or not candidates for assembly elections successfully won votes.11 A COMMUNITY OF SAINTS Ever watchful for the telltale signs of an outpouring of God’s grace, colonial evangelists collected scattered reports of revivals anywhere in the colonies or Europe, whether appearing in the form of private correspondence or passing references in newspapers. Soon after the publication of Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative, American clergymen began hearing about a similar awakening in England from British colleagues. For decades, American evangelicals passed news about revivals with their English counterparts through “the Old Dissenting network—a network with its roots in the seventeenth-century Puritan ‘community of saints.’” By such means, Benjamin Colman relayed news of the Northampton revival to Isaac Watts and John Guyse, establishing a major conduit of information across the Atlantic Ocean. In a robust and voluminous exchange of letters, they discussed revivals occurring in nearby communities, shared strategies for propagating the “means to grace,” and related conversion narratives that substantiated their belief that the revivals were genuine manifestations of God’s Spirit in the lives of converts. By means of this revivalist network, American colonists learned about an astonishing development in English evangelicalism.12 In April 1739, Colman received a letter from a Rev. R. Pearsall of Warminster, who had written to him previously about English response to the revival accounts coming from western Massachusetts. Pearsall reported that “what has employ’d tho’t, Pens, and Tongues of many of late has been the Rise of (as they are commonly call’d), the New Methodists.” He indicated that to some “they are look’d upon as Enthusiasts . . . , I suppose chiefly because they very much insist upon the Doctrines of Faith & the Necessity of a New Birth.” Whitefield, Pearsall wrote, preached “to the most crowded Auditories in London and Bristol,” and that when his Anglican opponents “oblig’d him to retire to the Villages & Fields adjoining, . . . he has been preaching to Thousands.” He reported that audiences were “deeply impressed” under the Methodists’ preaching and that “indeed there seems in many Places to be a great Noise among the dry Bones.” A potent indication of evangelistic success, according to Pearsall, and indeed all New Lights, was the intense opposition it sometimes aroused. “The carnal World is up in Arms,” he explained, “but in spight of all our glorious Lord seems to be getting himself a Wonderful Victory.” Better still, revivalism continued to



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spread despite resistance: “In parts of Wales the face of Things seems to be changed from Profaneness to Piety.” An identical scenario was playing out in Germany. “What has surpriz’d and rejoiced the Souls of some in the Highest Degrees,” he reveled, “has been the Narrative of the Planting of the Moravian Church . . . & the uncommon Operation of divine Grace upon the Heart of Count [Nikolaus] Zeinzendorff.” To Pearsall, this Euro-American revival marked a delightful, amazing manifestation of God’s providence. “Methinks the Spirit of Moses is revived, and God is showing how great is the Power of his Grace.”13 Colonial revivalists eagerly sought out revival accounts appearing in newspapers. Jonathan Edwards had, as far back as the 1720s, scoured newspapers for any revival news, as well as that concerning the general spread of the gospel to new lands. Throughout his career as Northampton’s pastor, Edwards carefully read the Boston newspapers for any religious news, from which a story often proved to be an inspiration for a sermon. The eagerness with which the New Lights sought revival news at home and abroad coincided with newspaper publishers’ yearning to print, as well as reprint, any story originating from England or Europe that subscribers might find interesting or edifying. Those who only kept up with the evangelical revival through the newspapers read a continuing saga dominated by the figure of George Whitefield and the seemingly impossible throngs he attracted. They heard next to nothing about other related developments, or about other English or German revivalists. But much of this has to do with Whitefield and his own promotional machine, and it also had to do with his particular appeal to American revivalists, with whom he was theological resonant. His confrontations with the Anglican clergy resonated in those regions where dissenting traditions had become deeply entrenched, while his ecumenism and willingness to ignore class distinctions increased his popularity, given the colonies’ generally more democratic cultures.14 Prior to Whitefield’s arrival in New England, local ministers kept up with revival news in the Britain Isles and parts of Anglo-America, not just through the newspapers and their own epistolary networks, but also by word-ofmouth. A conference of clergymen met at Boston in May 1740 to share news of the progress of the revivals, the details of which were carefully recorded in a diary kept by Rev. Ebenezer Parkman of Westboro, Massachusetts. He devoted considerable attention to Benjamin Colman’s sharing “several Things relating to the Spreading the Success of the Kingdom of Christ,” particularly his reportage on the activities of the German Moravian leader Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf. The New-England Weekly Journal published an account of the proceedings, wherein they also read that Thomas Prince preached on the subject “Of the Increase of his Government—there shall be no End.” Also appearing in the Journal was an approving note that the convention raised

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almost £200 for the “Propagation of the Gospel,” in addition to an account of Whitefield’s preaching to enormous crowds in Pennsylvania that confirmed for many their hopes that indeed a momentous effusion of God’s spirit was indeed pouring out over America.15 Colonial newspapers, in devoting considerable space to revival news, spread public interest in the Awakening far beyond its middle-colony and New England seedbeds, presenting the revivals as an intercolonial—and indeed an international—event. Thomas Prince, Sr. of Boston innovatively employed the city’s print trade to report on and promote revivalism. According to Isaiah Thomas, Prince was instrumental in assembling and publishing the Weekly Journal, but is better known as the author of the Chronological History of New England (1736), which followed Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) in asserting the region’s centrality to the coming triumph of Protestantism. What had begun with the Reformation would soon culminate in New England, and he interpreted the revivals as taking a central place in his larger historical idea put forward in the Christian History, a weekly magazine emulating London’s Gentleman’s Monthly that focused on reporting revival news. Aware that his periodical might be limited in its appeal, confined largely to New England clergymen, Prince stretched the distribution of the Christian History to laypeople by printing and reprinting from colonial and British newspapers revival accounts from throughout the colonies and Britain, confirming the idea put forward by the Boston conference that the revivals were a magnificent and unprecedented transatlantic phenomenon.16 Prorevivalists concerned themselves very deeply with depicting the Awakening as a coherent story spanning the Atlantic, but the patchwork nature of stitching snippets of newspaper accounts with short pieces written by revivalist preachers undermined the notion of continuity. In one issue, Prince begged his readers’ indulgence, reminding them that “It is not expected that, in publishing the Accounts successively sent us of Revival in various Parts, we should observe so exact an Order with Respect either to Time or Place,” but he and other promoters looked to drafting a consistent history of the revivals. The Scottish revivalist, John Gillies, made an attempt with Historical Collections Relating to the Remarkable Periods of the Success of the Gospel (1754), comprised local revival accounts extending over several decades and spread throughout the British Atlantic world. What in The Christian History had seemed randomly collected and disjointed, Gillies hoped now would be coherent and fitting into a pattern recognizable from New Testament chronology. Antirevivalists would be silenced, he expected, “when witnesses are sufficient as to their characters, their numbers, and their means of information; [and] their testimony affords a very high degree of moral evidence.” The ultimate goal was not so much to refute the Awakening’s critics, but rather



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to maintain its energy, which by the mid-1750s had seemed to flag in the northern colonies. Here, the Awakening becomes a truly international event, rather than a motley collection of local revivals, as critics and later historians have alleged.17 “ENTHUSIASTICAL RAPTURES AND EXTASIES” The outbreak of revivalism and the growing divide within the Synod of Philadelphia pushed Presbyterian ministers to declare their positions on evangelicalism. Prorevivalists within the Synod had already become known as the “New Side” and, strongly influenced by the Log College faction, they convinced the Synod in 1738 to allow its itinerant ministers to preach in vacant pulpits without permission from the governing presbytery, but only so long as no member of that presbytery voiced any objections. In addition, the New Siders were given their own presbytery at New Brunswick, while the presbyteries of Long Island and northern New Jersey formed a new Presbytery of New York. It was essentially an effort to build a firebreak around radical New Light and Scots-Irish evangelicalism in the hopes that it would burn itself out. Whitefield’s tour through New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania reenergized middle-colony revivalism just as it had begun to falter, assailed as it was by a firmly established Presbyterianism at that time wrestling with the Anglican Church for hearts and minds. The prospect of radical New Siders gaining more than a foothold among the Scots-Irish colonists in particular warranted vigorous responses to evangelical critiques. While in New Jersey, Whitefield spent much of his time in the company of the Tennents, who accompanied him to Philadelphia where he preached to “larger congregations than ever.”18 The fame and influence of the Tennents exploded throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the wake of Gilbert’s devastating salvo thundering outward from Nottingham, and the enthusiasm attending Whitefield’s passage through the region further heightened concerns within the Synod of Philadelphia that it might lose control. It had already passed sanctions against itinerancy and unlicensed preaching in 1738, and two years later it convened to squelch what it perceived to be an incipient evangelical rebellion. Gilbert Tennent, along with fellow revivalist Samuel Blair, blasted the Synod for, as Blair put it, “Hindering of Ministers to preach Christ’s Gospel as they had Opportunity.” The Synod, pressed to reach some kind of decision on evangelicalism that might appease the revivalist faction and still uphold the ban on itinerancy and “unlettered” preaching, could not come to a consensus, presaging a split between prorevivalist and antirevivalist factions, which only widened over the following year. A public furor arose that was sufficient to

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attract the attention of newspaper publishers, with the Pennsylvania Gazette noting that “Religion is become the Subject of most Conversations . . . owing to the successful Labours of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield.” The extremity of emotional displays that had been noticed in New England began to appear in Pennsylvania, though in Elizabethtown Jonathan Dickinson reported that he saw “no crying out or falling down (as elsewhere has happened),” but conceded that there were “tears and . . . an audible sobbing and sighing in almost all parts of the assembly.” Even this was too much for associate Baptist pastor Ebenezer Kinnersly, who wrote in the Gazette that another revivalist, John Rowland, when preaching before his congregation encouraged “Enthusiastick Ravings” among the “deluded Creatures” with his “whining, roaring Harangues.”19 Not only were people experiencing a heightened emotionalism in response to Rowland’s and other revivalists’ sermons, which tossed their audiences into “Enthusiastical Raptures and Extasies,” according to Kinnersly, but some in Rowland’s audience claimed “to have seen ravishing Visions; . . . to have beheld our Blessed Savior nail’d to the Cross, and bleeding before their Eyes in particular for them!” When Kinnersly dared to rebuke his flock, a coterie of Rowland’s supporters staged a noisy walkout, “Running out of the Place of Worship in a most disorderly and tumultuous Manner.” And just who were these “deluded Creatures”? “The Foremost of the Gang, I am inform’d, was a Woman . . . and as a Fool has often times made many, so this infamous Leader was followed by a Multitude of Negroes, and other Servants, among whom were some few of higher Stations, but not over-burthen’d with Discretion.” Here is a cross-section of those most potently affected by revivalism, and whose willingness to vote with their feet, as it were, proved most troubling to the majority of colonial Protestant ministers, becoming more desperate in their efforts to shore up a cracking status quo. By mishandling the congregation with his angry antirevivalism, he earned a sharp reprimand from Pastor Jenkin Jones, who nevertheless shared Kinnersly’s fears about revivalist “enthusiasm.”20 The crack running through the Presbyterian Church became a yawning chasm in the aftermath of Tennent’s acerbic attacks upon any he deemed to be antirevivalist. It is important to remember that in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the Presbyterian Church in the colonies was still struggling for legitimacy and respectability. The vast majority of its adherents came from the ranks of immigrants from northern Ireland and parts of southern Scotland—most of them impoverished and scorned, eking out livings as tenant farmers or freeholders, or as manual laborers and tradesmen. By the 1730s, the Scots-Irish communities in the Middle Colonies had begun to experience the rising standard of living available to some white colonists, which permitted the Presbyterian Church to rise to a level of prominence



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that accorded it a rough parity with the neighboring Dutch Reformed and Anglican churches. The prospect of wild-eyed evangelical Presbyterians becoming associated with the bulk of Presbyterians was simply unacceptable to the highly educated ministry governing the Synod of Philadelphia. Most of the lower clergy, brought up on “communion-times” and thus familiar with periodic revivalism, warmly embraced evangelicalism, even in its more radical forms. A smaller group dominant in the area immediately surrounding New York City had its roots in New England Congregationalism, and likewise saw the revivals as a positive development, though wary of emotional excess. However, the bulk of the higher leadership working in and near Philadelphia, raised and educated in southern Scotland, and trying to replicate as much of the traditional order in America as possible only saw antinomianism and fanaticism in evangelicalism, and tried to suppress it. Thus, the lines were drawn: antirevivalist “Old Side” versus the prorevivalist “New Side,” though such labels must be thought of as loose and only descriptive of doctrinaire minorities on each side. Eventually, the New Siders formed their own synod, thus confirming the existence of a “great schism” dividing middle-colony Presbyterianism.21 The argument was about more than the issues swirling around revivalism, such as itinerancy, clerical training, emotionalism, and the pietistic idea of the “New Birth.” It also involved maintaining ethnic and regional identity amidst the accelerating process of Anglicization. The forms of Presbyterianism brought to the colonies by the Scots and the Scots-Irish were quite different in terms of doctrinal and practical emphases, and the push and pull between the two groups in the Middle Colonies grew more divisive as a consequence of the outbreak of radical evangelicalism in the late 1730s. The Scots-Irish Presbyterians tended to be more skeptical of the authority wielded at the highest levels, and scorned the hauteur of the Scottish clergy who had graduated from the universities at Edinburgh and Glasgow. A degree of theological liberalism pervaded the churches standing closer to and along the western frontier, which were sometimes pastored by lay clergy—a source of particular concern to the higher leadership. This is not to say that the Scots-Irish did not value education and theological consistency, but that they saw greater value in, as Elizabeth Nybakken put it, “local autonomy guided by a flexible hierarchy.” The movement led by the Tennents took the idea of autonomy and flexibility to its furthest limits, and as the ranks of the “Log College Men” swelled after 1740, the mainly Scots-Irish New Siders posed a significant challenge to the English-dominated Old Side Synod of Philadelphia. When no consensus could be reached, the New Side Log College Men left the New York Presbytery to start a dissident Conjunct Presbytery in 1741, followed by the establishment of the Synod of New York in 1745. While the Synod of Philadelphia boasted a large majority who were Old Side clergy but had

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members who remained ambivalent about the revivals, the Synod of New York was firmly New Side and actively cultivated evangelicalism.22 Gilbert Tennent, along with many among the second-generation ScotsIrish, rejected the idea that the maintenance of Presbyterian theology and discipline required the replication of Scots-Irish or Scottish social institutions in America. The elder generation, apart from a minority represented by William Tennent Sr., pushed back vigorously against the steady Anglicization of the North American colonies, the ethnically diverse Middle Colonies being especially sensitive to such pressures. An identical dynamic can be found among the German immigrants at the same time. The second generation did not see such potent threats to Scots-Irish identity or middle-colony localism. The Tennents and their New Side colleagues were not, as the elder Old Side leadership presumed, schismatics, thinking of the Seceders and Covenanters who troubled the Church of Scotland in the mid-seventeenth century. Rather, the New Siders thought of themselves as another branch of the colonial Presbyterian Church—just one that was evangelical and more pietistic in orientation. Nevertheless, the combativeness Gilbert Tennent exhibited in 1740 was matched by that of Old Siders such as John Elder, who branded New Siders as “New Lights” and separatists akin to the radical New Lights such as James Davenport or Andrew Croswell. As it turned out, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry proved to be the apex of Gilbert Tennent’s radicalism, which—in addition to public and private attacks upon antirevivalists— included a curious spell of rejecting proper clerical dress in favor of wearing animal skins, à la John the Baptist. In response to a variety of pressures, not least of which was confronting the radical theology of the Moravian Brethren and being compared to James Davenport, he moderated his criticisms of the Old Side, resumed wearing proper clothing, and accepted a position as minister to the Second Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia beginning in 1743. This particular opportunity was in no small part due to the fact that the membership of that church comprised several high-ranking city and colonial officials.23 Tennent never surrendered his commitment to revivalism, however, and maintained strong ties to the evangelical movement reaching out to the western frontier. In this regard, the long tradition of Scottish revivalism contributed to a greater propensity for evangelicalism among the settlers of the more rural pockets of New Jersey and the hinterlands of Pennsylvania. The establishment of a new church serving the towns of Maidenhead and Hopewell in 1744 was celebrated by William Tennent, Jr. with what he described as “Soul-satisfying Sealings of GOD’s everlasting Love” and “the refreshing of the LORD’s dear People there,” while Gilbert recalled that at New Brunswick “there have been signal Displays of the divine Power and Presence: divers have been convinced of Sin by the Sermons then preached, some converted, and many much affected.”24



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“LIKE THIRSTE FLOCKS” “[I]t pleased the Lord to cause a very general awakening Thro’ the Land; especially in Norwich,” recalled Isaac Backus of James Davenport’s appearance there in the summer of 1741. Generally inattentive to his spiritual state as a youth, he felt a change coming over him when “many Powerfull Preachers [came] to Norwich,” among them Eleazar Wheelock and Jedidiah Mills, who made him realize that “God was Come with the offers of his grace.” But it was Davenport’s performance in August that made the greatest impression upon him, as the radical itinerant “preached [for] three days[,] going in an exceeding Earnest and Powerful manner: and I apprehend that his labours were the most blest For my Conversion.” Benjamin Lord, pastor of the Norwich Congregational Church, noted that sustained revivalism for the next two years wrought “a great reformation of religion” in area churches, not least his own. However, a history of fractiousness within the church over points of doctrine and practice left it vulnerable to a sharper spirit of divisiveness. A moderate prorevivalist, Lord disparaged lay exhortation and the behavioral excesses of radical New Lights, going so far as to bar Andrew Croswell from itinerating in his church. This, along with disputes over relaxed membership standards, precipitated a New Light defection from the church, led by Backus and Jedidiah Hide. According to Hide, who ministered to the Norwich Separates, they had to leave because “the Gospel [is] not preached here.”25 What happened at Norwich was no isolated event, but an increasingly common one as the Awakening gathered momentum after 1741. Between Gilbert Tennent’s excoriation of “unconverted” ministers, Jonathan Edwards’s reminders of the soul’s imminent danger of falling into eternal hellfire, and James Davenport’s insistence upon public piety and ministerial ardor on behalf of revivalism, churches all over New England split between prorevivalists and antirevivalists. For some, the central issue was ecclesiological: membership standards, church discipline, access to communion, or ministerial qualifications; for others the chief concern was ministerial support for, or opposition to, the revivals; and for still others it had more to do with excessively charismatic behavior displayed by some radical New Light ministers, and more often by newly converted laypeople. Usually when a church split, it was because it already suffered from longstanding divisions that evangelicalism sharpened and made deeper, but it was not unheard of for an otherwise stable church to become irreparably divided by the Awakening. While on tour in New England that balmy summer of 1741, Gilbert Tennent repeatedly blew the clarion of the peril faced by the saints and the unregenerate alike who languished under the guidance of unconverted ministers. In The Righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees Consider’d (1741),

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he denounced the saintly artifices that concealed and falsely comforted hypocrites, prescribing the “Terrors of the Lord” as the only sure means of unmasking them. The likelihood that churches were admitting the unregenerate to communion was cause for particular concern, no matter how outwardly pious they might appear to the untrained or misled eye. “It is a sad Sight,” he intoned, “to behold how merrily they go on to Damnation; like Fools in Bedlam, they sing and dance in their Shackels.” Ministerial “Pharisees” are easy to detect when they actively oppose evangelicalism, though “you will see some that profess the greatest Regard to Religion,” yet nevertheless “stand up and oppose it with implacable Hate.” This “prophane Herd of harden’d Mortals,” this “Generation of Vipers” must be confronted, Tennent averred, by the true saints who had experienced the New Birth, and must not falter in the face of antagonism and obstruction. “Some are so perverse,” he ominously warned, “that they will neither enter into the Kingdom themselves, nor suffer [the saints] to enter,” even to the awful point of being themselves “contented with their own Damnation.” Radical New Lights in Connecticut thus founded their own seminary, the “Shepherd’s Tent,” in 1742.26 At Norwich, as elsewhere throughout Connecticut, an old argument over adherence to the Saybrook Platform (1708) worsened as Lord and his congregation debated the validity of itinerancy and lay exhortation. The Saybrook Platform abrogated the Cambridge Platform (1648), standardizing Congregationalist doctrine and discipline through the establishment of regional “consociations” that centralized ecclesiastical authority in Connecticut, taking the decision-making power away from church elders in an inclination toward Presbyterianism that a significant portion of the church decried. For his part, Rev. Lord advocated the relaxation of membership requirements permitted by the Platform, and the stridency of New Light demands for an early seventeenth-century strictness in examining applicants for church membership put him in the radicals’ crosshairs. The dissidents accused Lord of insufficient zeal on behalf of the revivals—that he lacked “the power of godliness” and was “no friend to Lowly Preaching and Preachers.” It was true that Lord, though he embraced revivalism as “a great and glorious work of divine grace,” nevertheless deplored some itinerant and all lay preachers as being “Infatuated by [a] Strange kind of Spirit.” The dissidents had no choice but to secede for, as Backus explained, “manifest unbelievers are indulged in [Lord’s] Church.” He promulgated heterodoxy and barred truly gospel ministers from his church, and granted full membership to those who merely “have the form of Godliness” but are otherwise worldly and corrupt. Mary Lathrop, for her part, put it more succinctly: “By Covenant I am not held here any longer than I am edified.” Coordinating with like-minded ministers throughout eastern New England, Backus came to lead a separatist congregation at Titicut, Massachusetts, that became its own church in 1748.27



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George Whitefield’s tour of New York, concentrated at New York City and eastern Long Island, motivated many of the colony’s settled dissenting clergy to mimic both his extempore preaching style and peripatetic evangelism. Samuel Buell and the aforementioned James Davenport endeavored to build upon Whitefield’s intercolonial ministry by itinerating across British America. Their ministries in New England echoed the contributions New York-based revivalists made to the Awakening. Buell itinerated throughout eastern New England before his ordination in 1746, after which he widened his circuit to include Long Island and New York City. Eleazar Wheelock was very enthusiastic about Buell, declaring that “The Lord is with Mr. Buell of a truth; hell trembles before him” in a letter to Joseph Bellamy. Buell’s work bore fruit in the mid-1760s, when he oversaw a revival in Easthampton and the surrounding area. He extended the revivals by offering informal ministerial training, with most of his students going on to become itinerant ministers. Elam Potter, a Buell protégé, preached throughout Long Island from 1766 through 1768 before accepting a commission to perform missionary work in the southern colonies. New York’s itinerants and their supporters imitated Whitefield’s use of the intercolonial press to promote themselves and their colleagues, advertising news of upcoming revivals and the movements of famous preachers. The arrival of the Irish itinerant preacher, John Murray, to New York in the early 1770s was heavily publicized. “[I]ntelligence was wafted from one end of the city unto the other; and the people, being anxious to hear something new, and from a new preacher, became extremely importunate,” he recalled. He had not intended to stay on to do any preaching there and was planning to head to Pennsylvania, but he ended up preaching at a Baptist church, and eventually spent a week itinerating before going on to Philadelphia. Murray’s preaching was so well received that the New Yorkers issued regular invitations for him to return, which he did many times throughout his career.28 The experiences of Mary Cooper, an Oyster Bay housewife, highlight colonial New Yorkers’ sustained interest in revivalist preaching. Cooper was already an active part of a small revivalist community when she started keeping a journal in 1768, eventually joining a Separate church the following year. Historians of religion in early America have largely dismissed the notion of continuity in the First Great Awakening in British America colonies on account of the fact that women, African Americans, and American Indians comprised some of the largest audiences for New Light preachers. These Americans who occupied the margins of colonial society rarely recorded their religious experiences, but surviving accounts prove that the Awakening touched a broad spectrum of people throughout the eighteenth century. Mary Cooper and the other members of the Oyster Bay meeting—many of whom were women, African-American slaves, free blacks—had a marked penchant for traveling to hear itinerant ministers from a variety of backgrounds preach,

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especially at the Quaker and Baptist meetinghouses nearby. When the members of this evangelical meeting decided to appoint a leader for their group, Cooper prayed that her nephew was called by God to lead it. “Oh Lord,” she wrote in her diary, “suffer not this peapel to be deci[e]ved. If thou has not called him, suffer him not to go, I pray.” Apparently, her prayers met with an affirmative response.29 Baptist revivalists were among the most successful itinerant preachers in the Middle Colonies and the South during the 1760s and 1770s, and in late August 1773, Cooper and many of her fellow Oyster Bay New Lights were enthralled by three Baptist ministers who went by the names Philips, Warde, and Laurence. At one of their services, they drew an enormous crowd that Cooper claimed “covered the hill and parte of the field and the edge of the wood like thirste flocks.” Cooper also eagerly to attended sermons preached by women, African Americans, as well as American Indians. Cooper attended a crowded Quaker meeting in June 1769 where a “most amebel” English woman preached, and a few days after that she attended a sermon preached by an Indian itinerant, as well as one preached by an African American in August. Whereas many historians believe that the First Great Awakening had ended in the northern colonies by 1745, or at the latest by the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1755, the evidence left behind by Mary Cooper proves that New Light revivalism remained active and vibrant well into the prerevolutionary years.30  Nathan Cole’s impression of seeing George Whitefield as an angelic figure, wreathed in a luminescence that convinced him that he was about “to hear news from heaven,” and then of hearing a sermon that gave him “a heart wound,” are indicative ones of the most radical aspects of the First Great Awakening in colonial America: its fundamentally mystical nature. Cole was only temporarily affected by Whitefield’s spiritual and personal charisma, honed as they were by the evangelist’s frustrated theatrical ambitions. Others were much more deeply impacted by the power of the revivals. Men and especially women, as well as youths, beheld visions in dreams and trance states, discovered truths in revelations, and at times found in such experiences unprecedented spiritual authority that became one of the most controversial features of the Awakening. Antirevivalist critics seized upon the explicit antiauthoritarianism of itinerancy, deviations from liberal Calvinist theology, and the threat the revivalists posed to established ministerial authority to discredit evangelicalism. However, the overt supernaturalism that radical New Lights embraced was not merely a dim halo outshined by more salient issues. Rather, as the antirevivalists themselves believed, it was a central defining aspect of evangelicalism.



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NOTES 1. Michael Crawford, ed., “The Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 33 (January 1976), 125–26. 2. Crawford, “Spiritual Travels,” 94–96. 3. George Whitefield, The Journals of George Whitefield (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1960), 457–61. 4. Whitefield, Journals, 462–64, 466; Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1991), 118–23. 5. Jonathan Edwards to Eleazar Wheelock, October 9, 1740, WJE, 16:85, 86; Whitefield, Journals, 475–77; Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 222; Edwards to Benjamin Colman, March 9, 1740/41, WJE, 16:88. 6. Whitefield, Journals, 476–77, 480; George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 206–08; Edwards to Whitefield, December 14, 1740, WJE, 16:88; Edwards, Praying for the Spirit (1740), WJE, 22:219; idem, The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), WJE, 4:241; idem, A City on a Hill (1736), in WJE, 19:537. Whitefield did eventually marry Elizabeth James, an older widow. Stout, The Divine Dramatist, 156–73. 7. Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut, 2 vols. (New Haven: Utley, 1818), 2:145; “Diary of Stephen Williams,” typescript copy, 10 vols., Richard R. Storrs Memorial Library, Longmeadow, MA, 3:375–76; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 223–24. 8. Edwards to Thomas Prince, Sr., December 12, 1743, WJE, 16:118–20. 9. Kenneth P. Minkema, “A Great Awakening Conversion: The Relation of Samuel Belcher,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 44 (January 1987), 125–26. 10. Edwards to Whitefield, February 12, 1739/40, WJE, 16:80; Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (1743), WJE, 4:345, 353, 358, 484–90. 11. Kidd, The Great Awakening, 95. 12. Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” American Historical Review 91 (December 1986), 815. 13. R. Pearsall to Benjamin Colman, April 15, 1739, Colman Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 14. Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 104–05. 15. Francis G. Walett, “The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1739–1744,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 12 (April 1962), 109; New-England Weekly Journal, June 3, 1740. 16. Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening”, 119–20. 17. Thomas Prince Sr., ed., The Christian History, Containing Accounts of the Revival and Propagation of Religion in Great-Britain and America, 2 vols. (Boston, 1744–1745), 1:258; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 173–75.

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18. Whitefield, Journals, 419–21; Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England (Boston, 1743), 249–50. 19. Samuel Blair, “A Vindication of the Brethren,” in The Works of the Reverend Mr. Samuel Blair (Philadelphia, 1754), 224–25; Pennsylvania Gazette, June 12, 1740; Prince, The Christian History, 1:255–58; Pennsylvania Gazette, July 24, 1740; Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, 68–71; Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Jonathan Dickinson and the Making of the Moderate Awakening,” American Presbyterians 63 (Winter 1985), 346; Charles Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1920), 60–64. 20. Pennsylvania Gazette, July 24, 1740, August 14, 1740; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 65–67. 21. Leonard J. Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-examination of Colonial Presbyterianism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949), 118–22, 164; Elizabeth J. Nybakken, “New Light on the Old Side: Irish Influences on Colonial Presbyterianism,” The Journal of American History 68 (March 1982), 815. 22. Nybakken, “New Light on the Old Side,” 815–17, 819–22; Janet F. Fishburn, “Gilbert Tennent, Established ‘Dissenter,’” Church History 63 (March 1994), 34–35. 23. Fishburn, “Gilbert Tennent,” 35–36. 24. Prince, The Christian History, 2:309–10, 252; Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 54. 25. William McLoughlin, ed., The Diary of Isaac Backus, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979), 3:1523–26; J. M. Bumsted, “Revivalism and Separatism in New England: The First Society of Norwich, Connecticut, as a Case Study,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 24 (October 1967), 600, 602–04, 607–08; Richard L. Bushman, ed., The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740–1745 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 102; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 181–82. 26. Gilbert Tennent, The Righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees Consider’d (Boston, 1741), 3, 10, 12, 15, 17, 19; J. Richard Olivas, “Great Awakenings: Time, Space, and the Varieties of Religious Revivalism in Massachusetts and Northern New England, 1740–1748” (PhD dissertation, University of California–Los Angeles, 1997), 324–25. 27. Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 150–51; Bumsted, “Revivalism and Separatism in New England,” 600; Bushman, The Great Awakening, 102; McLoughlin, The Diary of Isaac Backus, 3:1528; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 181–83. 28. Elam Potter, The Author’s Account of his Conversion (Boston, 1772), 3–16; Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, 6 vols. (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1903), 3:143–46; Eleazar Wheelock to Jeoseph Bellamy, December 27, 1741, Joseph Bellamy Papers, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia; Judith Sargent Murray, The Life of Rev. John Murray (Boston, 1832), 146.



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29. Field Horne, ed., The Diary of Mary Cooper: Life on a Long Island Farm, 1768–1773 (Oyster Bay, NY: Oyster Bay Historical Society, 1981), 1–4; Nathaniel Prime, A History of Long Island (New York: Robert Carter, 1845), 266–68. 30. Horne, Diary of Mary Cooper, 13, 18, 24, 65–66; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 286.

Chapter 7

“Glorious Distraction” The Mystical Dimensions of Revivalism, 1740–1750

The crowd gathered at the New London, Connecticut, wharf in the chill of the first Sunday in March 1743 to demonstrate their commitment to true Christianity in its evangelical, revivalist form. Drawn by a call from James Davenport, an itinerant minister who had become familiar—and to some notorious—to revival followers in southern New England and Long Island, they brought with them at his behest books written by contemporaries who had criticized him for his excessive zeal, as well as works by such “Arminian” and “unreformed” theologians as Richard Sibbes, Increase Mather, and Benjamin Colman to be committed to purifying flames. To a cacophony of “Hallelujahs and Gloria Patri over the pile,” Davenport and his devotees watched the bonfire grow, confident that “the Smoak of the Torments of such Authors . . . as died in the same Belief as when they set them out, was now ascending in Hell in like Manner as they saw the Smoak of them Books rise.” Not satisfied with the destruction of books he deemed ungodly, Davenport called for his followers to return the next day for a bonfire of the vanities. Bring “Scarlet Cloaks, Velvet Hoods, fine Laces, and every Thing that had two Colours,” he instructed them, along with shoes, jewelry, wigs, and other finery that spoke of a devotion to Mammon rather than to God, and be prepared to cast them into the fire. As the pile grew, some of Davenport’s more radical disciples stripped off some or all of their own clothes to throw onto it. Some began to doubt the wisdom of such an act and hesitated, while curious townspeople joined them and boisterously denounced them for their dangerous folly. One woman, when Davenport took off his own breeches to throw into the pile, snatched them out and “flung [them] into his Face,” shouting “The calf you have made is too big.”1 At this point, Davenport lost control over the throng, which turned on him and refused to abide by his demands to continue as they retrieved 149

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their clothing and noisily dispersed. Apparently, burning books was one thing, but exhorting decent middle-class New Londoners to strip naked for a bonfire crossed all other lines of decorum. While one observer amusedly noted that it was a good thing the fire was never set, else Davenport “would have been obliged to strut about bare-arsed,” his followers, some of whom he regarded as his most faithful lieutenants, expressed regrets that they had eaten of the “Fruit of Delusion,” made hideous spectacles of themselves, and had betrayed the true spirit of the awakenings. Davenport and his inner circle were arrested by the constabularies for endangering public safety with the Sunday bonfire, and only on account of their visible contrition were they let off with minor fines for Sabbath-breaking. Davenport, his reputation lying in ruins about his feet, lamented that he was now “very much alone in ye world,” friendless, riding “from town to town without any attendance.”2 “Multitudes were seriously, soberly and solemnly out of their wits” wrote Ezra Stiles in his summation of the years of the Awakening’s peak in the 1740s. Critics of the revivals, of whom Charles Chauncy was the most prolific member, continually pointed to the most outrageous and baffling episodes to discredit the Awakening as little more than a kind of temporary insanity. Moderate and more wary New Lights defended the revivals as a whole, while offering their own criticisms of the more extreme behaviors and attitudes expressed by the likes of James Davenport. They insisted that excessive and “indecent” behaviors were anomalies and not indicative of the bulk of revivalist preachers and their audiences. Historians of the Awakening have likewise followed their lead, mentioning excessive New Light radicalism only very occasionally, emphasizing instead Edwardsian moderatism as essentially characterizing eighteenth-century evangelicalism. In truth, however, First Great Awakening revivalism was largely defined by extremities of religious opinions and behavior that have become basic traits of evangelicalism ever since, and sparked the highest degree of contentious debate about the Awakening between Old Lights and New Lights. Despite the best efforts of the moderates and most historians to insist that the revivals did not inherently involve excesses of emotion and behavior, as well as theological radicalism, the fact is that such was an essential trait of the First Great Awakening, distinguishing it from previous spates of revivalism better termed by contemporary clergymen as “covenant renewals.” Radicalism in the realm of religion also engendered other forms of radicalism, with deep implications for the future of American religious history.3 



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“THE BOW OF GOD’S WRATH IS BENT” Word from Suffield was that after George Whitefield’s visit in October 1740 had drawn “several Thousands of People” upon whom he made a “great Impression,” revivalist energy flagged until Jonathan Edwards began making regular trips to pastor the congregation there until the church found a replacement for the late Rev. Ebenezer Devotion. Edwards regularly exhorted the Suffielders to be “willful and obstinate” in their cultivation of holiness in the face of the opposition and temptations of “all the devils in hell.” In a letter addressed to a group of Suffield women, Edwards instructed them to persevere in “great strife and earnestness in religion,” that they must be “violent for the kingdom of heaven.” In so doing, though, Edwards warned them to avoid activities or shows of excessive emotion that might invite “adversaries of religion” to criticize. He concluded by enjoining them to “walk with God and follow Christ as a little, poor, helpless child . . . keeping your eye on the mark of the wounds on his hands and side, whence came the blood that cleanses you from sin and hiding your nakedness under the skirt of the white shining robe of his righteousness.” Here is evidence of an Edwards in transition from a moderate toward a more radical New Light.4 “I hear of strange & unusuall things at Suffield & Elsewhere,” confided Rev. Stephen Williams in his journal in May 1741, later commenting to his colleague Eleazar Wheelock on “strange . . . Extasies” experienced by recent converts throughout southern New England, and concentrated in the Connecticut Valley. Williams, a brother-in-law of James Davenport, had previously expressed his fears that Davenport’s antics would encourage and generate “many Adversaries” and that “religion may receive some wounds in the house of her friends.” Keeping a detailed watch over excessive zeal, Williams noted instances of worrisome fanaticism at places such as Westfield, Connecticut, where he described parishioners at risk of “being taken off” on account of extreme “concerns of their Souls.” During a subsequent visit to Suffield, Edwards, accompanied by an unnamed witness who recorded the event, guided the conversion of over ninety people, three of them African American slaves. On the day after that, the anonymous observer saw the amazing effects of a most moving sermon that spilled out of the meetinghouse and into a nearby home. This account, transcribed by Samuel Phillips Savage, a supportive Boston merchant who collected and copied revival accounts, goes on to relate a typical scene. As he approached the house, a loud roaring sound could be heard from a great distance away, becoming thunderous upon entering, a “Confus’d” mixture of “Sobs” and “Groans & Screeches,” reminiscent of “women in the Pains of Childbirth.” Some burst out into “Houlings and Yellings, which to Even a Carnal Man might point out

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Hell,” the tumult lasting well above two hours as Edwards patiently exhorted the most anxious. The tumult gradually subsided, and many went home feeling a sense “of Peace & Joy,” others in “Rapture,” and “all extolling the Lord Jesus Xt, all begging and beseeching Each One they could speak to, to Come to a Redeemer who had Shew’d them this Mercy” that favorably impressed the author.5 Jonathan Edwards, who has a reputation for being a moderate, nevertheless endorsed some of the more radical expressions of evangelicalism. Recent reexaminations of his own written works paint a slightly different picture of him—one that does not exactly conform to the consistently even-tempered New Light found in the pages of most accounts of the Awakening. They tend to present the Edwards who expressed a mild dismay with Whitefield’s theatricality, but in the wake of the Grand Itinerant’s visit to Northampton and western New England, Edwards began to incorporate many of Whitefield’s techniques and style of delivery. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God remains the best example of this marked shift in tone and style, but by no means the only one. Suffield was another case, and as his reputation as an “awakening” minister grew, he fielded invitations from like-minded and sympathetic colleagues and laymen to work his evangelical magic on their spiritually floundering churches. Enfield lay just across the Connecticut River east of Suffield, and it is likely that a contingent of Suffielders followed Edwards there to take in his next, and arguably greatest, performance two days after the events described by the author of the Savage manuscript. In the wake of Edwards’s Enfield appearance, Wheelock noted that the entire upper Connecticut Valley reverberated with evangelical fervor. “I do verily believe these are the beginning of the Glorious things that are Spoken [of] Concerning the City of our God in the Latter day.”6 The more mystical excesses attending the revivals had already become frequent enough that just prior to Edwards’s electrifying Enfield performance, Connecticut’s North Hartford Association, of which Timothy Edwards was a delegate, resolved that its support for the “general awakening” in the area must not be confused with an endorsement of “Sundry things . . . which are unscriptural and of a dangerous Tendency.” Indeed, according to the Association’s Daniel Wadsworth, by summer’s end “the great awakening . . . seem[ed] to be degenerating into Strife and faction,” and Stephen Williams noted in his diary that he and his colleagues “See & hear many unusuall . . . things,” while one Marston Cabot confided to a friend his concerns about “strange rumours from Suffield.” Between Enfield and Suffield bounced a flurry of indistinguishable facts, exaggerations, falsehoods, tales of people “faling into fits and lying speechless,” of rapturous spirit journeys and glimpses at the Book of Life, as Samuel Hopkins reported. “It seems to me that such may be the effects of Discoveries from the Spirit of God,



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& I rejoyce at it,” he concluded. Edwards, for his part, steadily distanced himself in print from the radicalism he displayed at Suffield and Enfield, but when mysticism entered his household, he found it impossible not to embrace it, at least initially.7 “THESE THINGS ARE THE LORDS DOINGS” Isaac Pratt lay hovering between life and death. Seemingly without warning, he fell into unconsciousness, his body rigid, and his pulse gradually slowing as though nearing death. His distraught family called in their pastor, Ebenezer Parkman, who noted Pratt’s “strange condition” even as he joined the family in prayers. Doctors bled him while his family desperately implored him to awaken, and after more than a day, when it seemed that Isaac was about to die, “by Degrees he came to” and related a most amazing account of his experience. “[H]e had not been asleep,” he explained, but had in fact taken an incredible journey to both hell and heaven. He traveled first to hell, where he was assailed by “the most dreadfull noise of roaring & crying,” and Satan came before to him and “told him that there was no room for him there.” He then ascended to heaven, which is “so wondrously happy a place as nobody could tell but those that were there,” and there stood Jesus Christ, “who looked more pleasant than ever he had seen any man, and who had a great Book before him, and in turning over the Leaves of it, told him that his name was there & shew’d it him.” There had been more, Pratt said, but they “were such great things that he could not speak of them.” Parkman did not countenance Pratt’s experience as real and that his story was “not to be depended upon.” Rather, he wrote, “we have a more sure word of prophecy to which we should do well to take heed.”8 Incidents of revival audiences being emotionally transported to extremities considered indecent and inconsistent with the sober Christian worship of the time were quite commonplace. The reluctance of more conservative New Lights and many of the Awakening’s leading historians to accept the radicalism inherent to the revivals reflects a squeamishness on the part of the former to accept innovation and change in forms of Christian worship, while with regard to the latter it constitutes a rejection of a vision of eighteenthcentury American society that was significantly more multilayered and complex. Durham, New Hampshire, offers another representative example of the ubiquity of radical evangelicalism. Rev. Nicholas Gilman, reading of fresh effusions of God’s spirit among congregations all over New England and yet seeing no signs of it among his own parishioners, lost all patience when the assemblage headed too quickly for the exit after his morning service on January 31, 1742. He was “mov’d to tell em that if I could See them flocking

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to Heaven as they were from Meeting it would Make My Heart Leap within me.” A few continued on out of the meetinghouse, but the rest sheepishly returned to their seats and Gilman began an extemporaneous continuation of his sermon that lasted through the afternoon. “[W]e held on thro the Night,” he wrote in his diary, “Sometimes Praying, then Singing, Exhorting[,] advising and directing, and Rejoycing together in the Lord.” The mood of the extended service changed quickly from simple enthusiasm to visionary frenzy. One member of the congregation, Stephen Buse, reported seeing a pair of dazzling angels as well as a “White Dove come down into the Meeting House over head.” Hubbard Stevens saw a beacon of light, a “bright star about as big as a Mans fist” descend into the sanctuary to rest above the pulpit. “These things are the Lords doings,” Gilman concluded, “and truly marvelous in Mine Eyes.”9 Gilman served as eager midwife to extremes of visionary experience, many of his congregants falling into ecstatic trances. Mary Reed regularly slipped into cataleptic states identical to the one that befell Isaac Pratt, each time her “appearance Breathless but her pulse beating,” and when she would come to she claimed her soul went on intense, rapturous journeys during which she sang with choirs of angels in Heaven and disputed with Satan who flung temptation after temptation at her. During one of Gilman’s sermons, “Two Youths under Good Influences and of regular Life” began spontaneously prophesying, sending the audience into waves of spiritual excitement. The “Out-cry . . . lasted till within Night,” he wrote, during the course of which he read from Stephen Buse’s account of two visions he lately received as indicating a likely fulfillment of Revelation 8:1–13, which foretells the profusion of visionary experiences among the faithful that would result from the breaking of the seventh seal. Gilman’s parishioners were “wrapt Up in Divine Praises” for several months straight, hearing heavenly voices from the skies, squinting at angelic luminescence indoors and out, recording divine messages, and even relaying celestial orders to Gilman as he preached his sermons. So convinced was he that these epiphanies and visions were real and important, he chronicled them in careful detail, insisted upon their validity when questioned or criticized by skeptics and opponents, and encouraged the Durham congregation to seek their own mystical visions.10 Charles Brockwell, an Anglican parson in Boston, wrote dismayed reports to the secretary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in London about the activities of a “set of Enthusiasts that steal about harangueing the admiring Vulgar” and the “shocking” behavior of the area’s more radical New Lights. At Salem, for instance, new converts and rapt disciples of evangelical preachers regularly let out “groans, cries, screams, & agonies” that “excite both laughter & contempt. . . . This tragic scene is performed by such as are entering into the pangs of the New Birth . . . [who]



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tell you they saw & have seen their names entered into the Book of Life & can point out the writer, character, & pen.” He wondered that “this year [1741] for Enthusiasm may be as memorable as was 1692 for witchcraft.” Itinerant New Lights assiduously chronicled ecstatic visionary experiences that attended sudden conversions at revivals and in private prayer meetings in the early 1740s. As Daniel Rogers toured New England, he regularly encountered new converts who told of heavenly journeys to meet God and Jesus Christ, of angelic hosts dazzling visionists with their preternatural voices, and of peeking at the glowing pages of the Book of Life. So ubiquitous did these episodes become by 1742 that it was widely assumed by many that “a person must be in a sort of trance and . . . see wonders” in order for his or her conversion to be considered real.11 An unknown person conveyed to one Henry Dyer of Lebanon, Connecticut, an amazing first-person account of his or her epiphanic experience, which, after making some marginal notes and light corrections, he then forwarded to Eleazar Wheelock. The narrative, written in an uneducated, unpunctuated prose, begins by crediting the influence of a visiting New Light preacher, in this case Benjamin Pomeroy, whose preaching suffused the narrator’s soul “with ravishing transport.” The intensity of the ecstasy was such that only “a thin paper wall . . . separated me from perfect Glory,” whereupon the visionist fainted. She/he then awoke “at the bottum of a Grat mouenten” blocking the way to the holy land of Canaan, where a great dove appeared to convey the narrator up to the summit, “set[ting] me doun on a Larg plaine.” Here, the writer faced a wild, rampaging bull, and just when she/he “Expected to be devoured by him,” an angelic presence intervened to guide him/her to heaven’s gates. Once inside, the narrator beheld “God the father and God the son seated on a throne of Glory” and surrounded by “angels bowing and paying their homage and adoration to them.” Dumbstruck before the holy majesty, the narrator felt she/he should join in the singing of the angelic praises, but “I found the plase whas so holy I felt as tho I should have shrink in to nothing be fore them.” Turning his attention to the terrified visitor, Christ opened the Book of Life and “shewed me my name reten in Letters of blood.” Jesus directed the narrator to return to the world, promising to grant to the supplicant the necessary grace to “with stand all temptation you shall mete with.” The angel and the giant dove returned to carry the him/her back to the mountain’s foot where, quite unexpectedly, a terrifying scene confronted the narrator: “I see the mouth of hell open and the dam[n]ed Souls wallowing in the flames[,] shreaking and houling.” Satan arose from the conflagration and informed the trembling sinner that “he would have me.” Frozen in horror, the narrator heard a reassuring voice from heaven quoting Isaiah 41:10: “be not dismayed I am thy God.” Thus encouraged, the author found the inner strength to renounce Satan, who lurched back down into hell with his

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“Ghastly crew.” At this point, the narrator emerged from the trance state, “my body all disordered with the Cramp.”12 Arguably one of the best-known accounts of one convert’s mystical experience is that of Hannah Heaton of North Haven, Connecticut, who penned an autobiographical “spiritual history” focusing on her faith for the benefit of her children. Heaton, who had been born and raised on a rural farm in Southampton, Long Island, felt the first stirrings of conversion during a visit to Connecticut at the age of twenty, in early 1741, to hear George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent. Initially impressed, she had yet to feel saving grace and described herself as “lost in the woods.” About the same time, a group of Separates started their own church in Southampton in which her family were active, and after a meeting she felt a calming sensation overcome her and the words of Jesus Christ came to her like a voice from heaven: “seek and you shall find[,] come to me all you that are weary and heauiladen[,] and I will give you rest.” Then, she beheld “a louely god man with his arm open[,] ready to receiue me[,] his face was full of smiles[,] he loookt white and ruddy and was just such a sauiour as my soul wanted”—Jesus Christ himself—and her heart filled with love and a feeling of gratitude. She later felt herself slipping back down into sinfulness, sensing “withdrawings of the lord from me, . . . but by degrees by little & little” she felt the warmth of God’s love. One night, an intense vision in a dream presented to her the “devil in the shape of a great snake all on a flame with his sting out” who attacked a helpless sinner “and seemd to aim at the mans mouth”; and throughout her life, Heaton dreaded such demonic assault to the point that she sometimes feared going to bed “for fear of the deuil that he would distress me.”13 When her father passed away in 1754, an especially distressing series of confrontations with the devil began, during which she felt cast adrift, and it was at this low moment that the devil approached and “fastned . . . in my mind that there was no heauen.” Satan would challenge her conception of faith and the truth of the Bible, suggesting that there is nothing beyond death but dissolving in the earth, and for which she had no retorts. Finally, while walking alone in tearful prayer one day, lost in “anguish of soul,” God reassured her that “my redeemer liueth and tho . . . worms destroy his body yet in my flesh shall i see god . . . let satan say what he will he is a lier o satan you will not onely be bound but cast into the bottomless pit and a seal sat upon you.” These grueling interviews with Satan highlight key elements of her mentality. The imminent presence of good and evil were patently real in her mind, and she knew that the choice between them was hers to make. Strikingly, it was the ordinariness of their discussions, replete as they were with persuasive logic, that most imperiled her mental fortitude. Similar tests frequently confronted her in her dreams, which, while admitting that they—along with visions and other random “reuelations”—stand upon “a foundation of sand,”



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nevertheless served to “do good when they driue or lead the soul to god & his word.” Her dreams abounded with symbolic images and figures that held great meaning for her, as well as for any Protestant who took great stock in dreams and visions: “a burning house, a dove, a dead tree, a man with a whip, and a raging bull.”14 She likewise invested ordinary incidents with portentous meaning, scrupulously recording solar eclipses, comets, fires, thunderstorms, and droughts, in addition to suicides, drownings, and public executions as personal reminders of the omnipresence of death and the continual necessity of God’s care. Indians figured heavily in her musings, occasionally as “the dear indiens” who affirmed their religious experiences at her Southampton church, but more often as “cruel barbarous enemies” who perpetrated outrages in the form of murderous raids or drunken rampages in town. Sometimes, Heaton allowed herself to pity the Indians because, as she put it, but for God’s mercy, she herself might languish in the same unfortunate situation. Heaton’s image of the Indian, being simultaneously a probable convert and a merciless, godless savage, speaks to Anglo-American ambivalence that usually hindered sustained efforts toward Indian Christianization. While typical of the more supernaturally attuned evangelicals of the mid-eighteenth century, Heaton was otherwise unique in her expertise in Calvinist theology, as well as the diligence with which she put quill to paper to record and interpret her experiences. She was conversant with works by such authors as John Foxe, Michael Wigglesworth, Solomon Stoddard, Thomas Shepard, Isaac Watts, and David Brainerd, in addition to devouring religious magazines and pamphlets devoted to revival news, to which she often referred in carefully analyzing the meaning of this dream, that vision, or an omen. Her reading of devotional and theological literature so deeply informed her thinking that she comes across in her spiritual autobiography as a minister in her own right; her authority compromised only by the somewhat untutored quality of her writing.15 “ENTIRELY SWALLOWED UP IN GOD” The only explanation Bathsheba Kingsley of Westfield, Massachusetts, could offer for her incredible behavior was that she was bound by her obedience to God. Confessing before her church’s congregation, she admitted that in October 1741 she did steal a neighbor’s horse, “riding away on the Sabbath with[ou]t her husbands Consent” upon receiving “immediate revelations from heaven” that she should itinerate as one of God’s ministers. She begged forgiveness from her neighbors and surely received a stern reprimand from her pastor, Rev. John Ballentine, but in February 1742/43 she was once more in trouble for going “from house to house, and very frequently to other

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towns, under a notion of doing Christ’s work and delivering his messages.” Ballentine called together a panel of his colleagues, one of them Jonathan Edwards, to examine her and offer their admonitions to her and her husband. She told them that she frequently had revelatory dreams and visions that confirmed in her a belief that she was “a proper person to be improved for some great thing in the church of God.” She unabashedly called out strangers and neighbors for their “vileness and wickedness,” and likewise blasted those ministers she thought unconverted or insufficiently zealous that divine judgments would soon strike them. Edwards noted that she was of a “weak vapory habit of body” and that this rendered her susceptible to satanic infiltration that often left her “in a continual tumult, like the sea in a storm.”16 While it was not unusual for a woman to experience dreams and visions, a woman who believed that those experiences qualified her to assume for herself the mantle of the ministry was a clear breach of church discipline, as well as an affront to traditional male authority. Her forwardness and irascibility would have been intolerable even had she been a man, but it was doubly worse on account of her being a woman. She had, according to the ad hoc council that examined her, “almost wholly cast off that modesty, shamefacedness, and sobriety and meekness, diligence and submission, that becomes a Christian woman in her place.” Edwards ventured further, calling Kingsley an insubordinate, “brawling woman,” whose husband’s attempts to correct her with “hard words and blows” led to her praying for his death and speedy descent into hell. In spite of this, the council decided only to admonish her, rather than “quench the spirit” of the revivals, and rebuked Mr. Kingsley for his harsh treatment of her. They reminded Bathsheba that nothing prevented her from visiting her “Christian neighbors and brethren for mutual edification,” and that she could “prudently and humbly . . . counsel, exhort and intreat others.” “[K]eep chiefly at home,” they warned her, and never again presume to play the role of an evangelist.17 Sarah Pierpont Edwards, Jonathan Edwards’s wife, came to embody the radical mysticism of the revival when she, very much like Bathsheba Kingsley, experienced a sustained period of ecstatic “transports” beginning in January 1741/42 that lasted for nearly a month. Jonathan, away from home at the time on a preaching tour throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut, where he noted that “the work of God is greater at this day in the land, than it has been at any time,” hastened back to Sarah’s side to bask in her “happy distemper.” Upon her husband’s return, the couple set about drafting a detailed account of her experiences, even as she went on to have still more, sometimes in the presence of the constant flow of visitors crowding a house already brimming with the seven Edwards children and a few servants. While Jonathan privately reveled in his wife’s heightened religious sensibilities, publicly he kept them under wraps, describing her experiences without identifying her in



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Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion (1742). Sarah’s experience, Jonathan avowed, seamlessly conformed to the ultimate spiritual standards to which “complete” Christians should achieve. At last, Edwards had irrefutable proof that visible bodily effects, which became common in the First Great Awakening, could not be interpreted as evidence of disgraceful “enthusiasm” or of spiritual naiveté. “Now if such things are enthusiasm,” he declared, “and the fruits of a distempered brain, let my brain be evermore possessed of that happy distemper!”18 The core of Sarah’s newfound spiritual fortitude was an attitude of absolute surrender to God’s will. Nursing fears about her inability to merit “sufficient rest in God,” on January 20 she met with family and friends for mid-morning prayers. Meditating on God’s identity as the heavenly father, she withdrew to her bedroom where once again she slipped into an ecstatic trance. “God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, seemed as distinct persons, both manifesting their inconceivable loveliness, and mildness, and gentleness, and their great immutable love to me.” Over the next several days, Sarah succumbed to a series of sublime ecstasies that she described as being “entirely swallowed up in God,” totally overcome with a “joyful sense of the presence and divine excellence of the Comforter, and of the glories of heaven.” As Jonathan returned from his trip, he heard glowing reports of Buell’s ministry and Sarah’s religious experiences, but he fretted about the impact upon the younger and less spiritually mature members of his congregation. Many, following Sarah’s example of seeking higher levels of religious intensity, began experiencing visions and spiritual delights. Sarah’s experiences seemed to overwhelm her mental stability, and at the end of 1742 Dr. Samuel Mather prescribed a variety of remedies for hysteria. For the greater part of the year, she had become obsessed with a willingness to submit to bodily tortures, personal misfortunes, and the unquenchable rage of a dissatisfied husband to prove her absolute submission to God’s will, fantasizing about tortures “so great, awful and overwhelming, that none could bear to live in the country where the spectacle was seen.” The masochistic, almost sexual tone of her fantasies was not unique to Sarah Edwards, and Jonathan knew that his critics seized upon real and exaggerated incidents of such excesses to discredit him and other evangelicals. Edwards carefully withheld these aspects from Some Thoughts, while their grandson, Sereno Edwards Dwight, omitted them in his reprinting of her narrative. Nevertheless, Sarah’s more humble attitude influenced her husband’s critical assessment of Bathsheba Kingsley.19 In light of the prevalence of strong female piety in New England, an especially remarkable aspect of the First Great Awakening is the corresponding male response. Jonathan Edwards had long held such religious sensibilities, and thus was an obvious leader in evangelical innovations, which included men as well as women in the cultivation of charismatic worship. However,

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Sarah’s religious obsessions became for Jonathan emblematic of a dangerous extremity of enthusiasm that had to be curbed, in spite of his early embrace of mystical piety. The charismatic radicalism that infected the Suffield congregation, some members of which attended Buell in his itinerant travels, embarrassed Edwards with their “raptures and violent emotions,” and he began to notice similar behaviors from members of his own congregation. In a letter to Thomas Prince written in December 1742, Edwards deplored the more extravagant expressions of sudden conversion and piety, consciously minimizing the phenomenon by claiming that only a small minority actually fell under “strange influence” and behaved inappropriately. “[I]n the years 1740 and 1741,” he wrote, “the work seemed to be much more pure, having less of a corrupt mixture” than more recently, and that the revivals must be more closely managed as they progress. But Edwards had a larger design in Some Thoughts than a defense of “glorious distraction.” He maintained that the revivals should not be dismissed “a priori; from the Way that it began, the Instruments that have been employed, the Means that have been made use of, and the Methods that have been taken and succeeded in carrying it on.” When the matter was considered “a posteriori,” he argued, “we are to observe the Effect wrought.” He concluded that, “raptures and violent emotions” notwithstanding, the Awakening was a genuine work of God conforming to scriptural teachings about extraordinary acts of divine dispensation.20 Sarah Osborn (1714–1796) is arguably the most important figure in the history of women in the First Great Awakening. Her spiritual journey, meticulously chronicled by her in a handmade journal volume, details a woman of exceptional self-awareness and introspection and constitutes a key piece of evidence for the depth, scope, and significance of the Awakening. An early devotee of Rev. Nathaniel Clap after her family’s move from England to Rhode Island in 1722, she became inured to a life of heartbreak, physical infirmity, and disappointment that precipitated an intense spiritual crisis in the mid-1730s. Fearing herself “utterly lost without . . . Christ,” in the choking grip of “legall feare,” Osborn experienced conversion and became a member of Newport, Rhode Island’s First Church in 1737. Nevertheless, she struggled with feelings of spiritual inadequacy that left her “sunk by degrees lower and lower” until she attended a sermon by George Whitefield in 1740, and later one delivered by Gilbert Tennent. Thus began a remarkable career in which Osborn became the leader of a “Religious Female Society” that substantially guided First Church for decades, corresponded regularly with Whitefield and Tennent, among other New Lights, and penned her own commentaries on key books of the Bible in addition to her own devotional journal that is heavily informed by her mastery of dozens of treatises by Puritan theologians. Male evangelicals, initially highly critical of her religious



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leadership, eventually commended her Calvinist orthodoxy and cautiously endorsed her lay authority.21 Osborn embodied the entirety of the First Great Awakening, particularly in its pietistic and mystical dimensions. Reflecting once on “the look [Christ] gave . . . Peter” in the Gospel of Luke, Osborn begged “dear Jesus! . . . look me into deeper repentance. . . . Look me into flaming love and zeal. . . . Do but look, dear Lord.” Often during private prayer she experienced “ecstacies of joy” that left her feeling physically exhausted, but enraptured. At other times when her doubts and fears overwhelmed her—as they so often did, she wondered aloud “Why am I not in hell[?]” Notwithstanding such low points, she always managed to find a way to take comfort, often in her correspondence with friends and leading New Light figures, but perhaps more so in her work in the First Church. Samuel Hopkins, a protégé of Jonathan Edwards, noted that hundreds of people routinely “repaired to her as a known, pious, benevolent Christian,” and her frequent meetings every week included young and old, male and female, as well as some of the city’s free African Americans. So many came, in fact, that she organized a separate “Ethiopian Society” that met on Tuesday nights, marking Osborn as one of the most inclusive figures in the First Great Awakening, one who is credited with sparking a renewal of evangelical revivalism in southern New England in the late 1760s.22 “OUR PRESSES ARE FOREVER TEEMING WITH BOOKS AND OUR WOMEN WITH BASTARDS” Charles Francis Adams, the great-grandson of former president John Adams and an amateur historian, read a paper on the First Great Awakening to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1891, and his assessment was one that revived the Old Light condemnation of the revivals as a mass delusion that unduly affected colonial society’s weakest members: women, African Americans, and—to a far lesser extent—Indians. He repeated charges made by Charles Chauncy and other Old Lights that the evangelicals’ influence upon women, particularly the magnetic appeal of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, was based not on their spiritual authority, but rather on their sexual power. They claimed that the frenzied religious fervor was, in fact, grounded in sexual arousal, and that the bodily exertions attending radical conversions turned quickly and easily into carnal orgies that would in part explain a marked increase in cases of fornication heard by New England courts in the 1740s and 1750s. As Timothy Cutler put it laconically in 1743, “Our presses are forever teeming with books and our women with bastards.”23

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Was there a heightened eroticism inherent to mid-eighteenth-century revivalism that resulted in a troubling spike in cases of sexual irregularities? Historians of the First Great Awakening have largely remained silent on this question, and when pressed fall back on mumbled assurances that there was likely neither more nor fewer instances of sexual irregularity at the height of the Awakening in the 1740s than in previous or subsequent decades. While premarital sex, illegitimate births, adultery, homosexuality, and deviancy were constant concerns in every colonial society, the fixation upon sexual governance was arguably greater in New England than elsewhere. Cedric B. Cowing concluded from research done by Emil Oberholzer that among a handful of church records from across Massachusetts that confessions of fornication were generally low between 1720 and 1729, especially among five churches that were swept up in the New Light stir. However, between 1730 and 1749, confessions increased significantly across the board between “awakened” and “unaffected” churches, with only a slight difference between the two categories, with women being far more apt to confess than men. Based on Oberholzer’s figures, male confessions before 1730 only comprised an average of 30 percent of all confessions, while after 1730 they jumped to just over 46 percent of the total, with comparatively little difference between awakened and unaffected churches. It would appear that heightened religious sensibilities, rather than a scandalous escalation of sexual activity, accounts for the higher numbers of men and women confessing to fornication in front of their fellow churchgoers.24 It must be underscored that the numbers of women confessing to fornication or some other sexual misconduct would outnumber male confessors on account of the membership rolls being dominated by women, as noted earlier, and as Cowing notes, women “were more interested than the men in the baptism of their children.” A renewed emphasis upon private and public morality prompted by revivalism explains the sharp increase in recorded confessions, even in churches largely untouched by the New Light stir, but in this aspect of the Awakening, Old Light critics were unable to see anything but evangelicalism encouraging radically increased sexual promiscuity and, in more extreme cases, perversions. Alexander Garden, Whitefield’s antagonist in South Carolina, alleged that the more enthusiastic New Lights shared the “delusions” of the members of Charleston’s unfortunate Dutartre family in the 1720s, whose excessive religious fanaticism led them to believe that “the holy Spirit of God commanded them to commit Adultery, Incest, Rebellion, and Murder.” A group of critical Massachusetts divines published a “Testimony” that decried the “ungoverned passions,” “disorderly tumults,” and “indecent behaviors” tainting the revivals, alluding to sexual improprieties. Charles Chauncy called the “strange unusual bodily motions” and vocalizations of the newly converted and the spiritually enlivened “gross disorders,”



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a “commotion of the passions” cultivated by New Light preachers. William Douglas, a deist antirevivalist, was bolder in charging George Whitefield with encouraging “wantonness between the sexes.”25 Enemies of Theodorus Frelinghuysen formally complained that he had abused his religious authority to seduce Jacobus Schuurman, who himself was accused of having “attempt[ed] scandalous undertakings by night upon the person of more than one man with whom he happened to sleep.” Similar accusations were levied against many New Side and New Light ministers of their having fornicated with enamored female adherents and even to have fathered bastard children. It is not difficult to see how some of them exposed themselves to such accusations when they often employed near-sexual metaphors to describe the relationship of the converted to Christ. Jonathan Edwards routinely discussed the faithful as “offered up to [Christ] in the flame of love” in a (spiritual) intercourse “most tender and ardent,” and frequently quoted from the Song of Songs—easily the most erotic book of the Bible. In some cases, there could be no misconstruing when the most radical New Lights encouraged men and women to abandon unconverted spouses in favor of properly converted counterparts in the bonds of “spiritual marriage.” This phenomenon had become worrisome enough that in 1749 the General Assembly of Rhode Island joined its neighbors in passing revised legislation forbidding “adultery, polygamy, and unlawfully marrying persons,” and prescribing harsher punishments for such offenders. Insinuations and outright accusations of sexual misconduct and perversion against evangelicals are far outweighed by theological arguments traducing revivalism, but they do throw a sensational capstone upon a monument of criticism erected by the antirevivalists. Most likely when the literate public is reading about the debate between New Lights and Old Lights in the newspapers and tract literature, the salacious material is more apt to stick in the memory than the theology.26 “NO REASON FROM THE SCRIPTURE TO BELIEVE” A letter published in the South-Carolina Gazette purported to describe a revival that took place at Plymouth, Massachusetts, under the direction of the radical New Light, Andrew Croswell, in February 1742. It noted disapprovingly that “not one Stroke of Work was done for three Weeks by Man, Woman or Child” while Croswell carried on marathon preaching sessions, marked by “a general Foaming or Fainting, Laughing or Crying” among the participants. At one point, “a big-bellied Woman from an hind Seat straddled into the Pulpit to assist C—ll, and was inspired with so much useful Matter, as took her up [to] half an Hour to deliver it . . . extending her Arms every Way, and not a Muscle of her Body but in Action.” Croswell had the people

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so whipped up in enthusiastic ardor that the anonymous reporter claimed that they marched through the town’s streets with Croswell “leading the Van.” More moderate fellow New Lights expressed discomfort with Croswell’s “irregular zeal,” his “skipping like a ram from pew to pew, and from seat to seat, even from the upper gallery to the floor” during his sermons. Davenport claimed to have been inspired to burn books by divine instructions transmitted through visions and dreams. The bizarre behavior exhibited by some radical New Lights and their adherents offered excellent fodder for criticism of the revivals, but of even greater concern to antirevivalists and more moderate evangelicals alike was the prominence of supernatural mysticism that many opponents seized upon to discredit the awakening and its promoters.27 This prevalence of supernaturalism attending radical revivalism marks the First Great Awakening as an extraordinary event, not just because it broke from established religious norms of behavior and public decorum, but also on account of its sharp deviance from Protestant doctrines that denounced such phenomena as characteristic of Catholic superstition. Although Protestant clergymen routinely condemned the Catholic fixation with supernatural visions, the faltering advance of the English Reformation confirmed that such accounts would long maintain a tight grip on the imaginations of otherwise good Christians far into the early modern period. Seventeenth-century print culture hastened the circulation of wonder tales containing the oracular predictions of entranced visionaries, which only grew in popularity in the 1700s. Eighteenth-century clergymen had this disturbing trend in mind when they equated New Light mystics with Quakers and Familists, among other antinomian sectarian groups, members of which had reported celestial spirit journeys during the previous century, and this tenacious fixation with visions of heaven and hell likely crossed the Atlantic to New England during the Great Migration. Rev. Peter Bulkeley of Concord published an influential treatise in 1646 detailing New England’s unique church membership practices, in which he also condemned fanatical laypeople who purported to “have the assurance of revelation, seeing the very book of life unsealed and open to them” and who “love to be wise above that which is written.” Comparable reports appeared during the Salem witch trials of 1691–1693.28 Motivated by astonishing communications with the Holy Spirit, New Light radicals determined that they stood poised on the edge of a latter-day Pentecost, and fancied themselves to be central characters in an unfolding cosmic spectacle that was rapidly approaching the apocalyptic final act. Seventeenthcentury Puritans trudged through their lives, never confident of their own salvation, but an ecstatic handful of their evangelical grandchildren revealed a shortcut to what one critic termed “an infallible Assurance.” Indeed, the idea that spellbound mystics could read the names set down in the Book of Life rendered archaic the standard Puritan morphology of conversion, and



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legitimized the notorious exercise of spiritual discernment through which New Light radicals such as James Davenport claimed an ability to judge the eternal condition of their clerical opponents. Inspired laypeople responded to their critics by averring that these scripturally authorized visionary abilities were available to all of God’s true saints everywhere and at all times, but chiefly during the extraordinary final days described in the Book of Revelation. While they were grounded in biblical literalism and a venerable primitivist Christian tradition, visionary experiences nevertheless pushed some radicals far past the acceptable limits of conventional Reformed theology.29 The appearances in radical conversion narratives of rampaging bulls, holy mountains, and a “Book of Life” full of names written in blood speak to the even mixture of medieval European supernatural folklore with Christian apocalypticism in the radical Protestant mind, particularly the description of God and Christ seated on celestial thrones surrounded by adoring angelic hosts that comes from Revelation 20. Importantly, the notion that anyone could be shown an open Book of Life contradicted the Calvinist predestinarian doctrine that the Book was sealed and would never be opened before the Last Judgment. The dispensation of extraordinary gifts had ceased with the end of the apostolic era and no self-proclaimed seer had any valid claim to knowledge about the “Grand Secrets of the Mediator’s Kingdom.” According to Solomon Williams, there is “no Reason from the Scripture to believe, that God will Reveal either the Coming of the Day of Judgment, or the Names of Persons in the Book of Life, to any of the Sons of Men.” In spite of Old Light efforts to discredit visionary supernaturalism, New England’s prorevivalists persisted in reenacting Revelation 20 in all manner of ways, from the pulpit and in print. Moderate New Light ministers tentatively sanctioned the ecstasies of their followers, as dreams and other varieties of mystical communication intermittently appeared in the written relations submitted by church membership applicants. The most fanatically zealous broke away to start separate churches or establish perfectionist cults that advocated a wide array of mystical traditions, including lay baptism, spiritual wifery, and the ardent cultivation of dreams and visions.30 “PETTICOATED PROPHETS” Without question, the Moravians took Christian mysticism to unprecedented extremes, finding receptive soil in the revival-strafed Middle Colonies. The Moravians were a German Pietist sect that coalesced out of refugee groups fleeing religious persecution in southern Germany and western Bohemia in the 1720s. Under the leadership of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, they emigrated to western Pennsylvania in the late 1730s, establishing the village

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of Bethlehem in 1740. In keeping with core aspects of Continental Pietism, the Unitas Fratrum, or Moravian Brethren, focused their devotion upon the physical suffering of the crucified Jesus Christ. Evangelical almost by default, the Moravians were initially welcomed by radical New Side Presbyterians and New Light Baptists, but as more came to light about deeper aspects of their theology, harsh opposition developed, spearheaded by Gilbert Tennent and Jonathan Dickinson. The German communities of frontier Pennsylvania suffered from a lack of qualified Lutheran and Reformed ministers, and Moravian clergy rushed to fill those voids in addition to sending emissaries out to other parts of British America, including Indian Country. What made them most objectionable, particularly to the evangelical Presbyterians, was not their non-Calvinist theology or their outreach to Indian communities, but their radical interpretations of trinitarianism that violated traditional EuroAmerican conceptions of sexuality and gender roles. The Moravian theology was unusually Christocentric, the bulk of an adherent’s worshipful devotion focused upon the wounded, bleeding, suffering Christ gasping out his rattling last breaths on the cross. God the Father and the Holy Spirit are consequently diminished in importance, and all three were regarded metaphorically as both male and female. God was reverenced as a distant and unapproachable figure—the generative source of divinity and ruler of the cosmos—while the Holy Spirit became a feminine figure that is the ultimate source of motherhood. While they did not deny God and Jesus’s outward masculinity, they emphasized their core identities as androgynous, and propagated a modified idea of the mystical marriage between Jesus and the Church (the body of all believers) to heavily eroticize that relationship. The erotic implications of the Christian’s relationship to Christ was nothing new, and was a frequent trope in Calvinist sermons in New England especially, but the Moravians carried this to lengths that outsiders found nothing short of obscene, as when they celebrated marital sexuality. Zinzendorf and August Gottlieb Spangenberg expounded upon Moravian theology in many treatises intended to clarify points of confusion that they thought generated opposition, but they did so without downplaying the Moravian feminization of Christianity. This reverencing of the feminine likewise extended into a reconception of the ministerial role as essentially maternal, and thus Moravian women were encouraged to preach and serve as eldresses.31 Pennsylvania’s German Lutheran leadership initially attacked the Moravians as dangerous and downright satanic, awash in unrestricted sexual perversity. They widely distributed a sensationalist, certainly wildly exaggerated exposé written by a disenchanted former adherent, Johann Franz Regnier, whose “Das Geheimnis der Zinzendorfischen Secte” was part of an expansive indictment published in Germany first by Johann Phillip Fresenius in 1747 and reprinted in Pennsylvania by Alexander Volck shortly afterward. Regnier offered a



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graphic account of Moravian marriage rites and sexual practices, centering on Count Zinzendorf’s watching brides dressing for the wedding ceremony and caressing their breasts. Communion followed the marriage ceremony, after which the newlyweds had their first sexual experience inside a temporary structure, a “blue chamber” (das blaue Cabinet), surrounded by the congregation who could observe the couple through windows, and which Volck claimed turned the church into a “bordello.” Regnier and Volck claimed that the Moravians believed that the marriage blessing issued from Jesus’s penis, the blood from Christ’s circumcision functioning as semen that, when mixed with the husband’s semen, conceives a child. The idea of an androgynous Christ was nothing new to Christianity or to Protestant theology, but the applicative extensions of Moravian theology sparked fierce opposition.32 Unquestionably, one of the most controversial Moravian violations of gender restrictions was their encouraging women to exercise leadership duties, including preaching. In an “Address to Women” given at a Moravian gathering in Philadelphia, Zinzendorf underscored the New Testament’s verses about Christ’s special regard for women. Women in the Old Testament are little more than servants and instruments of Satan—irrational, undeserving of honor or respect, and responsible for the Fall. However, Christ’s having been born of a woman, Zinzendorf said, meant that women must now be honored and respected. This was further confirmed by the fact that it was women who sat vigil by Jesus’ tomb, witnessed the Resurrection, and spread the word of the miracle to the wastrel disciples. Women are morally stronger and possessing of a nobler, more honest, humble, and steadfast character than men, he proclaimed. Moravian women enjoyed greater opportunities to join in formal church governance than women did in practically every other denomination of Christianity. From 1740 through 1742, several Moravian women undertook high-profile preaching tours of Pennsylvania, much as did a similarly small number of Calvinist female evangelicals, and others are known to have preached regularly to their congregations.33 Germany’s and Pennsylvania’s Lutherans and Reformed ministers sang a chorus of condemnation against the Moravian endorsement of female preaching, much as Old Lights and moderate revivalists likewise deprecated the presumptions of Anglo-American women who spoke out in church or held teaching sessions in their homes. Proof of the efficacy of Moravian conversion efforts, particularly in the small northern European enclaves of the Delaware Valley, can be found in the vituperative tone of their public critics. Gabriel Naesman, pastor of a Swedish Lutheran church in Philadelphia, complained bitterly to ruling elders in Sweden that “The whole Moravian ant hill” had been working to compromise his ministry by sending “petticoated prophets with all their eloquence” to lure his congregants away. Opponents accused the Moravians of attracting new adherents by emphasizing their

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radical views regarding sexuality, and they were not far off the mark, since Moravians positively celebrated marital sex and sang hymns that “portrayed the glory of sexual organs” in their worship services. Anti-Moravian writers unqualifiedly mixed facts, exaggerations, and fabrications about supposed sexual perversions and the upending of traditional gender roles, as when Johann Martin Bolzius of Georgia accused them of sexually abusing young boys living in their semiclosed communities.34 Religious disputes were a standard component of the First Great Awakening, and this was no less true in Pennsylvania’s German communities, particularly where the Moravians were concerned, but was also the case wherever the United Brethren established a presence in the colonies. Their theological radicalism challenged traditionally gendered ideas about religious power and authority at a time when longstanding institutions came under criticism from evangelicals throughout established Protestant Christianity. Zinzendorf, bowing somewhat to external pressures exerted by his many critics, tempered Moravian professions of female religious authority by reminding the Sisters that they remained under ultimate male authority on account of a secondary serpentine nature. The “greatest holy women” in the Old Testament used their “snake-like ways”—they being an “expression of original sin”—to control their husbands and masters. “It can’t be helped that the Brothers in the Church” have to govern the Sisters, he averred, but Christ’s coming repaired “the harm one woman brought into the world by being born and made human through another woman.” Among other aspects of Moravian theology and practice, the status accorded to women—while not resonating far in traditionalist Euro-American culture—did find receptive audiences among refugee Indian communities in western Pennsylvania.35  Historians have sought to explain the charismatic aspects of the First Great Awakening in psychological and sociological terms, betraying a presentist discomfort with religious feeling and the power of belief. However, it must be emphasized that the vast majority of eighteenth-century Americans genuinely believed in God to some degree or another, and demonstrated that belief in a fashion that ranged from practical nonobservance to hypermethodical zeal. Most believed in a life after death, and that that life would be spent either in heaven or in hell, based on the way one lived in this world. A yearning for an afterlife forever dwelling in heavenly paradise mixed with a fear of damnation and eternal torment in hell fundamentally shaped the early modern Western mentality, even if a handful of intellectuals in Europe and America had begun seriously to question basic Christian tenets and, in a few rare instances, the divinity of Jesus or the very existence of God.



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As itinerant New Lights fanned out from New England to the middle and southern colonies after 1745, they realized that they were part of a larger “‘visionary culture’ that included English Methodists, New Light Scots-Irish Presbyterians, German sectarians, and African slaves—all of whom possessed ecstatic religious traditions of their own.” Evangelical radicalism, spreading rapidly through the Atlantic world, increasingly became identified with visionary mysticism and charismatic physicality, much to the delight of the radicals, the discomfiture of the Moderates, and the dismay of conservatives and Old Lights. As worrying as church divisions and outright separations had grown to be for antirevivalists, the vituperation they directed at the New Lights assumed heightened degrees of vehemence as a result of the real and perceived behavioral excesses of lay men and women. Opposition to revivalism had been lukewarm in the second half of the 1730s and confined mainly to attacks on Whitefield, but in the 1740s, antirevivalist clergymen stepped forward—Canute-like—to confront a rising tide of evangelicalism sweeping through New England and the Middle Colonies. What ensued was an unprecedented war of words that lasted until the outbreak of the American Revolution.36 NOTES 1. Boston Evening Post, March 14, 1743; Thomas Clap to Jonathan Dickinson, March 14, 1743, in Richard Webster, A History of the Presbyterian Church in America (Philadelphia, 1857), 204; Harry S. Stout and Peter S. Onuf, “James Daveport and the Great Awakening in New London,” The Journal of American History 70 (December 1983), 556–57; Robert Brockway, A Wonderful Work of God: Puritanism and the Great Awakening (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2003), 147–49. It is interesting that Davenport condemned the works of Richard Sibbes, given the latter’s pietistic influence upon the origins of the Awakening in New England. 2. Boston Evening Post, April 11, 1743; Stout and Onuf, “James Davenport,” 576; Brockway, A Wonderful Work of God, 149–50; Sarah Pierpont to Eleazar Wheelock, May 30, 1743, Papers of Eleazar Wheelock (microform). 3. Ezra Stiles, Discourse on the Christian Union (Boston, 1761), 50. 4. Sermon on Luke 18:38–39, April 1741, Jonathan Edwards Collection, box 8, folder 593, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Jonathan Edwards to Deborah Hathaway, June 3, 1741, WJE, 16:91–95, emphasis added. Douglas L. Winiarski, “Jonathan Edwards: Enthusiast? Radical Revivalism and the Great Awakening in the Connecticut Valley,” Church History 74 (December 2005), 696. Winiarski erroneously identified the sermon as the Sermon on Luke 19:41, which was preached in May 1741 and never delivered at Suffield. 5. “Diary of the Reverend Stephen Williams,” 1715–1782, 10 vols., typescript, Storrs Public Library, Longmeadow, MA, 3:368–71; Stephen Williams to Eleazar Wheelock, March 16, 1741, April 15, 1741; Winiarski, “Jonathan Edwards,” 697, 738–39.

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6. Wheelock to the Lebanon North Parish Church, n.d., quoted in Winiarski, “Jonathan Edwards,” 713. 7. North Hartford Association of Ministers, Records, 1708–1800, quoted in Winiarski, “Jonathan Edwards,” 713–14; Williams and Cabot quoted in ibid., 714; Samuel Hopkins, Journal, 1741–1744, Simon Gratz Papers, Sermon Collection, box 6, Historical Society Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 12–13. 8. Journal of Ebenezer Parkman, in Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening. A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (1841; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1969), 204–05; Douglas L. Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport: Heavenly Visions and the Radical Awakening in New England,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 61 (January 2004), 13. 9. Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport,” 8–9, 11–12, 14–15; Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 189–90; William Kidder, ed., “The Diary of Nicholas Gilman” (M.A. thesis, University of New Hampshire, 1972), 241–43. 10. Kidder, “The Diary of Nicholas Gilman,” 253–58, 261–65 (255); Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport,” 15–16. 11. Charles Brockway to the Secretary of the SPG, February 18, 1742, in William Stevens Perry, ed., Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church, 5 vols. (Hartford, CT: AMS Press, 1870–1878), 3:353; Philip F. Gura, Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005), 115; William Wilson Manross, ed., The Fulham Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library: American Colonial Section Calendar and Indexes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 74; Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport,” 17. 12. “Wheelock Vision Manuscript, March 12, 1742, Wheelock Papers, #742219, reprinted in Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport,” 43–46. 13. Barbara E. Lacey, “The World of Hannah Heaton: The Autobiography of an Eighteenth-Century Connecticut Farm Woman,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 45 (April 1988), 282–85. 14. Lacey, “The World of Hannah Heaton,” 285–86. 15. Ibid., 286, 288–89. 16. “Advice to Mr. and Mrs. Kingsley,” Jonathan Edwards Papers, Andover Newton Theological School and “The Publick Records of the Church at Westfield,” Westfield Atheneum, quoted in Catherine L. Breckus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 23–24; George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 277. 17. Breckus, Strangers and Pilgrims, 25–26; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 277. 18. Jonathan Edwards to Joseph Bellamy, January 21, 1741/42, in WJE, 16:99; Sarah Pierpont Edwards, “Narrative” (1742), reprinted in Sereno Edwards Dwight, The Life of President Edwards (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1830), 181; Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (1743), WJE, 4:340, 331; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 239–42. 19. Edwards, Some Thoughts, 341; Sarah Pierpont Edwards, “Narrative” (1742), 172–73, 176–180, 184; Jonathan Edwards to Thomas Prince, December 12, 1743,



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WJE, 16:120–21; Dwight, Life of President Edwards, 182; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 242–45, 247. 20. Edwards to Prince, 125–27; Winiarski, “Jonathan Edwards,” 732–33. 21. Sarah Osborn, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn, Samuel Hopkins, ed. (Worcester, MA, 1799), 19, 24; Mary Beth Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times’: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine’ Activities,” Signs: Journal of Women, Culture, and Society 2 (Winter 1976), 515–29; Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, “The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714–1796),” Church History 61 (December 1992), 408–21; Catherine A. Breckus, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), chap. 4. 22. Osborn, Memoirs, 87–88, 21, 32; Hambrick-Stowe, “The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn,” 417–18; Breckus, Sarah Osborn’s World, chaps. 8–9. Breckus goes far in bridging the seeming chasm between the Enlightenment and the Awakening, identifying layers of both that interconnected each other at key points. See pp. 6–11. 23. Charles Francis Adams, “Some Phases of Sexual Morality and Church Discipline in Colonial New England,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd Series, 6 (1918), 497–503; Timothy Cutler to Dr. Z. Grey, September 24, 1743, “Letters of the Rev. Dr. Timothy Cutler, and others, on Church Affairs in New England,” in John Nichols, ed., Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century. . . ., 8 vols. (London: Nichols, Son & Bentley, 1817–1858), 4:303. 24. Emil Oberholzer, Jr., Delinquent Saints: Disciplinary Action in the Early Congregational Churches of Massachusetts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 256–58; Cedric B. Cowing, “Sex and Preaching in the Great Awakening,” American Quarterly 20 (Autumn 1968), 641, n. 48. 25. Alexander Garden, Take Heed How Ye Hear (New York, 1742), 35; “The Testimony of the Pastors of the Churches in the Province of Massachusetts Bay,” in Richard L. Bushman, ed., The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1744–-1745 (1970; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 128–30; Charles Chauncy, “A Letter from a Gentleman in Boston,” in ibid., 117, 120; Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 240–41. 26. Randall H. Balmer, A Perfect Babble of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 110–22; Edwards, The Church’s Marriage to Her Sons, and to Her God (1746), WJE, 25:167–96; Godbeer, Sexual Revolution, 241–45. 27. South-Carolina Gazette, June 21, 1742; Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 58; [Thomas Prentice], A Letter to the Reverend Andrew Croswell (Boston, 1771), 20; Stout and Onuf, “James Davenport,” 556; Tracy, The Great Awakening, 205; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 138–39. 28. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 132–40; David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 76–77, 86–87; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 110–12; Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport,” 34–35. 29. Boston Weekly Post-Boy, September 28, 1741; Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport,” 39. 30. Solomon Williams, The More Excellent Way (New London, 1742), 28–31; Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport,” 36–37, 40–41. 31. Aaron Spencer Fogleman, “Jesus is Female: The Moravian Challenge to the German Communities of British North America,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 60 (April 2003), 298–322. 32. Johann Franz Regnier, “Das Geheimnis der Zinzendorfischen Secte,” in Alexander Volck, ed., Das Entdeckte Geheimnis der Bosheit der Herrnhutischen Secte (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1748, repr. Philadelphia, 1749), 28–56, 65–66; Fogleman, “Jesus is Female,” 327–28. 33. Beverly Prior Smaby, “Female Piety Among Eighteenth Century Moravians,” Pennsylvania History 64 (Special Supplemental Issue 1997), 151–67. 34. Fogleman, “Jesus is Female,” 320–21, 324–29 Gabriel Naesman to Bishop Beronius, November 14, 1745, quoted on p. 321. 35. Zinzendorf quoted in Smaby, “Female Piety,” 158–59. 36. Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport,” 41.

Chapter 8

“Unhappy Contention” Debating Revivalism, 1740s–1750s

In September 1743, as evangelical revivalism reached new heights of popularity and influence, a damning indictment hit Boston bookstore shelves, Charles Chauncy’s Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in NewEngland. Focusing on the more extravagant behavior of radical revivalists and members of their audiences, Chauncy noted the “strange effects upon the Body” elicited by evangelical preaching, “such as swooning away and falling to the Ground.” Throughout this lengthy response to Jonathan Edwards’s Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England, published earlier that spring, Chauncy recounted the “bitter Shriekings and Screamings; Convulsion-like Tremblings and Agitations, Strugglings and Tumblings, which, in some Instances, have been attended with Indecencies I shan’t mention.” Chauncy denounced the New Lights as theologically inconsistent, contemptuous of proper religious authority, and—worst of all— prone to behavioral excesses such as displayed by James Davenport and his followers. In more than four hundred pages of dense argument, Chauncy cited historical examples of how religious enthusiasm only leads to heterodoxy, antinomianism, and delusion, the “conversions” most commonly illusory or at best ephemeral.1 Shortly after the sensation of George Whitefield’s first tour of the colonies and Gilbert Tennent’s excoriating diatribe against “unconverted” clergy, defenders of the previous ecclesiastical status quo arose to rebuke the evangelicals in order to contain the spreading wildfire. A war of words erupted between the New Lights and “Old Lights” like Chauncy over the nature of conversion, the legitimacy of itinerancy, and the validity of what Jonathan Edwards had already claimed to be “a great and general awakening.” The New Lights countered Old Light attacks with their own charges that opponents of revivalism were obstructing God’s work, blinded by careerism and 173

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“worldliness.” This war raged not just in printed versions of sermons delivered from pulpits, but also in books and pamphlets, as well as opinion pieces published in newspapers from Charleston, South Carolina, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The vast bulk of the print debate, however, came out of New England, where literacy rates tended to be proportionally very high and where printing presses and bookstores were plentiful. Amidst the vituperation, rumormongering, name-calling, and classist rhetoric, the debate raged not just over revivalism, but also what it means to be a Christian, as well as the fundamental nature of the clergyman’s vocation. Between 1741 and 1750, it became increasingly difficult to claim any legitimate middle ground, though a brave few struggled to do so anyway. In significant ways, the Awakening was constructed by each loose faction that weighed in on the debate, instigating the most significant exchange of ideas in eighteenth-century British America before the Revolution.  “ENTHUSIASM, DELUSION AND DISORDER” “It is Certainly an exceeding Difficult time with us,” lamented Rev. Israel Loring of Sudbury, Massachusetts, in his diary in late March 1743. “Such an Enthusiastick, factious, Censorious Spirit was perhaps never more predominant in the Land.” So, Loring and like-minded antirevivalists had lost all patience for religious intemperance and pulpit intrusions by itinerants, and that June he recorded with vexation that during one of his sermons in Bedford, Massachusetts, he noticed “a Stir among the Women” and later discovered that “a Woman . . . was (as it is Called) Struck.” He found the spectacle most repugnant. The woman was carried to a nearby house, and there she kept swearing that “she was bound, She was bound, and Cou’d not Speak.” Loring and others attempted to soothe her and bring her back to her senses, but they were hindered by “a proud, Impudent, boisterous exhorter” who encouraged her spiritual torments. The woman was eventually taken home, still in a state of distraction, and Loring learned the next day that she continued in her distress after a sleepless night. “The Lord in Mercy restore her to the free Exercise of her reason,” he prayed. In light of such occurrences, particularly after James Davenport’s latest sensational incident at New London, clergy on both sides of the question of revivalism concluded that it was time to debate the validity of the revivals in a more public forum. The year 1743 saw the pinnacle of a series of print debates over the revivals, most famously the dispute between Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Edwards. Antirevivalists had the advantage after the New London fiasco and pressed that advantage,



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the radicals having fewer occasions to present their case outside the pulpit. Davenport eventually reconciled with the moderate evangelical camp, and on their advice published a couple of sheepish retractions, hoping to rescue his failing pastoral career. Regardless of the tight confines of the debates, they substantively defined the tolerable parameters of the movement, particularly as the moderate evangelicals hoped to do so.2 One such debate erupted in the wake of the Cambuslang revival that occurred in Scotland in 1742. A pamphlet authored by “A.M.,” most likely Charles Chauncy, titled The State of Religion in New-England (1742) was published in Glasgow. This pamphlet portrayed all revivalists, especially George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent, in the most unflattering terms, asserting that they caused “a superstitious Pannick” everywhere they went. Whitefield was disparaged as a “bold and importunate Beggar,” while the “clownish” Tennent was blasted for denouncing “Every one that was not exactly of his Mind, . . . without Mercy.” Boston’s New Side Presbyterian minister, John Moorhead, was called an “ignorant, stupid, conceited, impudent, ill-natured and turbulent . . . Man,” who tended to the “poor Irish” and “common Sailors.” It related that James Davenport, on “a hot Day . . . strips to his Shirt, mounts a Cart, or any Eminence upon the Street, and roars and bellows, and flings about his Arms, till he is ready to drop down with the Violence of the Action.” Last but not least, the “strolling Preacher” Samuel Buell delivered sermons replete with “the most stupid Stuff that ever came from a Man’s Mouth.” George Whitefield, then on tour in Scotland, drafted a stern rebuttal appearing in both Glasgow and Boston, Some Remarks on a Late Pamphlet (1743), contending that A.M.’s “base and wicked” pamphlet should really have been titled The State of Religion Falsely Stated.3 Jonathan Edwards, eager to continue his defense of the revivals, penned Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England in early 1743 in order to prove that what was transpiring in the churches was, on the whole, a “wonderful work of God.” He expanded considerably upon the arguments made in The Distinguishing Marks, and devoted the bulk of the essay to upholding the legitimacy of the revivals while denouncing the radicals’ excesses as illegitimate. Some Thoughts remains the finest expression of the moderate evangelical position. He maintained that the excesses of the radicals, as well as the spiritual dullness of some ministers, posed dreadful problems. For Edwards, lack of any kind of zeal was what was truly “abominable to God; vastly more hateful in his sight than all the imprudence and intemperate heats, wildness and distraction (as some call it) of these zealous preachers. A supine carelessness and a vain, carnal, worldly spirit in a minister of the Gospel, is the worst madness and distraction in the sight of God.” He went so far as to suggest that God might intend to employ the radicals’ overheated zeal to shake some of the worldly clerics

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out of their “deadness.” In its range and power, he thought the revivals were “vastly beyond any former outpouring of the Spirit that ever was known in New England,” and indeed might well herald the imminent coming of the Millennium. That “the beginning of this great work of God” should take place in New England came as no surprise to Edwards and his fellow New Lights, who hoped that widespread revivalism would soon sweep through all Christendom.4 Edwards concluded Some Thoughts with a discussion of the limits of acceptable zeal and unacceptable enthusiasm. As noted earlier, he overwhelmingly favored “an orderly, hierarchical, and socially conservative awakening” in his public analysis of revivalism and in his later sermons after Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, even if privately he countenanced his wife’s ardent mysticism before her near mental breakdown. He continued to support itinerancy, however, but only when itinerants comported themselves respectfully toward settled ministers, even those who scorned and deprecated them. Those who denounced fellow ministers as unconverted or as “hirelings” must be rebuked, or otherwise allowed to lose credibility in proportion to the degree of their censoriousness. He never supported lay preaching, dismayed by the prevalence of “common people” who dared to “clothe themselves with the like authority with that which is proper for ministers.” People of all ages and ranks can certainly gather in groups to discuss religious subjects, Edwards reminded his readers, but only properly trained and ordained ministers may have the privilege of preaching from pulpits or to any group. The phenomenon of people speaking out in spontaneous testimony during formal church services, of unsolicited hymn singing, of fostering “uproar and confusion” was more the work of the devil than that of God when not moderated and strictly managed by proper ministerial authority.5 Edwards’s Some Thoughts was immediately met with a manifesto drafted by a handful of antirevivalist Boston ministers. The Testimony of the Pastors of the Churches in the Province of Massachusetts-Bay in New-England roundly denounced the revivals as breeding grounds for “Errors in Doctrine,” “Disorders in Practice,” “Breach[es] of Order,” and “ungoverned Passions,” propagated by the unordained and the uneducated who made a mockery of “the ministerial Office” that was “offensive to GOD, and destructive of these Churches.” The authors lamented the public tumults engendered by outdoor revival meetings such as during George Whitefield’s first preaching tour, even though they conceded that here and there might have been some legitimate revivals, but only when they conformed to the elder tradition of the covenant renewals of the previous century. A swift response came from Joshua Gee, a prorevivalist pastor of Boston’s Second Church, who worried that the opinions it expressed might be mistaken for a general sentiment among the city’s clergy and that the newly converted might be confused



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about the validity of their salvation. He noted for the record that only a small minority of area ministers attended the conference that produced the Testimony, and fewer still actually drafted and voted to approve it. He suggested that the evangelicals should have their own convention and produce their own testimony, which took place later that summer and produced The Testimony and Advice of an Assembly of Pastors. The convention was attended by slightly more clergymen than the earlier one dominated by the antirevivalists, and their Testimony defended the revivals as valid and significant, in spite of occasional “Extravagancies” that do not add up to a general movement defined by “Enthusiasm, Delusion and Disorder.” It admonished radical New Lights for fractiousness and combativeness, and decried the wave of separatism threatening to compromise “these Out-pourings of the Spirit” and risked provoking God’s displeasure.6 The most substantive response to Edwards’s Some Thoughts, however, was Charles Chauncy’s Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in NewEngland (1743). Chauncy’s exhaustive dissertation is a deep arranging of historical and theological arguments to discredit fervent religious immoderation. In standard antirevivalist fashion, he decried the evangelicals’ censoriousness, the itinerants’ harsh disdain for established clergy, and the charismatic antics that typified revival meetings. He sneered at how at revival meetings one will witness “strange effects” and “Indecencies,” and that such outrages were widespread and typical of New Light ministry. The profusion of errors and extravagancies in the revivals, Chauncy argued, were most scandalously represented in James Davenport, and he comprehensively provided details of Davenport’s bizarre career. The recent disorders, he averred, were a startling recurrence of the antinomian uproar that had erupted in the 1640s with Anne Hutchinson, whose name had become synonymous with the shameful female assumption of ministerial authority. Hutchinson’s wildly heretical opinions, which included a belief in immediate revelation, led to her banishment from Massachusetts along with many of her followers. He likewise compared the charismatic extremes of the revivals to similar excesses throughout Protestant history, particularly the French Prophets, and the latest disorders were, to his mind, fundamental characteristic aspects of New Light revivalism. While some people may honestly have been converted by New Lights preachers, their excesses must be considered heresy, pregnant with forewarnings of divine punishment for misleading practices that steer people away from proper faith. “The plain truth is,” Chauncy averred, “an enlightened mind, and not raised affections, ought always be the guide of those who call themselves men.”7 The sensationalism attending James Davenport’s early revivalist career, concentrated upon in Seasonable Thoughts and reaching its peak with the attempted bonfire of the vanities on the New London wharf, led to his

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becoming the quintessential radical New Light whose antics were attributed alike to others who variously did and did not subscribe to his methodology. The disaster at New London scattered his supporters and very nearly ruined his career, as evidenced by the rapidity with which some of his friends and colleagues criticized or abandoned him, hastened as it must have been by Chuancy’s damning critical portrait. Andrew Croswell, who in many ways was every bit as zealous and radical as Davenport, nevertheless repudiated Davenport’s ministry in May 1743. Croswell admitted that condemning “unconverted” ministers and allowing untrained laypeople to preach led to needless troubles in the churches. He continued to advocate separatism from established churches when necessary, however, which led his critics to judge his criticism of Davenport to be hypocritical and insincere. An anonymous editorialist accused Croswell of “Insincerity” in “this pretended Recantation” of “Whitefieldism,” having never taken personal responsibility for the contagion of separatism and schism. Davenport, scorched by the firestorm of ridicule directed at him by foes, and now friends, alike, chose to step away from certain career suicide and set about repairing his reputation among more moderate New Lights to whom he went for forgiveness.8 Prompted, at least in part, by the publication of admonitory letters addressed to him by Solomon Williams and Eleazar Wheelock in early 1744, Davenport seriously reconsidered his role as a revivalist. Both letters chastised him for deprecating fellow ministers, whose zeal he found lacking, and for encouraging his lay followers to exhort. Only “such as are called and commissioned thereto” may minister, Wheelock emphasized, though that did not entail the suppression of “zealous, Christian Conversation upon all proper Occasions.” Davenport paid a visit to Rev. Joseph Fish at Stonington, Connecticut, and he arrived in “such a mild, meek, pleasant and humble spirit,” Fish wrote, “broken and contrite, as I scarce ever saw excelled or equalled.” He begged his colleagues for forgiveness, and followed their advice that he should make a public contrition for his errors. It began with the publication of a letter he had written to Rev. Jonathan Barber of Bethesda, in which he proclaimed his embarrassment at the “awful Affair of the Books and Cloaths at New-London, which affords Grounds of deep and lasting Humiliation,” arising as it did from a “false Spirit.” He blamed his extreme distemper on a “Canc[e]ry Humour” with which Satan had afflicted his leg, the near-death experience causing him to reassess his religious convictions. Realizing the folly of his opinions and behavior, he felt spiritually refreshed, “heavenly Light and ravishing Joys [breaking] in . . . upon my Soul,” he exulted, and he emerged convinced that “Extremes on both Sides [of] the Path of Duty” hinder God’s purpose while advancing Satan’s obstructive goals.9



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Having made amends with the most influential moderate New Lights, Davenport then published a self-effacing apology, the Confession and Retractions, that summer. Starting with an introduction from Williams attesting to its authenticity and sincerity, the Confession was judiciously composed to conform to the moderate evangelical position. Beginning with an affirmation that a “glorious and wonderful Work” indeed was afoot in New England, and that God granted to him and other New Light ministers “special Assistance and Success” in advancing it. He admitted, though, that “several Appendages to this glorious Work are no essential Parts thereof, but of a different and contrary Nature on account of the “misguided Zeal” for which he accepted some responsibility. He accepted that his excessive zeal led many to doubt and oppose the revivals, and repudiated his old habits of condemning other ministers as unconverted and of encouraging separatism, as well as the dramatic practices of hymn singing in the streets and sanctioning lay preaching. He attributed his outrageous behavior to the leg ailment as well as to the “false spirit” he admitted privately to colleagues, but he insisted that his excessive zeal nevertheless came from an honest place in his heart, even if it had become distorted.10 Antirevivalist critics were less than convinced by Davenport’s halting tone and seeming prevarications, as exemplified by an anonymous Impartial Examination of Mr. Davenport’s Retractions. The author grumbled that “this Confession is neither so full nor so early as might have expected” and asserted that the Confession was nothing more than an attempt “to recover the Reputation, and make his Court to some few real Friends of the late Work, who had suffered by his Indiscretion.” The Impartial Examination argued that Davenport’s ministry and, by extension those of all New Lights, was illegitimate. “The Work is plainly proved to be not of GOD but of Men, because ‘tis come to Nothing, and overthrown by themselves and the remarkable Providence of GOD.” Benjamin Colman, for his part, welcomed the Confession, but countered that Davenport’s errors were “the Working of Satan . . . to blemish[,] defame and destroy the Work of GOD.” He yearned for the day when the Separates and itinerants who kept cropping up all over New England “like Mushrooms in a Night” would also come to their senses as Davenport had. Like the incredulous author of the Impartial Examination, Colman thought that the revivals generally were a “Work of God” despite New Light extremes. Davenport, favorably impressed by Colman’s admonishment, asked Solomon Williams to include passages from it in future printings of the Confession and Retractions.11 Colman singled out for special mention one Richard Woodberry, a lay exhorter and disciple of Nicholas Gilman, who had become especially notorious for his wild-eyed zeal and confrontational preaching style. Gilman supported Woodberry, even when his exhortations generated “Some great

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uneasiness . . . Uproar and Tummult.” Woodberry exemplified the sort of untrained itinerant that the moderates despised, and in May 1744 he, Gilman, and Daniel Rogers oversaw a potent revival in northeastern Massachusetts. At a private gathering in Newbury, Rogers documented that “Br. Woodberry & Br. Gilman fell prostrate upon the Ground floor & the Holy Gh. Came upon Almost Every One in the Room, . . . Some Rejoycing with Trembling Body’s.” Later that night, Gilman “publickly acknowledged [Woodberry] as a fellow Labourer in the Lord’s Vineyard,” though Rogers was apprehensive about Woodberry’s “motions.” “I find Pride & Shame working in me upon the Acco[unt] of Him & His Ways,” but Rogers soon repented of his initially negative disposition toward Woodberry. A group of moderate New Lights traveled to Ipswich later that summer to scrutinize Woodberry’s activities, concerned that his antics undermined true revivalism. They judged him to be “an illiterate Person, generally apprehended of a disordered Brain”—in other words, insane. He claimed to be privy to “the Revelation of secret Things, by pretended Predictions and Denunciation of temporal and eternal Curses upon particular Persons,” that he was able to perform miracles and exorcise demons. A newspaper report alleged that Woodberry once reacted to a critic’s challenge “with strange Emotion and violent Agitation[,] throw[ing] himself upon and rowl over the Floor, crying out, You have crucified Christ in what you have said.”12 The moderates who examined Woodberry reprimanded Gilman and Rogers, and warned “against any Persons intruding themselves into the sacred Ministry without proper Qualifications and regular Call,” who “proudly and falsely pretending to extraordinary and immediate Mission from Christ.” Moderate New Lights were in a nearly impossible position, in that they could not tolerate the radicals’ willingness to support untrained lay preaching, but they also had to acknowledge that radicals and itinerants did some good work in promoting revivalism. Another unknown detractor writing in the Boston Evening-Post asserted that the group’s conclusions were intended to conceal the fact that the entire Awakening was contaminated by radicalism, and that what prorevivalists insisted was “a gracious Revival of Religion, was in all Respects . . . more like such Torments of Delusion, as the Begging Fryars, the Mistical Divines, and the French Prophets, than like any really religious Reformations.” In spite of these reproofs, Woodberry continued his ministry for many years, attracting the disparaging notice of Isaac Backus, who on a 1751 visit to Durham fretted over Woodberry’s “awful wild extreams.” Woodberry was unusual in the extremity of his charismatic enthusiasm, but revivalist mysticism became a common thread running through the Awakening, and this accounts for much of the content of the vigorous debate over revivalism that waxed, waned, and waxed again in the decades immediately preceding the American Revolution.13



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“MEN’S CORRUPTIONS SHOULD VENT THEMSELVES” The Old Light-New Light debate entered a new phase with the return of George Whitefield in October 1744. Debarking at York, Maine, Whitefield was met by friends and supporters, most of whom had radical inclinations, among them Samuel Buell, Jonathan Parsons, Benjamin Pomeroy, and Daniel Rogers. Rogers noted that they “found [Whitefield] in Bed very Ill of a nervous Cholick,” but he was still overjoyed to see them. Soon afterward, a letter published in the Boston Evening-Post took the opportunity to impugn Whitefield as an unrepentant enthusiast due to his friendship with the radicals: “P——y, P—— ns, B——l, &c., furious Zealots, moulded into this very Temper, were the Men . . . who first met him at his coming.” The writer demanded that Whitefield apologize to those he had affronted on his previous visit, which might result in invitations to preach in their churches. Whitefield’s return triggered the most intense blizzard of treatises about the revivals, and about whether Whitefield should be hailed as a venerable man of God or spurned as a mischief-maker.14 Charles Chauncy once more led the charge against Whitefield, warning against welcoming the Grand Itinerant during an ordination sermon for Thomas Frink of Third Church in Plymouth. He advised Frink and his colleagues to “mark this Man who has caused Divisions and Offences . . . and to avoid him.” Referencing the chaos, confusion, and censoriousness prevalent in too many of New England’s churches, Chauncy identified Whitefield as the “true Source of most of this Mischief.” Were Whitefield to moderate his denunciations of established ministers, Chauncy suggested, he would still be foremost among the itinerants and consequently have no proper place in an acceptable, orderly church. Whitefield managed to convince the Boston moderates Colman, Sewall, Foxcroft, and Prince that he did not aim to encourage separations, and they welcomed him back to their pulpits. Whitefield itinerated through eastern Massachusetts in December, and once back in Boston he exulted that he “scarce had a pleasanter circuit since I have been a Preacher,” though controversy still shadowed Whitefield’s visit.15 Chauncy gave potent expression to a generally held Old Light presumption that the extraordinary events reputedly attending the revivals and private experiences with revivalist ministers were nothing more than deliberate contrivances invented by Whitefield and his supporters for their pecuniary benefit. Whitefield, who promoted himself “as a Wonder of Piety, [and] a Man of God,” was caricatured as little more than a charlatan whose claims to propagating “a most glorious Work of Grace going on in America” were part of a body of “known Falsehoods . . . strangely enlarged upon.” Another skeptic, John Caldwell, spoke of Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, as well as “Pomeroy, Buel, Davenport, Morehead, Croswell, Blair, and others as

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disseminating “fashionable Principles in Religion.” He denied that there was a persistent “Error and Deadness” among the clergy and laity that the New Lights believed needed to be remedied, and that in truth they propagated this myth in order to justify the broadcasting of “their own Fancies, and unscriptural Opinions.” Caldwell deprecated Jonathan Edwards and Whitefield, among the others, for casting themselves as true gospel ministers and any who criticized them, as Tennent famously did, “as Varlets, the Seed of the Old Serpent, Men whom the Devil drives into the Ministry, blind and dead Men . . . dead Drones, Dupes, [and] Dunces.” Both alleged that Whitefield and Tennent were heavily influenced by the Moravians.16 Caldwell went on to describe the New Lights as lamenting the materialistic hedonism of recent years, from which the unawakened would be rescued through a confusing mixture of fear mongering and the promise of redemption. A revival audience would be castigated as irredeemable sinners damned to hell for “worldliness,” but then suddenly assured that this is not really the case and that salvation was theirs for the taking. Simply put by Caldwell, who must have been thinking about Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, “Scare ‘em a little, and then perswade ‘em all is well, and they are sure of Heaven.” Might such methods, he wondered, be intended only to build bevies of ardent followers willing to surrender large sums of money so that they might “put on a Shew of Godliness” even as they “pretend to despise the World”? Building upon this last line of reasoning, Caldwell alleged that the revivalists’ only real objective was self-promotion, as evidenced by the profusion of self-congratulatory literature such as The Christian History and Whitefield’s published journals. Nathaniel Eells, a moderate Old Light, was more charitable in admitting to a conviction that “There is, (doubtless) a good Work of God going on in the Country,” however there was conversely “an evil Work of Satan going on in the Country.” This much was clearly evident in “all the Noise & Stir, the strange Agitations and Motions, Screaming and Fainting, and Disorders” that characterized the revivals.17 While a group of moderate New Lights remained well disposed toward Whitefield, a growing chorus of opposition swelled against him, part of which included radicals who distrusted him as lukewarm, leading some moderates to consider their position. Andrew Eliot of Boston’s New North Church voiced the moderates’ worries about Whitefield in a letter when he granted that, despite Whitefield’s good intentions, too often he had “Mistaken Nature for Grace[,] & Imagination for Revelation.” Eliot’s correspondent, Richard Salter, called Whitefield a “rank Enthusiast,” but Eliot thought this was imprudent. Whitefield wrote a self-defense that pointed out that the “common people” in Boston received him pleasantly, though not “many of the ministers” could be numbered among them. Whitefield acknowledged that “some occasions of offence” marred his last visit, but he thought that for the most



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part “nothing . . . appeared but a pure, divine power . . . without any extraordinary phenomena attending it.” Nevertheless, “wild-fire will necessarily blend itself with the pure fire” and some honest Christians became “guilty of great imprudence.” He knew these excesses were exactly what his detractors had been expecting. The faculty and tutors of Harvard College never forgot Whitefield’s acerbic remarks about them during his first tour, and in an open letter they cautioned that his ministry inclined “very much to the Detriment of Religion, and the entire Destruction of the Order of these Churches.” They used passages from his Journals against him, mentioning every instance of Whitefield’s legitimizing dreams and visions, or venturing harsh judgments of ministers, to label him “an Enthusiast, a censorious, uncharitable Person, and a Deluder of the People.”18 Thomas Clap led Yale College’s attack on Whitefield soon afterward, closely following Harvard’s Testimony, adding that they thought that Whitefield and his cronies “have laid a Scheme to turn the generality of Ministers out of their Places” and substitute them with radical New Light ministers. As did Chauncy and Eliot, they pointed to his Journals to prove that Whitefield assumed that the “generality of Ministers are unconverted,” from which it logically followed that the truly faithful must separate from their congregations. They contended that Whitefield, the Tennents, and their supporters planned to bring over like-minded clergymen from Scotland and Ireland as replacements, just as the Tennents’ New Brunswick Presbytery had been sending radical New Siders to support Connecticut’s Separate churches. They went so far as to insinuate that pupils at the Shepherd’s Tent had been informed that the College’ administration, as well as the colonial assembly, would be deposed and replaced with prorevivalists, and consequently it would be pointless to acknowledge or obey the current intellectual and political leadership. The Yale testators recommended that colony’s legitimate ministers “be fully upon their Watch against all divisive Plots and Designs” carried out by Whitefield and his disciples.19 Several ministerial “associations” across New England convened in 1744 and 1745 to discuss radical revivalism, publishing resolutions against Whitefield personally and itinerancy as a whole. Whitefield’s supporters were more cautious. A group of pastors from northern New England, led by Rev. William Shurtleff of Portsmouth, printed a validation of Whitefield and offered thanks to God for having “rais’d up Mr. Whitefield, and evidently owned and honoured him with so much Success in preaching the everlasting Gospel of JESUS CHRIST in this Land.” They insisted that Whitefield was not the “culpable Cause” of any church separations. A group of Bristol County, Massachusetts, ministers agreed that although Whitefield had his share of “Mistakes & Foibles, as well as other Men,” he and Tennent were indisputably God’s “chief Instruments” for propagating a genuine revival and

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that their work was biblically sanctioned. However, many more acerbic antiWhitefield essays flooded Boston print shops and appeared in area newspapers, all composed by a variety of Old Light “associations” coming together from throughout eastern Massachusetts.20 Some individuals took to the presses to defend Whitefield, such as Thomas Foxcroft, who wrote an Apology in Behalf of the Revd. Mr. Whitefield (1745), which was accompanied by letters of support from London’s Isaac Watts. Arguably the most ardent defense of Whitefield is found in A Vindication of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, an anonymous treatise that averred that Whitefield’s relative reticence in the press showed that he did not wish to waste time engaging in controversy on behalf “of the people nick named newlights,” as he was engaged in the much more important work of saving souls and reviving true religion. The author dispensed with Whitefield’s opponents, writing, “it may be expected, in a time of great revival of religion, that men’s corruptions should vent themselves . . . PHARISEES, tho’ friends to the outside of religion, yet can’t bear to see it flourish in its power.” His critics were nothing more than “half-way christians” and not rational judges of his character. The author defended Whitefield’s earlier criticisms of Harvard and Yale by conjecturing that if the colleges were not actually in an “evil state,” then Davenport’s fundraising on behalf of the Shepherd’s Tent would never have raised so much money. Whitefield had stepped away from earlier implications that New England’s Old Light ministers do not truly know Christ, but this author did not think an apology was necessary: “Is there not reason for such a fear? Don’t many, nay, the most of our ministers oppose the good work?”21 Whitefield spent February 1744/45 in New Hampshire and Maine, enjoying the warmth and camaraderie of his supporters. On February 8 he preached at Ipswich, Massachusetts, in the early part of the day, while Samuel Buell preached in the evening. Daniel Rogers observed that “the Power of God came down Remarkably upon Some.” Whitefield’s focus shifted to the military campaign against the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, under the command of Sir William Pepperrell, one of Whitefield’s supporters. The evangelist met with Pepperrell and delivered a rallying sermon to “the Officers and Soldiers engaged in the Expedition,” recounting that “many of them were stirred up to God.” On February 28 a public day of fasting was held to invoke God’s favor for the expedition, and Whitefield prayed that God would “give us Cape Briton. Lord prepare us either for Victory or defeat. But if it be thy will grant it may be a Garrison for Protestants and thy dear Children who will worship thee in spirit and in truth!” The merging of politics and religion, so typical in New England, is characteristic of what is known by historians as “civil millennialism.” British Americans, and New Englanders in particular, viewed the French with an apocalyptic dread since



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the outbreak of the imperial wars between Britain and France for control of North America in 1689. New England’s clergy could not reach a consensus about revivalism, but they all could rejoice in the humiliation of French Catholics, as they did when Louisbourg was successfully taken.22 In August, Whitefield embarked on a trip to Georgia to check on the Bethesda orphanage, making several stops along the way. The itinerant preached before an enormous crowd at New London, Connecticut, where Joshua Hempstead recounted that “p’haps twice So many as could possibly Sitt in ye meetinghouse” had turned out to hear him. From there, Whitefield stopped at Long Island and then traveled to Philadelphia, where he reunited with Gilbert Tennent, and heard good news about conversions among American Indians living in western Pennsylvania under the ministrations of David Brainerd. Whitefield’s devotees tried to persuade him to accept a semipermanent preaching situation in Philadelphia, but he turned them down and headed on to Bethesda, where he spent the late winter and early spring of 1746 tending to the orphanage’s finances.23 “ARE ALL SONS OF THUNDER?” While radical New Lights and equally radical Old Lights slugged it out from their respective pulpits and in print, a small cadre of ministers sought to bridge the chasm separating the two camps. Their earliest champion was Jonathan Dickinson (1688–1747) of Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Educated at Yale, Dickinson converted from strict Congregationalism to Presbyterianism when he saw how contentious Independent churches tended to be over doctrinal questions and concluded that Dissenters required greater coordination in light of Anglican attacks. His Presbyterian Calvinism was heavily influenced by the rationalism of moderate English Anglicans such as Samuel Clarke, as well as by his reading of John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity. Inspired by the recent wave of scientific inquiry, particularly in the realm of astronomy, Dickinson asserted that the avalanche of discoveries of natural laws offered unequivocal proof of God’s existence. Locke’s influence is readily apparent in Dickinson’s choice of title for his major treatise on the subject, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1732), in which he argued that while Locke had gone too far toward a deistic interpretation of Creation, true Christianity must involve a “simultaneous commitment to faith and reason.” Much like Jonathan Edwards, Dickinson endeavored to defeat theological arguments in favor of Arminianism and antinomianism that posed the gravest threats to “catholick” Calvinism. Arminianism, as Dickinson (and strict Calvinists) understood it, implicitly denied God’s omniscience by suggesting that God’s mind could be swayed by good works, while antinomianism

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assumed that saving grace absolved the saint of mindful obedience to God’s laws as though one did not possess a free will. For him, as for many emergent rationalist Protestants at the time, the mind and the heart are designed to support one another equally—not obstruct or contend with each other. Reason is God’s gift to humanity, with which the believer can seek “to know, obey, and enjoy his creator,” and only through which can arise faith, being “grounded on . . . rational reflection and enquiry.”24 The creation of the presbyteries of New Brunswick and New York, the latter of which Dickinson was a ranking member, put him in an uncomfortable position. In 1739, Aaron Burr, Sr., converted to New Light evangelicalism through the direct influence of Jonathan Edwards, visited Newark, New Jersey, and Dickinson rendered his assistance. The tendency of freshly converted New Lights toward hypercritical confrontations with lukewarm or disapproving colleagues dismayed Dickinson, who defended one of his New Side colleagues, John Pierson, who had been criticized by radicals within his congregation—a growing problem in churches touched by revivalism. The printed version of that sermon, The Danger of Schisms and Contentions (1739), argued that while different ministers are blessed with different “gifts, graces, or ministerial qualifications” than others, and that some have “brighter capacities and more eminent degrees of learning” than many of their peers, that this cannot be mistaken for a lack of ministerial care and zeal for saving souls. “Must all [ministers] be sons of thunder,” Dickinson pointedly asked, recalling Whitefield’s approving description of Gilbert Tennent. Every one of God’s ministers deserves attention and respect, Dickinson cautioned his audience, for they are “stewards of the mysteries of the Kingdom,” and are “obliged to . . . support” from his congregants, who should not think themselves free to vilify and condemn one minister because they think him lacking in the skills of another. “Must Paul be despised on Account of Apollos’s Eloquence of Speech? Or Apollos be contemptuously treated because Paul exceeded him in all the extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit?” He concluded with an exhortation to all “to be of one Mind, to live in Peace.” He repeated his call for prorevivalists and antirevivalists to seek a middle ground in The Witness of the Spirit (1740), wherein he declared a moderate position in the debate between prorevivalist assertions in favor of immediate conversions and antirevivalist insistence upon preparationism and ministerial guidance toward salvation. He directed his more pointed criticism at radical evangelicals, however, warning them that, regarding immediate conversion, “Whoever . . . teaches such doctrine . . . go contrary to the constant doctrine of the most eminent Protestant divines from the Reformation to this day, and contrary to the blessed oracles of truth.”25 In that spirit, Dickinson tried valiantly to bring Old Lights and New Lights together into an agreement that, while plagued by some excesses here and



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there, the revivals heralded a reversal of what had been a marked declension of piety and public morals. In A Display of God’s Special Grace (1742), Dickinson imagined a conversation between “Epinetus,” a dutiful—though as yet unconverted—churchgoer with misgivings about revivalism, and his minister, “Theophilus,” a thinly disguised version of the author. Epinetus repeats stories he has heard about excessive enthusiasm and charismatic exertions, which Theophilus readily admits can inflame “animal Impressions” and “diabolical Delusions,” but he assures his parishioner that revivalism served a great purpose in fulfilling God’s grand design. To the question of the reality and durability of “sudden” conversions at revivals, Theophilus again acknowledges that they demand closer scrutiny and some may prove fleeting, but that the earnest seeking after God must be praised, and sincere conversions were far superior to those that had been ratified in the past, being too formulaic and too often sought for invalid reasons. At this point, “Libertinus,” a radical New Light, intruded to discredit all moderate revivalists as insincere Old Lights in disguise, and defended sudden conversions as having greater validity than those arrived at through stultifying preparation. Theophilus insisted that true conversion can only be arrived at through ministerial guidance and must be followed by the cultivation of holy living. Libertinus grudgingly concedes the correctness of Theophilus’s views and Epinetus is convinced that the salvation he had begun to experience was indeed genuine.26 Prior to publishing it, Dickinson sent the manuscript to his friend and fellow moderate prorevivalist, Thomas Foxcroft, who agreed to write a preface, but not before he predicted that “you [will] expose yourself and me to . . . censorious attack.” True to Foxcroft’s warning and the characterization Dickinson had drawn of the radicals, they viciously condemned A Display’s cautiousness as concealing an antirevivalist agenda. Andrew Croswell, who called it “the most Dangerous book that ever was, or Indeed can be printed,” published a scathing refutation, a Reply to a Book, near the end of the year that branded Dickinson’s argument for preparationism and the value of good works as blatant endorsements of Arminianism, and thus surely “a Means of Damning many Thousands of Souls” to perdition. Patronizingly acknowledging what he presumed to be Dickinson’s good intentions, Croswell nevertheless dismissed A Display of God’s Special Grace as “more adapted to destroy the Power of Godliness than the worst Arminian Performance that ever was written.”27 During the course of the revivals, Dickinson drifted from mild opposition into a more moderate embracing of evangelicalism, though he repeatedly warned against the dangers of enthusiasm. Rather than condemn the radicals out of hand, as most antirevivalists did, Dickinson sought ways to reason with the radicals in order to bring them closer toward the moderate position. Gilbert Tennent, who had so stridently denounced “unconverted” ministers in 1740,

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by 1742 had begun to reconsider his revivalist philosophy, as evidenced by a stern rebuke of James Davenport published in the Boston Weekly News-Letter and the Pennsylvania Gazette. His admonitions against heretical presumptions of “immediate Inspiration,” and “objective Revelation, all following the immediate impulses without Consulting the Word of God,” contributed to the countenancing of “the strangest Absurdities in Opinion, and most enormous Evils in Practice.” In that regard, Tennent and Dickinson found ever expanding common ground in a shared opposition to Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf and the Moravian Brethren, whose radical theology and practices became a growing source of controversy in the Middle Colonies.28 Reacting to Zinzendorf’s perceived efforts to assume a position of great prominence in the middle-colony evangelical movement, Tennent and Dickinson attempted to determine the extent of his radicalism and to warn him against pursuing an evangelical, missionary campaign. Tenennt, after his one-on-one with Zinzendorf, came away convinced that he and the Moravians were planning an all-out assault upon the Presbyterian Church, instigating a minor pamphlet war between the two that left him despondent about the Presbyterian schism. In a letter to Dickinson published in the Boston NewsLetter in February 1742/43, Tennent admitted that he had “been of late visited with much spiritual Darkness, Temptations, and Distresses of various kinds, coming in a thick and almost continual Succession.” Reconsidering his earlier radicalism, he told Dickinson that he and the other moderates were “in the main of sound Principles of Religion,” and that the war between the Old Side and the New Side must end “while the Enthusiastical Moravians and Longbeards [Mennonites] . . . are uniting their Bodies. . . . Would to God the breach were healed!” He thus publicly disavowed his own “Enthusiastical” positions in 1743 and accepted a settled pastorate in Philadelphia the following year. Dickinson worked to seal the breach between the synods of New York and Philadelphia to little avail except the brokering of a ceasefire in New Jersey by 1744, in which Tennent played no small role. In late 1746, Dickinson wrote triumphantly to Foxcroft that “there is no where to be found a ministry more united in sentiments than those in this province.” In the war between the prorevivalists and the antirevivalists, it was the moderates who ultimately carried the day.29 “NEWS FOR DIVERSION” The newspapers published in all the major coastal cities of British America devoted considerable space to reports on the revivals, particularly George Whitefield’s first tour in 1739–1740, as well as to the opinions of both supporters and detractors. Newspaper publishing, which had been scant and



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desultory between 1690 and 1730, increased substantially during the Awakening’s first decade to number twelve weekly or biweekly papers. By 1742, Bostonians had five papers to choose from, two were printed in New York City and in Philadelphia, one in Williamsburg, Virginia, one in Charleston, South Carolina, and a German language newspaper serving the Palatine immigrants in and around Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This rather sudden effusion of popular print was not due solely to the revivals, of course, but also to the growing maturity and sophistication of British-American society with an unusually high literacy rate. The revivals generated very little attention from newspaper publishers before Whitefield’s arrival in 1739, but fairly exploded afterward, ranging from simple advertisements of a noted preacher’s appearance at such-and-such a time and place, to extended commentaries for and against itinerancy or to debates over the efficacy of evangelicalism. Religious literature had always been a staple of the colonial print trade, but its volume and profitability soared to unprecedented levels in the 1740s. According to the South-Carolina Gazette, “Sermons, which used to be the greatest Drug, are now [March 1740] the only Books in Demand.”30 Between 1740 and 1742, newspaper coverage was heavily weighted toward a positive assessment of the Awakening. As Lisa H. Smith notes, “an occasional reader of American newspapers during this time would have been convinced that the colonies were experiencing a general revitalization of religion.” The public’s hunger for news and opinion on the revivals significantly increased subscription rates for most of those papers printed in the early 1740s, and can be credited with the establishment of several new weeklies between 1742 and 1746. This was a truth not lost on Benjamin Franklin, publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which leads all colonial newspapers in revival coverage. Whitefield’s first tour accounts for the overwhelming bulk of reportage in the major weeklies, followed in 1741 by the printing of letters by prorevivalists and antirevivalists alike, and a generally more balanced presentation of the broad spectrum of clerical and popular opinions. However, the radically mystical and charismatic aspects of revivalism began to dominate stories about the preaching of the leading evangelicals. A theological debate between Gilbert Tennent and Jonathan Dickinson was one thing, but lurid tales of converts’ “deep anguish,” “crying out aloud,” and “great Horror” could guarantee healthy profits.31 The newspapers began in 1742 to depict the debate as devolving into irrationality, along with the revivals themselves. An anonymous piece in the Boston Evening-Post opined that radical New Lights, “having declared themselves mortal Foes to Humane Reason, in Matters of Religion . . . are so frequently heard snarling at REASON (that fair Offspring of the Father of Lights) in a most rude and opprobrious Manner.” Such condemnations became common in the pages of the Post throughout the year, epitomized by

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that and “A modest Proposal for the Destruction of Reason,” which—wearing the garb of a New Light—deprecates rationalism as “this Hydra” capable “of doing an infinite deal of Mischief.” Recommending the establishment of “a private Academy” clearly meant to denote the Shepherd’s Tent, young boys and girls would matriculate after years of isolation to be “taught to read just enough to collect News for Diversion” and the parts of their brains where reason is exercised filled with plaster. A report from England, first appearing in the Pennsylvania Gazette in October 1742 and reprinted in the Boston Weekly Post-Boy, the Boston Evening-Post, the Boston Weekly News-Letter, and the South Carolina Gazette in subsequent weeks, told of a revival convert who castrated himself “for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake.” The same papers carried stories about members of revival audiences committing suicide, while others opted to commit murder as gestures of extreme religious devotion or as acts in defense of New Light theology. An opinion piece in a December 1743 issue of the Boston Weekly News-Letter commented on “great Disorders among the People, even to the breaking up of some Churches and Societies, by reason of the New Light Religion,” the tumult “almost as bad as it was at Salem in 1692.”32 In keeping with that critical theme, newspapers began emphasizing the corrosive effects of radical New Light theology and practice upon the ministerial office and proper order in the churches. Itinerancy came under attack in the Boston Evening-Post in 1743, describing—alongside pat deprecations of settled ministers who abandoned their pulpits to go on preaching circuits—the almost comical incompetence of Nathaniel Wardell, whose attempt to baptize two women in the ocean resulted in a near drowning, while another report from Providence, Rhode Island, told of riots breaking out on the account of lay exhorters exciting female audiences. The Boston Weekly Post-Boy published a letter bewailing the activities of “a gifted (or rather conceited) Brother,” whose exhortations led his deluded followers to “forsake the Houses of their stated Worship and Communion.” Richard Woodbury, ordained by Nicholas Gilman, was called a “poor crazy Exhorter” by both the Boston Gazette and the Boston Evening-Post, while the New York EveningPost favorably printed Massachusetts governor William Shirley’s request that the General Court pass a new law granting better salaries for settled ministers in order to discourage “ignorant and illiterate Men” from having any ability to propagate “foolish and hurtful Errors.” Newspapers lingered over the subject of church divisions and separations between 1743 and 1750, the consensus being that “rambling and turbulent Zealots” turned believers’ wits against their better judgment, cheered on by acerbic and intemperate prorevivalists. It can be argued that under this sustained attack, in which the newspapers’ influence upon the lay readership was most crucial, the radical evangelicals were forced toward moderation—as with James Davenport, whose antics were



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frequently described in the press—and the rest moved toward the cultivation of legitimacy by other means.33 In part to counter Old Light charges of radical New Light anti-intellectualism and cultivation of “unlearned” ministry, revivalist Presbyterians and Baptists raised money and cultivated elite patronage to establish formal colleges. In 1745, there were only three institutions of higher education in all of British America: Harvard College and Yale College in Massachusetts and the College of William and Mary in Virginia. By the eve of the Revolution in 1775, a spate of “College Enthusiasm,” as Ezra Stiles thought of it, had resulted in the founding of seven additional colleges, most of them by evangelicals, spearheaded by the conversion of the Log College into the College of New Jersey and the foundation of the Baptist College of Rhode Island. While other factors were at work that led to the formation of new colleges—growing colonial prosperity, population growth, and greater numbers of students from among the ranks of the elite and upper middle class needing higher education—the push among the evangelicals to found colleges marks a significant milestone in their quest for legitimacy and respectability.34  Jonathan Edwards lay dying. A smallpox epidemic tore into Princeton, New Jersey, in the winter of 1757–1758 and Edwards, recently installed as president of the College of New Jersey, decided that he and his family should be inoculated against it. Dr. William Shippen performed the procedure, and initially it seemed to have been successful, but then Edwards developed pustules in his mouth and throat that rendered him incapable of eating or drinking sufficiently. What followed was several weeks of soaring fever, dehydration, and starvation that wracked Edwards’s “feeble frame,” while his family settled in for the solemn deathwatch.35 “Dear Lucy,” he wrote to his daughter, “I must shortly leave you; therefore give my kindest love to my dear wife, and tell her, that the uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us, has been of such a nature, as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever; and I hope she will be supported under so great a trial.” Sarah Pierpont Edwards had remained in Stockbridge while her husband took the rest of the family to Princeton, and then fallen ill and was unable to travel to her husband’s side in his last days. According to Dr. Shippen, who witnessed Edwards’s passing and described it in a letter to Sarah, “never did any mortal man more fully and clearly evidence the sincerity of all his professions, by one continued, universal, calm, cheerful resignation, and patient submission to the divine will, through every stage of his disease, than he.”36 Jonathan Edwards had good reason to die content, having defended the revivals against its harshest critics and watched some of its more radical

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proponents moderate their manner of promoting the Awakening. The war with France, which had begun so badly for the British and the Americans, had started to turn in the Anglo-American favor, such that he thought that the most fevered apocalyptic predictions jotted down in his “Notes on the Apocalypse” seemed to be coming to pass. When George Whitefield returned to New England from Georgia in 1744, looking forward to cultivating “as glorious a revival” as those he had excited in 1739 and 1740, he noticed that levels of popular interest had waned. Financial support for his travels through the region and for the Bethesda orphanage had dwindled in proportion, and a ministerial conference held in Boston confided to him that “a chill [has] come over the . . . work.” They blamed the excesses of radical New Lights like Andrew Croswell, Gilbert Tennent, and James Davenport, and the inflexible opposition of antirevivalists like Charles Chauncy and Joseph Fish, for compromising the efforts of moderate evangelicals. Even Whitefield’s occasional lapses in religious temperance in the form of deprecations of his opponents and critics were deemed to have eroded some public support for the revivals.37 In 1749, Gilbert Tennent, seeing no further evidence of the ecstatic revivals of the early years of the decade, no massive crowds flocking to hear him or George Whitefield preach wherever they went, pronounced the “very uncommon Effusion of divine Influence, in the Conviction, and Conversion of Sinners” to have come to a sputtering end. Prorevivalists and antirevivalists, he bemoaned, had fallen into pointless contention with one another over theology and preaching styles. Thomas Prince suspended publication of The Christian History by 1746, and altogether historians of the Awakening have agreed with Tennent and Prince, declaring that “no semblance of an extensive, uniform, intercolonial revival could any longer be found.” If the First Great Awakening is defined strictly in terms of thousands of Nathan Coles and Hannah Heatons riding horses to exhaustion and falling into visionary trances at the sound of a charismatic itinerant’s voice, and of that taking place uninterruptedly in New England, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, then indeed it had come to an end. That the nature of dissenting Protestant Christianity in America had changed to normalize extemporaneous preaching and emotional audience responses to impassioned sermonizing, and that revivalism had migrated to the South, does not fit what has for too long been a very narrow definition of a religious awakening in general, and of the First Great Awakening in particular.38 The tussle between Old Lights and New Lights came to no victorious conclusion for either side, but it did clearly define the positions of radical and moderate revivalists, as well as antirevivalists. The Old Lights tried to emphasize the excess of enthusiasm so as to deprecate the revivals, while the moderates downplayed the notion that radicalism was integral to the



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Awakening. Still, radical expressions of revivalism persisted, and in the latter phase of the northern revivals only the radicals suffered any damage to their case for radicalism on account of Davenport’s and Croswell’s retractions. Separatism had not been dealt any great setback, though revivalist clergy exercised a greater degree of control over church separations in ways that upheld ministerial authority. What seemed to upset the Old Lights about the revivals was not just the “enthusiasm” displayed by radical New Light preachers and itinerants or the deviations from liberal Calvinist theology, but also the effects their preaching had upon those considered to be the weakest members of colonial society: women, children, and slaves. The impact of the Awakening upon African Americans was especially deep, advancing a goal held dear by only a bare minority of American clergymen. But the slaves and free African Americans made evangelical Protestant Christianity their own in ways that the New Lights and others who advocated slave Christianization never anticipated. NOTES 1. Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in NewEngland (Boston, 1743), 77; Edwin S. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 93–97; Charles Lippy, Seasonable Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981), 36–37. 2. Journal of Rev. Israel Loring, March 24, 1743, Sudbury Archives, transcription, www.sudbury-ma.us/archives (April 28, 1742, to November 11, 1743), 35, 45; Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelicalism in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 156–57. 3. “A.M.,” The State of Religion in New-England (Glasgow, 1742), 3–5, 11, 13, 16; George Whitefield, Some Remarks on a Late Pamphlet, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1743), 3; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 157. 4. Jonathan Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (1743), WJE, 4:291, 296, 345, 353; George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 263–67. 5. Edwards, Some Thoughts, 474, 484–86, 488–90. 6. The Testimony of the Pastors of the Churches in the Province of MassachusettsBay in New-England (Boston, 1743), 6–13; Joshua Gee, A Letter to the Reverend Mr. Nathanael Eells, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1743), 4, 8–11, 14; Thomas Prince, Sr., ed., The Christian History, Containing Accounts of the Revival and Propagation of Religion in Great-Britain and America, 2 vols. (Boston, 1744–1745), 1:157; The Testimony and Advice of an Assembly of Pastors (Boston, 1743), 7–8, 10–12; Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 229–30. 7. Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts, 77, vi–xxx, 329–30, 327; Lippy, Seasonable Revolutionary, 36–37; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 280–83.

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8. Boston Evening Post, May 30/ June 13, 1743; Boston Weekly News-Letter, May 26, 1743; Leigh Eric Schmidt, “‘A Second and Glorious Reformation’: The New Light Extremism of Andrew Croswell,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 43 (April 1986), 224. 9. Two Letters from the Reverend Mr. Williams and Wheelock (Boston, 1744), 27, 29; Fish quoted in William B. Sprague, ed., Annals of the American Pulpit, 9 vols. (1866–1869; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1969), 3:88; James Davenport, A Letter from the Rev. Mr. Davenport (Philadelphia, 1744), 3–4, 7–8, 11; Robert Brockway, A Wonderful Work of God: Puritanism and the Great Awakening (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2003), 152–53. 10. James Davenport, The Reverend Mr. Davenport’s Confession and Retractions (Boston, 1744), 3–7; Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 96. 11. An Impartial Examination of Mr. Davenport’s Retractions (Boston, 1744), 1–2, 8; Benjamin Colman, A Letter from the Reverend Dr. Colman of Boston (Boston, 1744), 3–5; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 167. 12. Colman, Letter, 4; Eugene White, “Decline of the Great Awakening in New England: 1741–1746,” NEQ 24 (March 1951), 46; Kidder, “Diary of Nicholas Gilman,” 299, 326; Diary of Daniel Rogers, May 25, 1744, June 14, 1744, New-York Historical Society, New York City; Boston Evening-Post, July 30, 1744, August 6, 1744; Boston Gazette, July 24, 1744; Erik R. Seeman, Pious Persuasions Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 133–38; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 167–68. 13. Boston Evening-Post, July 30, 1744, August 6, 1744; Boston Gazette, July 24, 1744; Backus quoted in Seeman, Pious Persuasions, 138; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 167–69. 14. Diary of Daniel Rogers, October 27, 1744; Boston Evening-Post, November 19, 1744; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 169. 15. Charles Chauncy, Ministers Exhorted and Encouraged (Boston, 1744), 37–38; George Whitefield, The Journals of George Whitefield (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1960), 542. 16. Charles Chauncy, A Letter from a Gentleman in Boston, to Mr. George Wishart, One of the Ministers of Edinburgh, Concerning the State of Religion in New-England (Edinburgh, 1742), in Richard L. Bushman, The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740–1745 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 116–20; John Caldwell, An Impartial Trial of the Spirit Operating in this Part of the World . . . (Boston, 1742), i; idem, The Scripture Characters or Marks of False Prophets or Teachers (Boston, 1742), 30–31; idem, The Nature, Folly, and Evil of Rash and Uncharitable Judging (Boston, 1742), appendix, 5; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening”, 190–92. 17. Caldwell, The Scripture Characters, 31; Nathaniel Eells, Religion is the Life of God’s People (Boston, 1743), 30; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 192–93. 18. Andrew Eliot to Richard Salter, April 15, 1745, Gratz Collection, American Colonial Clergy, 8/22, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; George



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Whitefield to Mr. -------, January 18, 1745, in Whitefield, The Works of George Whitefield, 6 vols. (London, 1771–1772), 2:72–73; Harvard College, The Testimony (Boston, 1744), 3–4, 15; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 169–70. 19. Yale College, The Declaration of the Rector and Tutors (Boston, 1745), 4, 10, 12, 14; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 170. 20. William Shurtleff, A Letter to Those of His Brethren (Boston, 1745), 22; The Testimony of a Number of Ministers Conven’d at Taunton, in the County of Bristol (Boston, 1745), 3, 10; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 170. 21. A Vindication of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield (Boston, 1745), 3–4, 13–14; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 171. 22. Diary of Daniel Rogers, February 8, 1745; Whitefield, Journals, 551; Luke Tyerman, The Life of the Rev. George Whitefield, 2 vols. (London: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1877), 2:150–51; Nathan O. Hatch, “The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 31 (July 1974), 417; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 310–14. See also Thomas Prince, Sr., Extraordinary Events the Doings of God (Boston, 1745) and Charles Chauncy, Marvellous Things Done by the Right Hand of God (Boston, 1745). 23. Joshua Hempstead, Diary of Joshua Hempstead (New London, CT, 1901), 447; Tyerman, Life of the Rev. George Whitefield, 2:152–53; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 172–73. 24. David C. Harlan, “The Travail of Religious Moderation: Jonathan Dickinson and the Great Awakening,” Journal of Presbyterian History 61 (Winter 1983), 412; Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Jonathan Dickinson and the Making of the Moderate Awakening,” American Presbyterians 63 (Winter 1985), 347; Jonathan Dickinson, The Reasonableness of Christianity, in Four Sermons . . . (Boston, 1732), 1. 25. Jonathan Dickinson, The Danger of Schisms and Contentions (New York, 1739), 8–10, 40 (emphases in original); idem, The Witness of the Spirit . . . (Boston, 1740), 26–27; Bryan F. LeBeau, Jonathan Dickinson and the Formative Years of American Presbyterianism (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 108–09, 118–21. 26. Jonathan Dickinson, A Display of God’s Special Grace (Boston, 1742), 69–70, 89–90, 107–08; LeBeau, Jonathan Dickinson, 141–43; Schmidt, “Jonathan Dickinson,” 344–50. 27. Thomas Foxcroft to Jonathan Dickinson, April 12, 1742, quoted in Harlan, “Travail of Religious Moderation,” 415; Andrew Croswell to Nathaniel and Daniel Rogers, September 23, 1743, in Kidd, The Great Awakening, 149; Croswell, Mr. Croswell’s Reply to a Book (Boston, 1742), 18, 23; Schmidt, “‘A Second and Glorious Reformation,’” 223–25. 28. Pennsylvania Gazette, September 2, 1742; Milton J. Coalter, Jr., Gilbert Tennent, Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 96–118. 29. Boston News-Letter, July 15–22, 1742; Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, 118–23; Jonathan Dickinson to Thomas Foxcroft, November 24, 1746, quoted in Harlan, “Travail of Religious Moderation,” 424. See also Coalter, “The Radical Pietism of

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Count Nicholas Zinzendorf as a Conservative Influence on the Awakener, Gilbert Tennent,” Church History 49 (March 1980), 35–46. 30. South-Carolina Gazette, March 15, 1740; Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 194–99; Lisa H. Smith, The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers: A Shifting Story (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2012), 17–19. 31. Smith, The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers, 19–21; American Weekly Mercury, July 16, 1741. 32. Boston Evening-Post, January 4, 1742; Boston Weekly News-Letter, December 8, 1743; Smith, The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers, 26–27. 33. Boston Evening-Post, March 21, 1743, August 23, 1743; Boston Weekly PostBoy, December 8, 1743; Boston Gazette, July 24, 1744; Boston Evening-Post, August 6, 1744; New York Evening-Post, February 22, 1746/47; Smith, The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers, 30–33. 34. Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 3 vols., ed. Franklin B. Dexter (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 1:45–46; William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 1:491–500; Christopher Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 257, n.47. 35. [William Douglass], Inoculation of the Small Pox as Practiced in Boston . . . (Boston, 1722); Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 493–94. 36. William Shippen to Sarah Edwards, March 22, 1758; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 494–95. 37. Whitefield, Journals, quoted in Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 253. 38. Gilbert Tennent, Irenicum Ecclesiasticum; or a Humble Impartial Essay upon the Peace of Jerusalem . . . (Philadelphia, 1749), 91; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 251–52.

PART III

“METHINKS I SEE MIGHTY CITIES RISING ON EVERY HILL”

“Methinks I see mighty cities rising on every hill, and by the side of every commodious port; mighty fleets . . . laden with the produce of this, and every other country under heaven . . . And do I not there behold the savage nations, no longer our enemies, bowing the knee to Jesus Christ, and with joy confessing him to be “Lord, to the glory of God the Father!” Methinks I see religion professed and practiced in this spacious kingdom, in far greater purity and perfection, than since the times of the apostles . . .” —Jonathan Mayhew, Two Discourses Delivered October 9th, 1760. Being the Day appointed to be observed As a Day of public Thanksgiving For the Success of His Majesty’s Arms . . . (Boston, 1760)

Chapter 9

“I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” The Christianization of African America

Soon after George Whitefield’s wildly successful first tour of New England, a Bostonian gentleman known to be an acerbic critic of the revivals witnessed his slave standing in an empty room and preaching in the highly emotional style of the “Grand Itinerant” himself. The gentleman surreptitiously watched this adoring act of mimicry and, finding it hilarious, resolved to amuse his guests at a dinner party the next evening with a command performance. Following the meal, as drinks and pipes were proffered to the assemblage, the host announced, “I’ll entertain you with Mr. Whitefield’s preaching; for my Negroe can preach as well as he.” Instructed to stand upon a stool placed at the center of the room, the host’s slave proceeded to evangelize in the Whitefieldian manner to immediate waves of derisive laughter. Unembarrassed and undaunted, the slave admonished his audience that they blasphemed against God even if the lecturer was a lowly slave, and that they might find regeneration in listening to his exhortations in favor of the new birth. Then, “the Negro spoke with such Authority that [he] struck the Gentlemen to Heart.” To his owner’s mounting discomfiture, the slave delivered a penetrating sermon addressed partly to his owner that struck many of the high rhetorical notes regularly hit by Whitefield. “I am now come to my Exhortation; and to you my Master after the Flesh: But know I have a Master even Jesus Christ my Savior, who has said that a Man cannot serve two Masters. Therefore I claim Jesus Christ to be my right[ful] Master; and all that come to him he will receive.” Upon the conclusion of this rather unexpected performance, so the report goes, the man and his company were thus converted on the spot and became ever after “pious[,] sober men.”1 This scene, reported in an issue of the prorevivalist magazine The Weekly History, may or may not actually have taken place, as prorevivalist literature is replete with strikingly similar stories of charismatic slaves converting 199

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skeptical masters and others to evangelical Christianity. Little does that matter. The important point to consider here is that Whitefield, while at times upholding the institution of slavery even as at others denigrating it, imparted to his black audiences a conceit of spiritual equality with whites and a budding conviction that evangelicalism carried within it the seeds of the abolition of slavery. Prior to the 1730s, the overwhelming majority of white clergymen along the entire Christian spectrum did not consider African Americans, particularly those who were enslaved, as fit subjects for conversion. Most practiced some adumbrated form of indigenous West African religions or a borrowed patchwork of Christianity leavened with West African elements, while others lived functionally atheist lives. However, starting with Whitefield’s sermons to slaves and slave owners alike in 1740 and 1741, shafts of the New Light began to shine through clouds of doubt onto patches of the slave population from Georgia to Massachusetts. The end result was a massive campaign of slave Christianization in the 1750s and 1760s that became arguably the First Great Awakening’s most enduring legacy. As Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood put it, the slaves’ acceptance of Christianity “created a community of faith . . . and provided Afro-Atlantic peoples with an ideology of resistance and the means to absorb the cultural norms that turned Africans into African Americans.” But the Christianity practiced by the African Americans was one shaped by them, in spite of the efforts of white missionaries and clergymen to tightly circumscribe it.2  AFRICAN RELIGIONS The majority of enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic along the “Middle Passage” hailed from coastal West Africa in a meandering arc from Senegambia in the north to Angola in the south just below the Equator, and those taken to the English colonies in the Caribbean, the Carolina Lowcountry, and the Chesapeake were never considered worthy prospects for Christianization before the mid-1700s. The reasons for this center around European assumptions that the Africans were not intelligent enough to grasp the fundamentals of the Christian religion and a dismissal of the Africans’ religions as primitive and barbarous. Together these notions rationalized presumptions of innate stupidity and the consequent unsuitability of Christianity for Africans. Slave traders and slave owners alike, when they thought about indigenous African religions at all, made no attempt to consider them as anything other than a single type of paganism—each identical to the others for all intents and purposes. However, significant differences divided the theologies



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and religious practices of the many African cultures from which the forced emigrants to British North America were separated. Concepts of good and evil, of morality and immorality, of the parts played by deities in human lives, and of how the individual relates to the cosmos and can determine his or her fate varied considerably from one society to another. Wolofs, Serers, Mandinkes, Bambaras, Fulanis, and Hausas subscribed to one variety or another of Islam, while the Akans, Ewes, Yorubas, Fons, and Ibos practiced their own distinctive tribal religions. All to one degree or another had either heard of or been introduced to Christianity since the arrival of Portuguese traders in the early fifteenth century, if not earlier, through information passing along wellestablished overland trade routes crisscrossing northern Africa.3 In stark contrast to the essentially dualistic worldview of Western Europeans, and strikingly similar to the American Indians, traditional Central and Western Africans recognized no clear distinctions between the visible material and the invisible spiritual realms. However, for all the variations that distinguished one religious system from another, a general sketch remains possible to draw. West African cosmologies, according to Albert J. Raboteau, shared a “belief in a High God, or Supreme Creator of the world and everything in it.” Beneath the High God stand ranks of lesser deities responsible for maintaining the cosmos and managing human affairs through patronage of tribal groups, villages, families, and individuals, with ancestor spirits and demons completing the spiritual plane. While the High God generally stood aloof from Creation and received little or no direct veneration, worshipers cultivated the favor of particular lesser deities and ancestor spirits through various rituals, prayers, sacrifices, and acts of devotion. Devotees were guided by the divinatory and mediatory powers of priests and/or priestesses who assisted the faithful in obtaining advice, acted as doctors and herbalists for the sick, and often communicated with gods, spirits, and ancestors in order to foretell the future, interpret dreams and visions, and explain past events.4 Priests and priestesses also served as intermediaries in the process of “spirit possession,” when a god chose a person for initiation into its particular cult. He or she formed a bridge between the spiritual and material worlds—a conduit through which the god could assume temporary control over the devotee in a ritual that symbolizes his or her death and rebirth into their patron god’s cult. Music and drumming, which always accompanied and was an integral part of worship, dissolved the barriers between this world and the next and allowed gods and spirits to come forth. Devotees dancing in syncopated rhythm fell into an ecstatic trance state and surrendered themselves to their god—usually the patron deity of his or her family—and became its “horse.” He or she would feel themselves enveloped in a dazzling light descending from above, penetrating their heads. What had been a carefully ordered dance then becomes fervently chaotic and spontaneous, the identity of the

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god determined by the devotee’s movements and gestures. Having thus been “ridden” about, the god departs and the devotee is left lying on the floor, exhausted but joyful, ready to carry out the god’s will. Elsewhere, Sufi Islam gained prominence, though comparatively very few Muslim Africans were sold into the Atlantic slave trade.5 Throughout the plantation colonies in the Caribbean and South America, slaves blended their native religions with Catholic Christianity that represents, as Raboteau attests, “a continuity of perspective that is significant.” The old gods sometimes survived intact, even to the retention of names and duties, but more often became conflated with Catholic saints, while ancient techniques of divination and other ritual practices underwent imaginative repurposing. Music and dance retained their centrality in worship, as did the symbolic importance of colors worn on specific occasions, spirit possession, and the roles played by ancestor spirits in everyday life. New rituals and theologies borrowed and adapted from Christian liturgies and native Indian religions further enriched the African-American and Afro-Caribbean religious landscape, and offered to slaves solace and meaning where otherwise there was degradation and suffering. As Raboteau concludes, “despite discontinuity and innovation, the fundamental religious perspectives of Africa have continued to orient the lives of the descendants of slaves in the New World.”6 A “SPIRITUAL HOLOCAUST”? Close to two centuries of tentative Iberian experimentation in creating an Atlantic slave trade from the 1450s through the 1650s turned into a massive international operation when the profitability of New World colonization began to be recognized, even as the original planned labor force—the Indians—proved insufficient on account of the catastrophic population loss from disease epidemics. Along the “Middle Passage,” tens of millions of Africans brought to the Americas their knowledge and memories of cosmology, theology, and religious practices that in the crucible of slavery became the many varieties of Christianity practiced by the slaves and their descendants. As Raboteau notes, “African liturgical seasons, prescribed rituals, traditional myths, and languages of worship were attenuated, replaced, and altered, or lost,” which led Jon Butler to declare that in North America “an African spiritual holocaust . . . forever destroyed traditional African religious systems as systems.” This, Butler argues, “left slaves remarkably bereft of traditional collective religious practice before 1760.” This was certainly how eighteenthcentury advocates for the Christianization of African Americans perceived the situation, but a supposed absence of systematic religious beliefs and practices does not entail the absence of beliefs and practices in and of themselves,



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much less to any deliberate effort on the part of the participants in the slave trade to destroy African religions. The failure of traditional West African religions and Islam to be transplanted entirely to the New World was not so much a goal pursued by slaveholders as it was a side effect of the inevitabilities of the slave trade itself.7 While the bulk of the Europeans and white Americans involved in the slave trade were unconcerned with converting Africans and African American slaves to Christianity, they nevertheless paid lip service to the idea of slave Christianization and the conversion of the Africans to Christianity. Just as the Spanish and Portuguese justified the enslavement of the American Indians and Africans by claiming that slavery would achieve the long-term goals of Christian conversion and the civilization of the heathens, so also did English crown and colonial officials argue that slavery would civilize “barbarous” Africans in America. However, the slave trade was a lucrative business and rarely did slavers, slave merchants, and slaveholders wring their hands in worry about not fulfilling the loftier objectives found buried in colonial charters and instructions to British Royal African Company officials. As John Barbot, an agent for the French Royal African Company, commented in 1682, “provided that the slaves can multiply, and work hard for the benefit of their masters, most men are well satisfied without the least thoughts of using their authority and endeavors to promote the good of the souls of those poor wretches.” Barbot was thinking mainly of Caribbean slaveholders, but the sentiment was common throughout mainland North America as well. According to Rev. Francis Varnod of St. George’s Parish, South Carolina, some maintenance of the old religions could be found, as he noted that “some of our negro-pagans have a notion of God and of a Devil, and dismal apprehensions of apparitions.”8 Slaveholders and the small number of clergymen who advocated Christianization often commented on the slaves’ seeming lack of spirituality or simplistic notions of good and evil, which further bolster most historians’ contentions that they fundamentally lacked any sort of organized religion before the First Great Awakening. Such thinking precludes the likelihood that the slaves strategically concealed the breadth and depth of their religious sensibilities, as well as the extent to which they engaged in formal religious practice. To do otherwise risked the implementation of an even more repressive micromanagement of their lives than they already endured, to say nothing of compounding white concerns about black perfidiousness. For their part, slaveholders remained contentedly ignorant of their slaves’ religious practices so long as they did not compromise their authority or work productivity. Pre-Christian slave religions seem rarely to have been a cause of much concern among slaveholders in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in spite of missionaries’ emphasis on the inherent dangers of allowing

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non-Christian religions to persist in the slave quarters. Nevertheless, revivalism eroded resistance among both slaveholders and the slaves themselves. Consequently, resistance to slave Christianization rested firmly atop the twin pillars of the fear that it would give the slaves the idea that they would become their masters’ equals or otherwise render them unruly, and that Africans and African Americans were inherently stupid, and thus unfit for conversion. In 1699, the Virginia House of Burgesses, responding to Gov. Francis Nicholson’s instructions that slaves and Indians be familiarized with Christianity, replied that this was no problem for Creole slaves, but that the “gross bestiality and rudeness of [Africans’] manners, the variety and strangeness of their languages, and the weakness and shallowness of their minds, render it . . . impossible to make any progress in their conversion.” Some masters worried that Christian conversion would lead slaves to a fixation upon liberation in this life rather than in the next, while others considered any efforts at conversion to be a ridiculous waste of time and energy. Some slaveholders took seriously the idea that they might have to liberate any slaves who became Christians because of supposed biblical injunctions against Christians holding other Christians as slaves, and so refused to allow missionaries to proselytize among their bondspeople, even though colonial laws since the late seventeenth century made clear that slaves were to serve durante vita—for life—regardless of their circumstances. David Humphreys, a secretary for the SPG, complained about this in a 1730 report, in which he noted that although “some Hundreds of Negroes have been instructed, received Baptism, and been admitted to the Communion,” nevertheless there remained “many Thousands uninstructed, unconverted, living, dying, [as] utter Pagans.” By and large, between the planters’ spiritual squeamishness and racial prejudices, and their overall refusal to grant any time away from work to receive religious instruction, the Christianization of free and enslaved African Americans remained a low priority before the outbreak of revivalism in the 1730s.9 For their own part, many slaves felt little interest in adopting a religion that justified their enslavement by appeals to Old Testament stories about the Mark of Cain and the Curse of Ham, as well as New Testament exhortations for servants to obey masters. By the 1720s, however, a small but growing number of Creole slaves exhibited an attraction to learning about Christianity and seeking conversion. This was particularly the case in the Chesapeake colonies, where Anglican parsons reported only occasional slave baptisms before 1738. Slaves were made to understand that baptism did not confer liberation upon them, and now carried a heavier, spiritual mandate of humble submission and obedience to their masters, which they apparently took to heart. Consequently, Chesapeake slaveholders began to relent and permit missionaries to ply their trade in slave communities. It was a far different



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story in the Lowcountry colonies of South Carolina and Georgia where slaves continued to resist, especially those who were native Africans. As late as the 1760s, observers routinely noted the slaves’ ignorance of and hostility to Christianity, while masters there also continued to frustrate most ministers’ efforts at proselytization. One SPG missionary estimated in 1762 that only about five hundred slaves in all of South Carolina could be considered Christians, and Henry Laurens opined the following year, in a letter to Moravian missionary John Ettwein, that the reason for this was because planters considered “the adding House to House and laying Field to Field” to be more “profitable . . . [than] the saving of Souls.”10 This striking, though hardly uncommon, materialistic attitude was not only evident whenever the question of slave conversion came up among planters, but also more indicative of a prevailing attitude of spiritual indifference. In the more heavily populated regions of the southern colonies, religious fervor was practically nonexistent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The production of cash crops occupied the attention of planters, some of whom also focused heavily on provincial politics, while rural farmers living farther out toward the western frontier concentrated upon subsistence. The state of one’s soul and its fate beyond the grave kept few southerners up at night, and church attendance primarily served a social networking purpose. While church construction increased in an effort to keep up with eighteenth-century population growth in the northern colonies, such was not the case in the South, where some parishes did not have a church, and others on the frontier went sometimes for decades without resident parsons. Those who did accept a parsonage usually faced the daunting prospect of traveling great distances to tend widely scattered flocks, with the result that many opted to keep close to their churches and avoid ministering to far outliers. In the rare event that a truly committed parson arrived to practice his vocation, he often faced a vestry that pushed back forcefully against any attempts to upbraid the colonists for exhibiting profane behavior or conspicuous materialistic excesses. According to one Virginia parson in a 1724 report to the Bishop of London, “should [a parson] prove disagreeable to [the vestry], . . . they might the more easily cast him off for another more suitable to their humour.”11 Nevertheless, slave Christianization in the mainland colonies was directed by the Anglican SPG and the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), the former of which founded several schools for slaves throughout British America, anchored at New York City and Charleston. Francis Le Jau, an SPG missionary sent to South Carolina in the early 1700s, opted for a careful and deliberate approach to slave conversion methods, requiring “good testimony and proof of their life and conversation” before baptism or admission to their first communion. Literacy was also a requirement, and missionaries routinely complained about the difficulties of

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teaching native Africans English well enough to understand the complexities of Christianity. As the Bishop of London put it in an exhortative letter in 1727, although lacking “the gift of tongues,” just the same “many of the Negroes who are grown persons when they came over, . . . [can] attain so much of our language as enables them to understand and to be understood.” Africans proved most resistant, while Creoles tended to be more receptive, but most who did convert rarely failed to notice the rampant inconsistencies of white Christians’ behavior with the teachings in the Bible. According to Francis Varnod, slaves were keenly aware “that as we are Christians, we do not act accordingly.” This could inspire some recent converts to return to their old faiths out of frustration, while others became adept at pointedly comparing their own uprightness to the “wicked life of [white] Christians” around them. Others exhibited a determination to use their status as Christians to try to gain ascendancy over other slaves, wheedle concessions or perquisites from their masters, or simply become “lazy and proud, entertaining too high an opinion of themselves, and neglecting their daily labour,” as Rev. Charles Martyn lamented. Fears that conversion would give slaves the idea that they had been liberated or shared equality with their masters, Le Jau insured that slave converts pledged “in the Presence of God and before his Congregation that you do not ask for the holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the Duty and Obedience you owe to your Master while you live,” establishing a procedure forming the centerpiece of slave conversion from that point onward.12 The fact that so many slaves had not been actively encouraged to convert to Christianity was thus the product of the psychological trauma of the Middle Passage, the general unwillingness of slaveholders to allow missionaries to work among their slaves, an atmosphere of religious apathy characteristic of the planter colonies, and the slaves’ own resistance to it. Nevertheless, by the early 1700s, a significant minority of Creole slaves, especially in the Chesapeake colonies, accepted Christianity in a form that—though shaped by missionaries and clergymen to buttress the institution of chattel slavery—the slaves deliberately adapted to meet their spiritual needs and conformed to their cultural tastes. Most native African slaves who rejected Christianity continued to practice their traditional religions in some form, but usually in secret, out of sight of master and overseer. Taking the complaints of SPG missionaries and the unusually committed parson at face value leads one to imagine a scene of desperate spiritual bereavement, when the reality was much more complex. The cultural holocaust wrought by the Atlantic slave trade certainly entailed some abrogation of religious systems and traditions, but the slaves proved incredibly resourceful in fashioning new systems and traditions that grafted Christianity onto the roots of West African beliefs and practices.



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“TRANCES, DREAMS, VISIONS, AND REVILATIONS” As the tide of revivalism began to rise in the Middle Colonies and New England, evangelical ministers saw fit to comment on unprecedented levels of African-American interest and participation. A typical example comes from Jonathan Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative, in which he noted that at the 1734 Northampton revival “several Negroes also appear[ed] to have been born again.” Seizing upon the interest shown by slaves and free blacks alike, Benjamin Colman exhorted slaves to seek conversion, for God “shall make you free. . . . Why should you be Men’s Slaves and Satan’s too[?] . . . It is in my Sight, I can truly say, a Beauty to our Communion, to see a Number of the poor Blacks with us.” While Colman certainly meant only spiritual liberation, it is hard to ignore the implications of bodily and legal freedom in Colman’s exuberant rhetoric. At Boston’s Old South Church, William Cooper sounded nearly identical notes, using the words “free,” “Free-men,” and “Liberty” in such a way as to inadvertently encourage slaves to hope for literal freedom after baptism. George Whitefield was pleased to see slaves and free blacks attending his sermons in Philadelphia in the spring of 1740, some fifty of whom went so far as to approach him at the house where he lodged, “giv[ing] thanks for what God had done to their souls” and making a modest donation to the Bethesda Orphanage. While on tour in the North, Whitefield composed a moderate rebuke to southern slaveholders for regarding their bondspeople “as bad or worse than brutes,” subjecting them to regular abuse and occasional torture cloaked in the euphemism of “discipline.” “God has a quarrel with you,” he informed them, and warned that “if slaves got the upper hand, all good men must acknowledge the judgment would be just.” Little wonder that many plantation owners looked upon Whitefield and his disciples as dangerous.13 Wherever Whitefield went on his evangelical tour, imitative revival movements usually spawned in his wake, and South Carolina was no exception. In the humid summer of 1740, in the remote St. Helena parish, Hugh Bryan, scion of a wealthy planter family, fell under a conviction of his wickedness. Visiting Whitefield at Bethesda that June, Hugh felt that the great evangelist’s religious conversation wrought a momentous change. It “struck my heart,” he later reported, “I was certain I had never felt any afflicting sorrow for sin, . . . but . . . I began to see that I was in the very gall of bitterness, and bonds of iniquity.” He declared that, after his conversion, he could “delight no more in worldly goods, but in a life [instead] of faith in Jesus Christ” and, personally encouraged by Whitefield, resolved furthermore to impart the same faith to the family’s slaves. He and his brother, Jonathan, likewise converted, began instructing their slaves not just in Christian fundamentals, but also in reading. While teaching slaves to read was not illegal, it was still considered a

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dangerous act in light of the recent Stono Rebellion the previous year. After a catastrophic fire in November destroyed hundreds of homes and commercial buildings at an estimated value of £200,000, Hugh Bryan declared the disaster, following so soon after “Drought; . . . repeated Diseases on Man and Beast; . . . [and] Insurrections of our Slaves” to be a divine rebuke, “severe strokes of [God’s] displeasure” for the laxness and spiritual insufficiency of the city’s Anglican clergy and Charleston’s worldliness. Bryan’s pious indictment of the colonial capital, initially written in a letter to Jonathan, was given an editorial pass by Whitefield and then published in the South-Carolina Gazette at the beginning of the New Year. The Bryans and Whitefield hoped that the letter would inspire some collective soul-searching. Instead, Hugh Bryan and Whitefield found themselves arrested and indicted on charges of having “made and composed a false, malicious, scandalous, and infamous libel against the clergy of this Province, in contempt of His Majesty, and his laws, and against the King’s peace.”14 Whitefield and Bryan posted bail and promised to appear in answer to the charges at the next session of the general court, after which Whitefield continued to berate the colony’s “men in authority” from the pulpit for “the heinous sin of abusing the power which God had put into their hands.” He then took ship for England to handle affairs at home and plan his next American sojourn. Meanwhile, the Bryans, undeterred but also unwilling to provoke the government further, convinced neighboring planters William Gilbert and Robert Ogle to join them in their campaign to Christianize South Carolina’s slaves. They fell back under official scrutiny early the following year for arranging “frequent and great Assemblies of Negroes” that attracted slaves from “different Plantations” to hear not just the word of God, but also—according to a committee tasked with investigating the matter—encouragement to endanger “the Peace and Safety of this Province.” An account submitted to Georgia’s trustees by Thomas Bosomworth alleged that Hugh Bryan discouraged slaves from working for unconverted masters, and even from working at all except for their own spiritual welfare. A slave’s only duty is the same as that of a free person, to “go and seek Christ.” As Bosomworth related, the slaves “reply’d in the Height of Joy and Transport, . . . if [Christ] would get ‘em a Holy Day, they would seek him every day.” He claimed that Bryan’s evangelical conventicles occasionally led to slaves “running in the Wood, for some time till their Masters were oblig’d to take them under Discipline.” A sympathetic visitor to Jonathan Bryan’s plantation averred that, in contrast to reports of rampant, ungoverned bondspeople, many of the slaves there had been “honestly converted to God” and regarded “their master and mistress so well that they do not desire freedom and show great loyalty in their work.” However, peer pressure exerted upon Hugh Bryan to conform to more conventional



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attitudes, combined with what he perceived to be official persecution, drove him to an extremity of delusion.15 Bryan, to the consternation of friends and relatives, began to behave erratically. He would disappear for extended periods of time into the woods, or lock himself in a room of his house, at which times he would “Converse with an invisible Spirit,” an “Angel of Light” who provided the validation that eluded him in Whitefield’s absence. From this spirit, he received apocalyptic insights. According to Eliza Lucas, a young neighbor, “He came to working miracles and liv[ing] for several days in the woods barefooted and alone . . . to write down his prophecies,” which predicted “the destruction of Charles Town and the deliverance of the Negroes from their Servitude.” Indeed, “Charles Town and the Country as farr as Ponpon Bridge should be destroyed by fire and sword, to be executed by the Negroes.” It was rumored that he planned to stockpile weapons in order to supply and then lead a slave army to assault the city. Bryan, fully enrobed in self-proclaimed messianic authority, compiled his prophecies into a volume he forwarded to the colonial legislature, and that august body promptly ordered his arrest. Then came perhaps the most bizarre incident in Hugh Bryan’s career as an apocalypticist. The May 3rd Boston Weekly Post-Boy reported in “a Letter from South Carolina” that Bryan’s ethereal companion “directed him to go and take Him a Rod, of such a certain Shape and Dimensions, from such a Tree, in such a Place as he told him of and therewith to go and smite the Waters of the River.” He did as he was told and, thinking himself a reincarnation of Moses, proceeded to wade into the Pocotaligo River that ran through the plantation, flailing away with his stick, convinced that the waters would part for him as a sign of his divine power. Chased to the river by his brother, Jonathan, he had to be dragged, soggy and half drowned, back home. “Lo! Dear Sir,” the anonymous correspondent concluded, “Whitefieldism in its native tendency.” When officers arrived to apprehend him for preaching abolitionism and inciting slave insurrection, they found not a wild-eyed fanatic but a soberly chastened man restored to his senses, and embarrassed by his antics that he attributed “with Shame” to “a Delusion of Satan.” He publicly apologized for his disorderly conduct, paid a court-ordered fine, and settled for being a modest advocate for slave Christianization thereafter.16 Meanwhile, in New York City, a series of fires broke out in the spring of 1741 amidst rampant speculation that the city’s 2,000 slaves were plotting a massive rebellion. The plan, rumor had it, was that they would start fires around the city and use the panic and commotion as cover to murder as many of the white citizens as possible. When flames destroyed the roof of the royal governor’s house at Fort George on March 18th, and a smaller fire damaged another part of town a week later, paranoia turned into an outright panic that spread far faster than any fire. More fires erupted around the city in the

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ensuing weeks—ten in all—and the frequency of conflagrations in so relatively short a time confirmed the existence of a general “slave conspiracy.” A pair of suspected rebels were apprehended, tried, and found guilty in late May, and both falsely identified dozens of accomplices in desperate bids to save their lives, but to no avail. They were hanged and the new bevy of suspects arrested posthaste. More trials followed, as did more arrests and a third round of trials throughout the summer. Altogether, 160 slaves and twentyone whites went on trial as conspirators, arsonists, and their accomplices, resulting in the executions of thirty slaves, four whites, and the expulsion of seventy blacks and four whites from the city. While it was taken as a given that slaves persistently contemplated murder and rebellion, the prevailing opinion in Manhattan was that the incendiaries were aflame with New Light Christianity of an especially apocalyptic variety after the recent visit of George Whitefield. Historians have agreed that slaves privately interpreted conversion and baptism as conferring bodily freedom alongside spiritual liberation, and enough manifested such a conviction that Old Light and Anglican clergymen shared an alarm that “Negroes have this notion, that when they are baptized, they are immediately free from their masters.” As one New York pastor convicted and hanged for playing a role in the conspiracy, John Ury, testified, “it was through the great encouragement the negroes had from Mr. Whitefield, [that] we had all the disturbance.”17 Authorities in the plantation colonies thus were ever more sensitive to the negative effects of evangelicalism on their slave populations and viewed anyone, especially itinerant evangelicals, advocating slave Christianization with deep suspicion and apprehension. While the Bryans’ efforts to convert the colony’s slaves to Christianity seemed to have ended in an embarrassing episode of messianic radicalism, supporters still valued the progress made thus far. Jonathan Barber, who oversaw the Bethesda Orphanage, noted that through the Bryans’ and others’ efforts “many poor Souls were savingly converted,” even if Hugh Bryan had been briefly “deceived by ye Devil.” In spite of that, Barber asserted, the real impediment to “promoting ye best Interest of ye poor Negroes” were the elites who “oppose ye Religion of Jesus.” In Charleston, Presbyterian ministers Josiah Smith and James Parker justified slave Christianization in an April 1743 letter published in the South-Carolina Gazette, which referenced the Bishop of London’s interest in slave conversion and that the Bryan incident should not discredit the effort.18 Slaveholder opposition to slave Christianization had as much to do with a general antagonism toward itinerancy and lay preaching as with the aforementioned concerns about the elevation of African-American self-esteem. A 1742 editorial in the South-Carolina Gazette affirmed planter support for “the regular attempts, specified by his Lordship, viz. by Masters and Mistresses in their own private Families, or Mistresses, or School-masters,



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lawfully thereunto authorized, and appointed, pursuant to his Majesty’s Instructions, and the Laws of this Province” for the religious instruction of slaves. However, such instruction, as the piece makes clear, had to be undertaken by the masters themselves or by legally qualified (Anglican) ministers. As it was, the editorialist bemoaned, “every idle or designing person that pleases, shall be at Liberty to pursue Attempts not of this, but another and most dangerous nature; viz. gathering Cabals of Negroes . . . without public Authority, at unseasonable Times, and to the Disturbance of a Neighbourhood; and instead of teaching them the Principles of Christianity,” these Hugh Bryans in disguise will begin “filling their Heads with a Parcel of Cant-Phrases, Trances, Dreams, Visions, and Revilations, and something still worse, which Prudence forbids to name.” Written possibly by Alexander Garden himself, it firmly equated slave evangelization with insurrectionist leanings and—more ominously, even—abolitionism of the sort then being advocated by Pennsylvania Quaker Anthony Benezet. According to Harvey Jackson, Bryan’s radicalism and the effective Anglicanelite response “took much of the momentum away from the evangelical movement in South Carolina.”19 Efforts to revive slave Christianization in the Lowcountry thus floundered in the 1740s and 1750s, taking a harder direct hit in April 1761 when attention focused on a radical evangelical cult in the South Carolina backcountry town of Congarees that dissolved in an orgy of murder. Led by Swiss settler and self-proclaimed embodiment of God the Father, Jacob Weber, and composed almost entirely of Swiss and German colonists, Weber’s group included “colored preacher” Frederick Dubard, also known as Dauber, whom Weber identified as the Holy Ghost. A third person, Peter Schmidt, assumed the role of Jesus Christ and completed the cult’s leadership. Weber’s wife, Helen, he identified as the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary. An argument seems to have developed between Weber and Dauber over the strength of Dauber’s commitment to his part, with Weber accusing him of being a “lukewarm” Holy Ghost as well as of conniving with a Johann Schmidtpeter (the Devil) to usurp his position. Weber settled the matter by killing Schmidtpeter with the aid of his apostles, as well as murdering a visitor, Michael Hentz (or Hans). According to an account in the South-Carolina Gazette, the militia turned out to apprehend the “unhappy wretches,” who confessed to the murders. Seven Weberites were indicted for the murders, with four found guilty and sentenced to execution. Jacob Weber swung from Charleston’s gallows on April 17, while the other three, which included Helen Weber, were granted a one-month reprieve. Gov. William Bull petitioned the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, William Pitt, to pardon the remaining three, which would seem to have been granted due to an absence of any further mention of the affair in the newspapers. The fate of Dauber is unknown, though it is

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speculated that he continued to rove the backcountry as a fugitive preacher to slave communities.20 The Moravians, meanwhile, had successfully begun to proselytize among the slave communities of the Caribbean in the 1730s, confronting the same hostility and resistance as did missionaries on the mainland. John Wesley, who had become attracted to Moravianism, was convinced that the Christianization of African-American slaves was an absolute necessity, and commented approvingly of Moravian missionary outreach to the colonies. The Moravian fixation upon the mystical body of Christ and the power of his blood resonated deeply with slave converts, one of whom, an African named Abraham living in St. Thomas, ascended quickly to spiritual leadership. However, white resistance succeeded in squelching the evangelical fire before it could spread far or wide. Such was not the case when they endeavored to convert slaves in Pennsylvania and North Carolina in the next two decades, the seed of African-American interest in Christianity having found fertile soil, and eroding clerical support for slavery. The successful creation of a racially integrated Moravian community in North Carolina, as Jon S. Sensbach noted, had to wait until after the American Revolution, only to fall apart in the early 1800s on account of entrenched racism. Nevertheless, a small Afro-Moravian community throve for much of the nineteenth century.21 “THE RELIGION THE NEGROES OF LATE HAVE PRACTISED” Slave Christianization encountered significant obstacles in the Lowcountry colonies, whether it was planter resistance, slave resistance, or evangelicalism’s generally bad reputation. Such was not the case in the Chesapeake colonies, where the Presbyterian revivalist Samuel Davies (1723–1761) led the effort in Virginia’s Hanover County. Beginning in the late 1740s, when revivalism had ebbed in the North, Davies reported that he had baptized forty slaves by 1751, and that at least 100 regularly attended his Sunday services. By 1755, he more than doubled those respective totals, and in 1756–1757 he recorded 150 slave baptisms and the expansion of the number of his black communicants to sixty. Other white ministers trained by Davies enjoyed comparable achievements. Col. James Gordon of Lancaster County reported that at his Presbyterian church “a pretty large company of . . . Negroes” regularly attended in 1760, counting seventy-five attendants in December of that year, with ten more joining them by 1763. All in all, the mixed congregation was nearly half white, half black—a rarity anywhere in the colonies. Unlike Christianized slaves in South Carolina, only a minority of whom were taught to read, Davies and other Presbyterian missionaries in Virginia considered literacy to be fundamental to Christian conversion and spiritual growth.



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However, just as Anglicans in South Carolina reminded slaves and reassured planters that conversion did not amount to legal or literal equality with whites, so also did Davies stress the necessity of slave submission to magisterial authority and acceptance of their racial inferiority. One planter commented favorably that Davies’ converts were noteworthy for their “Sobriety and diligence.”22 Davies argued in favor of a paternalistically Christian philosophy of slave ownership identical to that which Whitefield tried to impart to his planter auditors, whom both evangelists exhorted to view their slaves as human beings fully deserving of salvation and of equal spiritual value in God’s eyes. This is not to say that he thought of African Americans as intellectually capable or teachable as whites, and he commented frustratedly about their inability to grasp certain fundamental concepts, but in terms of teaching them to read and write, he found them “generally as capable of Instruction as the White People.” More importantly, he observed that in terms of “experimental religion” African Americans easily outpaced their white brothers and sisters on account of their being more emotionally open and naturally musical, eager to take “a kind of extatic [sic] delight in Psalmody.” Whatever the differences among the races, Davies insisted that Christ was “a common Saviour” to all, and in addition to his efforts among slaves and free blacks, Davies advocated missionary campaigns to the Indians. He was particularly concerned about the spiritual and diplomatic disposition of the Cherokees, “because their situation exposes them . . . to the intrigues of the French,” and tried to recruit missionaries to venture to the far West, but to no avail. His activities occasionally got him into some trouble with the planter elites, who suspected him of stirring up slave rebelliousness, but the colonial authorities were well apprised of Davies’s prudent approach to his work.23 African-American Christianization carried out by Virginia’s Presbyterians followed an essentially conservative course. Davies insisted that literacy attend conversion, and so used primary education as a means of teaching Christianity. While South Carolina and Georgia strictly forbade teaching slaves to read and write, Virginia’s House of Burgesses never passed such a law, though the slaveholding class did view slave literacy as inherently dangerous and strongly discouraged anyone from teaching these skills to slaves. Lowcountry slaves who showed any interest in conversion often did so out of hope that it would liberate them, or at least put them on a closer level to their masters, which Anglican and other evangelical missionaries had to refute. Such was also the case in Virginia and Maryland, where Davies turned away many slaves who evinced a conviction to become Christian as a strategy for gaining “an Equality with their Masters.” Much of Davies’s success is due to the support he received from slaveholders whom he convinced about the benefits of a Christianized slave work force, and of how his

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“Sobriety and diligence,” as Edwin Conway put it in a letter to fellow planter William Dawson in 1758, inspired emulation from converts. On the question of incipient slave rebelliousness, Chesapeake planters and officials had less to worry about than their Lowcountry counterparts, since Chesapeake slaves lived in a world surrounded and inundated by whites, and thus did not feel the oppressive force of the law to control their lives in the same way as Lowcountry slaves. The ranks of Christian slaves, especially in Virginia, swelled under Davies’s efforts, but he made sure not to put aspiring converts off “by imposing high Forms of Admission to Baptism.” He wished to avoid “swelling the number of proselites with only nominal Christians,” as he believed the Anglicans did. In spite of theological and doctrinal differences, Davies made sure to work in close coordination and fraternal harmony with the Anglican Church.24 Other Presbyterians in Virginia were similarly impelled to reach out to unchurched slaves, most notably John Wright of Cumberland County, who championed New Side theology and African-American Christianization during and after the Seven Years’ War. Assisted by another Anglican missionary arm, the Society in London for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, Wright oversaw a racially integrated evangelical campaign. He enjoyed a rising wave of success beginning in 1761, when primarily slaves and a handful of free blacks “crowded to me in great numbers . . . to know what they should do to be saved.” He noted in a letter to the moderate Massachusetts New Light Joseph Bellamy that “about 300 Ethiopians [are] seriously engaged after ye great salvation,” citing a prophecy in Psalms 68:31 that reads: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” as being fulfilled directly through his ministry. Virginia’s Anglicans and Presbyterians—much as did their colleagues throughout the colonies—strongly believed that enslaved and free black converts required close guidance from white ministers and fellowship with white coreligionists. The Baptists were somewhat less insistent upon that point, though ultimately the degree of racial integration in the early southern Baptist churches tended to be higher.25 New Light (also known as “Separate”) Baptists began cropping up in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas in the 1750s, spreading into Georgia by the next decade. Strident in their criticism of the Anglican establishment in the southern colonies, they tended to draw more hostility than curiosity, suffering ruthless mockery and suppression from government and church authorities in the more densely settled areas along the coast. The frontier region of the Piedmont, however, proved to be a more attractive pool of potential support. Exploiting the chronic frustration and resentment with perceived administrative neglect and Tidewater hauteur, Baptists under the leadership of James Ireland and John Leland generated the greatest support among the



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impoverished subsistence farmers and emerging commercial tobacco growers of the backcountry. Slaves also showed interest in the Baptists’ relatively more antiauthoritarian message, and—taking adherents wherever they could be found—Baptists welcomed them into their churches. Harshly critiquing the luxuriant and reputedly dissipated culture of the planter gentry, Baptists found eager audiences among slaves, who swelled their ranks considerably in the years immediately preceding the American Revolution. Baptists throughout the southern colonies suffered no small measure of harassment and official persecution for their antiestablishmentarian stance, but just as much of it rained down upon them for their cultivation of slave converts.26 Formal and informal persecution was particularly severe in Virginia. James Ireland noted several instances of meetings at which slaves were welcome being broken up by mobs and posses led by the constabularies. A typical such episode involved “patrolers [being] set loose upon them . . . the poor Negroes flying in every direction, the patrolers [sic] seizing and whipping them, whilst others were carrying them off [as] prisoners, in order, perhaps, to subject them to a more severe punishment.” Ireland and Leland, among others, regularly suffered imprisonment for illegal preaching—usually in pastures or common fields—and they would often preach from their cells to whoever gathered outside the jail. Just as many came to heckle as to listen, and the former often threw garbage and ordure through the window bars, while others tried to urinate into the cell in an effort to shut them up. Slaves and free blacks who dared to approach the windows at all, much less appear to be supportive of the Baptist prisoners, got the worst of the mistreatment. According to Ireland, on an occasion of his preaching from his cell in Williamsburg, “the poor negroes [were] stripped and subjected to stripes. . . .” In an anonymously written opinion piece in Purdie’s Virginia Gazette, the colony’s attorney general, John Randolph, defended the practice of fining and imprisoning dissenting preachers, and of punishing slaves attracted to them, because men like Ireland and Leland lure away “Slaves from Obedience to their Masters.” To staunch the flow of slaves to “these vagabond preachers,” William Lee suggested that masters offer rewards of extra rations of food and clothing to those slaves who “go every Sunday to their parish church, [and] are the most constant attendants,” while any slaves caught harkening to the evangelicals should be subjected to “very exemplary and solemn” punishment. Ironically, planter resistance to slave Christianization evaporated in the face of the New Light Presbyterian/Baptist challenge.27 The dissenters’ success among the slave populations of the South in particular inspired tremendous hostility from the planter elites, with responses from the colonial assemblies to curtail evangelical activities in the Tidewater and Lowcountry. Much of it was the consequence of the overwhelming response Separate Baptists in particular received from slave converts.

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African-American audiences responded enthusiastically to evangelization, but as Rhys Isaac pointed out, the Christianization of African America cannot be interpreted solely in terms of whites bringing Christianity to blacks. The implication that slaves had no recognizable religious sensibilities before the Awakening speaks to the objectification of African Americans, as well as revealing the prejudices of historians who cannot recognize the legitimacy of polytheistic religions. As Albert J. Raboteau explained, much of African religions survived the Middle Passage, and not “as static ‘Africanisms’ or as archaic ‘retentions.’” African-American Christianity evolved “as living traditions putting down new roots in new soil, bearing new fruit as unique hybrids of American origin.”28 “HE HAD SEEN A HAND THAT GAVE HIM A BOOK” The emphasis that Presbyterian, Baptist, and northern Anglican missionaries placed upon literacy as incumbent upon conversion proved to be as powerful an attractant as raw emotional power to slave converts. James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African slave living in New York City, converted under the guidance of his owner, a Calvinist minister, who encouraged him in his reading of devotional works by the seventeenth-century Puritan writers William Baxter and John Bunyan. He traced his interest in literacy back to the Middle Passage, during which he observed the slave ship’s captain reading. As he recalled in his autobiography, “I was never so surprised in my whole life as when I saw the book talk to my master,” and—obviously having a freedom of movement above deck not normally enjoyed by the bulk of slaves, who passed the journey wallowing in filthy misery down in the cargo hold—“when nobody saw me, I open’d it and put my ear down close upon it, in great hope that it would say something to me.” Later, having learned to read and write, he believed that his conversion would not be truly complete until he had gone to England, to steep himself in the world that produced Baxter and Bunyan, and this he accomplished with Whitefield’s assistance. In spite of this apparent success, Francis Le Jau cautioned that missionaries had to very strictly control African American literacy since, in his opinion, slaves especially “lacked judgment enough to make good use of their Learning.”29 Enslaved African Americans took the Christianity imparted to them and, defying the strict controls exercised by white missionaries, creatively blended it with existing and modified African beliefs and practices. With an audible sigh of exasperation, Anglican parson Isaac Browne commented on the Whitefieldian influence upon black converts in New York City, where the slaves and free blacks “who were lately called Heathens, seem many of them now to be a miraculous compound of Paganism and Methodism.”



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In the Deep South, where Africanisms remained very strong among the slaves of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, “the old superstitions of a false religion” fundamentally defined slave Christianity, according to one exasperated missionary. Particularly resonant were the practices of baptism as practiced by the Baptists, which equated with spiritually cleansing rituals practiced in much of West Africa. A staple of old beliefs was that of spirit possession, and those few slaves who recorded their conversion experiences often used the language of West African religion to describe their conversion to Christianity. James Gronniosaw wrote that “I saw (or thought I saw) light inexpressible dart down from heaven upon me, and shone around me for the space of a minute. I continued on my knees, and joy unspeakable took possession of my soul.”30 Christianized slaves in the southern colonies creatively blended remembered and reconceived African beliefs and practices with the new religion, and here the Baptists’ success in netting black converts cannot be understated. The “invisible institution” of slave religion expressed itself in the language of work songs and spirituals, “hush harbors” in swamps, woods, culverts, and thickets, and a message of liberationist Christianity contrary to the accommodationist Christianity propagated by white ministers and strategically parroted by their black counterparts. Slave preachers walked a thin tightrope between accommodation and resistance to slavery, proscribed as they were by whites to speak of equality or liberty, yet generally doing so in secret, which made these figures enigmatic spiritual rulers in the slave quarters. Many of them were illiterate, yet some learned to read and write on some level—and likely feigned illiteracy when confronted by suspicious whites—and consequently they became highly skilled in extemporaneous preaching that drew almost universal admiration from blacks and whites. In the slave communities, though, preachers had to compete with conjurers for authority, though some blended the two offices—especially if they were native Africans or had come from Brazil or the Caribbean. While some slaves regarded their preachers as white men’s collaborationist mouthpieces, most understood that there was the role one was expected to play in front of masters, overseers, and other whites, while playing entirely different ones among each other.31 The religious songs slaves sang in church, in the fields, and in the quarters came mainly from Protestant hymns and sermons as well as the Bible, and employed “African styles of singing.” They tended to be of the calland-response type, their highly repetitive lyrics and choruses facilitating a growing ecstasy of religious feeling typical of camp meetings and the “ring shouts.” Ring shouts, hailing directly from West Africa, blended singing with worshippers arranged in circles, dancing to the rhythms of stamping feet and drums. They lingered over themes of trial, tribulation, sorrow,

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suffering, and release in death. The slaves saw in the singing of spirituals a conduit between the material and spiritual worlds, hence the heights of ecstasy to which slave singers could reach, which has its cultural antecedents in West African religious practice. This also extended to funerary practices, where Christian rites performed at graveside services reminded the living of the presence of the dead, and graves were usually adorned with broken bottles or crockery, as was done in West Africa. Spiritual authority sometimes had to be shared with the “hoodoo man,” an adept at “conjure” who used a blend of West African pagan religion and folklore to perform services analogous to seventeenth-century “cunning persons.” There was no apparent inconsistency for many slaves in believing both in conjure and Christianity, though it was generally assumed among pious slaves that conjure’s power derived from satanic forces, though conjure itself was technically neutral vis-à-vis good and evil. According to Raboteau, it “answered purposes which Christianity did not and Christianity answered purposes which conjure did not”32 Although white religious authorities and colonial governments demanded strict controls over slave Christianization, and for the most part the evangelicals complied with those dictates and agreed upon their necessity, there was only so much that anyone could do to prevent slaves from equating conversion with liberation. George Whitefield reminded both white and black audiences that Satan enslaves people through sin, and that the sinner is incapable of freeing himself or herself. Bound to hell by chains forged from lust and greed like “poor slaves in the galleys,” the sinner could only gain freedom purchased by Christ, “bought with a price, even with the price of own blood.” While slaves were told at their baptisms that the rite only conferred spiritual, and never bodily freedom, they nevertheless logically extended spiritual liberation to entail the fundamental injustice of slavery. In 1730, a large number of slaves in Virginia heard rumors “that the king designed that all [enslaved] christians should be made free,” and thus “flocked to baptism.” Ignoring reminders that baptism did not change their material circumstances, these slaves excitedly awaited royal emancipation, and when that proved not to be forthcoming, “they grew angry and saucy,” and plotted an insurrection that was squelched in utero. Many runaway slave advertisements in newspapers of the 1760s and 1770s increasingly mentioned a fugitive slave’s religiosity, as when Thomas Savin informed readers of the Pennsylvania Gazette that his slave “pretends to be very religious,” and John Hales took out an ad in the same paper in search of Moses Grimes, whom Hales characterized as “very religious, preach[ing] to his colour, walk[ing] before burials,” and performing marriages. Not only did slaves fashion a distinctly African-American Christianity, but also one that spoke implicitly of freedom not just in the world to come, but in this world now.33



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Christianized slaves proved to be even more prone to an apocalyptic worldview than their free white coreligionists. Francis Le Jau, in his warning about the perils of slave literacy, relayed the cautionary tale of one convert, “the best scholar of all the Negroes” of Saint James Goose Creek parish in South Carolina, who acquired “a Book wherein he read some descriptions of the several judgmts that Chastize Men because of their Sins.” Reading this to mean an imminent destruction of all slaveholders and the uplifting of the slaves, “he told his Master abruptly there would be a dismal time and the Moon wou’d be turned into Blood, and there wou’d be dearth of darkness.” Another slave, upon overhearing this spread a rumor “that an angel came and spake to the Man, [that] he had seen a hand that gave him a Book, [that] he had heard Voices, [and] seen fires.” In 1759, a group of slaves and free blacks were indicted for plotting a revolt in St. Helena Parish, South Carolina, when Philip John, a free black preacher, reported having “seen a Vision, in which it was reveal’d to him that in the Month of September the white people shou’d be all under [the] ground, that the Sword shou’d go through the Land, and it shou’d shine with their blood, that there should be no more white King’s Governors or great Men but the Negros shou’d live happily and have Laws of their own.” In the early summer of 1775, as the American Revolution was just underway, fresh rumors of imminent slave liberation took an apocalyptic cast among slaves in Saint Bartholomew Parish, who believed George, another slave preacher who promised his audiences “that the old king had received a book from our Lord, by which he was to alter the world, (meaning to set the negroes free), but his not doing so, was now gone to hell and in punishment; that the young king [George III] . . . came up with the book, and was about to alter the world, and set the negroes free.” The common thread running through all early African-American apocalypticism is the high reverence accorded to books and the printed word, which often took on overtly mystical qualities.34  In April 1743, Daniel Rogers, the radical New Light itinerant working in coastal Maine, committed to his diary a conversation he had with a woman at York who, after experiencing an ecstatic vision, claimed to have “had a View of ye Coming ye Kingdom of God, and p[ar]ticularly of ye Negroes being brot into It.” To Rogers, this heralded the fulfillment of a prediction in Psalm 68 (“Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God”). “[M]any poor Negroe slaves in N. Eng[lan]d” had been converted in the wake of George Whitefield’s first preaching tour of the region, he reported, and he hoped that these conversions were the “first Fruits” of the wholesale conversion of African Americans throughout the colonies that would in time spread to Africa itself.

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Rogers and his female follower were unusual in that they espoused a kind of egalitarianism that, if not specifically antislavery, nevertheless countenanced spiritual equality between white and black.35 For the bulk of the history of slavery in British America until the outbreak of the revivals in the 1730s, most African Americans—both enslaved and free—remained strangers to institutionalized Christianity. Slave communities, rather than being devastated by a “spiritual holocaust,” maintained a religious vibrancy and inventiveness that established a strong foundation upon which Christianity was built through the concerted efforts of progressive clergymen and New Light evangelicals throughout the mid-1700s. African Americans responded positively to the more demonstrative and emotive Christianity offered by the New Lights, and quickly made it their own through creative incorporations of traditional and newly invented beliefs and practices. African Americans thus crafted a unique form of Christianity that provided not only solace, but also the tools to mitigate their situation and ultimately erode slavery from within. New Light missionaries also devoted some effort to evangelizing some American Indian communities as well, but with decidedly mixed results, while the Indians themselves had begun their own revivalist movement having little to do with Christianity. NOTES 1. Thomas Prince, Sr., The Weekly History (London), July 18, 1741; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 168. 2. Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African-American Protestantism in the American South and the British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1. 3. T. O. Ranger, “Recent Developments in the Study of African Religious and Cultural History and Their Relevance for the Historiography of the Diaspora,” Ufahamu 4 (April 1973), 21; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5–8. 4. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 8–15; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 610–11. 5. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 5, 7, 10–11, 15. 6. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 16–42, quote from p. 42. 7. David Eltis, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 53 (January 2001), 15–46; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 16; Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 130.



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8. John Barbot, Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea (London, 1732), in Thomas Astley and John Churchill, eds., A Collection of Voyages and Travels . . . (London, 1732), 271; Francis Varnod to SPG, April 1, 1724, quoted in Raboteau, Slave Religion, 122. 9. David Humphreys, An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1730; New York, 1969), 232; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 100. 10. William Stevens Perry, ed., Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church, 8 vols. (Hartford, CT: AMS Press, 1870–1878), 4:320; Charles Martyn to the Bishop of London, April 11, 1762, Lambeth Palace Library; Henry Laurens to John Ettwein, March 19, 1763, in David R. Chestnutt and C. James Taylor, eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens, 16 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968–2002), 3:374; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 420–22. 11. Perry, Historical Collections, I, 320; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 104–06. 12. Le Jau, Varnod, and Martyn quoted in Raboteau, Slave Religion, 115, 122, 123; [Edmund Gibson], A Letter of the Lord Bishop of London . . . (London, 1727), 17–18; Perry, Historical Collections, 327; Frank Klingberg, ed., The California Chronicle of Francis Le Jau, 1706–1717 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 76–77. 13. Jonathan Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God (1734), in WJE, 4:122; Benjamin Colman, Souls Flying to Jesus Christ Pleasant and Admirable to Behold (Boston, 1740), 24–25; William Cooper, One Shall be Taken, and Another Left (Boston, 1741), 13; George Whitefield, The Journals of George Whitefield (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1960), 419–20; Whitefield, “A Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina,” in John Gillies, ed., The Works of the Rev. George Whitefield . . . , 6 vols. (London, 1771), 4:38–39. 14. Hugh Bryan to Mary Hutson, ebruary 5, 1740, in Bryan and Hutson, Living Christianity Delineated . . . (London, 1760), 9–14; South-Carolina Gazette, January 1, 1741; South-Carolina Gazette, January 8, 1741; Harvey H. Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement in Colonial South Carolina,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 43 (October 1986), 598, 601–03. 15. Whitefield, Journals, 505; J. H. Easterby, R. Nicholas Olsberg et al., eds., The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 15 vols. (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1951–1989), 3:380, 382; Thomas Bosomworth to the Georgia Trustees, March 10, 1742, in Allen D. Candler, comp., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 26 vols. (Atlanta: Chas. P. Byrd, 1904–1916), 23:231; George Fenwick Jones, trans., “John Martin Boltzius’ Trip to Charleston, October 1742,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 82 (January 1981), 107; Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement,” 603, 606; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 423. 16. Boston Weekly Post-Boy, May 3, 1742; South Carolina Council Journal, 10, April 27, 1742, CO5/441; Eliza Lucas, “Memdam,” March 11, 1742, in Elise Pinckney, ed., The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1739–1762 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 29–30; Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement,” 609–10; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 424. 17. Daniel Horsmanden, A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and other

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Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York . . . (New York, 1744), quoted in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 191–92; Thomas J. Davis, “The New York Slave Conspiracy of 1741 as Black Protest,” The Journal of Negro History 56 (January 1971), 17–30. See also Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), esp. 183–88. 18. Jonathan Barber to Daniel Rogers, October 5, 1742, in Simon Gratz, Church and Clergymen Autographs, 9/3, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement,” 611–12. 19. South-Carolina Gazette, April 10, 1742; Frank Lambert, “‘I Saw the Book Talk’: Slave Readings of the First Great Awakening,” The Journal of African American History 87 (Winter 2002), 15. 20. South-Carolina Gazette, April 25, 1761, May 16, 1761; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 424; Richard J. Hooker, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 78–79. 21. Young Hwi Yoon, “The Spread of Antislavery Sentiment through Proslavery Tracts in the Transatlantic Evangelical Community, 1740s-1770s,” Church History 81 (June 2012), 353–55; Jon S. Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an AfroMoravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 55, 80–84, 125–26, 153–55, 178–217. 22. Philip D. Morgan, “Slave Life in Piedmont Virginia, 1720–1800,” in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 472–73; “Journal of Col. James Gordon,” WMQ, 1st Series, 11 (1902–1903), 199, 205 and 12 (1903–1904), 9; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 426–27. 23. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 187–93; Samuel Davies to the Rev. Mr. F———, February 7, 1757, in Letters from the Rev. Samuel Davies, 2nd ed. (London, 1757), 30–31; Davies to John Wesley, January 28, 1757, in The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley (London: Epworth Press, 1938), 194–95; Davies to Joseph Bellamy, February 23, 1757, reprinted in Evangelical and Literary Magazine and Missionary Chronicle (November 1823), 568–69; Wesley M. Gewehr, The Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740–1790 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1930), 96; Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 183–87. 24. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 426–27; Edwin Conway to Thomas Dawson, March 3, 1758, William Dawson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 25. John Wright to the Publisher, August 18, 1755, in “Attempts to Evangelize the Negroe-slaves in Virginia and Carolina, from 1747 to 1755,” reprinted in Evangelical and Literary Magazine and Missionary Chronicle (October 1821), 551; Wright to Joseph Bellamy, November 7, 1761, Joseph Bellamy Papers, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia.



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26. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 162–72. See also Chapter 12. 27. James Ireland, The Life of the Reverend James Ireland (1819, reprint Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2002), 114–15, 141; Virginia Gazette, February 20, 1772; William Lee to Cary Wilkinson, May 22, 1771, Lee Family Papers, Virginia Historical Society; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 425–26. 28. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 4. 29. James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narrative of Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, Written by Himself (Newport, RI, 1774),16–17; Lambert, “‘I Saw the Book Talk,’” 17–18, 20; Milton C. Sernett, ed., Afro-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 27. 30. Lambert, “‘I Saw the Book Talk,’” 19; Margaret W. Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 100; Gronniosaw, A Narrative of Remarkable Particulars, 25. 31. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 231–39; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 591–92. 32. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 83–85, 230–31, 243–44, 286–88; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 616–17, 640–45. 33. Whitefield, Sermons on Important Subjects (London, 1825), 573; James Blair to Bishop Gibson, May 14, 1731, Governor William Gooch to Bishop Gibson, May 28, 1731, Fulham Palace Papers, Lambeth Palace Library; Pennsylvania Gazette, January 18, 1770; Pennsylvania Gazette, November 24, 1772; Lambert, “‘I Saw the Book Talk,’” 22. 34. Rev. Francis Le Jau to SPG, February 1/10, 1710/11, quoted in Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 648; “Journal of the Council of Safety,” July 13–18, 1774, South Carolina Historical Society, Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, vol. II (Charleston, SC: S. J. Courtenay & Co., 1858), 70–71; David E. Stannard, “Time and the Millennium: On the Religious Experience of the American Slave,” Prospects 2 (October 1977), 349–71. 35. Diary of Daniel Rogers, April 30, 1743; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 213.

Chapter 10

“A Salvation from Heaven” The Awakening in the Seven Years’ War, 1755–17631

On April 5, 1757, Major General John Campbell, the Earl of Loudon, and his second-in-command, Major General James Abercrombie, along with other officers, settled into their reserved seats at Philadelphia’s Christ Church to hear Rev. William Smith, Anglican parson and first provost of the College of Philadelphia, deliver a sermon on a day of fasting and humiliation. Smith took as his theme that a greater Britain was engaged in a holy war to extirpate Catholicism from the New World. “I pronounce it before Men and Angels that from the days of our Alfreds, our Edwards and our Henries downwards, the British sword was never unsheathed in a more glorious or more divine cause than at present. . . .” Smith’s theme was a very familiar one, striking notes repeatedly heard in many fast day and Thanksgiving Day sermons raining down from pulpits throughout the colonies during the course of the French and Indian War: the renewal of patriotic sentiment, the perfidiousness of the French and their Indian cohorts, and the dire consequences of potential French victory. But it was Smith’s casting of the war as a religious one that separates the “French and Indian War” apart from earlier colonial wars, and he was by no means unique in doing so. The scope of the conflict, which became global by 1757, led to American preachers perceiving it acutely in apocalyptic and millenarian terms, much as the New Lights had the late revivals, and so the Seven Years’ War transformed into one much more overtly religious in scope—at least as far as colonial British-Americans were concerned.2 Smith believed it necessary to shake his audience, particularly Loudon and Ambercrombie, out of the traditional manner of thinking about waging an imperial war against France on the American periphery. He was not alone, as most northern clergymen saw good reason to be alarmed. The previous year proved to be a doleful one, as British and Anglo-American 225

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forces suffered a series of humiliations at the hands of the French and their Indian allies. The first year of the Seven Years’ War saw the French destruction of Forts Bull and Oswego on Lake Ontario. French-allied Indian raids upon Anglo-American frontier settlements in Pennsylvania and Virginia continued virtually unanswered, prompting the replacement of Gov. William Shirley of Massachusetts with Loudon as supreme commander of the North American theater. Loudon devised an ambitious plan to invade Canada via the St. Lawrence River to seize Québec in late summer, but he was overruled by William Pitt, who thought it more prudent to take Fort Louisbourg on the tip of Cape Breton Island first. Plans were pushed back into the following year, and seeming British lethargy, combined with French aggressiveness, led to waning optimism of the prospect of victory.3 While the Seven Years’ War cannot strictly be called a war of religion akin to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, the “French and Indian War”—as the North American theater is known—was framed by nearly all Protestant clergymen in overtly religious terms. Just as the New Lights and other prorevivalists thought they were witnessing the beginning of the final preparatory phase of the millennial reign of the saints before Jesus Christ’s second coming. The apocalyptic rhetoric of the more radical New Lights of the 1740s transformed easily in the 1750s into more widely utilized, unprecedentedly bellicose expressions of providentialism that, even as it extolled the glories of the British Empire, also underscored a growing sense of Protestant American exceptionalism. This built bridges spanning the rifts that had opened between prorevivalist and antirevivalist factions in the previous decade. Among evangelicals, the bright promise of the Awakening was succeeded in the latter half of the 1750s by the desperate sense that the tendency of history had suddenly shifted downward. Arminianism and rationalism seemed to be growing increasingly fashionable, and, as both cause and consequence of this intellectual change, “vices of all sorts” abounded. In this time of “terrible darkness,” made all the darker by the French and Indian War, pious Americans began to ask if the Millennium promised by Edwards would ever arrive.  “THE CHURCH OF ROME . . . ENTIRELY POSSESSED BY SATAN” While British patriotism encouraged a general hatred of the French throughout the colonial period, anti-Catholicism was a more powerful sentiment shared by the vast majority of Anglo-Americans. The anti-Catholicism that became so ubiquitous a feature of the French and Indian War was itself an



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outgrowth of a commonplace prejudice among the large majority of British America’s Protestants, the roots of which go back to Reformation-era England. The Catholic Church, as Martin Luther made abundantly clear in his translation of the New Testament, was the seat of the Antichrist, the Whore of Babylon lounging luxuriantly on Rome’s seven hills. Catholic clergy kept their adherents shrouded in ignorance and unthinking belief in idolatrous superstitions, and Catholic governments used these to control the people absolutely. Opposed to all that was good and true in the world, Catholicism was the embodiment of satanic evil, and Europe’s and Anglo-America’s Protestants believed that—sooner or later—it would fall. Spain and France were its great powers in Europe, and every conflict between Britain and the Bourbon powers carried an inherently apocalyptic religious component.4 Ostensibly, the primary objective for the colonization of the Americas was the Christianization of the “heathen” native populations, and for those few English clergymen who took this goal seriously, it was less about saving Indian souls and more about preventing the Catholics from gaining more converts. The Spanish had been working fairly assiduously at native conversion for over a century before the English planted their first North American colonies, and the French had made some inroads among the Northern Algonquians and Hurons by the 1630s. For New England Calvinists, missionary indolence invited disaster. John Eliot’s “praying town” experiment largely failed, but missionary efforts persisted unevenly throughout the 1600s and beyond. A significant lack of progress on this front led Solomon Stoddard to blame the simmering conflict with French-allied Wabanakis on the northern frontier on this signal failure. In his Question Whether God Is not Angry with the Country for Doing So Little towards the Conversion of the Indians? (1723), Stoddard likened the Indians to the Gentiles to whom the Apostle Paul took the Gospel, and that New England’s dereliction of its duty to proselytize to the Indians constituted one source of the region’s afflictions.5 “GOD is Angry with this Country, and has been these threescore years,” he declared in standard jeremiadic fashion, because, among other of the more usual reasons having to do with worldliness and materialism, “we have little care of the Heathen.” The French, on the other hand, “are diligent in Canada, and elsewhere, to gospellize [sic] them. . . . And is it not a Shame to us to be backward to promote the true Religion?” Unless a reinvigorated effort to evangelize them is not undertaken, Stoddard predicted, “they [will] continue in their Heathenism,” and thus “be occasion of Contention.” “[T]hey will be apt to fall in with the Papists . . . run to Arms, and avenge themselves by making War. But if they be brought to Religion, then there will be Hopes of a Durable Peace.” In New England, the fear that French Catholics might convert Anglo-American Protestants was nonexistent, apart from the rare examples of the conversion of white captives of the Wabanakis or the Iroquois, but the

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prospect of hoards of Catholic Indians descending upon them at any moment proved a useful incentive to revitalize waning piety and nationalistic fervor.6 Popular anti-Catholicism was most prevalent in the New England colonies, and its epicenter was Boston, which riotously observed Guy Fawkes’s Day (November 5) as “Pope’s Day.” Elaborate effigies of the Pope and the Devil would be constructed, often by competing teams from the “North End” and the “South End,” which were then paraded through the streets to a “stage” erected on or near the Common, where they were then lit ablaze amidst revelry, alcoholic excess, and not a little violence among members of the two sides, who clashed over whose effigies were more lifelike or artfully made. Along the way, revelers exacted monetary tribute from the wealthy and prosperous, whose homes were vandalized if the residents had been deemed too parsimonious—a precursor of modern Halloween festivities. Aside from regular condemnations of Catholicism and “Popery” issuing from Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Baptist pulpits, popular anti-Catholicism received periodic reinforcement from the press, especially the newspapers, which breathlessly reported goings-on in Spain, France, Italy, and elsewhere that claimed to reveal Catholic plots against Protestants in various forms.7 Beginning in the early 1700s, the Boston News-Letter, the Boston Gazette, the New-England Weekly Journal, and a few other short-lived newspapers kept New Englanders abreast of papist machinations in Europe and America throughout the eighteenth century, feeding anti-Catholic prejudices in general and anti-French sentiments in particular. The editors showed little or no concern for the veracity of the stories they reprinted from English papers or excerpted from private letters, often repeating old canards in updated settings. The News-Letter proved to be the most overtly religious in its journalistic emphasis, with hardly an issue coming off the press that did not feature at least one juicy story about clownish or lascivious priests, fraudulent exorcisms and miracles, the plights of Protestants suffering persecution in France and Poland, and the Church’s problems with schismatic movements such as the Jansenists. The publication of such accounts were intended less to keep readers informed of European affairs, and more to highlight the threat posed by Catholics in New France, particularly the Jesuits, who were presumed to be taking over every aspect of Catholic religious and political life. The relative success that Jesuit missionaries enjoyed in converting Canada’s Indians to Catholic Christianity thus became all the more dangerous, given New France’s close proximity to New England.8 Appearing as they did during a period of recurrent warfare between Britain and France, the frequency of stories about the incipient French and Spanish Catholic threats ebbed and flowed with the tides of war and peace. During the War of the Spanish Succession, known in the British colonies as Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), and the War of the Austrian Succession, known



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as King George’s War (1744–1748), the Boston News-Letter intensified its coverage of Spanish and French affairs in connection with its reporting on Spanish-allied and French-allied Indian attacks throughout the backcountry. In this respect, the Boston News-Letter is no different from the several other major newspapers in the colonies printed at the time, which likewise devoted ample space to reportage on the war, and to a significant degree it cannot be argued that the newspapers cast the wars in starkly religious terms, however anti-Catholic they otherwise tended to be. Nevertheless, religious overtones permeate newspaper stories of the war’s progress, and New England’s readers needed little reinforcement to perceive the flow of events as conforming to a timeline that lay hidden in the Book of Revelation. They had their Congregational clergy for that. The onset of evangelical revivalism in the mid-1730s, intensified by the arrival of George Whitefield for his preaching tour of the colonies in 1739, shifted the tone of anti-Catholic newspaper coverage, at times sharpening the sense of urgency and existential danger while at others heightening the sense of hope that the final victory of Protestantism was near at hand. Jonathan Edwards, among the first to identify a new turn in Protestant evangelical revivalism, remarked that during a trip to New York City in the winter of 1722–1723, “If I heard the least hint of anything that happened in any part of the world, that appeared to me, in some respect or other, to have a favorable aspect on the interest of Christ’s kingdom, my soul eagerly catched at it; and it would much animate and refresh me.” Cotton Mather, who built an extensive correspondence network in Britain and the Continent, strongly advocated the public reporting of Catholic persecution of Protestants as goads to energizing a greater New England Protestant piety and devotion. “The Church of Rome, with the Man of Sin at the Head of it, entirely possessed by Satan, is resolved upon the Extermination of the Christians upon Earth, who come not into a Combination with her, in her Detestable Idolatries,” he warned in a 1726 treatise on the subject, exhorting “That the Glorious GOD of our Life . . . Revive Decay’d PIETY among [New Englanders]; and that his Quickening Spirit would not withdraw any further from them.”9 The revivals of the 1730s and 1740s thus became that spiritual quickening that Mather prayed for near the end of his life, and for which Edwards earnestly acted as midwife. Apocalyptic anti-Catholicism was a major feature of the First Great Awakening, as radical prorevivalists and antirevivalists accused one another of being “Jesuitical” or of being knowing or unwitting agents of the Antichrist or the pope, the two being interchangeable in the eighteenth-century Protestant mind. A dualistic with-me or against-me mentality made it extremely difficult for moderate supporters and critics of the revivals to concede any middle ground. However, once the threat of French expansion into British-claimed territory in the trans-Appalachian West

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became much more palpable in the early 1750s, mutual charges of secret Catholicism vanished almost entirely from the heated debate over revivalism. New Lights and Old Lights easily put aside their smaller differences to warn against the prospect of the forced Catholicization of British America should the French prove victorious. The small minority of Catholic Anglo-Americans consequently found themselves in a most uncomfortable predicament: challenged to prove a loyalty deemed inherently suspect by their adherence to the Catholic Church, and doing so only with enormous difficulty. By far the largest concentration of Catholics in eighteenth-century British America lived in Maryland. Founded in 1634 as a refuge for English Catholics escaping sociopolitical disability in England, Maryland’s proprietary leaders realized early on that they would have to institute a policy of religious toleration in light of the colony’s being majority Protestant. A series of conflicts with the Puritan-dominated majority in the seventeenth century overturned proprietary rule by the Calvert family in 1650, which was restored five years later and then revoked in the Glorious Revolution in 1689. Only when Benedict Calvert converted to Anglicanism in 1715 did the crown restore the Calvert family’s proprietary rights, and even though the Calverts saw to it that an act in 1718 required all colonial officeholders to swear an oath of loyalty to the newly crowned Hanoverian monarchs of Great Britain, the colony’s Catholics lived in the shadow of widespread suspicion of disloyalty. The accession of George II to the throne elicited a fawning letter of congratulations from his “most dutiful Subjects[,] the Roman Catholic inhabitants” of Maryland in 1727. Anxious to dispel rumors of being “Jacobite” supporters of a second Stuart Restoration, the letter urged the king to recall the “steady and constant adherence” to the British monarchy they had always exhibited, and implored him to grant them “some share in that tender Concern Your Maty has been so graciously pleased to express for all your Subjects.”10 Benedict Calvert’s conversion went far toward drawing down open conflict between the colony’s Protestants and Catholics, but the large Protestant majority in the provincial assembly steadily whittled away at proprietary power and privilege over the next twenty years. This most likely had more to do with the assembly’s jealousy of the governor’s power—a dynamic often found in eighteenth-century colonial politics—and at the everyday level tensions between Protestants and Catholics subsided considerably by midcentury, as evidenced by increasing social, political, and economic cooperation between the two groups. However, even if Maryland’s Protestants grew more comfortable with papists in their midst, they remained vigilant against Stuart plots to regain the British throne abroad. In 1729 the Maryland Gazette reported that James Edward Stuart, the “Old Pretender,” received a “crown of Gold enriched with very fine Diamonds” from Pope Benedict XIII in



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Rome. Although no further comment was given, none was really necessary. Protestant readers would have taken this as Rome’s further endorsement of a future Stuart restoration should it occur. When Charles Calvert, the 5th Baron Baltimore, arrived from Britain in 1732 as the new governor, Maryland’s Catholics welcomed him in writing with effusive language underscoring their loyalty and devotion to the king and “his Royal family,” as well as to “y[ou]r L[ordship’]s Government,” which they hoped would earn them his “favourable countenance & protection.” For the most part it did, but that did not stop the colony’s newspapers from printing and reprinting sustained attacks upon Catholicism in general, and upon Maryland’s Catholics in particular.11 Readers of the Gazette in the 1750s learned that the rise in tensions between Britain and France might be leading the colony’s Catholics to side with their Gallic coreligionists. Alongside accounts of vote rigging in elections intended to echo papist political manipulation in Europe, the newspaper also reported that along the frontier Catholic landowners and tenant farmers cultivated friendly relations with hostile Indians, winking at violence perpetrated against Protestant neighbors. Protestants read echoing rumors that slaves were being encouraged to revolt against Protestant masters. The assembly began to hear repeated calls for the complete disfranchisement of the colony’s Catholics, prompted in part by an anonymous piece in the Gazette that suggested the confiscation of their lands as had been done in Ireland. Instead, the assembly proposed the imposition of a revised property tax scheme in 1756 that—in order to shore up frontier defenses—forced Catholic landowners to pay double by dint of being Catholic. Charles Carroll of Carrolton later characterized the bill as “subversive of the foundations of the Maryland constitution,” but in the virulent atmosphere of invigorated anti-Catholic hatred attending the start of the war, the bill passed with ease. A petition submitted to the king after the bill won passage reminded him that in spite of Catholic disfranchisement and “great hardships” throughout most of the century, they insisted that nevertheless they “e[n]joy[ed] peace & quiet” with their Protestant neighbors. While Maryland was unique in its comparatively high Catholic population, its popular and official antiCatholicism was as ubiquitous as elsewhere throughout the colonies, and featured only a slightly sharper edge.12 “OUR ENEMIES MAY YET TRIUMPH OVER US” The outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1740 once again pitted Europe’s Catholic and Protestant powers against each other, though the conflict between Britain and Spain had begun a year earlier after Capt. Robert Jenkins claimed that his merchant vessel, the Rebecca, had been

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illegally boarded off the Florida coast by a Spanish warship, the captain of which allegedly severed Jenkins’s ear with his sword as punishment for defiance—the last in a series of straws swiftly bringing a declaration of war. The Anglo-French facet of the war expressed itself in America—as it always had—in proxy warfare between Indian tribes allied to the main combatants, but in 1745 the New England governments resolved to strike a blow against New France by seizing the fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. An outpouring of popular enthusiasm buoyed the endeavor.13 Jonathan Edwards shared this enthusiasm, and now looked upon the revivals of the period 1734–1744 as having even greater import than he had thought, being obviously preparatory to a campaign to destroy French power in America. In a letter written most likely to Rev. John McLaurin of Glasgow, Scotland, in November 1745, Edwards recounted the successful capture of Louisbourg as one “of the late wonderful works of God in this part of the world.” Noting proudly that “about twenty of my parishioners” from Northampton participated in the siege and capture of the fortress, he credited their victory to the fact that “There was very discernibly an extraordinary spirit of prayer given the people of God in New England, with respect to this undertaking, more than in any public affair within my remembrance.” The officers and soldiers were assured of their success, Edwards reasoned, because they “seemed . . . to commit themselves to God in the undertaking, to resign their lives to his disposal, and trust in him.” Believing that this was only the beginning of a series of Anglo-American victories against the French and their Indian allies, Edwards exulted that “we live in an age, wherein divine wonders are to be expected; and a dispensation wherein God has so apparently manifested himself, that it appears to me it ought not to be concealed, but to be declared in the world amongst his people, to his praise.”14 He followed this up with a work tying Anglo-American militarism against France to a planned “Concert of Prayer,” An Humble Attempt to Promote an Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People thro’ the World . . . for the Revival of Religion, and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth, Pursuant to Scripture Promise and Prophecies Concerning the Last Time (1747), as giving proof that the millennial dawn was near at hand. The Concert of Prayer, a planned effort for a series of simultaneous, international appeals to God, was both a necessary precursor to the old Protestant hope for a complete Christian union, as well as an important sign of the imminent establishment of the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth through the saints. The ensuing age would be one of absolute peace, harmony, and unity through the triumph of global Christianity, “an event unspeakably happy and glorious.” The victory at Louisbourg seemed another step toward that blessed future, and when it was handed back to France in the Treaty of Aixla-Chapelle in 1748, New Englanders felt betrayed. Edwards urged patience



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and continued promoting the Concert of Prayer, and New England settled back into its routines, awaiting the next round.15 As the storm clouds of war gathered on the horizon in the early 1750s, anti-Catholicism reached new heights of virulence, as Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Anglican clergymen all warned their flocks about the existential threat posed by the French papists to the north, while not a few laymen likewise raised the alarm. In the wake of George Washington’s debacle at Jumonville’s Glen, Benjamin Jones of Virginia penned an exhortation to his fellow colonists in Pennsylvania that drips with anti-Catholic militancy and Anglo-American exceptionalism. “‘Tis the joint and common Cause of every Englishman on the Continent [to] Warn them of their Danger; press them to Unite, come forth and join us, their Neighbors, and fight like Men, for their Religion, Property, and Liberty,” he intoned, lest “they (and if not they, assuredly their Posterity) must be content to submit to a slavish, papal, tyrannical Yoke; become Beasts of Burden; their most excellent and pure Religion changed into the vilest Idolatry and Superstition.” Jones was hoping to rouse Pennsylvania’s leaders to join Virginia in waging the war, but to no avail. Not only were the enemies without, but possibly also within, as another author in the Pennsylvania Gazette urged the assembly to make proper appropriations for the militia on account of the “numerous, or rather, numberless, Enemies amongst us, many of them fed at our Tables, and nurs’d up in our Bosoms, as it were, who are ill-wishers to the Protestant Interest, and may, if they have an Opportunity, rise to such a height in Rebellion, that neither Church discipline, nor the civil Law, quash them.”16 As Britain and its colonies geared up for yet another round in the seemingly endless scuffle with France, an earthquake shook New England on November 18, 1755, driving thousands of anxious people into the churches, just as the 1727 Lynn End quake had done. The Cape Ann Earthquake toppled chimneys, weakened building foundations, brought down stone walls, disrupted tidal patterns, and disgorged sand from gaping cracks in the ground. This, when connected to the renewal of Anglo-French hostilities that same year, sent American ministers into feverishly interpreting events in terms of the Books of Daniel and Revelation. The earthquake took on a greater, more ominous significance when clerics learned that even as tremors rattled New England, other quakes devastated the Portuguese capital of Lisbon and parts of Peru and Africa. Voltaire questioned the beneficence—indeed the possible nonexistence—of God in light of the Lisbon disaster, and American New Light ministers recognized the signs of God’s wrath and upcoming judgment of humanity. Charles Chauncy, offering a more hopeful interpretation, reminded his listeners that “it was by earthquakes that God sometimes display’d his power in favour of [the Israelites], to defend and protect them.” Comparing the people of New England to the ancient Hebrews, Chauncy

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explained that earthquakes “give proof of the presence of God with his servants to make way for their salvation.” In a later sermon, The Earth Delivered from the Curse, he interpreted the various portents—particularly the earthquakes—as evidence that God would soon miraculously bring about a new Heaven and a new Earth. Jonathan Mayhew of Massachusetts had been more effusive in his printed sermons, warning that the tremors announced the onset of the “dissolution of all things” prior to the Last Judgment, though he appeared to be unsure as to whether the Apocalypse was truly imminent or not.17 Alongside the portents in the skies and underfoot, the outbreak of war proved more troubling, and filled people with apocalyptic expectation. This latest clash between Britain and France became a stage upon which Americans witnessed a climactic battle for their religious posterity. Mather Byles, Sr. of Boston, in his sermon about the recent earthquake, noted that according to Revelation 16:17 earthquakes would accompany the destruction of the Antichrist, which his auditors equated with the Catholic Church generally, as well as the French in Canada. It comes as no surprise that eighteenth-century Protestants perceived devils hiding underneath every Catholic priest’s vestments, and saw the pope as being Satan’s proxy on Earth, but Americans had fought the French before, and at first there seems little or nothing to distinguish this conflict from those that preceded it. But the Seven Years’ War, though much of it was fought on American soil, nonetheless was a world war fought in European and Asian theaters involving all of the leading European powers—one that would determine which major European power would dominate North America and control trade to and from Africa and Asia, as well as achieve greater power status in Europe. The sheer scope of the conflict lent it an apocalyptic flavor not lost on the colonial American population, for in addition to the geopolitical ramifications, the war’s religious significance occupied a prominent place in the colonial American consciousness.18 Hardly had the gun smoke cleared and the blood absorbed by the soil of Jumonville’s Glen, on the Virginia-Pennsylvania frontier where this new imperial war began, than Jonathan Mayhew predicted in his 1754 election sermon that any British refusal to defend its territorial claims to the Ohio Valley would presage a gradual French absorption of the Atlantic colonies, and the transformation of “liberty, property, religion, happiness . . . into slavery, poverty, superstition, [and] wretchedness.” Philip Reading’s 1755 sermon to his Presbyterian congregation in Philadelphia portrayed AngloAmerica as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecies, and graphically predicted a grim apocalyptic future should the French win the war: “Do I see this goodly Land, so long the Seat of blooming Peace and Plenty, ravaged by the Sons of Rapine and Violence? Do I behold our fair Streets trod by the lordly Feet



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of French Conquerors . . . ?” Once war had been officially declared, John Mellen of Massachusetts detailed the horrible consequences of potential Anglo-American defeat, most notably the curtailment of Anglo-American Protestantism’s sacred mission: “Our enemies may yet triumph over us, and the gospel taken from us, instead of being by us transmitted to other nations.” Preaching to New England provincial militias gathered in Albany, New York, for an offensive thrust toward Fort Carillon in 1755, the Dutch Reformed minister Theodorus Frelinghuysen identified the Pope Benedict XIV as the Antichrist, the Canadian French as his agents in America, and Protestant Americans living in the British colonies as God’s chosen people charged with either converting or subduing their aggressive Catholic neighbors.19 Other ministers likewise foretold the sinking of a formerly pristine American Protestant Christianity into Catholic iniquity and superstition by recalling the horrors of the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation. In rallying the Middleborough, Massachusetts, militia, Sylvanus Conant declared that “our Enemies in the present bloody Controversy are no less Enemies to God, to Religion, Liberty, and the pure Worship of the Gospel than to us.” In chastising the Pennsylvania Quakers for their pacifism, Samuel Finley reminded his Philadelphia auditors that failure to take up the sword against the “spiritual Babylon” would precipitate the Day of Doom, while AngloAmerican victory would elicit a multitude of blessings. Aaron Burr, Sr. of New Jersey hopefully predicted that “the Destruction of Antichrist, and the End of this Night of Popish Darkness, is near at hand,” and Samuel Davies of Virginia more enthusiastically speculated that “the present war is the commencement of this grand decisive conflict between the Lamb and the beast, i.e. between the protestant and the popish powers.” The Seven Years’ War thus became a recapitulation of the Thirty Years’ War on American soil, and a sign of the ever-approaching Millennium.20 In New England and the Middle Colonies, attracting recruits for the militia in 1755–1756 was not very difficult. New France lay just over the northern and western horizons, as did the powerful Iroquois Six Nations, whose attachment to the British was never highly trusted. When the British government essentially gave blank checks to the colonial governments to finance the supplying and payment of militia salaries, young and middle-aged men turned out in impressive numbers to serve. While fighting against Catholicism to secure Protestant Anglo-America’s future was some inducement, the fiduciary lure proved all the more enticing, particularly when officers were additionally supplied with “billeting money” to pay for lodging in inns and taverns as they traveled to and from the front lines. Rev. Samuel Bird of Dorchester, Massachusetts, in casting the war as the first stage of a crusade against Catholicism in 1759, scorned those militiamen who “instead

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of serving their country, mean nothing but to serve themselves.” The early French victories inspired clergymen, both New Light and Old Light, to deliver fresh jeremiads designed to send men to enlist in the militias, lest the enemies of God conquer the only place in the world where Protestantism flourished unrestrained.21 Back in Pennsylvania, a volunteer militia regiment comprised largely of Scots-Irish Presbyterians, German and Swiss Baptists (and possibly a few Catholics) from the backcountry, arose out of frustration with the Quaker assembly’s pacifism. The 60th Regiment, calling itself the “Royal Americans,” also attracted troops from New York, Virginia, and North Carolina, often employing clergymen as recruiters rather than officers. As a result, a higher proportion of the 60th was motivated by religious concerns than by British patriotism or by the lure of good pay. While elsewhere in the colonies indentured servants had to have permission from masters in order to serve, the Royal Americans took in runaway servants without asking questions. It was also unusual in that it was one of the few militia units to be consistently supplied with a chaplain, who kept the soldiers’ minds fixed upon an oath to defend true religion from the forces of Catholicism and the Antichrist.22 While a majority of American colonists began to see the war through religious—in some areas even apocalyptic—lenses, such was never the case with the British or colonial governments. As far as they were concerned, the war erupted over long-standing territorial and economic disputes, but ordinary American colonists thought of themselves in ways that were alien to their counterparts in the mother country. The New England colonies in particular had been founded on the premise that the religious among the first generation had emigrated from a religiously wayward England and that they were on a divine mission to usher in the Millennium. That sense of providential destiny persisted well into the 1700s, even if the old Puritanism had receded into dim memory. Throughout the rest of British America, the conceit that Protestantism would one day triumph over Catholicism constitutes a kind of background static within religious rhetoric both oral and printed. Protestantism became equated with British identity, and in some quarters it was not enough to not be Catholic. One example is the Society of Friends, who looked for the Millennium within their own hearts and not through human activity. The Quakers’ refusal in the Pennsylvania Assembly to vote appropriations for the war led to blistering charges of perfidy and cowardice from Presbyterian and Congregationalist ministers. Chauncy Graham of New York, in a typical example of anti-Quaker sentiment, argued that Quakerism “is a Rebellion against God, Disloyalty to our King, and murder to his truest and best Subjects.” Any sort of apathy or conscience-bound neutrality was thus greeted with contempt and charges of abetting the Antichrist.23



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Jonathan Mayhew’s election sermon for 1754, with the drumbeat of war beginning to sound in the distance, informed Massachusetts’ leaders that their failure to face the looming threat of expansionist French Catholicism courted disaster. Adopting the guise of a prophet, Mayhew in his wartime sermons often described the barren landscapes of a thoroughly Catholic North America: “Do I see Christianity banished for popery? The Bible for the massbook? The oracles of truth, for fabulous legends? Do I see sacred Edifices erected here to honour the true God, and his Son, on the ruins of pagan superstition and idolatry; erected here, where Satan’s seat was[?]” John Lowell of Connecticut, in a sermon delivered to a mixed gathering of British Redcoats and colonial militia, exhorted the soldiers to bear in mind the religious duty of every Briton to confront and defeat Catholic despotism and superstition: “Surely every Englishman, every heart subject of King George, every true Protestant, should do all in his Power to prevent such Tyranny, Superstition and Absurdity gaining Ground in our Nations, or making any further Progress in the World.” Philip Reading was no less adamant in his expansion upon this standard trope, loading his rhetoric with vividly pointed biblical allusions. “Where [Catholics] wield the Scepter, they govern with a Rod of Iron: Where they have Authority to chastise, they inflict Chastisements with a Knot of Scorpions.”24 Sermon after sermon delivered in the first two years of the war, most of them jeremiadic in tone, offered the direst predictions of what would befall American Protestantism in the wake of a French victory. Solomon Williams believed that “We have no Reason to expect our Churches will meet a kinder Fate than the Protestant Churches in France, all Ruined and Demolished; the Members of them, either cruelly Destroyed, or forced into Gallies or Nunneries, the Ministers Shot and Hanged, and Massacred without Mercy, as obstinate Hereticks.” France, he reminded his audience, “has had a great Share in the Persecutions of the Church of Christ, from the Year 1124.” Thomas Barton of Philadelphia, upon hearing the news of Gen. Edward Braddock’s ill-fated attempt to take Fort Duquesne, predicted that the negligence of God’s admonitions and a failure of British-American resolve would guarantee defeat, and “evils unnumbered” would ensue. Reminding his audience that the British government guaranteed to its citizens fundamental rights, the “horrid Prospect” of French victory meant that America would be “obliged to exchange our holy Protestant Religion for Popish Error and Delusion. . . . All freedom of debate, speech, and writing will be taken from us.” In Newport, Connecticut, Jonathan Ellis told his audience that in the present war “the Cause is Christ’s,” recounting the historical crimes of the Catholic Church in its campaigns to eradicate Protestantism. Comparing the New England “city on a hill” to St. Augustine’s City of God, Ellis summarized the papal imperative: “The holy City must be trodden under Foot. It is Jesus whom they persecute.”25

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The war in America, having begun so inauspiciously for the British and Anglo-Americans, proceeded nearly disastrously. Lord Loudoun was baffled by colonial resistance to his demands for quartering the Redcoats, as well as requests for money and supplies, and militia officers’ reluctance to engage in joint operations against the French with other colonial forces. The southernmost colonies of Georgia and the Carolinas offered nothing more than moral support and demands that Redcoats be stationed on their western and southern borders against the Cherokees and the Spanish, which were the more immediate threats. Maryland, for its part, was so mired in internal political squabbles that it scarcely noticed that a war for British America’s survival had begun, content—like its neighbor, Delaware—to let the Royal Navy continue defending its shores. Diplomatic overtures to the Indian nations outside the orbit of the Iroquois Six Nations tended to be ill-informed, clumsy, and insincere regarding promises of sufficient supplies and respect for their sovereignty. Thus, poor military planning, inadequate funding, and an embarrassing lack of coordination plagued the Anglo-American war effort from the start, in spite of the fact that northern Calvinists kept reminding their audiences that the fate of Protestantism itself hung in the balance.26 The Calvinism of the New Lights suffuses the militant, yet also selfaccusatory language thundering from pulpits throughout the colonies. God afflicts his chosen people, thus the humiliations of 1754 and 1755. Chauncy Graham averred that the French and Indian frontier raids in western Pennsylvania were the fault of unrepentant sinners in their midst, and a marked lack of commitment to converting Indians to Christianity. Nathaniel Potter identified the source of New England’s miseries as their “Disregard of God and Religion,” that they permitted “Sin and Prophaness—Wantoness and Luxury—Debauchery and Injustice” to flourish. Philip Reading, the most lurid sermon writer of the war years, told his audiences about how Catholic soldiers “wanton in the Death of young Infants” and “cut the Flesh of Men off alive.” Amos Adams of Massachusetts described the horrors of war to Gov. William Shirley and the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company of Boston, warning them that should they and British arms fail, they can expect to witness “our Wives and Daughters ravished, our young Men slain in Battle, our Infant-Offspring dashed in pieces, our Houses laid in Ashes.” William Hobby, a fervent supporter of George Whitefield’s American tours, offered what would be the universal lament of once free British-Americans: “Farewell, Religion; the Sun sets upon the Sanctuary; which is left dark and desolate! Farewell, ye Ministers of Christ, whose Mouths must now be stopped. . . . O how the Land mourns! and the Inhabitants of it made Sacrifices in it, to Popish cruelty.”27 Pious colonial militiamen rated themselves well above the British soldiers of the regular army when they witnessed the impious attitudes and behavior



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of the Redcoats. While salty language and crude manners was not unexpected from the common troopers, the officers, according to some American observers, did not comport themselves very much better. Not only was there unabashed profanity, drunkenness, and idleness, but the British also did not see any reason not to work on Sundays, which scandalized Caleb Rea, who worried that such rampant immorality jeopardized their chances for victory. Writing in his journal in 1758 during the siege of Fort Carillon (Fort Ticonderoga), Rea averred, regarding the loss of Fort William Henry the previous year, “as a moral cause I can’t but charge our defeat on this sin, which so prevails, even among our chief commanders.” “[S]ad! Sad!” he concluded, “to see how the Sabbath is profaned in this camp!” Nevertheless, there were a few faithful officers in the regiments, as Rea noted with evident relief. Nevertheless, the Regulars looked upon their effort as one of advancing the colonization of North America and of frustrating French and Spanish imperial ambitions, and not as prosecuting a war of religion. However, American perceptions of the war cannot be understood fully without recognizing the high degree to which providentialism factored into their thinking about the French and Indian War.28 Joseph Bellamy harbored no doubt of Anglo-America’s ultimate victory in the war, reminding his audience that the final vindication of God’s elect in the absolute destruction of the Antichrist had been foretold in the Book of Revelation. In The Millenium (1758), Bellamy recounted “the whole Series of these divine Predictions, from the beginning of the World” as “cause for consolation to all the people of God.” He engaged in a biblical arithmetic derived largely from the Book of Daniel to prove that the beginning of the Millennium was imminent, carefully avoiding the temptation to use his calculations to predict a specific year—though heavily implying that it would be very soon. In rhetoric clearly designed to relate to current events, Bellamy exulted, “Things have been ripening these five or six Thousand Years, and are now so nearly every Way prepared for God.” Take heart, he encouraged his listeners, and avoid Satan’s inducements to “turn aside to earthly Pursuits, or to sink down in unmanly Discouragements, or to give Way to Sloth and Effeminacy,” for “the glorious Day is coming on.” Prevail in your personal morals, and the millennial dawn will arise from Boston, Bellamy seemed clearly to be saying. The flow of events immediately after 1758 seemed to justify his confidence.29 “HEAVEN APPARENTLY FIGHTS FOR US” Col. Israel Williams of Massachusetts wrote to a fellow officer in 1759 that “In all . . . things the hand of Heaven is very visible . . . if it be for the glory

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of God’s name, he will make your arms victorious.” American colonists, far more than their counterparts on the home islands of Britain, understood the world as operating according to an at times inscrutable divine plan. New Englanders were especially prone to a providentialist perception of events as momentous as the late war with France and its Indian allies, as evidenced by many references to it in soldiers’ and officers’ writings. When Capt. Samuel Jenks marched with the British army into Montreal in August 1760, he confided in his journal that “Heaven apparently fights for us, and therefore it is our duty to acknowledge it’s the hand of divine Providence, and not done by any force of ours, or arm of flesh.” Throughout the course of the war, American militiamen and their officers whose letters and journals have survived quote from or reference 134 sermons by military chaplains and civilian clergymen. Some diarists went so far as to complain about seeming clerical indolence, lack of zeal, and brevity in sermonizing, as when Capt. Jenks dimly noted that one sermon lasted only “eight minutes by my watch,” and that the men around him appeared discomfited by it.30 The turning of the war’s tide in 1759 with the seemingly miraculous capture of Québec, and the rapid collapse of Franco-American defenses that followed, intensified millenarian expectation among New Englanders especially. The avalanche of victories coming so quickly after four years of humiliation, anxiety, and dread seemed nothing less than the mighty hand of God sweeping before His chosen American people. The defeats underwent reinterpretation to become purifying chastisements, and the successes a demonstration of providential American exceptionalism. Samuel Cooper of Boston informed the Massachusetts General Court that “We have received a Salvation from Heaven, greater perhaps than any since the Foundation of the Country,” and Samuel Langdon’s celebratory sermon assured his New Hampshire congregation that “God has thus prov’d and humbled and convinc’d us that the race is not to the swift.” Eli Forbes of Massachusetts looked forward to a glorious future for America with the expulsion of the French: “Methinks I see Towns enlarged, Settlements increased and this howling wilderness become a fruitful Field, which the Lord hath blessed.”31 Jonathan Mayhew exhaustively analyzed the rapid unfolding of events as the trials and tribulations foretold in the Book of Revelation, announcing that the final purgation of Catholicism had begun in the New World and would inevitably spread to the Old World. He predicted the establishment of a powerful Protestant Anglo-American empire fulfilling John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a godly “city on a hill,” the imagery of which Mayhew borrowed for his 1760 thanksgiving sermon in Boston: “Methinks I see mighty cities rising on every hill, . . . laden with the produce of this, and every other country under heaven . . . And do I not there behold the savage nations, no longer our enemies, bowing the knee to Jesus Christ, and with joy



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confessing him to be ‘Lord, to the glory of God the Father!’” Underscoring the destiny of Anglo-Americans as God’s chosen people, Thomas Foxcroft of Massachusetts celebrated the capture of Montreal by recounting the incidents when providence similarly rescued Protestantism and Great Britain from defeat at the hands of Catholic enemies. Victory seemed to have confirmed America’s holy destiny.32 The war with France and its Indian allies did much to heal divisions that had erupted during the Awakening. The specter of an aggressively expanding Catholicism brought the Protestant denominations together in ways that offered a ray of hope that the apparent irreligion of the period from 1745 to 1755 that so deeply worried Jonathan Edwards had been merely a bump in the road and complete Protestant unity lay just ahead. The Presbyterian Synod of Philadelphia reconciled with its New Side brethren in a formal reunion in 1758, and most of the New England Separates who had not become Baptists settled back into Congregational churches. Old Lights and New Lights rediscovered some common ground, especially in their general agreement that the validation of American greatness necessitated internal social reform. People continued to decline under the weight of their sins and vices, and irreligion remained a serious concern for the evangelical clergy in particular. Joseph Bellamy, Edwards’s disciple, informed the Connecticut General Court in 1762 that America’s millennial potential could only be realized once piety, frugality, and industry became cardinal virtues again.33 There happened to be, however, another bogeyman still lurking in the shadows: the potential establishment of an Anglican bishop to preside over the colonies. While many Americans focused their attention upon France and the looming possibility of Catholic subjugation, dissenting clerics also kept watchful eyes on Thomas Secker, the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, who assumed the post in 1758. Already for fifty-seven years Anglican missionaries from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts had proliferated throughout the colonies, erecting catechetical schools for Indians and blacks, instituting poor relief, and overtly proselytizing in New England in ways that alarmed Congregationalists and Presbyterians there. Concerns about the real aims of the SPG spread to middle-colony Presbyterians, thus playing no small role in the healing of the schism, and SPG missionaries everywhere made no secret of their desire for an American bishop to galvanize Anglican discipline in the colonies. Archbishop Secker cautiously answered their requests by telling them that it was one of his dearest wishes to accomplish “the establishment of bishops of our church in America. This I have long had at heart. . . . Nor shall I abandon the scheme as long as I live.” He carefully noted, however, that “pushing it openly at present would certainly prove both fruitless and detrimental,” clearly cognizant that unity was imperative for Britain to defeat France.34

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Ezra Stiles of Connecticut, convinced of a manifest plot to establish an American episcopate, delivered a famous sermon, A Discourse on the Christian Union, at Boston in April 1760 calling for the union of the Congregational churches with other dissenting denominations to stave off a renewed infusion of Anglicanism by the SPG, as well as alerting his audience to the clandestine designs of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Presciently, he saw episcopacy as a grave threat not just to religious liberty, but to political liberty as well: “The right of conscience and private judgment is unalienable; and it is truly the interest of all mankind to unite themselves into one body, for the liberty, free exercise, and unmolested enjoyment of this right, especially in religion.” Whether the Church of England actually worked toward the establishment of an American episcopate remains a subject of debate, but it was widely believed in New England that it would happen. Stiles’s persuasive argument for a union of the dissenting churches met with an enthusiastic response and came to some fruition with the unfolding of later events. Reflecting in 1815 about the origins of the American Revolution in the 1760s, John Adams recalled that “the apprehension of Episcopacy contributed . . . as much as any other cause, to arouse the attention . . . of the common people.”35  The seeming decline in revivalism in the late 1740s in New England and the Middle Colonies has generally been interpreted as the end of the First Great Awakening. The renewal of war with France in 1744 and then again in 1754 appears to have distracted most American colonists from overtly spiritual concerns, followed closely by the political and economic arguments of the 1760s that eventually triggered the American Revolution in the 1770s. However, the energy of Protestant revivalism simply moved southward and toward the backcountry after 1750, while ingrained anti-French, anti-Catholic sentiments found sharper expression in millenarian and apocalyptic interpretations of the French and Indian War. Soon afterward, New Light rhetorical tropes began to appear in the increasingly acerbic colonial critiques of British policies concerning trade regulation and taxation. Evangelical Calvinism in its more antiauthoritarian forms thus dovetailed with the rising criticism of British rule in the 1760s, and augmented the language of liberty that suffused the American Revolution.

NOTES 1. Portions of this chapter were previously published as “‘The Promised Day of the Lord’: American Millennialism and Apocalypticism, 1735–1783,” in Richard



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Connors and Andrew Colin Gow, eds., Anglo-American Millennialism, from Milton to the Millerites (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 115–57. Reprinted with permission. 2. William Smith, The Christian Soldier’s Duty; the Lawfulness and Dignity of His Office; and the Importance of the Protestant Cause in the British Colonies, Stated and Explained (Philadelphia, 1757), 26–27. 3. Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1756 (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 135–57. 4. Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 6–8. 5. George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 117. 6. Solomon Stoddard, Question Whether God Is not Angry with the Country for Doing So Little towards the Conversion of the Indians? (Boston, 1723), 6, 10–11. 7. The Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay . . . , 21 vols. (Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., 1869–1922), 3:647; “Printshop Boys,” North End, South End Forever (Boston, 1768); Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 16–18, 180–197. 8. Thomas S. Kidd, “‘Let Hell and Rome Do Their Worst’: World News, AntiCatholicism, and International Protestantism in Early Eighteenth-Century Boston,” NEQ, 76 (June 2003), 270–74. The Jansenist Controversy involved the Church’s efforts to suppress a radical reformist sectarian campaign arising in the late 1600s; a movement that generated sympathy among American Protestants. See W. R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29–33. 9. Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” WJE, 16:797; Cotton Mather, Suspiria Vinctorum: Some Account of the Condition to which the Protestant Interest in the World is at this Day Reduced . . . (Boston, 1726), 3, 20–21. 10. “The humble Address of the Rom: Cathcs of the Province of Maryland” [1727], Maryland Province Archives, Special Collections Division, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Box 3, Folder 11. Robert Emmett Curran, Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 124–36, 142–49, 162–63. 11. Maryland Gazette, July 1–8, 1729; “The humble Address of ye Rom: Catholick Inhabitants of ye Province of Maryland” [1732], Maryland Province Archives, Special Collections Division, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Box 3, Folder 11. 12. Maryland Gazette, July 31, 1755; Charles Carroll of Carrolton to Charles Carroll of Annapolis, February 13, 1761, in Ronald Hoffman, Sally D. Mason et al., eds., Dear Papa, Dear Charley: The Peregrinations of a Revolutionary Aristocrat . . . , 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 1:195; “Address of ye Rom Cathks to ye Govr against ye 40,000£ Act as double taxing them . . .” [1756], Maryland Province Archives, Special Collections Division, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Box 3, Folder 11; Maura Jane Farrelly, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 211–13.

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13. Richard Harding, The Emergence of Britain’s Global Naval Supremacy: The War of 1739–1748 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010), chap. 1. 14. Jonathan Edwards to [John McLaurin], November 20, 1745, WJE, 5:449, 459; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 334. 15. Edwards, An Humble Attempt (1747), WJE, 5:397; Walter R. Borneman, The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 11; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 334–35. 16. Pennsylvania Gazette, July 17, 1754, July 13, 1754. 17. Voltaire, Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne et sur la loi naturelle (1756); Charles Chauncy, Earthquakes a Token of the righteous Anger of God (Boston, 1755), 12–13; The Earth Delivered from the Curse (Boston, 1756); Jonathan Mayhew, The Expected Dissolution of All Things . . . (Boston, 1755); idem, A Discourse on Rev. IV. 3d. 4th. Occasioned by the Earthquakes in November 1755 (Boston, 1755); idem, Practical Discourses Delivered on Occasion of the Earthquakes in November, 1755 (Boston, 1760). See also Pedro Lozano, A True and Particular Relation of the Dreadful Earthquake, which Happen’d at Lima, the Capital of Peru . . . (Boston, 1755); and [Anonymous], A Relation of a Remarkable Providence, which Fell Out at the Time of the Great Earthquake at Jamaica . . . (Philadelphia, 1755). 18. Mather Byles, Divine Power and Anger displayed in Earthquakes (Boston, 1755), 26. 19. Jonathan Mayhew, Election Sermon (Boston, 1754); Philip Reading, The Protestant’s Danger, and the Protestant’s Duty (Philadelphia, 1755), 19; John Mellen, The Duty of all to be ready for future impending Events (Boston, 1756), 19–20; Theodorus Frelinghuysen, Wars and Rumours of Wars, Heavens Decree over the World (New York, 1755), 36. 20. Solomon Williams, The Duty of Christian Soldiers, When Called to War . . . (New London, 1755); Sylvanus Conant, The Art of War (Boston, 1759), 12; Samuel Finley, The Curse of Meroz (Philadelphia, 1757), 31; Aaron Burr, Sr., Sermon Before the Synod of New-York, Convened at Newark, in New-Jersey (New York, 1756), 20–21, 32 [Burr’s emphases]; Samuel Davies, “The Crisis: Or, the Uncertain Doom of Kingdoms at Particular Times,” in Sermons on Important Subjects (New York, 1792), 403–04; Nathan O. Hatch, “The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution,” WMQ 3rd Series, 31 (July 1974), 418. 21. Fred A. Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 69–70; Harold E. Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 148. 22. Alexander V. Campbell, The Royal American Regiment: An Atlantic Microcosm (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 56–72. 23. Chauncy Graham, Some Few Reasons Suggested, why the Heathen are at Present Permitted to Rage in the British colonies in North-America (New York, 1756), 19. 24. Jonathan Mayhew, A Sermon Preach’d in the Audience of His Excellency William Shirley, Esq. (Boston, 1754), 38; John Lowell, The Advantages of God’s



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Presence with His People in an Expedition Against their Enemies (Boston, 1755), 21; Reading, The Protestant’s Danger, 18. 25. Williams, The Duty of Christian Soldiers, 24, 26; Thomas Barton, Unanimity and Public Spirit. A Sermon Preached at Carlisle . . . Soon After General Braddock’s Defeat (Philadelphia, 1755), 9–10; Jonathan Ellis, The Justice of the Present War against the French in America, and the Principles that should Influence Us in this Undertaking, Asserted (Newport, CT, 1755), 7 (emphasis in original). 26. See Anderson, Crucible of War, chaps. 10, 12–15. 27. Graham, Some Reasons Suggested, 7; Nathaniel Potter, A Discourse on Jeremiah 8th, 20th. Preached on the Lord’s-Day Morning, Jan. 1, 1758 at Brookline (Boston, 1758), 6–7; Reading, The Protestant’s Danger, 16; Amos Adams, The Expediency and Utility of War, in the Present State of Things, Considered (Boston, 1759), 27–28; William Hobby, The Happiness of a People, Having God for Their Ally (Boston, 1758), 22. 28. Caleb Rea, The Journal of Dr. Caleb Rea, F. M. Ray, ed. (Salem, MA: n.p., 1881), 13, 28. 29. Joseph Bellamy, The Millenium, in Sermons upon the Following Subjects . . . (Boston, 1758), 47, 53–54, 58–59, 69. 30. Israel Williams to John Burk, August 13, 1759, John Burk Correspondence, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA; Samuel Jenks, August 30, 1760, in “Samuel Jenks, His Journall of the Campaign in 1760,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd Series, 5 (Boston, 1890), 352–91; Anderson, A People’s Army, 210; Jenks, October 5, 1760. 31. Samuel Langdon, Joy and Gratitude to God for . . . the Conquest of Quebec (Portsmouth, NH, 1760), 37–38; Samuel Cooper, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency Thomas Pownall, Esq. . . . October 16, 1759. Upon Occasion of the Success of His Majesty’s Arms in the Reduction of Quebec . . . (Boston, 1759), 38–39; Eli Forbes, God the Strength, and Salvation of His People (Boston, 1761), 33. 32. Jonathan Mayhew, Two Discourses Delivered October 9th, 1760 . . . (Boston, 1760); Thomas Foxcroft, Grateful Reflexions on the signal Appearances of Divine Providence for Great Britain and its Colonies in America . . . (Boston, 1760). 33. Joseph Bellamy, A Sermon Delivered Before the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut (New London, CT, 1762). 34. Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 110. 35. Ezra Stiles, A Discourse on the Christian Union (Boston, 1761), 28, 30; John Adams to Dr. Jedidiah Morse, December 2, 1815, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States . . . , 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1865), 10:185. For contrasting opinions on the subject of the American episcopacy, see Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, chaps. 7–8, and Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), chap. 7. See also John F. Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1984), 221–26.

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“More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” Redefining Religion in Indian Country, 1730s–1760s A holy man berated the Lenni-Lenape (Delaware) residents of the Susquehanna River town of Juniata, “a devout and zealous reformer,” as the missionary David Brainerd described him in 1745, and he admonished the people that they had “grown very degenerate and corrupt,” weakened by their addiction to alcohol, greed for material things, and by having neglected their ancient religion. The only cure for their cultural malaise, he averred, would be the revival of the old ancestral rites. The shaman called up in Brainerd “such images of terror in my mind,” and the evangelical’s opinion that he was little more than a savage pagan remained strong, but he admitted that, alone among the Indians he had encountered so far in his missionary career, “there was something in his temper and disposition that looked more like true religion than anything I ever observed.” This seer held his own people responsible for the catastrophes that had reduced them to refugees and vassals of the Swannock (white men). Nevertheless, the younger generation in Indian communities nursed a simmering hatred against the colonizers that intermittently exploded in violence and war stretching back to the era of first contact.1 While the late “French and Indian War” was over as far as colonial governments in America and imperial governments in Europe were concerned, the situation along the Appalachian frontier and beyond gave the lie to such a notion. John Penn, the newly inaugurated governor of Pennsylvania, wrote to his brother Thomas in November 1763 that “We have been oblig’d to order the Moravian Indians down to Philadelphia to quiet the minds of the Inhabitants of Northampton County,” who had become convinced that the Christianized Conestogas were aiding and abetting Delaware war parties raking through the Susquehanna Valley. The gruesome discovery of the defiled bodies of a group of settlers from New England confirmed for authorities what many western colonists had been insisting was going on for years, 247

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namely that some Indian tribes did not recognize the Peace of Paris as having ended the war. Persistent demands from the frontier settlers to take aggressive action against real and assumedly hostile Indians went unrequited, and Quaker pacifist principles were rapidly eroding the Penn Family’s political strength. Governor Penn thought he had no choice but to take steps to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, and he knew that the residents of Northampton County drew few, if any, distinctions between Indian friends and foes, and “were determined either to quit their settlements or take an opportunity of murdering them all.” Hence, the precautionary measure of bringing the Moravian Indians into the capital.2 Indian peoples, most of them living on the Pennsylvania frontier, underwent their own religious awakening in the years surrounding and within the Seven Years’ War. “Prophets” itinerated throughout the backcountry preaching about unity and renewal, some militant and others more introspectively quiescent. Critics arose to question and chastise them, and vigorous debates were held as Indian peoples considered the merits and weaknesses of the various arguments put forward. That non-Christian Indians have been, until very recently, ignored or overlooked in the historiography of the Awakening comes as no surprise, though the overall work on early America had gone far to reestablishing the presence and importance of American Indians generally. The Awakening is not generally believed to have taken place in Indian Country, or at best to have had only a minimal impact.3 However, an expanded definition of the Awakening to include more than its being a Calvinist revival among white colonists in the densely settled areas east of the Appalachian Mountains, reveals a religious and cultural revival began among the Indians of the Delaware Valley and points farther west that was every bit as galvanizing as it was divisive an experience.  EASTERN WOODLAND RELIGIONS Any summary of Eastern Woodland Indian spirituality and religious practice must resist analogous comparisons with book-based, monotheistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as polytheistic or atheistic religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. The indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands lived in an animistic world of wonders both material and spiritual, all of which were thought to be emanations of the “Master of Life.” Reality was broadly divided into the realms of the sky, the earth, and the spirit, all of which variously touch and intersect one another. The spirits of men and animals exist within their bodies in this world, but also inhabit the



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spirit realm, to which all return upon death. As in nearly all religions, spiritual power is the common denominator of all things, and that power can be harnessed by the spirits to bring blessings of good fortune to those who live rightly or curses of affliction and misfortune to those who do not. The living can also harness this power to ensure their people’s prosperity and security while damning their enemies to misfortune and calamity. People in the distant past were gifted with rituals by the Master of Life in order to maintain natural balances, inattentiveness to which courted disaster. Unlike the portable world religions such as Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, American Indian religions were specifically rooted in a particular landscape, where most Indian peoples believed that the Earth originated. All Indian religions held their particular landscapes in deep reverence as sacred, and they can teach important lessons as reminders of mytho-religious stories and historical events. Land also conferred individual and collective identity, and the idea of permanent removal from one’s ancestral landscape meant the elimination of any form of identity.4 Holy men, often referred to as shamans, acted as intermediaries between the material and spiritual worlds, and Indian communities looked to them to know the will of the spirits concerning the origins and meaning of natural and supernatural events, the causes and remedies for ill fortune, as well as important decisions facing individuals and the community. Shamans attained their spiritual power and social status through a dream or vision in which they were confronted and supernaturally endowed by powerful spirits. This conferred upon the recipient the power and wisdom to commune with the spirits of animals and of nature, the ability to heal the sick and injured, and render advice to the sachems. Although anyone could receive instruction through dreams and visions, only shamans could interpret them and gain insight and direction. Shamans played critical roles when disease epidemics struck, tending to the afflicted, administering remedies drawn from ancient pharmacological knowledge in combination with specific incantations and prayers intended to cure the sick as well as purging the disease from the community.5 Indian peoples universally perceived intense spiritual power immanent in nature—rocks, rivers, trees and plants, the sky, the soil, and of course animals—that in the lattermost case strayed into the anthropomorphic. Indians were taught from earliest childhood to respect nature and avoid insulting or abusing animals, which could withhold their availability for hunting or turn on people to avenge any disrespect. Abuse of nature, in the form of greediness, wastefulness, or destructiveness, brought grave personal, communal, tribal, and spiritual consequences if not amended by some propitiating action. Religious beliefs and practices, as well as overall lifeways, changed considerably as a result of contact with Europeans and colonists over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this created a situation in which

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the Indians became dependent upon European goods and protection against enemies—a situation that became intolerable to those who witnessed a loss of power to the Euro-Americans. From Opechancanough, to Metacomet, to El Popé, Indian leaders have struggled to maintain their peoples’ selfdetermination in the face of growing power among the colonizers, but to little avail. In the 1730s and 1740s, a rising generation of Indian leaders watched bitterly as the colonizers capitalized upon tribal weaknesses to force land cessions that hemmed some tribes in, or compelled them to move to unfamiliar lands. Epidemic diseases depleted their communities, alcoholism tore at familial and societal bonds, and enemies took fatal advantages, and distressed people sought answers to these calamities from the Master of Life. Some holy men and women realized that the fault lay with the gradual walking away from their ancient religious beliefs and practices, the light embracing of Christianity, and most of all the willing dependence upon material things.6 “A GREAT BLESSING TO THE . . . TRIBES OF INDIANS” No determined effort by Christian colonizers to evangelize Indians anywhere in Anglo-America took place before 1640. Roger Williams spent time among the Wampanoags and Narragansetts of present-day Rhode Island, as he negotiated the purchase of some of their land to establish the core community of Providence in the mid-1630s, but without making any particular effort to convert them. Rev. John Eliot of Roxbury, Massachusetts, was essentially the first clergyman to commit himself to the evangelization of local Indians. Eliot began learning the Massachusett language in 1640, and by 1646 ventured to preach in their language. That same year, he had enough converts to begin establishing the first of what became a cluster of fourteen Christianized Indian communities, “praying towns,” outside Boston. A handful of likeminded ministers attempted to convert the Indians, and they successfully raised money from English donors to carry on the work, culminating in the chartering in 1662 of a missionary organization known in the early 1700s as the New England Company. However, persistent warfare and significant Indian resistance to Christianization dampened interest in the campaign until the 1720s.7 At that point, there emerged an expansive network of lay, political, and religious leaders in Old and New England committed to the Christianization of New England’s Indian tribes. They justified themselves by successfully arguing that the benefits of mass Christianization would result in populations of loyal, industrious, sober, and—most importantly—docile Indians. A significant motivation for the renewed effort in New England was that the SPG had been stepping up its operations in New York, and French Jesuit



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influence was leaking southward out of Canada and into northern Algonquian and Iroquois lands. The New England Company financed a major expeditionary trip through southern New England, undertaken in 1713–1714 by Rev. Experience Mayhew of Martha’s Vineyard. Meeting with dozens of Indian and colonial leaders and clergymen throughout Rhode Island and Connecticut, Mayhew met with great receptivity from magistrates, but with significantly diminished enthusiasm from most of his fellow clergymen, as well as from the Indians themselves. Indian resistance had much to do with the bad behavior of the colonists, as he was told by the Narragansett sachem Ninigret, who told Mayhew that he would be more successful only if he should “make the English good in the first place: for he said many of them were still bad.”8 What Mayhew and subsequent missionaries learned was that southern New England’s Indian tribes were broadly familiar with Christianity from earlier missionary efforts, and expressed interest in learning more about it. They did this not so much out of any disillusionment with their own traditional religion, but out of recognition of the value of English literacy to advance their tribal agendas centering on maintaining political and territorial sovereignty. The New England Company commissioned missionaries to several southern New England tribes, establishing schools for English instruction throughout the 1720s and early 1730s. Among the most successful of the mission towns established under this program was Stockbridge, a Housatonic Mahican enclave founded in 1735 in far western Massachusetts, led by Rev. John Sergeant and Timothy Woodbridge. Unlike most such experiments—which were largely a replication of John Eliot’s “praying towns” of the previous century—the Stockbridge Mahicans sought Christian conversion and baptism, and this success attracted additional funding and support from the Massachusetts government, the New England Company, and an array of benefactors on both sides of the Atlantic. A similar town populated by Christian Pequots in Connecticut was healthy enough to spur the Connecticut General Assembly to pass an act in 1736 requiring “a contribution [from] every ecclesiastical society or parish in this government” for “civilizing and Christianizing of the Indian natives in this Colony.”9 Indian requests for English education cannot be interpreted as an explicit expression of a desire for the complete transformation of racial or tribal identity, but rather as a selective and strategic adoption and adaptation of aspects of Anglo-American culture that satisfied their unique communal and individual needs. They consistently resisted evangelization, stressing only a desire for English education. When Rev. Eliphalet Adams addressed a large assembly of southern Algonquian leaders in July 1732 to propose sending resident missionaries to live with them and establish schools, he was gently rebuffed. The sachems reminded him that other clergymen had proposed

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similar schemes in the past, “but they [the Indians] never well understood it; they were afraid they should not understand it now, and wished that the preaching might be deferred till they were able to understand it.” This was a fundamental restatement of their strong interest in acquiring an English education, but one that concealed their true motives of developing the means to engage local and colonial governments in defense of Indian rights using Anglo-American language and legal constructs. Inevitably, those missionaries who did labor in Indian communities were not content to accommodate native resistance to Christianization as the purpose of their educational efforts. Consequently, Indians strategically set aside traditional religious practices in accepting certain Christian rites, such as in the burial of the dead. It must be emphasized, however, that Indians conformed to select Christian practices less from any genuine belief in Christianity, but more often as a means of cultivating Anglo-American goodwill. This selective adoption and adaptation of Christianity was rarely common, and there were many arguments within Indian communities over the wisdom and value of cultural accommodation. As the First Great Awakening dawned in the 1720s and 1730s, the prospects for Indian Christianization appeared quite bleak. But then New Light revivalism significantly affected the American Indian religious landscape.10 “It is no small Part of the wonderful Dispensation of the Grace of God in the present Day,” an awestruck Thomas Prince, Sr. wrote in The Christian History in 1744, to learn of “the surprizing Effusion of his Spirit on diverse Tribes of Indians in these Ends of the Earth, who wou’d never before so much as outwardly receive the Gospel, notwithstanding the Attempts which have been made this hundred Years to persuade them to it.” During the 1740s, white evangelicals had some remarkable success proselytizing among the Indians, but resistance remained strong in the face of the handfuls of Protestant missionaries who made any sustained Christianization effort. Conversions tended to be superficial, and thus ephemeral, but the New Lights in New England had begun to notice more semi-assimilated Indians expressing interest in Christianity, finding themselves drawn to revivalist preaching, and exhibiting true conversion. This unprecedented development confirmed for prorevivalists the validity of evangelicalism, as well as the fact that a momentous spiritual shift was under way in America. However, what to the New Lights appeared to be a sudden outpouring of the spirit upon the Indians was not all that unexpected when one considers that the Indians of southern New England, living as they did surrounded by and in constant contact with Anglo-American colonists, were poised to take that next step toward greater assimilation.11 New Lights who visited Christianized Indian communities reported levels of enthusiasm in response to their sermons equivalent to that found



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among whites. David Brainerd noted that while he preached to Delaware audiences, “most were much affected & many in much distress; & some could neither go, nor stand; but lay flat on the ground as if stab’d at heart: Crying incessantly for mercy.” Others recorded similar reactions. Joseph Park concentrated his efforts in the Narragansett reservation at Westerly, Rhode Island, in the 1730s and 1740s, inspired by the radicalism of James Davenport. Following many disappointing years marked by polite indifference, in 1743 Park recorded his first genuine success in reaching his Indian audience, when “a great Sense of spiritual and eternal Things” dawned on them. “A SPIRIT of Prayer and Supplication was poured out upon them; and a SPIRIT of Conviction upon the Enemies of God” seized them such that he “was unable to continue . . . by Reason of the Outcry.” Jonathan Edwards, who once denied any commonalities between Christianity and Indian religions, and professed a belief that Indians were the devil’s creatures, nevertheless expressed admiration for David Brainerd’s efforts among the Delawares, and himself journeyed to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1751 to begin a seven-year mission among the Mahicans. He learned to appreciate the Indians’ inherently spiritual nature and receptivity to his preaching, abandoning his earlier prejudices and coming to equate all Indians with the pre-Christian European “barbarians,” and therefore worthy of a millennial destiny. It was the emotional fervor of their affirmative response that changed his mind.12 For the most part, Indians living in close proximity to Anglo-Americans preferred to remain aloof when it came to religious matters, and white ministers demonstrated only a halfhearted interest in converting them. However, in a very few instances a concerted missionary campaign generated positive results, as when the radical New Light James Davenport of Connecticut focused much of his attention upon the Mohegans living near New London. Davenport was widely credited as having the greatest effect upon the Indians by clerical supporters and detractors in the 1730s, but he was just one among many New Light ministers near Indian communities who played important parts in an invigorated campaign to convert the Indians. According to Jonathan Parsons, who was a sharp critic of Davenport’s activities in and around Lyme, he nonetheless proved himself “a great Blessing to the . . . Mohegan and Nahuantuc [Niantic] Tribes of Indians,” upon whom “nothing seem’d to have any considerable Effect” in the past. Eleazar Wheelock, a Moderate New Light who had devoted himself to Indian education and conversion, likewise commended Davenport for being “the Great instrument of the work among them.” Doubtless, the most successful exponent of Davenport’s work among Connecticut’s Indians was Samson Occom.13 Occom was exposed to Davenport’s preaching while a teenager in 1740, as well as “Extraordinary Ministers Preaching from Place to Place . . .

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exhorting us to the things of God.” He began frequenting revival meetings, picking up a sufficient command of English to be admitted to Moor’s Charity School in Lebanon under the patronage of Rev. Eleazar Wheelock. Occom proved an unusually capable student in spite of persistent ill-health and poor vision, becoming Wheelock’s protégé and living advertisement for the value of educating Indian youths through separation from their tribal communities. Wheelock saw his mission as not just the conversion of Indians to Christianity, but their conversion into Anglo-Americans who could be sent out into the backcountry to proselytize to Indian communities. White missionaries, Wheelock conceded, suffered too much skepticism and resistance to their message, but Christianized Indians would have greater credibility and ultimate effectiveness. Such would not only “attach them to the English; & the Crown of Great Britain,” but also rescue them from “the subtle Insinuations of great Numbers of Jesuits” that were binding the western Indians to France and the Catholic Church.14 Occom received training toward the Presbyterian ministry under the guidance of Rev. Solomon Williams at New London, and in 1749 was sent out to eastern Long Island to teach and lay minister to the Montauks—a post he maintained for the next ten years. His success there seemed to bear out Wheelock’s confidence in the effectiveness of Indian missionaries, and he began drawing a salary from the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK). Presbyterian authorities in Long Island were not as impressed with Occom as Wheelock and Williams and delayed his ordination, but within two years of his licensure in 1757 he became a fully ordained minister. As the war with France was then reaching an apex, Wheelock became still more forceful in his calls for Indian Christianization as a means not only of saving their souls, but also of robbing the French of their most important allies. The most recent victory at Québec led him to enthuse, “we have Reason to believe from Scripture Prophecy, . . . that the Latter-Day Glory is dawning.” While Occom had originally been attracted to Christianity by the New Light radical, James Davenport, he himself was much more moderate, leaning even toward Old Light wariness about revivalism. Hoping to replicate his success among the Montauks, the SSPCK persuaded Occom— who was struggling financially and contemplating abandoning his missionary work—to travel to an Oneida mission in New York in 1761. Plagued by underfunding and rattled by the militant unrest that triggered Pontiac’s War, the mission never prospered and Occom returned frustrated to Connecticut. He eventually sailed to Britain to raise funds for Wheelock’s school, but Wheelock lost faith in his missionary schemes and in Occom’s abilities, hampered occasionally by overindulgence in “strong Drink.” The school became a whites-only institution, and Occom finished his ministerial career in obscurity.15



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Occom had begun to run up against a common obstacle for Christian missionaries in Indian country: Calvinist Christianity’s lack of appeal. Intolerant of gradualism, much less the syncretic blending of Christian and Indian religious ideas and practices that French Jesuits used effectively as a conversion strategy, Anglo-American missionaries expected converted Indians to abandon their native identities entirely. Compared with traditional religion, Christianity was staid and inflexible, at times downright boring. Occom had been drawn to the heady emotionalism of Davenport, but over time had become much more conservative and sedate. The energy he expended among the Montauks he no longer wished to devote to the Oneidas, who tended to be much less receptive in light of his blunt assertions that they abandon their traditional ways. He frequently demanded that his converts demonstrably turn their backs on their non-Christian families and communities, and when they refused, was as quick as any white missionary to give up on the endeavor. George Whitefield, who had been a distant admirer in the 1750s, had grown cool in his enthusiasm, refusing requests from Wheelock to donate or raise funds for the mission, at one point judging it an “imprudent scheme.” Better to concentrate upon white settlers living in the backcountry using ministers who can produce a record of unqualified success.16 In spite of Whitefield’s comparative indifference toward the Indians, radical New Lights were able to attract Indian interest because they were willing to venture into Indian villages to convey an enthralling message of a direct experience of God, in contrast to other ministers who exhibited a marked disinterest in the condition of Indian souls. The New Light emphasis upon making an emotional connection to God, and the credence they often gave to visionary experiences, harmonized with aspects of traditional Indian religions wherein mysticism was commonplace. To be sure, some Indians in southern New England and Long Island gravitated toward the Anglican Church instead of New Light Separate churches, but those Indians had the most sustained interactions with whites and had already largely assimilated much of Anglo-American culture, even if they continued to live at a respectful distance from colonial towns. In some cases, the choice of denominational affiliation had more to do with geography than with theological orientation—a fact that is almost as applicable to many Anglo-Americans. As had been the case in the past, Indians sought Christian conversion for their own reasons involving adaptation to increasing Anglo-American dominance and influence. Not the least of their concerns was the tenuous control over their lands, and New Light ministers presented themselves as potential allies in land disputes with municipal and colonial governments. However, in some cases, the form of Christianity offered to some Indian communities resonated deeply with converts, as with the Moravian Brethren in Pennsylvania.17

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“HOW MUCH BLOOD FLOWS FORTH!” Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf received permission in 1742 from the Iroquois overseer of the multitribal refugee village of Shamokin, Shikalemmy, for him and some of the Brethren “simply to sojourn in their towns, as friends, and without suspicion, until such time as we should have mutually learned each other’s peculiarities.” By 1749, many members of a prominent family that governed the Lenape town of Meniolagomekah accepted baptism and comprised the nucleus of a growing Indian Moravian community on the lower Susquehanna River. New England’s missionaries could only dream of such unqualified success. What made the Moravians different was the degree to which mysticism and the cultivation of visionary experiences fundamentally defined not just their religious world—a world shared by an increasing number of radical revivalists—but, more essentially, the world in toto. Just as Eastern Woodlands peoples placed great stock in the predictive and instructive power of dreams and visions, so also did the Moravians, though the latter focused mainly on a fixation upon Christ’s suffering. The majority of Protestant denominations perceived Christ’s blood only as a powerful metaphor of his personal sacrifice and the promise of salvation. However, Moravian veneration of Christ’s wounds and blood, particularly the wound in his side and the blood that flowed from it, involved a high degree of emotional sensuality to their religion, which Indians found most captivating.18 The suffering and bleeding Christ on the cross was an awesome figure to American Indians, simultaneously attractive and repellant. The mysterious, dangerous power of blood, whether in the spiritual or the material world, was perceived in different ways by Indian men and women. Men thought about Christ as a noble warrior shedding his blood, confirming his spiritual power, and conferring it to his followers. The reaction of a group of Nanticoke and Shawnee warriors, when shown pictures of the crucified Christ while on a visit to Bethlehem in 1753, was fairly typical: “[H]ow many wounds he has! how much blood flows forth!” Women, on the other hand, thought about Christ’s blood as infused with the same innate spiritual power that overruns their ability to control it during menstruation—full of creative energy and healing potential. When some Delaware women who had been recently baptized visited Gnadenhütten in 1749, they described themselves as “right hungry after the Sav[ior’]s Blood.”19 The Moravians practiced a ritual form of bloodletting running parallel to its use as a medical technique for balancing the bodily humors. August Gottlieb Spangenberg, a leading Moravian minister and physician trained at the University of Halle, worked assiduously among Indian communities. The Moravians’ belief in blood’s procreative and healing powers made their form of Christianity deeply attractive to the Indians of Pennsylvania, ravaged by



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disease epidemics to such a degree that they were willing to latch onto anything that might bring meaning to their suffering and—more importantly—an end to it. The ritualism of communion and individual and group healing connected the Moravian Christian and Indian worlds in ways that other denominations did not. When Moravians visited Indian communities along the Susquehanna River, bloodletting presented a compelling means to build and maintain peace and harmony between Indians and colonists. On one such journey to Onondaga in the summer of 1745, Spangenberg “let the blood of our house host, the King [Canassatego]” in what was certainly an extraordinary gesture of trust, seeking relief from a smallpox outbreak then scything through the capitol of Iroquoia. Indians in the face of such crises found meaning and consolation in the syncretic modification of certain Moravian spiritual doctrines and healing rituals into their extant practices. As with other Indians who, facing pressure from colonial missionaries to abandon their religions for Christianity, creatively synthesized Christianity with traditional religions, the Delawares refused to jettison their traditional practices and discovered original strategies for incorporating Christian elements into their reinvigorated spiritual lives.20 Most Indians, whether in New England, the Middle Colonies, or the South, viewed Christianity and its missionaries with deep suspicion and refused to allow them or their religion into their lives. Many who did convert later regretted their decision and returned to their former traditions, some under pressure from nativist kinsmen. A significant exception is that of Teedyuscung, the Delaware sachem who welcomed Moravian missionaries and eventually converted to their faith. He was sharply criticized for this by his uncle, Nutimus, who headed a majority faction that vehemently resisted Christianization, and he tried in vain to convince his nephew to return “to the old Indian Way.” It can be argued that Teedyuscung was simply making a pragmatic political decision, since the Moravians served as political liaisons to the colonial government in Pennsylvania and neighboring colonies, but tribal leadership was shared between sachems and shamans. The status and influence of the latter were seriously challenged by the missionaries, and converts had some reason to worry that the shamans might spiritually punish them, which variously drove them closer to the missionaries or led them to renounce their conversion. Oftentimes, the shamans found Christianized patients impossible to treat effectively. One such practitioner explained his failure to treat a Christian patient at a Moravian mission town in July 1760 on the grounds that “he and his heart are always there in the [Moravian] church, where I have no power to perform my business.”21 Whether Indians living in western Pennsylvania endeavored to find new religious foci for their societies or to discharge individual misery in an environment of social and political disorder, Indian leaders closely managed their

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peoples’ experiences with Christianity. Many like Teedyuscung harnessed Christianity quite successfully as a political means to defend their communities’ independence from the powerful Iroquois League through making treaties with Christian colonial governments. Some, however, readily accepted Christianity as a viable approach to expressing their belief in the supernatural. Regardless of the strategy, Indian leaders sought what would best benefit their communities. Throughout the mid-eighteenth century, Christianity aided some Indian communities to redefine themselves at a time of terrible catastrophe, but in most cases it was a Christianity incorporated into extant and revived native religions that conformed to their specific spiritual requirements. Indian prophets arose to regenerate native theologies and practices, and gather support for sociocultural reforms. Nativist reformers used their understanding of Christian theologies in order to deflect their influence. In the process, Christian concepts insinuated themselves into the beliefs and rhetoric of Indian seers and shamans. They and their adherents did not simply discard their ancient beliefs and practices in order to embrace new ones offered by Christian missionaries. In the religious environment of the First Great Awakening, individual Indians and tribal communities reoriented their spiritual histories to supply their current physical and supernatural needs. THE GREAT INDIAN AWAKENING In the Susquehanna River town of Otseningo in New York in 1737, missionary Conrad Weiser reported the strange appearance of a “seer” who pronounced scathing admonitions against all Indian people. This charismatic shaman had experienced “a vision of God” informing him that wild game had been driven away in retribution for hunting merely to satisfy an immoral thirst for alcohol, and that unless Indians stopped trading animal pelts and skin for rum, God (the Master of Life) would erase Indians “from the earth.” A young Delaware woman in another Susquehanna River town, Wyoming, like the “reformer” David Brainerd met in 1745, preached against alcohol consumption, and that the Master of Life had created red, black, and white people separately, never to mix. A Nanticoke prophet wandered into Gnadenhütten in the winter of 1749 to recount a dream he had had in which he met the Master of Life, who had become displeased with his brown and white children, whom he had intended to keep separated. Because they had strayed from their respective paths, the whites were going to devour the Indians unless the Indians reclaimed their true destiny. John Brainerd, David’s younger brother, took note of the so-called Wyoming Woman during a missionary foray in 1751, which was frustrated by the residents’ acceptance of her message and terse opposition to his presence. They bluntly told him



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of their suspicions that he was an agent come to help the whites dispossess them of their land and enslave them “as they [the whites] did . . . the negroes.” Stressing an idea that was gaining prominence throughout the Middle Ground, she preached that Christianity was only for white people since God gave no such religion to the Indians, in which case they must reject all forms of the whites’ religion. Her visions and dreams told her that only through a complete separation from contact with white men, their ideas, and their material goods could the Indians’ revive their ancient religion and thereby restore peace and prosperity. She blamed the elders of spreading “poison” by means of a witch bundle, which can be seen as an analog of the elders’ opting to cooperate with whites because of an addiction to European alcohol and technology. In 1752, Papounhan, a Munsee Delaware influenced by Moravian and Quaker Christianity, likewise preached a rejection of alcohol and material dependence upon the whites. He was especially angry and frustrated with Indians’ materialism, and the whites’ deceitful trade practices, insisting that only by “adhering to the ancient Customs & manners of their Forefathers” would Indians be able to purify themselves of those things that weakened them.22 The doctrine of the separate creation of Indians, Euro-Americans, and African Americans, which justified separate forms of religious practice, gained rapid ascendancy in the Susquehanna and Ohio river valleys, and became commonplace throughout the Eastern Woodlands by the eve of the American Revolution. In addition to giving further validity to traditional Indian lifeways, it unambiguously challenged those Indians who had accommodated or converted to Christianity, as well as those who had become too intimate with and dependent upon the Anglo-Americans. It corresponded to the Wyoming Woman’s condemnations of the accommodationist leadership in her community. A separatist theology tacitly confronted Indian clients of the Anglo-Americans by positing that only a restoration of traditional Indian ways can lead to their redemption. It carried radical implications for Indian identity in its critique of ancient tribalism and appeal to an embryonic panIndianism, reflecting the increasing coordination of militant factions from various tribes in a crusade to galvanize Indians as a single race confronting the Anglo-American threat. It likewise echoed the intensifying of local divisions, as leaders who rejected nativism in preference for accommodation with the colonists were accused of being witches, or of being traitors.23 Around the time Papounhan was beginning to build a following, farther up the Susquehanna near the border of New York there emerged around 1753 another prophet among the Munsee Delawares, the “Assinsink Prophet” Wangomend. His message was fundamentally identical to those of the Wyoming Woman and Papounhan, but he was to date the most militant against the British and Anglo-Americans, using a chart or map to explain graphically how contact with whites spiritually weakened Indians. He too believed

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in separate creations for the red, black, and white peoples, the lattermost of whom had fundamentally disturbed the world’s balance by leaving their proper place to invade Indian lands, and dragging blacks from their proper place to work as slaves to the conquerors. He railed against alcohol consumption, dependence upon the whites’ technology, the influences of Christianity, and the collaborationist policies of the elder generations. These had angered the Master of Life, who punished the Indians by allowing the whites to have power once enjoyed by the Indians. David Zeisberger and Christian Frederick Post, Moravian missionaries who had observed and described Papounhan’s movement, chronicled how Wangomend explained his visionary revelations to growing audiences that were encouraged to attend to their own dreams to gain religious insight. Large gatherings held at quarterly intervals and presided over by Wangomend featured aspects familiar to attendants at radical New Light open-air revivals: marathon preaching, dancing, singing, the relation and interpretation of dreams and visionary experiences, and cathartic weeping thought to purify the penitent. It is clear that David Brainerd, who had once been a radical evangelical, perceived the enthusiasm of radical New Light revivals, and that cultivated by the various Susquehanna Valley prophets, to be essentially identical. The only difference is that one was inspired by Protestant Christianity, while the other was inspired by Delaware religion.24 Just as Papounhan’s and Wangomend’s revivalist movements were gaining momentum, the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War exacerbated the process of sociopolitical instability and dislocation suffered by Indians in the Eastern Woodlands. In the same way that the war distracted New England and middle colonists from the ongoing controversies of the Protestant Awakening, it temporarily impeded the progress of pan-Indian nativist revivalism. Indian tribes variously attempted to take advantage of their alliances with European colonial powers to strengthen their respective positions and undermine their rivals, but for most tribes the costs of the war in the disruption of trade and the loss of human power to campaigning, disease, and death weakened them still further. In the previous contests between Britain and France stretching back to the late 1680s, Indians made effective proxies set against one another, while white colonists played very limited roles. When peace returned for a time, enmities, old and new, kept tribes at odds and often at one another’s throats, as warfare began to dominate and define Indian life. Ancient rhythms of social and religious life became impossible to maintain, and therefore shifted as ritual calendars adjusted to the vicissitudes of war rather than of seasonal and agricultural cycles. Oftentimes during these wars, white partisan groups, enraged by Indian raiding along the frontier and into more densely settled areas, wreaked vengeance by burning crops and razing villages defended only by women, children, the elderly, and the infirm. The “French and Indian War” was different only in the scale of the American theater



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and colonists’ participation as auxiliaries. The impact of this war on Indian peoples was more devastating than any of the others combined. A Delaware delegation led by Shingas and his brother Tamaqua sharply rebuked Christian Frederick Post in 1758, asking “It is plain that you white people are the cause of the war; why do not you and the French fight in the old country, and on the sea? Why do you come to fight on our land?”25 The extensive communications and trade networks that connected Eastern Woodlands peoples through shared alliances with the French remained intact despite the concussions of the war and the difficult adjustment to dealing exclusively with the British and American victors after 1760. In the Ohio Valley, the Ottawas, Ojibwes, Hurons, Mingos, Shawnees, Potawatomis and Ohioan Delawares became much more receptive to the exhortations of militant nativist prophets, especially in light of the abrupt changes in British Indian policy that replaced gift giving and lengthy treaty conferences with blunt dictation by Sir Jeffrey Amherst. The war scattered the Munsee Delawares and Wangomend’s followers to the west, where he most certainly encountered an Unami Delaware prophet, Neolin. This latest seer, living in the upper Ohio Valley in 1760, experienced a mystical visitation with the Master of Life that is nearly identical to the one related by the anonymous author of the testimony given to Wheelock two decades before. A dream had instructed him to prepare for a long “hunting” journey, and after walking for eight days he camped near a three-pronged fork in the road, the three divergent paths glowing with increasing intensity. Choosing the brightest and widest path as the one leading to the celestial plane, Neolin soon encountered an impenetrable wall of wildfire, which forced him to backtrack and choose another narrower route. This, too, led to an inferno, and so taking the third and narrowest path, he found himself standing before a great white mountain, where he met with a woman shimmering in white raiment. She instructed him that the mountain leads to the Master of Life, and that he must strip naked, cleanse himself in a nearby river, and then climb the mountain using only his left hand and left foot. Eventually, and with great exertion, he approached three villages at the summit, and heading for what appeared to be the greatest one, an escort ushered him into the Master’s presence.26 As Neolin explained it to missionary observers, the Master of Life told him that it was right for him to meditate upon Indians’ misfortunes as having arisen from accommodation to white men’s ways and dependence upon their technology. He revealed the true nature of the cosmos to Neolin, which recapitulated the separate creations based on race professed by earlier prophets, and how ignorance of the old religion and inattention to the performance of rituals was the source of Indian weakness. “Because I love you, and ye must do what I say and love, and not do what I hate,” the Master of Life admonished Neolin. The Master was angry with his Indian children for their neglect

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of tradition and their having prostituted themselves to the whites for alcohol and material possessions. “[W]hen I saw that you were given up to evil, I led the wild animals to the depths of the forests so that ye had to depend upon [the whites] to feed and shelter you. You have only to become good again and do what I wish,” which along with the reinvention of the old faith, included driving the whites away, for “they know me not, and are my enemies.” Neolin learned a prayer to the Master that all Indians must learn, and he was taught how to draw a simple chart, or map, which is very similar to Wangomend’s and Christian missionaries condescendingly misidentified as a “Bible,” to explain to his disciples the nature of the Indians’ dilemma. It explained that the whites had come across the Great Water and blocked the usual route by which Indians approached heaven, forcing them to take a more dangerous route bordering on hell, and into which many fell on account of their dependence upon European technology and things, especially alcohol, and thus doomed them to damnation. It also reflects the perils Neolin encountered in the early stage of his spiritual journey, with its two false paths and one true—though still difficult—path to the celestial realm. In this sense it mirrors a standard Christian belief that the road to heaven is narrow and perilous.27 The only way for Indians to avoid falling into hell was to begin a process of gradual separation from dependence on European trade goods and cultural influences, after which the blocked path would become clear again. Indians should thus divest themselves gradually and entirely of the use of Europeans’ tools and implements, as well as clothing, purifying themselves inside and out. He and his followers began to reinvent old rituals, which included the frequent consumption of “black drink,” an emetic tea that had been introduced through the Shawnees’ contact with the Cherokees. Neolin in 1761 eventually based himself at a Shawnee town, Wakatomica, which white traders dubbed “vomit town” on account of the residents’ enthusiasm for imbibing the “black drink.” He, like the other prophets, preached racial and cultural separatism, and anti-Anglo-American militancy that resonated throughout the upper Eastern Woodlands, gathering adherents and sympathizers among the Shawnees, Delawares (both Unami and Munsee), Wyandots, Potawatomis, Miamis, Senecas, Ottawas, and Ojibwes, among others. Another Delaware prophet at Kuskuski similarly visited the Master of Life in heaven in 1762, Katapelleecy, an Ottawa chief, followed suit in 1764, and an Onondaga prophet arose around the same time. Their messages were deeply consistent: “Reform the world through ritual; recapture sacred power.” While Neolin never seemed to advocate the achievement of this reformation through violence, one of his disciples, Pontiac, believed it a duty for Indians to wage a holy war against the British.28 In his final visionary revelation, Neolin received sanction from the Master of Life to negotiate with the British, but only through Quaker mediators.



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The offer was rejected, and Delaware delegates had little choice but to make peace in April 1765, facing “great Confusion amongst themselves,” even as other tribes had already been dropping out of the war and frontier raiding ceased. While the war was unsuccessful in expelling the British and AngloAmericans from the trans-Appalachian west, it is significant in the scope of its multitribal alliances threaded together by Neolin’s religious pan-Indianism. The decisive victories of the British against the Indians put Neolin’s followers into confused disarray. Divisions that already existed between those who agreed with the rejection of all European technology, trade goods, and influences and those who urged varieties of accommodation deepened, as the more pragmatic elders echoed Teata, a Catholic Huron who had counseled wary patience: “We do not know what the designs of the Master of Life may be.” Neolin was able to exploit those divisions to prove that he was correct and discredit his opponents. The Indians lost the rebellion because of the corruption and connivances of the accommodationists, he insisted, and this helped Neolin to maintain his spiritual power. Young warriors, who had been most attracted to the prophets’ denunciations of the older generation, defended their militant nativist beliefs against the “Chiefs who advised them not to accept the Hatchet,” and blamed them for Indian disunity and weakness.29 Wangomend and other prophets, such as “Newcomer,” likewise kept up their rhetoric of racial and cultural separatism, as well as the revival of old rituals and theologies as being the only potentially successful strategy for reclaiming power. Missionaries and Indian agents continued to note with dismay that disillusioned young men “despise[d] the counsel of the aged, and only endeavored to get into favor with these preachers, whose followers multiplied very fast.” The Shawnees stoutly refused to allow Christian missionaries to settle near or among them, suspecting them of either being the agents of land speculators (as the Baptist missionary David Jones certainly was) or of being pernicious cultural influences. This helped the nativists maintain a separatist appeal and to argue for militancy despite the collapse of Pontiac’s War. An epidemic in Newcomer’s town sent its residents into new heights of desperation. Witch-hunts broke out throughout the area, with elders most often accused by a younger generation fed up with accommodationist leadership. Despair also led some villages to try to manufacture more prophets to guide them, usually by underfeeding young boys while they continued to search for and destroy witches in their midst. Nevertheless, Indian communities remained fatally divided between nativists and accommodationists. New prophets such as Scattameck joined Neolin, Wangomend, and Newcomer in keeping up the chorus of militant cultural reformation that worried AngloAmerican officials and traders, and inflamed rumors of another large Indian war. The Shawnees organized a pan-Indian conference at Scioto in 1769, attracting delegates from throughout the Eastern Woodlands and the Great

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Lakes tribes. Some intertribal animosity remained, but a consensus in favor of peace with the Anglo-Americans was arrived at which angered the nativists, who organized desultory raids along the frontier. Religious nativism faded somewhat in the early 1770s, as nativists and accommodationists reached an uneasy truce in the years immediately preceding the American War for Independence, though nativism revived in subsequent decades.30 In the American Indian Awakening, only the Otseningo Seer specifically predicted an apocalyptic outcome—either the destruction of white colonial society following Indian revival, or the final destruction of Indian civilizations following revivalist failure—but no subsequent Delaware or Shawnee prophet really needed to explain to disciples and sympathizers the dire consequences for continuing to walk the accommodationist path. By the 1730s, the vast majority of Indian peoples east of the Appalachians submitted to Euro-American power or otherwise became dependent upon the whites’ diplomatic influence, technology, and alcohol. The prices for maintaining the status quo were progressive land cessions and higher quotas for furs and pelts. As Indians became increasingly unable to keep up with demand for the latter, land was all that could be offered as a satisfactory alternative, and by the outbreak of the American War for Independence in 1775, trans-Appalachian tribes began to feel keenly the pressures that demanded a decision between resistance and accommodation. So much had the old ways altered or fallen away for the sake of tribal integrity and collective survival that only those few who managed to live to very old age could recall them to any degree. Consequently, a strict return to the old rituals and theologies was practically impossible, and none of the prophets ever suggested that such a thing was really possible. Rather, they blended the memory of the old ways with variations of others’ rituals and theologies, including substantial Christian components. Here, one finds another chain linking the Protestant Christian and American Indian awakenings together, as it is clear that elements of millenarianism and apocalypticism influenced the Lenape and Shawnee prophets through their many contacts with white missionaries and Christianized Indians. As work done by many scholars demonstrates, European-American Christianity exerted considerable influence on Indian religious beliefs, both through conversion and syncretism. In those tribal communities hardest hit by disease and war, conversion to Christianity represented a desperate attempt to make sense of deteriorating and disorientating circumstances. For others, Christianity may have offered a more coherent cosmos, or a means of acquiring rank and authority normally unavailable in their native society. Certainly, the political and economic benefits of conversion that came with presumed friendship and alliance with colonial governments, as was the case with the Oneidas and Mohawks of New York, brought modest tangible benefits. For the Lenape, it constituted a strategy—albeit a failed one—to prevent further



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loss of territory and gain protection from Pennsylvania’s proprietary authority. That non-Christian Indians acquainted with Christianity opted to incorporate elements of its theology and practice into their established beliefs and rituals, particularly those that were already analogous to each other, does not mean that Christian influence was necessary to the formation of Indian religious revivalism.31 While New Light enthusiasm among Christianized Indians did not seem to match that evident among whites and blacks in terms of the numbers of converts, this is only because there were dramatically fewer Indians living in those areas where they were compelled to adapt or otherwise acquiesce to the reality of living in conquered territory. Though the specific religious beliefs and practices varied, the spirit of revivalism in the Middle Ground was exactly the same. The religious awakenings experienced by Indians and colonists almost exactly mirror one another: the former arising out of profound distress, population decrease, mass refugee migrations, and overall contraction, the latter brought on by dramatic population growth and diversification, economic and territorial expansion, and societal ferment. The rapidity of both sets of dynamics impelled Indians and colonists to an “inner directedness,” leading to twin efforts to reclaim lost pasts even as this process redefined traditions, both remembered and invented. Just as the Indian prophets split native communities between nativists and accommodationists, the Awakening divided the colonial elite and middle classes between New Lights and Old Lights. However divisive they may have been, Indian and white revivalists had a greater unity as a declared goal, and war provided a means of unification set afire by apocalyptic expectations—however divergent they may have been.  The First Great Awakening is not exclusively the story of the advent of Calvinist fundamentalism in American Protestantism and its proliferation throughout the British-American colonies. Christian missionaries congratulated themselves upon the realization that their reinvigorated efforts to convert the Indians away from “paganism” had generated some successes, but what they did not understand—or perhaps refused to acknowledge—was that those conversions came mainly from a combination of diplomatic pragmatism and desperation, both personal and collective, rather than genuine religious feeling. The omission of nativist religious revivalism from studies of the Awakening perpetuates the colonialist dismissal of non-Christian religions as illegitimate, particularly with regard to the animistic religions practiced by the Americas’ indigenous peoples. Traditional Eastern Woodland religions were substantially revived and redefined at precisely the same time as was

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Calvinist Protestantism, and thus constitute a significantly overlooked aspect of the First Great Awakening. The year 1745 concludes many accounts of the First Great Awakening, which discounts revivalist nativism in Indian Country, but also the advent of radical revivalism in the southern colonies. Evangelical missionaries, most of them coming from Pennsylvania and New Jersey under the auspices of the Synod of New York, traveled to Virginia and the Carolinas—bastions of the colonial Church of England—to propagate the New Birth theology. A handful of New England Baptists likewise found receptive audiences in the backcountry, and in light of these incursions the Anglican Church and its allied colonial governments reacted quickly, and sometimes violently, to silence revivalist preachers. Persevering against the scorn and ridicule of grim-faced constabularies and outraged mobs, the Baptists in particular experienced their greatest period of expansion, mainly among the yeomanry and AfricanAmerican slave communities. Traditionally misinterpreted as a phenomenon distinct from the northern awakenings, the First Great Awakening in the colonial South began in the last years of the peak of northern revivalism, and gathered momentum during the Seven Years’ War, reaching a critical peak in the twenty years before the outbreak of the American Revolution. NOTES 1. Jonathan Edwards, The Life of David Brainerd (1749), WJE, 7:329–30. 2. John Penn to Thomas Penn, November 15, 1763, quoted in John Dunbar, ed., The Paxton Papers (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957), 22n.2; Gregory Evans Dowd, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, & the British Empire (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 192–93. 3. The majority of works on the Great Awakening make little mention of Indian communities, apart from articles or book chapters about the missionary endeavors of Eleazar Wheelock, David Brainerd, John Sargeant, Joseph Fish, Gilbert Tennent, and Jonathan Edwards. Notable exceptions include Jane T. Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in Pennsylvania,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 54 (October 1997), 723–46; and Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). However, The Indian Great Awakening does not discuss Indian religions in depth, except to indicate their parallels to Christianity and individual Indians’ receptiveness to Protestant evangelicalism in New England exclusively. 4. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 4–9; Joel W. Martin, The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 12–14.



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5. Martin, The Land Looks After Us, 13. 6. Ibid., 40–49. 7. Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 23–34. 8. Experience Mayhew, “A Brief Journal of My Visitation of the Pequot and Mohgin Indians . . . 1713,” in Some Correspondence between the Governors and Treasurers of the New England Company in London (London: Spottiswoode & Co., 1896), 101; Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 37–41. 9. Charles J. Hoadly, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 15 vols. (Hartford: Lockwood & Brainard Co., 1850–1890), 8:38; Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 43–49. 10. Frances Manwaring Caulkins, Memoir of the Rev. William Adams, of Dedham, Mass: and of the Rev. Eliphalet Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), 35; Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 57–59, 63–64. 11. Thomas Prince, Sr., ed., The Christian History, Containing Accounts of the Revival and Propagation of Religion in Great-Britain and America, 2 vols. (Boston, 1744–1745), 2:21. 12. Edwards, Life of David Brainerd, 307; Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood,” 726–30; Prince, The Christian History, 1:208; Simmons, “Red Yankees,” 261–62; McDermott, “Jonathan Edwards and American Indians.” Edwards had been ousted from his pulpit in 1750 as a result of a dispute with his congregation and the Northampton town government over his strict enforcement of closed communion and high standards for church membership. See George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), chap. 22. 13. Prince, The Christian History, 2:154; Eleazar Wheelock to Daniel Rogers, January 18, 1742, Papers of Eleazar Wheelock (microform). 14. Samson Occom, “Autobiography,” in Gaynell Stone, ed., History and Archaeology of the Montauk, 2nd ed. (Stony Brook, NY: Suffolk County Archaeological Association, Nassau County Archaeological Committee, 1993), 238; Eleazar Wheelock to George Whitefield, March 11, 1756, in Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelicalism in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 207; Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 75–76, 87–88. 15. Samson Occom confession [1769?], Samson Occom Papers, Connecticut Historical Society; W. DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 74–76, 92–98, 103–04, 119, 130–51, 162–66; Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 144–45; Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 122–29, 154–56. 16. George Whitefield to Eleazar Wheelock, September 5, 1764, no. 764505, Papers of Eleazar Wheelock (microform); Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 125–26. 17. Kevin McBride, Transformation by Degree: Eighteenth-Century Native American Land Use (n.p., 2006), 7. See Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 40, 61–63. 18. Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf to European Brethren, September 29, 1742, in William C. Reichel, Memorials of the Moravian Church (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1870), 65; “Daß Meine Fraue, und freünde auch möchten geholffen warden,” in Carl John Fliegel, ed., Records of the Moravian Mission among

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the Indians of North America (microform), April 1, 1749 and April 22, 1750; Jane T. Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in Pennsylvania,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 54 (October 1997), 727–28. 19. Moravian Records, June 4/15, 1749, in Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians & Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 113; Beverly Prior Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem: From Communal Mission to Family Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 28–29; Craig D. Atwood, “Blood, Sex, and Death: Life and Liturgy in Zinzendorf’s Bethlehem” (PhD dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1995), 101–04; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 15–16. 20. John W. Jordan, ed., “Spangenberg’s Notes of Travel to Onondaga in 1745,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 2, no. 4 (1878), 430; Charles A. Waltman, Eighteenth Century Bethlehem Medical Practices (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1986), 5, 19; Merritt, At the Crossroads, 116–17, 120–21. 21. Moravian Records, December 30/January 10, 1750 and July 20–21, 1760, in Merritt, At the Crossroads, 123. 22. Conrad Weiser quoted in Paul A. W. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760, Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945), 88; “Und gesagt er wäre bie Gott gewesen . . .,” Records of the Moravian Mission, February 18, 1749; John Brainerd, Life of John Brainerd, ed. Thomas Brainerd (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Publication Committee, 1865), 239; Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 40; idem, A Spirited Resistance, 30–31. 23. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 30–31. 24. David Zeisberger, “1769 Diary” quoted in Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 32–33; Hunter, “The Delaware Nativist Revival,” 42–43; Douglas L. Winarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport: Heavenly Visions and the Radical Awakening in New England,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 61 (January 2004), 11–12; Edwards, Life of David Brainerd, 326–27; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 117–73, 198–99. 25. Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America (New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), 11–21; Dowd, War under Heaven, 41–53; Colin G. Calloway, ed., The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994), 133. 26. [Robert Navarre], Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy, 1763, trans. R. Clyde Ford (Detroit, MI: Society of Colonial Wars, 1910), 20–32; Cave, “The Delaware Prophet Neolin,” 271–272. 27. Charles Beatty, Journals of Charles Beatty, 1762–1769, ed. Guy Soulliard Klett (University Park, PA, 1962), 65; James Kenny, “Journal of James Kenny, 1761–1763,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 3, no. 2 (1913), 171; Cave, “The Delaware Prophet Neolin,” 273; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 25–27. 28. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 33–35. 29. George Croghan to Gen. Thomas Gage, May 12, 1765, Thomas Gage Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; [Robert Navarre], “Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy,” 24; William Trent, “William Trent’s



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Journal at Fort Pitt, 1763,” entry for June 16, 1763, ed. Albert T. Volwiller, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 11 (December 1924), 399; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 36–37. 30. George Henry Loskiel, History of the Mission of the United Brethren among the Indians in North America (London, 1794), 38; John Heckewelder, Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren (Philadelphia, 1820), 135–36; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 38–64. 31. Hunter, “The Delaware Nativist Revival”; Simmons, “Red Yankees,” 253–71; James Axtell, ed., The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), chap. 6; idem, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chaps. 5–6, 9–11; Daniel K. Richter, “‘Some of Them . . . Would Always Have a Minister with Them’: Mohawk Protestantism, 1683–1719,” American Indian Quarterly 16 (Autumn 1992), 471–84. The adoption of Christianity among Indian communities, especially those consumed by European-American conquest and colonization, represents what Vittorio Lanternari identified as the acceptance of a “religion of the oppressed” as the only strategy remaining for sociocultural cohesion. See Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults (New York: New American Library, 1965).

Chapter 12

“The Seed of Dissention and Discord” The Awakening in the South, 1743–1775

The scene at Rev. Oliver Hart’s home was unprecedented. Crowds of young people crammed together, anxious about the state of their souls, gravitated around Hart’s maidservant, Margaret, who had become powerfully affected. “[S]he had these Words [from Jeremiah 31:3]; I have Loved thee with an Everlasting Love, set home with so much light, and Evidence, that she could not avoid taking Comfort from them,” Hart wrote. She bore witness to the other young women in her company about her conversion, shouting “Oh Miss Betsy! . . . Jesus Christ is Sweet, he is precious; had I known his sweetness . . . I would not have lived so long without him.” She then turned to another and cried “Oh! Miss Nancy, Christ is Sweet! And since he hath had mercy upon such a Vile Wretched Sinner as me; I am sure none need ever to Despair, Oh! Come to Christ; Come to Christ!” Betsy and Nancy, emotionally overcome, rushed outside to “vent their Grief,” while others still inside, men and women together, prayed loudly. Hart, shaken and stirred by this riveting scene, exulted in the wonder of group conversion, and in his role in bringing it about.1 The excessive radicalism of the charismatic Awakening in the northern colonies, particularly New England, brought such a backlash from Old Lights and moderates alike that ongoing revivals paled in comparison, and the outbreak of King George’s War and the Seven Years’ War seemed to have further pushed the revivals offstage. This has misled most historians into thinking that the Awakening had effectively ended shortly after 1745, when in fact such was not the case. The high energy of revivalism had largely spent itself in the North, to be sure, but in the mid-1740s and 1750s much of that energy shifted southward, setting evangelical fires in Virginia and the Carolinas. There the same dynamics of ecstatic, mystical and charismatic Christianity, carried by New Light Baptist and New Side Presbyterian 271

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itinerants from Pennsylvania, ran up against fierce opposition from the established church—in this case the Church of England, but refused to be extinguished. Steadily gaining in popularity and respectability, evangelicalism triumphed in the South in ways it could not in the North, due in large part to the determined efforts of moderate, ecumenically minded proselytes. In many ways, the redefinition of Protestant Christianity in America had its greatest iterations in the southern backcountry.  “UNDER THE PRETENDED INFATUATION OF NEW LIGHT” Samuel Morris, a bricklayer from Hanover County, Virginia, was instrumental in starting Protestant evangelicalism there. Always a faithful man, Morris nevertheless did not feel saved, and received scant support from his neighbors who attended church with him. He attempted without success to shake them out of their spiritual torpor by publicly reading Martin Luther and John Bunyan, and a conviction grew in him that the Church of England was mainly at fault. Morris heard news that George Whitefield would be visiting Williamsburg in late 1739, but was despondent that he could not make the trip to hear him. A few years later, however, a “young Scotch gentleman” gave him a volume of Whitefield’s sermons, which Morris incorporated into his public lectures. He eventually gathered together a group who felt as he did, and— convinced that they could not get their spiritual nourishment from their parish church, “concerted to disregard the law requiring their attendance at church.” These extramural Sunday gatherings routinely generated intense emotion, as Morris’s homilies affected some so greatly that they would begin “crying out, weeping bitterly.” Some group members’ charisms were so “strange and ridiculous” that Morris concluded that they had to be genuine expressions of godly spirit, and this was further confirmed when interested neighbors joined his “reading group.” Before long, Morris’s meetings grew too large for them to continue at his house, and so his followers constructed a meetinghouse “merely for Reading.” The Anglican authorities summoned Morris and his core disciples to court to justify their separating from the church and flouting the attendance law. The judges asked to what denomination they presumed to belong and, unsure how to respond, Morris and his friends simply identified themselves as “Lutherans.” Governor William Gooch, however, decided that doctrinally they were “of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.”2 Evangelical dissenters in Virginia confronted a rather hostile established Church of England. Virginia’s Baptists and Presbyterians strove to circumvent mandatory church attendance laws and the penalties for doing so, which



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made them an obvious danger to the Anglican establishment. They also had to face the grim reality of Virginia’s slaveholding society, and decide where they stood on the issues of slavery and race, both as Christians and as citizens in a society that depended upon slavery for its economic well-being. Virginia’s white evangelicals opted to Christianize African Americans, but only in rare instances did they suggest black-white spiritual equality, or permit black coreligionists to occupy positions of leadership. Nevertheless, the threat evangelicals posed to constituted religious authority and culture was compounded by their commitment to African-American Christianization, as well as an implicit critique of slaveholding that eastern tidewater elites found intolerable. Northern evangelicals had long considered sending missionaries to the southern colonies, and the Presbytery of New Castle commissioned William Robinson, a Log College graduate, to itinerate through Virginia and the Carolinas in 1743. Robinson’s sermons triggered so high a level of enthusiastic zeal that he was compelled to amend several “Antinomian Mistakes” made by new converts in their professions of faith. His preaching created “an agreable Confusion of various Passions . . . some could not refrain from publickly declaring their Transport.” Robinson moved on and was followed by fellow Log College alumnus John Blair, brother of Samuel Blair of Fagg’s Manor, Pennsylvania. His meetings likewise generated an uproar, as attendees could “hardly sit or stand, or keep their Passions under any proper Restraints.” Samuel Morris, trained as a Moderate, admitted later that he and his disciples never realized that such fervor could give rise to “Apostasy.” John Roan, another Log College graduate, toured Virginia in the winter of 1744–1745, distinguishing himself with his scathing public denunciations of the Anglican clergy. Under Roan’s influence, the Hanover revivalists were once again brought up on charges, leading to Gov. William Gooch demanding that “ministers under the pretended infatuation of new light, extraordinary impulse, and such like fanatical and enthusiastic knowledge” be suppressed. Subsequent visits by William Tennent, Sr. and Samuel Blair further guided the Hanover separatists along Scots-Irish Presbyterian lines, while a visit from George Whitefield passed with Morris only commenting that the Grand Itinerant offered “farther Encouragement.”3 Patrick Henry, the rector of St. Paul’s Parish in Hanover County and uncle of the future revolutionary firebrand of the same name, directed the campaign against the evangelical dissenters. In a 1745 letter to Virginia’s Anglican Commissary, William Dawson, he detailed the dangers posed by separatist evangelicalism. Based largely on information supplied by John Thomson, a major antirevivalist in the Philadelphia Synod, Henry branded the Hanover evangelicals—and by extension all evangelicals—as dangerous firebrands. Disdainful of the recognized social and religious order, they

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posed an imminent threat to the Anglican establishment, according to Henry. He accused the New Siders of sending poorly trained, unqualified itinerants throughout “all parts of America, to disturb the established Churches,” and that they believed themselves needful of no more qualification than “experiences of a work of grace in their hearts.” Henry repeated a rumor that John Roan claimed that sinners could not be converted until they willingly embraced the justice of their damnation, to the point of “disbelieve the very being of a God!”4 Evangelicals, he alleged, denounced their critics as “Grey headed Devils, . . . whose [souls] are in hell, though they are alive on earth, Lumps of hellfire, incarnate Devils, 1000 times worse than Devils.” The preacher, for his part, “puts himself into a violent agitation, stamping & beating his Desk unmercifully, until the weaker sort of his hearers being scar’d, cry out, fall down & work like people in convulsion fits,” and that these were the only true converts. Echoing Gov. Gooch, Henry suggested constant watchfulness against these “wild & wicked men.”5 The Log College itinerants devoted an enormous amount of attention to Hanover County since 1743, but Morris and his followers did not have a properly constituted church. This changed in 1748 when the New Side Presbyterian pastor Samuel Davies arrived to form the Hanover separatists into a congregation. Davies, a graduate of Samuel Blair’s seminary at Fagg’s Manor in 1746, was ordained by the New Castle Presbytery the following year and immediately traveled to Hanover where he gathered an enthusiastic following and no small amount of opposition. Patrick Henry renewed his attacks upon itinerants like Davies, who forcefully defended revivalism and proved himself a thoroughgoing Moderate during his tenure in Virginia, discouraging excessive enthusiasm and distancing himself from radical revivalists. Nevertheless, his Anglican opponents reprinted John Caldwell’s An Impartial Trial of the Spirit (1747), an antirevivalist exposé of the “Quack Methods” used by George Whitefield and his disciples. Davies countered with The Impartial Trial Impartially Tried and Convicted of Partiality (1748). Insisting that he never preached anything other than pure Reformed Christianity, he averred that his only purpose was the “faithful peaceable preaching of the Gospel, and necessary Self-Defence, when unjustly aggressed,” and never the encouragement of radical enthusiasm. “Sundry Irregularities have attended the Work of God” in New England, admitted Davies, but it “did not attend it in Pennsylvania.—Speculative Antinomianism has infected a few; and Lay-Exhorters were too much tolerated by some.”6 Davies reminded his readers that the 1689 Act of Toleration protected all Dissenters, despite suggestions from members of the Virginia House of Burgesses that the Act only applied to the British Isles. In a letter to the bishop of London written in 1752, Davies expounded further on this line of reasoning. “[I]f those that were formerly conformists, follow their own judgments, and



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dissent,” he asked, are they then “cut off from the privileges granted by law to those that are dissenters by birth and education? If not, had not these people a legal right to separate from the established church, and invite any legally qualified minister they thought fit to preach among them?” Consequently, Virginia’s Presbyterians and other evangelicals had a legal and religious right to be Dissenters. Davies knew that in order to gain influence in the Tidewater region he would have to be a model of religious moderation and sobriety, and the strategy was very successful. While he could not draw the kind of crowds George Whitefield did, he routinely gathered many hundreds of people to his meetings, where he would not tolerate excessive enthusiasm, and when he would ask for evangelical ministers to come to Virginia, he made sure that none come who were “freaks of ardent zeal.” James Davenport, who had repudiated his radical enthusiasm, visited in 1750 and earned Davies’s approval, and ministers sent by the New York Synod were warmly welcomed by dissenting congregations.7 There were, however, some Anglicans who embraced revivalism in Virginia, chief among whom was Devereux Jarratt. A schoolmaster in Albemarle County, Jarratt lived for a time with a family under strong evangelical influence, and the lady of the house lent Jarratt a number of Puritan pietistic texts. After that, he began attending meetings presided over by Presbyterian itinerants, where he acknowledged the power of evangelicalism. Sometime around 1752, he underwent the New Birth that left him, as he put it, “blessed with faith to believe, not one promise only, but all the promises of the gospel with joy unspeakable and full of glory . . . it was a little heaven upon earth—so sweet, so ravishing, so delightful.” Dismayed by the generally low quality of Virginia’s parsons, particularly “their cold and unedifying manner of preaching,” Jarratt decided to stay within the Anglican Church, as had George Whitefield and John Wesley. Assigned to Bath Parish in 1763, Jarratt despaired at the “ignorance of the things of God, Prophaneness, and Irreligion then prevailed” there. Most of his colleagues derided him for being “an enthusiast, fanatic, visionary, dissenter, Presbyterian, madman, and what not,” but undeterred, Jarratt began a successful career itinerating throughout Virginia and North Carolina, especially in coordination with Methodist itinerants in the mid-1770s.8 Jarratt, as concerned about enthusiasm as Davies, emulated Jonathan Edwards in his preaching style, but not to the point of dismissing the greater pangs of the new birth that he had come to believe attends true conversion. “[T]here were some circumstances,” he admitted, “which I disliked: such as loud outcries, tremblings, fallings, convulsions,” and he refused to allow lay exhorters to share the pulpit with properly ordained ministers, lest “the Assembly . . . be all in confusion, and must seem . . . like a drunken rabble.” Nevertheless, at Jarratt’s meetings it was common for converts to “fall down as dead,” which

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increasingly became a standard feature of the Methodist conversion process. Jarratt and Davies both worked to conform evangelicalism to Anglican doctrine, finding converts among those for whom the Church was too distant or unsatisfying. The Separate Baptists were enjoying a high degree of success at the same time, but Jarratt could not tolerate their “notion of going into the water, and its evil train of consequences.” The Baptists’ appeal lay in their satisfaction of ordinary people’s need for religious community and spiritual power in a socially imbalanced world; their growing popularity and persistence in the face of violent official and popular persecution posing a serious challenge to the Anglican establishment, threatening to change Virginia society.9 Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall were not the first Baptists to work the area. Anglo-American Baptists generally belonged to one of two branches, the “Regular” Baptists affiliated with the Philadelphia Association of Baptists and the “Separate” Baptists who arose from Anabaptist groups in New England. A third variant, the Arminian “General” Baptists, was a small minority with no real influence during the eighteenth century. Baptists, regardless of type, suffered the greatest degree of popular persecution in Virginia, being perceived as being radical subverters of the established social order. David Thomas of Broad Run in Fauquier County, as careful as he was to prove himself and the Regular Baptists as being temperate and theologically consistent, nevertheless endured repeated assaults from angry mobs made up of Anglicans and antirevivalist Presbyterians. On several occasions, mobs physically attacked him and his followers wherever he tried to preach, and rumors abounded about his and the Baptists’ sexual deviancy and criminal nature. A thoroughgoing antienthusiast, Thomas denied that his meetings dissolved into pious mayhem or that his preaching induced “horrid vociferations and obstreperous commotions.” For that kind of outrageousness, he suggested, one need look no further than to the Separate Baptists.10 The Regular Baptists struggled to radiate sobriety and respectability, while the Separates eschewed any compromise with the dominant culture, embracing an emphatic radicalism threatening Virginia’s prevailing religious order. Separate Baptist itinerants traveled into North Carolina, establishing a base at Shubal Stearns’s church at Sandy Creek. Stearns’s brother-in-law, Daniel Marshall, worked the Virginia-North Carolina border in the late 1750s, as did Dutton Lane, a once devout Anglican who converted to Separate Baptist principles after a terrifying spectral encounter with Satan. He founded a church on the Dan River in 1760, which faced persistent hostility from local Anglicans. According to Morgan Edwards, when a mob formed to arrest Marshall and Lane, God interceded by blinding them, convincing them “that this strange event was a warning to them; . . . which procured quietness to the poor baptists.” This was fairly common in the early years of Separate Baptist establishment in the South, as its leaders testified to having experienced a



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variety of signs and divine messages. James Read, compelled by “frequent teachings from God” in the form of dreams and visions, left North Carolina for Virginia in the mid-1760s. In one such dream he stood before a multitude, and his family aroused him when he started shouting “O Virginia, Virginia, Virginia!” His tours met with raucous success, the revival meetings often lasting long after dark, “the floor . . . covered with persons struck down under conviction of sin.”11 A deeply significant aspect of the popular appeal of Baptist Christianity was the vibrancy of its ritualism, specifically the rite of baptism, as compared to the staid formalism and sobriety of the Anglican Church service. Rejecting the notion of “sprinkling” water onto infants’ heads, as was practiced in most other Protestant churches, Baptists insisted that only a sensible person of at least seven years of age (the “age of reason,” according to conventional wisdom) could choose to accept and follow Christ, at which point she/he would be either fully immersed in water or have water poured over their heads by a minister or lay exhorter. As one Baptist minister, John Leland, described it, “At times appointed for baptism the people generally go singing to the water in grand procession: I have heard many souls declare they first were convicted or first found pardon going to, at, or coming from the water.” A much more potent form of community and fellowship permeated the Baptist churches than many believed they could experience in the Anglican Church. The celebration of the Eucharist further emphasized this within the “closed community” of Baptists, as David Thomas explained, the partaking of the Lord’s Supper being an “ordinance [that] should not be put under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that all may enjoy the illumination.”12 Other Baptist practices resurrected first-century Christian rites, and these shocked or discomfited sober Virginia Anglicans, such as the laying on of hands, the kiss of charity, the washing of feet, and offering the right hand of fellowship. One critical observer regarded these practices “with awful horror of mind,” and another grandee lamented—in terms that would have filled an early southern Baptist with pride—“that the Anabaptists . . . seem to be increasing in [influence]; and . . . quite destroying pleasure in the Country; for they encourage ardent Pray’r; strong & constant faith, & an intire Banishment of Gaming, Dancing, & Sabbath-Day Diversions.” Implicit and explicit rejections of the frivolity of planter-led Tidewater culture, which to the elites constituted a rejection of mostly innocent pleasures that only occasionally degenerated into “convivial excess,” as well as their radical egalitarianism, made the Baptists a serious threat to Virginia’s social and economic order. Baptist itinerants suffered the greatest degrees of raucous popular hostility that often erupted into violence that was usually permitted—and sometimes perpetrated—by law enforcement officers.13

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Separate Baptist growth, so fitful in the 1760s, exploded in the 1770s on the strength of tales of the conversion of powerful foes. One such character was John “Swearing Jack” Waller. Waller, a Spotsylvania County lawyer, had been an ardent opponent of all Baptists, but the resilience of one pastor deeply impressed and drew him into the Baptist orbit, and he eventually into becoming an itinerant minister. Waller often endured physical abuse and ridicule throughout his career, most poignantly when in 1771 he was threatened by the Caroline County sheriff and the parish priest at an outdoor revival meeting. The priest reportedly thrust the butt end of a horsewhip into Waller’s mouth, after which he was dragged down from the platform by the sheriff and horsewhipped such that “Waller was presently in a gore of blood and will carry the scars to his grave.” Undaunted, Waller returned to his pulpit to continue his sermon, and he was famous for the power of his preaching, as well as rumored to have the ability to heal people through prayer alone. So often were Baptist preachers jailed that in several counties the authorities had to erect barriers around the jails, given the itinerants’ penchant for delivering sermons from their cell windows.14 The Baptists in general, but especially the Separates, challenged genteel Virginia society, defined as it was by the planter decadence they so harshly criticized. New Baptist converts were often confronted by old friends who tried to persuade them to readopt the extravagant dress and resume attendance at horse races and cockfights they had abandoned. James Ireland, a Scottish immigrant schoolmaster who eagerly participated in the pleasureseeking culture of Tidewater, Virginia, and then converted to Baptist asceticism, was met by an old friend who hoped to persuade him to resume his old luxuriant lifestyle. He asked Ireland, incredulously, “In the name of the Lord, what is the matter with you?” Unsure himself, Ireland started seriously to consider himself among the damned until “a voice from Heaven reached my soul with these words. ‘But I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy.’” Melting into tears, his “hard heart . . . thawed to contrition,” he knew the genteel world of Virginia high society to be the Devil’s domain from which he had been delivered through God’s grace. Ireland began a career as an itinerant Baptist preacher, fully understanding that he would be persecuted for it. Shortly afterward, he was arrested for disturbing the peace in Culpepper and thrown into the jail. His followers appeared to hear him preach through the grate of his cell, but an antirevivalist mob formed to disperse the small crowd. His African-American devotees suffered the worst abuse, the mob stripping them naked and whipping them severely. Some tried urinating into the cell to stop him preaching, but to no avail. Later, another group unsuccessfully attempted to destroy his cell using kegs of gunpowder, while others tried to “smoke me with brimstone and Indian pepper.”15



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Baptists rejected Virginia’s planter-led patriarchalism, as well as the Anglican establishment itself. Anglicans were well aware of Baptist derision and spared no words to express their detestation of the dissenting upstarts. As the parson William Green wrote to a Baptist minister in 1767, “Worse could not be said of the Pagans & Idolators, who sacrificed their Children to Moloch, than has been said by some of your Society, concerning the Church and its Members.” Consequently, the Baptists could never “reasonably expect to be Treated with common decency or respect,” as far as Green was concerned. While the Presbyterians seemed willing to work within the parameters of the 1689 Act of Toleration, the Baptists were accused of aggressively flouting it with their vocal opposition to the Anglican establishment. A satirical piece in the Virginia Gazette identified the component parts of a Baptist preacher to be “Hypocrisy and Ambition,” “the Spirit of Pride,” “the Seed of Dissention and Discord,” “the Flower of Formality,” and “the Roots of Stubbornness and Obstiancy.” Virginia authorities routinely arrested and punished them for committing one or more of the following crimes: vagrancy, violating laws against itinerancy, unlawful assembly, and for propagating “Schismatick Doctrines.”16 Not surprisingly, parsons and laypeople alike were horrified by the Separate Baptists’ disregard for traditional racial and sexual order. In 1772, the Virginia Gazette printed an “Address to the Anabaptists Imprisoned in Caroline County,” which accused Baptists separating “Wives . . . from their Husbands, Children from their Parents, and Slaves from the Obedience of their Masters. Thus the very Heartstrings of those little Societies which form the greater are torn in sunder, and all their Peace destroyed.” From the beginning, Separate Baptist churches in Virginia included both black and white members, and as badly as white Baptists were treated, African-American Baptists fared far worse at the hands of white Anglicans. Separate and Regular Baptists rarely pressured white members to emancipate their slaves, much less advocate for the abolition of slavery, but some slaveholding converts did feel compelled to free their bondspeople. More often, they exhorted slaveholding members to treat their slaves compassionately, and in the 1770s would lightly discipline members who treated their slaves with “uncommon” cruelty.17 Evidence abounds that women, African Americans, and American Indian men played important roles in Separate Baptist churches and found spiritual empowerment in them. Some churches granted women leadership authority as “deaconesses” and permitted nonwhite males to exhort, which their Regular Baptist counterparts deplored and for which they refused to extend a hand of fellowship. A few churches even permitted African-American men to itinerate and serve as deacons and elders, and this empowerment of African Americans by Baptists and Presbyterians deeply alarmed the vast majority of white Virginians. The House of Burgesses officially threatened

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dissenters with fines and imprisonment for encouraging slave disobedience, for denigrating the institution of slavery, and for attempting to “baptize or admit any Slave . . . a Member . . . of any Congregation, or religious Society, without the Permission of the Owner of such Slave.” A common concern was that slaves would pretend to be itinerant Baptist preachers as a pretext for “absconding,” as typified by a Virginia Gazette advertisement offering a reward for capturing “a likely Negro fellow named ADAM,” who “pretends to be a Newlight.” Gradually, the Baptists began to circumscribe AfricanAmerican participation as exhorters and preachers, relegating them to the status of simple worshippers. In time, white church leaders cultivated respectability by disciplining women and African Americans far more, and with harsher punishments, than they did white men, but his apparently did nothing to deflect slaves and African-American freedmen from joining the churches.18 In the face of violent hostility, the Baptist churches committed themselves to an almost pacifist refusal to respond in kind to physical assaults, emphasizing Christ’s meekness and self-sacrifice. “Traditional [Virginia] society,” Rhys Isaac explained, “expected a free man to ‘resent’ insult and showed approval if he did,” but the Baptist churches reproved members who fought back against attackers. Rawley Hazard, a church clerk, when he was assaulted by a neighbor who used “Very Scurrilous language,” he decided to “defend himself against this sd Violence, that both the Assailant and Defendent was [sic] much hurt.” The elders, “seeming to make no allowances for the provocation,” voted to “Admonish Brother Rawley Hazard in the presents [sic] of the Church,” determining “that his defence was Irregular.” The Baptists tightly circumscribed their private and public behavior in a way that served both to strengthen their communal bonds, as well as isolate them from what they perceived to be a licentious social environment. Early southern Baptist church records abound with discipline cases against elders, deacons, and members for a wide variety of transgressions or lapses in behavior that speak to a determined campaign to impose order upon disorder, prefiguring the idea of the “Christian Sparta” that the evangelical revolutionaries of the 1770s hoped they were establishing.19 “A HAPPY REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN THE INTERIOR PARTS” Charles Woodmason, a former merchant, planter, tax collector, and magistrate around Charleston, South Carolina, took ship back to his hometown of London in December 1765 to receive ordination as a priest in the Church of England. Motivated, in part, by financial setbacks and personal troubles, he had grown deeply concerned about the apparent neglect of religion in the backcountry of the Carolinas. Licensed to preach in St. Mark’s Parish



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north of Charleston, Woodmason resolved to tour the backcountry upon his return in the summer of 1766, and itinerate among those he assumed were unchurched. “The People around, of abandon’d Morals, and profligate Principles—Rude—Ignorant—Void of Manners, Education or Good Breeding—No genteel or Polite Person among them,” was Woodmason’s initial assessment, but he found them not to be so unchurched as he had assumed. They were “extremely poor,” he sniffed, “Liv[ing] in Logg Cabbins like Hoggs—and their Living and Behaviour as rude or more so than the Savages,” and many of them “eaten up by Itinerant Teachers, Preachers, and Imposters from New England and Pennsylvania—Baptists, New Lights, Presbyterians, Independants, and an hundred other Sects.” His work of civilizing this boisterous people was clearly cut out for him.20 The plurality of Carolina backcountry settlers were Scots-Irish, interspersed with English, Scottish, and German enclaves, the Piedmont and eastern Appalachian mountain areas steadily populated beginning in the 1730s. Some of the Scots-Irish arrived via the ports of Charleston and, to a much lesser extent, New Bern, but many more migrated southward from the Virginia-Pennsylvania frontier in the 1750s and 1760s, mainly to escape the worst of the fighting in the French and Indian War. The migrants from the Great Valley to the north brought with them their traditions of outdoor revivalism that the Tennents were popularizing in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but the marked lack of settled ministers and churches left the Carolina ScotsIrish spiritually adrift. A high degree of indifference to religion pervaded the backcountry, but of those still spiritually hungry, practically any form of Protestant Christianity sufficed, and the Baptists and New Side Presbyterians exploited this to their advantage. But revivalism preceded the great ScotsIrish migration to the Carolinas.21 In the aftermath of Hugh Bryan’s humiliating attempt to part the waters of a local river in the South Carolina Lowcountry, he and his brother Jonathan founded the Stoney Creek Independent Presbyterian Church near the Pocotaligo River. The first minister appointed to lead it was William Hutson, another of Whitefield’s converts, who also worked as a tutor to the Bryans’s slaves. He and the Bryans permitted slaves to be full and active members of the church, Hutson often baptizing slaves belonging to himself and the Bryans. While Hutson followed Whitefield in his insistence that slaves be treated as spiritual equals, he and Jonathan Bryan nevertheless helped restore Hugh Bryan’s mild support for the “peculiar institution.” The Bryans and Hutson likewise encouraged Whitefield to permit slavery to be introduced at the Bethesda orphanage, which led to Georgia’s government to lift the prohibition on slavery in 1751. As Whitefield wrote to Hutson, “If you think propr as you once sd. to give me a Negroe, I will venture to keep him, & if he shod. be seized it is but for me to buy him again.” Later, however, “Upon

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2d. thots. you may Deferr sendg ye Negroe till I talk furthr abot it.” Hutson and other southern evangelicals sharpened the division between AfricanAmerican social and spiritual equality. Stoney Creek’s success was relatively unusual, as evangelical Presbyterianism spread slowly through the Carolinas from the 1740s through the 1770s, despite the northern presbyteries’ regular sending of itinerant missionaries to the Scottish and Scots-Irish residents of the backcountry. They also devoted some attention to proselytizing among the Catawbas, Cheraws, and Cherokees, among other Indian tribes, though with very little success.22 One such Presbyterian missionary operating in Cherokee country in the 1750s and 1760s was William Richardson, minister of the Waxhaw Church in northwestern South Carolina. A favorite student of Samuel Davies, Richardson arrived at Fort Loudon in east Tennessee in late 1758, where rumors of a Cherokee uprising made everyone jittery. Not surprisingly, the Cherokees strongly resisted his preaching. “They show the greatest Indifferency. How blind to their best Interests,” he confided to his diary. He hoped though that by “conversing familiarly with them, giving them small Presents inviting them to eat with me, smoking with them, [and] going to their Town House,” they might be persuaded to embrace Christianity. Once he gained some familiarity with some of the Cherokee leaders, he discovered that “they are very much given to conjuring & the Conjurers have great Power over ym,” and they repeatedly denied him any opportunities to preach to the community. Frustrated by his lack of progress and fearing imminent war, he departed east Tennessee in February 1759 after only a few months of desultory effort. His decision to leave turned out to be a prudent one, since the Cherokee War (1759–1761) began later in the year. He eventually settled at Waxhaw, where he lamented the “very distressing conditions” he found there, and spent many a sleepless “night . . . expect[ing] to be awakened with the Indian hollow.” Though discouraged by his lack of success, he had managed to gather about a hundred people into his church, and appealed to supporters in England for help, lest his flock “soon turn [back into] Heathens, and be as savage as the Indians themselves.”23 Richardson eventually suffered a controversial demise. Charles Woodmason, who spared no opportunity to disparage Presbyterian and Baptist evangelicals, apparently respected Richardson, and noted Richardson’s death in a memorandum that ascribed it to a fit of sectarian lunacy. Richardson had married the daughter of Alexander Craighead, the Scottish Covenanter and Pennsylvania revivalist who had come to North Carolina in 1755. In 1771, Richardson was discovered, according to Woodmason, “dead on his Knees in his Study, with a Bridle round his Neck, reaching to the Ceiling,” and he implied that Richardson’s wife was somehow responsible for killing him while in a religious frenzy. John Joachim Zubly of Savannah offered a less



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suggestive description of Richardson’s body in death, noting that he was found “hold[in]g to a chair with one hand stretched out, in an ordinary posture—stiff dead.” At first glance it seemed that Richardson had simply hung himself and he was buried without delay, but rumors and suspicion persisted to such a degree that authorities exhumed his body to perform an autopsy. The examiners discovered strangulation marks around his neck and bruising on his chest, which confirmed Woodmason in his conclusion that he died a “Martyr to the persecuting Spirit that Distinguishes Superstition and Enthusiasm, from Reason and Religion.”24 The Baptists outpaced the Presbyterians in evangelizing the Carolinas in the decades preceding the Revolution, and enjoyed their greatest initial success in the backcountry. Regular Baptists made an early incursion into the South Carolina Lowcountry in the 1730s, led by Isaac Chanler, founder of the Ashley River Baptist Church. An ardent supporter of George Whitefield, who preached to an overflow crowd at his church in July 1740, Chanler was instrumental in disseminating Baptist Calvinism in the Lowcountry, founding Regular Baptist churches at Welsh Neck and Euhaw, as well as elsewhere. Francis Pelot, a Swiss immigrant, was baptized by Chanler and became his protégé in 1744, eventually becoming the pastor at the Euhaw Baptist Church, where George Whitefield graced the new meetinghouse with a dedicatory sermon in March 1752. Oliver Hart, another devotee of Whitefield and an effective leader, emigrated from Philadelphia to Charleston, where he founded the Charleston Baptist Association in 1751. Possessing an ecumenical temperament, he helped legitimize Baptist revivalism against Anglican and Presbyterian criticism, guiding a major revival in 1754 that had so strongly affected his housemaid, Margaret.25 The continuing support of the Philadelphia Baptist Association was instrumental to the growth of the Regular Baptist churches in the Carolinas, having sent “ministering brethren” there in the late 1750s and 1760s. Rev. John Gano was one such missionary, briefly leading the church at Jersey Settlement, North Carolina, in 1754, and the following year preaching to a “numerous and brilliant” audience at Oliver Hart’s congregation at Charleston, an audience that included George Whitefield. Like other Baptists, he endorsed the evangelization of slaves, preaching to “a large congregation of negroes” at Ashley River Baptist Church, where he proclaimed that “they had been touched by the Spirit of the Lord.” He eventually assumed the permanent pastorate at Jersey Settlement, while also traveling 110 miles to preach at the Cashaway Church during its search for a new minister to replace one dismissed for drunkenness. The Cherokee War drove Gano away from North Carolina in 1760, settling in New York City to lead the First Baptist Church there in 1762. He maintained his itineration through Long Island and New England, contributing significantly to Baptist revivals there in the mid-1760s.

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The success of his endeavors was attested by Isaac Backus, who observed that Gano’s preaching “seems to be as much admired as Mr. Whitefields,” and it had a profound effect upon Hezekiah Smith, a 1762 graduate of the College of New Jersey. Smith became part of an influential circle of southern Baptist leaders, and reported to a colleague in Pennsylvania that “many Thousands are in ye back Parts, without any one, to break unto [them] ye Bread of Life.” However, like so many non-Carolinian Baptists, Smith’s career in the South was short lived. Ordained in Charleston in 1763, Smith was primed to take over the pulpit at the Cashaway Church, but he abruptly left for New Jersey “in a Flood of Tears” after having, by his own count, traveled “4235 Miles and preached 173 Sermons” in the year that he spent in the Carolinas. He ended up the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Haverhill, Massachusetts.26 Evan Pugh, a Pennsylvania native who had been raised in the Society of Friends and converted to the Baptist faith while living in Virginia in 1754, moved on to Charleston in 1760, where he spent a year training for the ministry. From there, he went to Welsh Neck to study under Nicholas Bedgegood, and agreed with most observers that the people of that region were “perishing for lack of Knowledge” of the gospel. He eventually made his way to Euhaw in 1763, where he was ordained by Francis Pelot, and embarked on a widely peripatetic career as an itinerant, traveling throughout the midAtlantic region. Frequently touching base in Philadelphia and keeping the Baptist Association there abreast of developments in the South, he often expressed discouragement with evangelical efforts in the Carolinas, confirmed in his dim assessment by a fractious year spent as pastor of the turbulent Welsh Neck Church. This and other difficulties led Oliver Hart to lament in 1769 that in Charleston “Religion is grown extremely unfashionable,” the citizens preferring to worship “God Mammon.” In the backcountry, however, Hart rejoiced that “There is a happy Revival of Religion in the interior Parts of this Province,” as radical evangelicalism had begun to take hold.27 The Separate Baptists’ epicenter was the Sandy Creek churches of North Carolina, energized by the work of Shubal Stearns and his itinerant colleagues. Separate Baptists established numerous churches in towns hugging the rivers of the Piedmont region. Tiden Lane remembered watching Stearns preaching from under a peach tree. “He fixed his eyes upon me immediately,” and Stearns’s unwavering stare convinced Lane that Stearns possessed mystical powers. As Stearns began his sermon, Lane collapsed, overwhelmed by the Baptist’s spiritual aura. Another convert, Elnathan Davis, traveled with a group of skeptical friends to watch Stearns perform a baptism. Davis was the only one who dared to approach the pulpit, and he noticed the people around him began to “tremble as if in a fit of the ague.” One attendee, overcome and sobbing, leaned upon Davis and he hastened back to his friends, vowing not to return to the pulpit, “but the enchantment of . . . Stearn[s’s] voice drew



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him to the crowd once more,” and the “trembling seized him also.” Within a week, he had been baptized by Stearns and encouraged to exhort, “raw as he was,” and eventually became the minister at the Haw River Baptist Church. The success of the Baptists in the backcountry of North and South Carolina was exultantly noted by Stearns, who wrote that in the year 1765 “the Lord carries on his work gloriously in sundry places in this province.”28 “CAUGHT UP BY GOD” Catherine A. Brekus attributes some of the Anglican backlash against the early southern Baptists to their allowing women to serve in leadership positions as eldresses—an extreme rarity in eighteenth-century American Christianity. They could be “as vocal and contentious as their counterparts in New England,” often “weeping and crying in a most extraordinary manner,” or succumbing to “ecstasies of joy.” Morgan Edwards reported that southern Baptist eldresses went much farther than their northern evangelical counterparts in their service to the churches, performing baptisms, conducting religious instruction with female members, and even consulting with male elders on important matters. On very rare occasions, eldresses were allowed to teach audiences containing both men and women, but Edwards hastened to add that there were required to “be veiled when they preach or pray, . . . if men be sent to their assemblies.” Nevertheless, this indicates the highest degree of authority women could have at that time in American religious history. Hannah Cave Graves, one such teaching eldress, apparently overran her bounds, making herself an exception proving the rule that religious women should be strictly controlled. Rev. John Taylor conceded that Graves, though an intelligent and devout woman, nevertheless forgot her place in “her blunt dealings with preachers at times, . . . [running] some hazzard of violating a saying of God himself, ‘touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm.’” Taylor noted with dismay that she once denounced a minister as a “hireling” who “fled when the wolf came, and seemed not to care for the sheep.”29 Several Baptist women are known to have exhorted in public in the 1740s and 1750s. Shubal Stearns’s sister Martha, “a lady of good sense, singular piety, and surprising elocution,” according to the Baptist historian Robert Semple, often “in countless instances melted a whole concourse into tears by her prayers and exhortations.” Her sister-in-law, Eunice Marshall, reportedly took it “upon herself to exhort and preach Baptist doctrines; was ordered to desist, but not obeying, was (although pregnant at the time) thrown into jail.” Margaret Meuse Clay enjoyed some notoriety for her gifts as an evangelical exhorter, and was esteemed highly enough that male ministers invited her to lead public prayers, but inevitably she ran into trouble. As with the male

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itinerants, Clay was brought up on anti-itinerancy charges and sentenced to a public whipping, but an unknown man volunteered to pay her fine so that she could avoid the agony and degradation of corporal punishment. Charles Woodmason, never one to miss an opportunity to ridicule his New Light competitors, sneered at a female Baptist exhorter who “was highly celebrated for her extraordinary Illuminations, Visions and Communications.” In response to her reported experience of an angelic visitation, he dismissed it as having been nothing more than a visit from her lover, a Baptist minister wreathed only in “the Fire of Lust.”30 While the vast majority of female preachers and eldresses were white, there is a smattering of evidence that African-American women may also have served as exhorters. Certainly, some slave women may have informally preached or taught to slave audiences, which masters would have regarded apprehensively or forbade outright, and white ministers would likely not have given them permission to speak out in church. What evidence there is for black exhorters comes mainly from slaves and their descendants passing down stories about influential matriarchs. In spite of restrictions placed upon slave and free black women, southern Separate Baptists did grant to white women a degree of religious freedom that was unprecedented in the history of British America. Morgan Edwards, during his tour of Virginia and the Carolinas in 1771–1772, counted forty Baptist churches that had deaconesses and six churches that had eldresses. Deaconesses tended to “the sick, miserable, and distressed poor,” while eldresses acted as “pastors” counseling female church members and new converts. Edwards summarized the eldress’ role as involving “praying, and teaching at [women’s] separate assemblies; presiding there for maintenance of rules and government; consulting with the sisters about matters of the church which concern them, and representing their sense thereof to the elders; attending at the unction of sick sisters; and at the baptism of women, that all may be done orderly.” Though barred from speaking publicly as though they held a male elder’s authority, they were nonetheless acknowledged as informal church leaders by their congregations.31 The Separate Baptists’ endorsement of female religious leadership developed from the distinctive culture of southern evangelicalism. While New England’s traditionalist patriarchalism had begun to dissolve under the influences of secularization, the South grew more conservative and committed to Anglican-led patriarchy and the convictions of white racial superiority. The institution of slavery, while it existed in the North, albeit to only a small degree, was particularly embedded in southern culture, “where its influence permeated every facet of life, including the government, the economy, the family, and the church.” A thin cadre of wealthy planters dominated the region’s society and politics, including the church vestries. They reinforced black subordination to whites, female subordination to men, and yeoman



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deference to the planter elite as integral to the maintenance of proper Christian order. Regardless of an undercurrent of tension and some conflict, mainly between commercial farmers and planters, the latter successfully created a realm of mutual obligations between black and white, female and male, and poor and rich that “many nostalgic clergymen in the North claimed to want,” namely “a communal, well-ordered society in which everyone knew his or her place.”32 “A DISORDERLY SET” The Separate Baptists did not confine their efforts to Virginia, but carried their radical evangelicalism into the Carolinas and Georgia. Philip Mulkey and a modest assembly of Separate Baptists founded the first church in South Carolina in 1760. Mulkey, a native North Carolinian, converted from Anglicanism to the Baptist church in 1756. A talented fiddler, he was confronted one night after a dance by a “hideous specter” of the “Devil grinning at him with fiery eyes,” and the shock of it rendered him insensible for several minutes. Upon regaining consciousness, he was alone, and grew convinced that this meant his certain damnation, and for many days he was unable to eat or sleep. He would sporadically “roar out, ‘I am damned! I shall soon be in hell,’” sure that God had made him for no other purpose than to cast him into the eternally burning lake of fire in hell as a lesson to other sinners. The arrival of an itinerant Baptist minister to his home persuaded him of the opportunity for Christ’s forgiveness, and he converted. Mulkey heard what he believed to be God’s call for him to preach, initially to his bewildered wife and later to a neighbor named Campbell, who converted after an intense meeting during which Mulkey broke into anguished sobs. Mulkey underwent baptism at the Sandy Creek Church sometime around 1758, and in 1760 he and his followers established a church on Broad River in South Carolina, which grew quickly. Charles Woodmason had nothing but contempt for “the infamous Mulchey, who came here lately in Rags, hungry, and bare foot.” By 1772, Mulkey’s church—relocated to Fairforest—and a few offshoots served about three hundred families, and Mulkey busily itinerated in the Congaree area, successfully converting many of Woodmason’s former adherents, doubtless driving the Anglican churchman to distraction.33 Daniel Marshall and Philip Mulkey worked the Piedmont region of the Carolinas together in the early- to mid-1760s, founding churches in the Savannah and Congaree river areas. Charles Woodmason alleged that Joseph Reese, a convert of Mulkey’s who led the church on the Congaree, abused his religious authority over women there. “What Man amongst all the Beaus and fine Gentlemen of the Land has such Influence over the Women as Joseph

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Reez?” he bemoaned. He accused Reese of having made the women disrobe down to their shifts during one Sunday meeting and commanded them to “walk home bare footed and bare legged.” Most likely, Woodmason wrote, “had He only said it, they would have stript off their Smocks, and gone home stark Naked.” This echoes the allegations of sexual improprieties levied at revivalist itinerant preachers in the North, as well as recalling the implications that the evangelicals targeted women in order to exploit their supposedly inherent mental and spiritual weakness. Reese did not just suffer attacks upon his character from Woodmason, but was also censured by the Sandy Creek Baptist Association for cooperating with Regular Baptists.34 The Regular Baptists refused to “hold fellowship” with the Separate Baptists on account of their support of informal female church leadership. In a culture where racial and class hierarchy and deference were crucial to the social order, elites worried that any acceptance of “insubordination,” even in the dissenting churches, could prove politically corrosive. Responding to this reality, the Philadelphia Baptist Association resolved in 1765 that the Bible “excludes all women whatsoever from all degrees of teaching, ruling, governing, dictating, and leading in the Church of God.” One Regular Baptist minister refused Shubal Stearns’s invitation to assist in Daniel Marshall’s ordination because he believed the Separates to be “a disorderly set, suffering women to pray in public.” The Congaree Baptist Association, established in 1771, followed Philadelphia in nudging Baptist evangelicalism toward greater moderation and Separate-Regular cooperation in the Carolina backcountry as a strategy for cultivating respectability. Richard Furman was instrumental in bridging the gulf between Separate and Regular Baptists in South Carolina. A convert of Joseph Reese at the High Hills Baptist Church on the Santee River, Furman was ordained in 1774 by Reese and Evan Pugh, and elected to lead the High Hills Church upon his ordination. His friendship with Oliver Hart began the process of bringing the Separate and Regular Baptists together in greater fellowship and cooperation during and after the American Revolution, culminating in Furman succeeding Hart as pastor of Charleston’s First Baptist Church in 1787.35 Baptists also ventured into Georgia in the early 1770s, led by Edmund Botsford, who itinerated throughout the Savannah River area from Augusta to Savannah. Daniel Marshall and his son Abraham likewise itinerated there after moving to Kiokee Creek. John Joachim Zubly, a moderate Presbyterian living in Savannah, met Daniel Marshall and observed one of his services near Augusta, Georgia, in 1772, and reported despairingly that Marshall “insisted on washing of feet & the holy kiss as necessary Practices.” Zubly further deprecated “Marshals Crazy Behav[io]r & his intruding himself every where to hold forth,” and suggested that the colonial government do something to bar the Baptists from operating in Georgia. He was also concerned



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about the Baptists’ antislavery inclinations and popularity among the slaves. Indeed, an African-American Baptist Church was founded in Savannah in 1775 by George Liele, a slave from Virginia whose master held Baptist sympathies. Emancipated in 1777, Liele pastored the Savannah Church until the British evacuated the city at the end of the War for Independence. He eventually settled in Kingston, Jamaica, where he founded and led a mixed congregation of Baptists.36 In many ways, the South’s Separate Baptists were much more radical than northern New Lights in their challenge to the traditional sexual and racial order. In the hills and mountains of the Carolina backcountry, white yeoman farmers and itinerant workers, as well as African-American slaves, embraced the revivals in search of religious fulfillment that implicitly challenged the plantation gentry’s power. While northern revivalists enjoyed support from across the socioeconomic spectrum, southern evangelicals were more likely to attract the poor and disfranchised. Robert Semple thought that this was because the preachers were “without learning, without patronage, generally very poor, very plain in their dress, unrefined in their manners, and awkward in their address,” and thus more apt to relate to rural folk rather than the urban middle class or the gentry. “Countercultural and egalitarian,” as Rhys Isaac noted, the Separate Baptists distinguished themselves from the Anglican gentry by their humble dress and deportment, austere sobriety, and passionate worship style. In addition to reviving ancient primitive Christian customs that scandalized Anglicans, specifically foot washing, laying on of hands, and the kisses of charity exchanged between adherents, they also brazenly allowed women, slaves, and laymen to exhort, counsel, and lead. It gained them much initial ground in the 1750s and 1760s, but only by retreating on these radical practices in the 1770s and beyond did they start to win respectability37  Exploiting the weaknesses of the Anglican Church, and focusing their efforts on a widely dispersed and spiritually hungry backcountry population, evangelicalism grew quickly in the fertile religious soil of the Carolinas and Georgia in the decades preceding the Revolution. By 1775, the Presbyterians and Baptists could boast that one-third of the total population of the colonial south were members of their churches, evenly divided between whites and African Americans. Evangelical radicalism faded in the South as the Baptist and Presbyterian churches grew stable and sought respectability, specifically by curtailing female and African-American leadership. The Baptist critiques of slavery and pronouncements of racial spiritual equality diminished and ceased by 1775, yet this did not significantly affect evangelicalism’s appeal among slaves and free blacks. They found in evangelicalism spiritual

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consolation, self-esteem, a greater sense of community, and the promise that all are equal in God’s eyes.38 The idea of equality became increasingly pertinent in the minds of white British-Americans in the 1760s and 1770s, as the ideological argument between the colonies and the mother country heralded the Revolution. Protestant revivalism lost much of its radical edge, though the theological debate between prorevivalists and antirevivalists continued even as it was overshadowed by the print debate over British imperial policy after the Seven Years’ War. Most revivalists found themselves drawn to the “patriot” side, which borrowed some of its rhetoric from New Light defenses of religious libertarianism, while some Old Lights gravitated toward Whig-Loyalism and staunch loyalism. Evangelical support for colonial rights against shifts in British administration, however, can be—and have been—overstated, as the more immediate concern for the revivalists was for establishing greater elite acceptance and respectability. In significant ways, embracing prerevolutionary sentiments became a potent means to that end.

NOTES 1. Oliver Hart, Diary, August 26, 1754, South Carolina Baptist Historical Society, Furman University, Greenville, SC, quoted in Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelicalism in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 256–57. 2. Samuel Davies, State of Religion among the Protestant Dissenters in Virginia (Boston, 1751), 8–11; Petition of Some of the Clergy to the House of Burgesses, n.d., in William S. Perry, ed., Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church (Hartford, CT: AMS Press, 1870), 381; Robert Leland Bidwell, “The Morris Reading-Houses: A Study in Dissent,” MS 7:3, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, 7–9, 23–24, 29, 34; Wesley Gewehr, The Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740–1790 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1930), 47–50; Rodger M. Payne, “New Light in Hanover County: Evangelical Dissent in Piedmont Virginia, 1740–1755,” Journal of Southern History 61 (November 1995), 672–73, 682–685; Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 139–40. 3. Davies, State of Religion, 12–17; Wesley M. Gewehr, The Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740–1790 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1930), 50–58; Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 56–57. 4. Patrick Henry to William Dawson, February 13, 1745, in Kidd, The Great Awakening, 236. 5. Dan Hockman, “‘Hellish and Malicious Incendiaries’: Commissary William Dawson and Dissent in Colonial Virginia, 1743–1752,” Anglican and Episcopal History 59 (June 1990), 158; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 150.



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6. Patrick Henry to William Dawson, June 8, 1747, in Kidd, The Great Awakening, 236; John Caldwell, An Impartial Trial of the Spirit (Williamsburg, VA, 1747), vii; Samuel Davies, The Impartial Trial Impartially Tried and Convicted of Partiality (Williamsburg, VA, 1748), 4, 26, 34, 36; George W. Pilcher, Samuel Davies: Apostle of Dissent in Colonial Virginia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971), 11–13; Gewehr, Great Awakening in Virginia, 71, 82–85. 7. Davies, Impartial Trial, “Appendix,” 4; Samuel Davies to the Bishop of London, January 10, 1752, in William H. Foote, Sketches of Virginia, Historical and Biographical, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1850), 1:191; Davies, State of Religion, 22, 28; Samuel Davies to Joseph Bellamy, July 4, 1751, Davies to Bellamy, July 13, 1751, in Kidd, The Great Awakening, 238; Gewehr, Great Awakening in Virginia, 89–90. 8. Devereux Jarratt, The Life of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt (1806; repr., New York, 1969), 31, 49, 56, 85–86, 96–97; idem, A Brief Narrative of the Revival of Religion in Virginia (London, 1778), 3, 8–11; Gewehr, Great Awakening in Virginia, 143–52. 9. Jarratt, Brief Narrative, 12, 15, 17–18; Jarratt, Life of Jarratt, 107; Gewehr, Great Awakening in Virginia, 152–55; Richard R. Beeman, “Social Change and Cultural Conflict in Virginia: Lunenberg County, 1746 to 1774,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 35 (July 1978), 468; David Bebington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1992), 45–50. 10. Morgan Edwards, Materials Towards a History of the Baptists, ed. Eva Weeks and Mary Warren, 2 vols. (Danielsville, GA: Heritage Papers, 1984), 2:36–37; David Thomas, The Virginia Baptist (Baltimore, 1774), 56, 63, 66; William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Foundations in the South: Tracing through the Separates the Influence of the Great Awakening, 1754–1787 (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1961), 62–68; Janet Moore Lindman, “Acting the Manly Christian: Evangelical Masculinity in Revolutionary Virginia,” WMQ, 3rd Series, 57 (April 2000), 401–02; Gewehr, Great Awakening in Virginia, 115; C. Douglas Weaver, “David Thomas and the Regular Baptists in Colonial Virginia,” Baptist History and Heritage 18 (October 1983), 7–8, 11. 11. Edwards, Materials, 2:44–46; Robert B. Semple, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Baptists in Virginia (Richmond, VA: Pitt & Dickinson, 1894), 21–24; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 245. 12. John Leland, The Virginia Chronicle: With Judicious and Critical Remarks under XXIV Heads (Norfolk, VA, 1790), 36; David Thomas, The Virginian Baptist, or a View and Defence of the Christian Religion as It Is Professed by Baptists of Virginia . . . (Baltimore, 1774), 35–36; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 166–67. 13. John Taylor, A History of Ten Baptist Churches . . . (Frankford, KY, 1823), 296; Hunter Dickinson Farish, ed., Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian (1943; repr., Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1968), 72; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 167–69. 14. Edwards, Materials, 2:54–55; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 162–63. 15. James Ireland, The Life of the Rev. James Ireland (Winchester, VA, 1819), 84–85, 94–95, 123–25, 164–66; Lindman, “Acting the Manly Christian,” 393–96; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 161–62; Christine L. Heyrman, Southern Cross:

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The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 211–17. 16. William Green to Nathaniel Saunders, February 7, 1767, in Lewis Peyton Little, Imprisoned Preachers and Religious Liberty in Virginia (Lynchburg, VA: J. P. Bell Co., 1938), 80–81; Virginia Gazette, October 31, 1771; Gewehr, Great Awakening in Virginia, 128–33; Sandra Rennie, “Virginia Baptist Persecution, 1765–1778,” Journal of Religious History 12 (June 1982), 50–53; Orange County Order Book, July 28, 1768, in Little, Imprisoned Preachers, 135–36. 17. “An Address to the Anabaptists Imprisoned in Carolina County, 8 Aug. 1771,” Virginia Gazette, February 20, 1772; Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 102, 194. 18. Edwards, Materials, 2:46, 50–51, 54, 56, 59–61; Virginia Gazette (Rind), March 26, 1772, April 23, 1772; William S. Simpson Jr., ed., “The Journal of Henry Toler, Part II, 1783–1786,” Virginia Baptist Register 32 (1993), 1630, 1653 n.179; Semple, Rise and Progress of the Baptists, 16; Elder John Sparks, The Roots of Appalachian Christianity: The Life and Legacy of Elder Shubal Stearns (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 44; Jewel Spangler, “Becoming Baptists: Conversion in Colonial and Early National Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 67 (May 2001), 258–67; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 201; Lindman, “Acting the Manly Christian,” 411–13. 19. Morattico Baptist Church Records, February 17, 1783, in Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 170. 20. Richard Hooker, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), xii–xix, 6–7, 13. 21. Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots-Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1; Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 3; W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 265–69. 22. Harvey Jackson, “Prophecy and Community: Hugh Bryan, George Whitefield, and the Stoney Creek Independent Presbyterian Church,” American Presbyterians 69 (Spring 1991), 15–18; R. W. Hutson, ed., “Register Kept by the Rev. Wm. Hutson, of Stoney Creek Independent Congregational Church and (Circular) Congregational Church in Charles Town, S.C., 1743–1760,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 38 (January 1937), 22, 27; George Whitefield to William Hutson, December 16, 1745, in John Christie, ed., “New Discovered Letters of George Whitefield, 1745–1746,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 32 (June 1954), 77. 23. William Richardson, Diary, December 5, 1758, January 14, 1759, in Kidd, The Great Awakening, 254; Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 228–32; William Richardson to J. F., May 6, 1760, May 21, 1761, in Samuel Davies, Letters from the Rev. Samuel Davies, and Others (London, 1761), 20–22, 30–31; Frederick V. Mills, Sr., “The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge in British North America, 1730– 1775,” Church History 63 (March 1994), 25.



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24. Hooker, The Carolina Backcountry, 14, 132–34; Lilla Mills Hawes, ed., The Journal of the Reverend John Joachim Zubly (Savannah, GA: Georgia Historical Society, 1989), 14. 25. George Whitefield, The Journals of George Whitefield (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1960), 440–41; Edwards, Materials, 130; Thomas Little, “‘Adding to the Church Such as Shall Be Saved’: The Growth and Influence of Evangelicalism in Colonial South Carolina, 1740–1775,” in Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy Sparks, eds., Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina’s Plantation Society (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 370; Loulie L. Owens, Oliver Hart, 1723–1795: A Biography (Greenville, South Carolina Baptist Historical Society, 1966), 7; Little, “‘Adding to the Church’,” 371–72. 26. John D. Broome, ed., The Life, Ministry, and Journals of Hezekiah Smith (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 2004), 8, 15–16, 234–35; A. D. Gillette, ed., Minutes of the Philadelphia Baptist Association, 1707–1807 (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 2002), 72; Terry Wolever, ed., The Life and Ministry of John Gano, 1727–1804 (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 1998), 60–61, 71–73, 78–79; William B. Sprague, ed., Annals of the American Pulpit, 9 vols. (1866–69; New York: Arno Press, 1969), 6:63–64; William McLoughlin, ed., The Diary of Isaac Backus, 2 vols. (Providence, RI Brown University Press, 1979), 1:583. 27. Evan Pugh to Samuel Jones, May 14, 1762, in Kidd, The Great Awakening, 260; Oliver Hart to Samuel Jones, June 30, 1769, in ibid. 28. Edwards, Materials, 2:93, 96–97; George W. Paschal, History of the North Carolina Baptists, 2 vols. (Raleigh North Carolina Baptist State Convention, 1930), 1:296–97; Robert M. Calhoon, “The Evangelical Persuasion,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert, eds., Religion in a Revolutionary Age (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 156–57; Shubal Stearns quoted in Isaac Backus, Church History of New England from 1620 to 1804 (Philadelphia, PA: American Baptist Publication and S. S. Society, 1844), 228. 29. Edwards, Materials, 2:91; idem, The Customs of the Primitive Churches (Philadelphia, 1768), 41; Garnett Ryland, The Baptists of Virginia, 1699–1926 (Richmond: Virginia Baptist Board of Missions and Education, 1955), 35–36; John Taylor, A History of Ten Baptist Churches (1827; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1980), 106; Catherine L. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 61–62. 30. Semple, History of the Baptists, 374; William L. Lumpkin, “The Role of Women in Eighteenth-Century Virginia Baptist Life,” Baptist History and Heritage 8 (1973), 164–65; Hooker, The Carolina Backcountry, 104; Breckus, Strangers and Pilgrims, 62–63. 31. Edwards, Customs of the Primitive Churches, 41; Breckus, Strangers and Pilgrims, 63–64. 32. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order: The Religious Foundations of the Southern Slaverholders’ World View,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55 (Summer 1987), 219–220; Breckus, Strangers and Pilgrims, 64. 33. Edwards, Materials, 2:139–43; Hooker, The Carolina Backcountry, 112–113; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 262–263.

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34. Ibid., 2:143–46; Hooker, The Southern Backcountry, 113; Little, “Adding to the Church,” 374–75; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 263–64. 35. Leon McBeth, “The Changing Role of Women in Baptist History,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 22 (Fall 1979), 88; Semple, History of the Baptists, 5; Edwards, Materials, 2:149–50; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 264. 36. Charles Mallary, Memoirs of Elder Edmund Botsford (Charleston, 1832), 38–51; Hawes, Journal of John Zubly, 21, 24; Lumpkin, Baptist Foundations in the South, 55; John Rippon, The Baptist Annual Register (London, 1793), 332–33; Sylvia R. Frey and Better Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African-American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 115–17, 131; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 264–65. 37. Semple, History of the Baptists, 26; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 163–72. 38. Little, “Adding to the Church,” 377; John B. Boles, The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt, rev. ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 6–7; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 265–66.

Conclusion “A Great and General Awakening”1

The “present enterprise,” General Washington’s instructions to Col. Benedict Arnold read, is “of the utmost consequence to the interest and liberties of America.” Arnold had volunteered to lead a small army northward through Maine and into Canada to secure Québec, while Brigadier General Richard Montgomery was to trek through New York and take Montréal before linking up with Arnold at Québec. “[T]he safety and welfare of the whole Continent,” the instructions continued, depended upon scoring two decisive early victories against lightly garrisoned cities that could be used as staging areas for future invasions of New York and New England. Securing Canada would make it more difficult for Britain to wage a ground war against the colonies, and joining Canada to the United Provinces would give the Continental Congress additional political and economic leverage against George III’s and Lord North’s government. The Northern Algonkians, the tribes of the pays d’en haut, and those living along the western slopes of the Appalachians could be counted on to side with the British, while the Iroquois Confederacy proclaimed neutrality even as it played both sides against the middle. Dealing with the Canadians and the Indians as “our friends and brethren” rather than as “enemies” would go far in buttressing the case for reinventing the empire in keeping with the historically English “standard of liberty—against which all the force and artifice of tyranny will never be able to prevail.” On the Sunday prior to the army’s departure from Newburyport, Massachusetts, Arnold ordered his men to attend a service at the First Presbyterian Church presided over by their chaplain Rev. Samuel Spring, after which the party, led by Arnold and Rev. Spring, entered the crypt of George Whitefield. They regarded “the hallowed corpse” in devotional solemnity for a while, then dared to touch it as though it was a holy relic, which by then it had certainly become. Finally, Arnold and Spring removed the clerical collar and wrist bands, which were cut up into small pieces and distributed among the officers as tokens of divine favor for the upcoming expedition.2 295

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This strange episode of Protestant relic hunting speaks volumes about not merely the fame of George Whitefield in America at the time, or the overt religiosity of the American Revolution, but also about the significance of the First Great Awakening as a defining—in fact a redefining—moment in American religious history. It reveals the complex dichotomy that developed in the mid-1700s, of a colonial American society as deeply influenced by the European Enlightenment as by the fundamentalist Calvinism of the Awakening. At once mutually contradictory and complimentary, its unique combination in the late 1760s and early 1770s gave the radical proto-revolutionaries a powerful vocabulary that justified independence from Great Britain on both political and religious grounds. But questions still abound about what transpired in the middle decades of the eighteenth century that is known as the First Great Awakening.  “TAKE AWAY THE WICKED FROM BEHIND THE KING” “My asthma is coming on,” George Whitefield rasped upon awakening in the wee hours of the morning of September 30, 1770. He admitted to an apprehension that this especially severe attack—the worst yet of so many he had endured throughout his life—would not just interrupt his preaching schedule for the day, but might also end his life. A doctor was summoned, and a simple examination confirmed that Whitefield indeed was suffering an asthma attack that would likely prove fatal. The “Grand Itinerant” steeled himself to meet death in accordance with pietistic principles—“to die . . . with resignation to God’s will,” and the witnesses attested that he embraced his end as a good Christian should, less than an hour after the doctor’s arrival as the sun was rising over Newburyport. His wife had died a couple of years before, and their one child did not survive infancy, so the only people who could stand for him as family in making the funeral arrangements were his colleagues. After a brief discussion about where he would be interred, the funeral was scheduled for several weeks hence in expectation that large numbers of mourners would want to attend. They were right. George Whitefield’s funeral was everything that Jonathan Edwards’s was not: elaborate, expensive, and a theatrical spectacle. The entire affair cost £50, which paid for his coffin and interment in a crypt that became a site of pilgrimage for his devotees. Newspapers throughout the colonies hastened to report the doleful news of a famous minister who—like Edwards—died prematurely. The virtual absence of criticism from his former adversaries speaks not just to cultural injunctions against maligning the dead, but to the degree to which evangelicalism had gone mainstream.3

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Whitefield’s passing might have been an even bigger news event had it not happened at a crucial turning point in colonial British-American history. A constitutional crisis gripped the colonies in the wake of the Seven Years’ War that set them at odds with their mother country, and put them on a short, winding road toward revolution and independence. New Light rhetoric about freedom of conscience and religious liberty soon found easy employment in the political rhetoric of libertarianism. On December 3, 1772, the Rev. John Allen of Boston’s Second Baptist Church delivered a sermon commemorating a day of thanksgiving ordered by Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. He chose as his central text not a passage from the Bible, as was customary, but rather a section of the royal charter for the colony of Rhode Island: “Be it enacted, that no freeman, shall be taken, or imprisoned, or deprived of his freehold, or liberty, or free custom, or be out-law’d, or exil’d, or otherwise destroy’d, nor shall he be oppressed, judged or condemned, but by the law of this colony.” His inspiration was an incident that took place in Narragansett Bay earlier that summer, when a packet boat, the Hannah, was chased by the British schooner HMS Gaspée on suspicion of customs duties evasion and ran aground on a sand bar. A crowd comprised of members of the Providence Sons of Liberty stormed the ship during low tide, evicted the crew, and burned the ship to the waterline.4 Allen proceeded to put forward a fairly standard argument on behalf of American rights and liberties as they were understood to be established and protected by the British constitution, which he grounded in biblical precepts. “I have seen,” he said, “an authenticated copy of your Lordship’s letter to the governor of Rhode-Island, in which there are such dictations, directions, and possitive [sic] commands, to oppress, with tyranny, a free people, which is inconsistent with a good man, or a Christian to have any concern or agency therein.” He refers generally to the changes in colonial administration as being antithetical to the concepts of British liberties, and that the Americans have the right and indeed a solemn duty “to oppose every usurping power (let it be from whom it will), that assaults his person, or deprives him of his own law or liberty as an American.” He continued by laying out the threat emanating from the Houses of Parliament and the Court of St. James as being roughly equivalent to that which had mobilized New Englanders to rally against the French in the war a decade ago, and that if it “be the bloody intent of the ministry, to make the Americans subject to their slavery, then let blood for blood, life for life, and death for death decide the contention.” In concluding his dedication, he reminded Dartmouth that the colonists loved their king and remained steadfastly loyal, but only so long as they can be allowed to “enjoy their birthright blessings.”5 The political turmoil surrounding the British government’s revision of colonial administration and trade regulation seemed to have nothing

298 Conclusion

whatsoever to do with Protestant revivalism, but the strength of AngloAmerican responses to the tightening of imperial control owes much to the Awakening. The rhetoric of American resistance borrowed heavily from that of the New Lights, and the democratizing forces in the churches contributed significantly to the further democratization of colonial politics. The dark religious implications of an apparently more insidious and sinister Parliament and King George III transferred easily from the hated Catholic French to the Anglican British, both rhetorically and graphically. So far has the connection been made between the Awakening and the American Revolution most famously by Alan Heimert that many in his wake have wondered if the Revolution could have happened at all without the Awakening.6 Of all the acts of Parliament that angered the American colonists, the Stamp Act and the Quebec Act most powerfully offended American religious sensibilities. Signs of monarchy were already everywhere for the average colonial to see, and it did not take much of a conceptual leap to perceive the royal stamp as the biblical mark of the Beast foretold in the Book of Revelation. Apocalyptic interpretations of the Stamp Act came mainly from the laity, who found in biblical imagery a potent device for raising colonial indignation. The Sons of Liberty characterized Connecticut’s stamp distributor, Jared Ingersoll, in effigies and in print as a devil while King George III’s friend, tutor, and closest advisor John Stuart, the Earl of Bute, became a scapegoat for having originally concocted the Stamp Act. When news of the Stamp Act’s repeal reached the colonies in the late spring and summer of 1766, ministers took to their pulpits to give thanks to God for yet another deliverance of his chosen people, extolling the benevolence of King George III and the belated wisdom of Parliament. The Virginia Gazette reported that a Rev. Mr. Davis of Norfolk, in a thanksgiving sermon celebrating the Act’s repeal, insinuated that Bute should be expelled from Court, quoting from Proverbs 25: “Take away the wicked from behind the king, and his throne shall be established in righteousness.”7 Jonathan Mayhew suggested that Catholic conspiracies aimed to undermine Britain and the American colonies, and that the Stamp Act had been a fateful misstep caused by concealed agents operating in Whitehall that might soon be exposed and punished. Nevertheless, in good New England Calvinist fashion, he reminded his Boston audience that the Americans were due for a chastisement after the war.8 Rev. John Cleaveland of Ipswich, Massachusetts, likened the support for revivalism to support for resistance to British policy in A Short and Plain Narrative of the Late Work of God’s Spirit (1767). “[W]hat,” he wrote, “has roused up the Spirits of the SONS OF LIBERTY at this Time, but an apprehended, or supposed unreasonable Encroachment upon their civil Rights and Liberty!” The New Lights, no less than the Sons of Liberty, he averred, must defend the “sacred Right and Liberty of private Judgment as to their

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spiritual Edification.” Similar notes were struck by Isaac Backus, who forcefully harnessed Whig libertarian rhetoric to the cause of religious toleration, emphasizing the hypocrisy of those Whigs who supported anti-itinerancy legislation. “[M]any who are filling the nation with the cry of LIBERTY and against oppressors,” who wrote, “are at the same time themselves violating the dearest of all rights, LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE.”9 Further measures by Parliament to tax and regulate the provincial economies heightened antagonism between Britain and the colonies. The greatest concern to clerics came as a result of the passage of the Quebec Act, which among its provisions for officially establishing the Church of England there, guaranteed religious toleration and political enfranchisement to the Catholic majority. Quebec’s proximity to New York and New England made it a convenient bugbear, and anti-Catholicism reinvigorated in the 1770s. This was especially pronounced among New Englanders, who thought of Canada as a vast breeding ground for Papist slaves and Jesuit-brainwashed Indians waiting to swoop down on them at any moment. For Calvinists throughout America, the defeat of the French vindicated their anti-Catholicism, and the Quebec Act seemed a disturbing betrayal of Anglo-America’s religious destiny. To those most alarmed by it, the Quebec Act could only mean that Roman Catholicism had once again resurfaced at the Court of St. James. The First Continental Congress, in an address to the British people, alerted its audience to Parliament’s aim of establishing in Canada “a religion that has long deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world,” implying that Britain eventually would be next. In his famous pamphlet debate with the Whig-Tory Daniel Leonard, John Adams argued that anti-Catholicism actually elevated New England to a higher moral plane.10 Just as the French and Indian War served to galvanize Old Lights and New Lights in New England and elsewhere under their shared apocalyptic anti-Catholicism, so also did the looming shadow of a war for independence from Britain likewise force most prorevivalists and antirevivalists among the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists to set aside their theological and ecclesiological differences in asserting colonial rights and liberties. Alan Heimert asserted that the antiauthoritarian aspects of the Awakening prepared the ground for the American Revolution, and while there is some truth in that, he overstated his case, especially in casting the majority of New Lights as embracing the Revolution and the Old Lights as Loyalists. Religious conviction certainly influences political opinion, but there is no escaping the fact that where one stood politically in the 1770s had only a little to do with the position one took in the religious arguments of the 1740s. Whitefield’s memory and legacy were lovingly maintained and embellished in the years following his death, even as Jonathan Edwards’s were

300 Conclusion

steadily fading. A small handful of Edwards’s disciples shepherded a tiny selection of his writings to publication, mainly in Scotland, but Ezra Stiles predicted in the summer of 1787 that his works in “another Generation will pass into as transient Notice perhaps scarce above Oblivion,” to be “looked upon as singular & whimsical.” Stiles wrote this by way of measuring the two men against each other, judging Whitefield a genius and Edwards a poor imitation. Many aspired to succeed Whitefield as a leading preacher and theologian, but they were nothing more than “dying & extinguished Lights” because “Geniuses never imitate.” What little of Edwards’s works that survive, Stiles supposed, are doomed to gather dust “in the Rubbish of Libraries.” Whitefield’s sermons and other works were copiously published and sold well in the 1770s, alongside memorial sermons and tributes delivered throughout the colonies as news of his death spread. The most famous of these was that of the poet and former slave, Phillis Wheatley, who lamented that “We hear no more the music of thy tongue, / Thy wonted auditories cease to throng.” Whitefield remained the embodiment of the First Great Awakening for the next few decades, while Edwards faded into obscurity before the revival of his reputation in the nineteenth century.11 A GREAT AWAKENING? This book began with William G. McLoughlin’s question, “Is not the history of America the history of the pietistic impulse in various formulations?” Pietism, secondarily defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “Devotion to religious feeling, or to strict religious practice; piety or pious sentiment, esp. of an affected or exaggerated kind,” is a trait that finds expression not just in American religion, but in politics and diplomacy. The infant United States, afire with a pietistic zeal for democratic-republicanism, behaved as though it would—as Thomas Paine encouraged them to—“create the world anew,” and the history of American foreign policy cannot be understood without acknowledging the fundamental role played by the pietistic, evangelical mentality. It forms much of the nucleus of American exceptionalism, which has its deepest roots in the seventeenth-century Puritan sense of apocalyptic mission, cogently expressed in Cotton Mather’s decision to title his 1702 history of New England Magnalia Christi Americana, and achieving culmination in Ezra Stiles titling his 1783 sermon celebrating the Treaty of Paris The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor. The former interpreted the Puritan exodus to America as the true church’s flight into the wilderness, as was foretold in Revelation 12:6, while the latter extended this metaphor to depict the United States as the bastion of liberty—a beacon shedding a

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purifying light that would banish the darkness of despotism and caesaropapacy throughout the world.12 This book endeavors to answer a number of questions swirling about the First Great Awakening, but one last question remains: Was the Awakening “great”? Eighteenth-century evangelicals and nineteenth-century historians had no doubts that the revivals of the mid-1700s were a glorious work of God’s grace, and subsequent generations of scholars accepted Jonathan Edwards’s summation of the revivals as having been “a great and general awakening.” Despite Jon Butler’s attempt to diminish the Awakening to near nonexistence, it continues to stand as a significant turn in American intellectual history. Evangelical historians believe that the advent of modern evangelicalism was what made the Awakening great, while others think it so only because of the revivals’ intercolonial and transatlantic nature. The use of the superlative term “great” presents a problem, and its use in this book indicates only a submission to an extended historiographical convention. What made this a great Awakening was the degree to which radical evangelicalism began to supplant the sedate, rationalist Protestant Christianity that defined Anglicanism and late seventeenth-century Calvinism, and then opened a floodgate of noisy, disputatious sectarianism. But even more importantly, it sparked a heated and fruitful theological debate about the nature of conversion, of religious liberty in the churches’ relation to government, and what it means to be a Christian.13 The First Great Awakening is one of the most important events in early American history, being a major turning point in the development of the American mind. Its power and influence reverberates through all of American religion, and evangelicalism constitutes a defining feature of the American character, both for good and for ill. It has been argued in this book that the Awakening redefined religion in late colonial British America, and proffers an expanded definition of a religious awakening. Instead of its being a unifying force providing British-Americans with a greater common identity, it was in a critical way a corrosive agent that splintered American Protestantism and made it more contentious. New and interesting sectarian and denominational movements sprung out of the Awakening and continued through the American Revolution, exploding still further in the Second Great Awakening of the 1800s.14 An understanding of the First Great Awakening is critically antecedent to encompassing the American character, and to deny the existence or to diminish the importance of the eighteenth-century revivals would be to remove a thread from the tapestry of American history. One would be left with a half-unraveled, nearly incomprehensible tangle of fibers. Fortunately, the First Great Awakening continues to fascinate and inspire, and its place as a crucible of eighteenth-century American identity formation will remain secure for ages to come.

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NOTES 1. Portions of the Conclusion were previously published as “‘The Promised Day of the Lord’: American Millennialism and Apocalypticism, 1735–1783,” in Richard Connors and Andrew Colin Gow, eds., Anglo-American Millennialism, from Milton to the Millerites (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 115–57. Reprinted with permission. 2. George Washington to Benedict Arnold, Cambridge, September 14, 1775, George Washington Papers: Revolutionary War Series, Philander D. Chase et al., eds., 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985–), 1:455–56; “Journal of Abner Stocking,” entry of September 15, 1775, in Kenneth Roberts, ed., March to Quebec: Journals of the Members of Arnold’s Expedition (New York: Doubleday, 1938), 546; J. T. Headley, The Chaplains and Clergy of the Revolution (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864), 92–93, 105; John J. Currier, History of Newburyport, Massachusetts . . . 1764–1905 (Newburyport, MA: John H. Currier, 1906), 272–75; Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 23–24; Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 188; James Kirby Martin, Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 117–19. 3. James Belcher, George Whitefield: A Biography, With Special Reference to His Labors in the Americas (New York: American Tract Society, 1871), 438–43; Ezra Stiles, journal entry for December 12, 1770, in Franklin B. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 1:79–80; David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study of Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 101–03, 137. 4. John Allen, An Oration upon the Beauties of Liberty, Or the Essential Rights of the Americans. . . . (Boston, 1773), 6, ix, xiii. 5. Allen, An Oration upon the Beauties of Liberty, xiv. 6. Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); John M. Murrin, “No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculations,” Reviews in American History 11 (June 1983), 161–71. 7. Lawrence H. Gipson, Jared Ingersoll: A Study of American Loyalism in Relation to British Colonial Government (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1920), 167–68; Virginia Gazette, June 6, 1766. 8. Jonathan Mayhew, The Snare Broken (Boston, 1766), 50. 9. John Cleaveland, A Short and Plain Narrative of the Late Work of God’s Spirit at Chebacco in Ipswich (Boston, 1767), 64, 71; Timothy D. Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 114–15. 10. “To the People of Great Britain,” in W. C. Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 34 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904–1937), 1:83, 88; [John Adams], “Novanglus, ” February 27, 1775, in [John Adams and Daniel Leonard], Novanglus and Massachusettensis (Boston, 1819), 74; Charles P. Hanson,

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Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 11–14, 61–64; Joseph Lathrop, “On ‘Revelation’”, quoted in Hanson, 9. See also Robert Emmett Curran, Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783 (Washington, DC, 2014), chap. 10. 11. Stiles, journal entry for August 11, 1787, in Dexter, ed., Literary Diary, 3: 275; Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 498–99; Phillis Wheatley, “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1770,” in John Shields, ed., The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 22. 12. “pietism, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2014, http://www.oed. com/view/Entry/143632?redirectedFrom=pietism (accessed May 22, 2014), emphasis added; Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), xvi–xxxix; Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 454–55. 13. Kidd, The Great Awakening, 323. 14. For an analysis of the influence of evangelicalism on American society and politics, see Christian Smith, Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). For an analysis of the changes within evangelicalism that have contributed to a trend toward profound anti-intellectualism, see Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Selected Bibliography

DOCUMENT COLLECTIONS Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University Library. New Haven, Connecticut. Joseph Bellamy Papers. Presbyterian Historical Society. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Clydesdale Synod Records. National Archives of Scotland. Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K. Colman Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston, Massachusetts. William Dawson Papers. Library of Congress. Washington, D.C. Jonathan Edwards Papers. Andover Newton Theological School. Andover, Massachusetts. Fulham Palace Papers (Papers of the Bishops of London). Lambeth Palace Library. Microform. Thomas Gage Papers. William L. Clements Library. University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, MI. Simon Gratz Papers. Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Lee Family Papers. Virginia Historical Society. Richmond, Virginia. Samson Occom Papers. Connecticut Historical Society. Hartford, Connecticut. Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts Correspondence. British Museum. London, U.K. Sudbury Archives. www.sudbury-ma.us/archives. Sudbury, Massachusetts. The Papers of Eleazar Wheelock. Microform. “Diary of Stephen Williams,” 1715–82. Typescript, 10 vols. Richard R. Storrs Memorial Library. Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES American Weekly Mercury. Boston Evening-Post. The Boston Gazette. 305

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Boston Post-Boy. Boston Weekly News-Letter. Charleston Mercury. Evangelical and Literary Magazine and Missionary Chronicle. Gentleman’s Magazine. The Independent Reflector. Maryland Gazette. The New-England Weekly Journal. New York Evening-Post. New-York Mercury. Pennsylvania Gazette. South-Carolina Gazette. Virginia Gazette. The Weekly History. The Weekly Magazine (London). The Weekly Miscellany (London).

PUBLISHED PRIMARY SOURCES Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, 21 vols. Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., 1869–1922. Adams, Amos. The Expediency and Utility of War, in the Present State of Things, Considered. Boston, 1759. Adams, Eliphalet. The Gracious Presence of Christ with the Ministers of the Gospel, a ground of great Consolation to Them. . . . New London, CT, 1730. Adams, John. The Works of John Adams. Charles Francis Adams, ed. 10 vols. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1850–56. [Adams, John and Daniel Leonard]. Novanglus and Massachusettensis. Boston, 1819. Allen, John. An Oration upon the Beauties of Liberty, Or the Essential Rights of the Americans. . . . Boston, 1773. Allin, John. Thunder and Earthquake, A Loud and Awful Call to Reformation. . . . Boston, 1727. “A. M.” The State of Religion in New-England. Glasgow, 1742. Appleton, Nathaniel. A Thanksgiving Sermon on the Total Repeal of the Stamp-Act. Boston, 1766. Armstrong, Maurice W. et al., eds. The Presbyterian Enterprise. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956. Backus, Isaac. The Diary of Isaac Backus, 3 vols. William G. McLoughlin, ed. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979. Barber, Daniel. The History of My Own Times, 3 vols. Washington, DC: S. C. Ustick, 1827–32. Barnard, John. The Hazard and the Unprofitableness, of Losing a Soul for the Sake of Gaining the World. Boston, 1712. Barton, Thomas. Unanimity and Public Spirit. A Sermon Preached at Carlisle . . . Soon After General Braddock’s Defeat. Philadelphia, 1755.



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Bellamy, Joseph. Sermons upon the Following Subjects. . . . Boston, 1758. ———. A Sermon Delivered Before the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut. New London, CT, 1762. Blair, Samuel. A Short and Faithful Narrative, of the Late Remarkable Revival of Religion in the Congregation of New-Londonderry. Philadelphia, 1744. ———. The Works of the Reverend Mr. Samuel Blair. Philadelphia, 1754. Bound, Nicholas. The Doctrine of the Sabbath, Plainly Laid Forth and Soundly Proved. . . . London, 1595. Boyd, William K., ed. Some Eighteenth Century Tracts Concerning North Carolina. Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Co., 1927. Bryan, Hugh and Mary Hutson. Living Christianity Delineated. . . . London, 1760. Burr, Aaron, Sr. Sermon Before the Synod of New-York, Convened at Newark, in New-Jersey. New York, 1756. Bushman, Richard L., ed. The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740–1745. New York: Atheneum Press, 1970. Byles, Mather. Divine Power and Anger displayed in Earthquakes. Boston, 1755. Caldwell, John. An Impartial Trial of the Spirit Operating in this Part of the World. . . . Boston, 1742. ———. The Nature, Folly, and Evil of Rash and Uncharitable Judging. Boston, 1742. ———. The Scripture Characters or Marks of False Prophets or Teachers. Boston, 1742. Candler, Allen D., comp. The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 26 vols. Atlanta: Chas. P. Byrd, 1904–16. Caulkins, Frances Manwaring. Memoir of the Rev. William Adams, of Dedham, Mass: and of the Rev. Eliphalet Adams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849. Chandler, Thomas Bradbury. What Think Ye of the Congress Now? New York, 1775. Chase, Philander D. et al., eds. George Washington Papers: Revolutionary War Series, 6 vols. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1985–. Chauncy, Charles. A Letter from a Gentleman in Boston, to Mr. George Wishart, . . . Edinburgh, 1742. ———. Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England. Boston, 1743. ———. A Discourse on “the good News from a far Country.” Boston, 1766. Clap, Thomas. The Greatness and Difficulty of the Work of the Ministry. . . . Boston, 1732. Cleaveland, John. A Short and Plain Narrative of the Late Work of God’s Spirit at Chebacco in Ipswich. Boston, 1767. Collins, Anthony. A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion. London, 1724. Colman, Benjamin. The Judgments of Providence in the Hand of Christ. . . . Boston, 1727. ———. Souls Flying to Jesus Christ Pleasant and Admirable to Behold. Boston, 1740. ———. A Letter from the Reverend Dr. Colman of Boston. Boston, 1744. Conant, Sylvanus. The Art of War. Boston, 1759. Cooper, William. One Shall be Taken, and Another Left. Boston, 1741. Cotton, John. Singing of Psalmes a Gospel-Ordinance. London, 1647.

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Hubbard, William. Happiness of a People in the Wisdome of Their Rulers Directing and in the Obedience of Their Brethren Attending unto What Israel Ough[t] to Do. . . . Boston, 1676. Humphreys, David. An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. 1730; New York: J. Downing, 1969. Hunter, Robert. “By His Excellency . . . A Proclamation,” January 12, 1711/12. Broadside. New-York Historical Society. New York City, N.Y. [Husband, Herman]. An Impartial Relation of the First Rise and Cause of the Recent Differences, in Publick Affairs, in the Province of North-Carolina. n.p., 1770. ———. Continuation of the Impartial Relation of the First Rise and Cause of the Recent Differences. . . . New Bern, 1770. Impartial Examination of Mr. Davenport’s Retractions, An. Boston, 1744. Ireland, James. The Life of the Reverend James Ireland. 1819; repr., Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 2002. Jarratt, Devereux. The Life of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt. Baltimore, 1806; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969. Keach, Benjamin. Sion in Distress, or the Groans of the Protestant Church, 3rd ed. Boston, 1683. Klett, Guy S., ed. Minutes of the Presbyterian Church in America 1706–1788. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1976. Klingberg, Frank, ed. The California Chronicle of Francis Le Jau, 1706–1717. Berkeley, : University of California Press, 1956. Langdon, Samuel. A Rational Explication of St. John’s Vision of the two Beasts, In the XIIIth Chapter of the Revelation. Portsmouth, NH, 1774. Laurens, Henry. The Papers of Henry Laurens. David R. Chestnutt and C. James Taylor, eds., 16 vols. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1968–2002. Livingston, John. A Brief Historical Relation of the Life of Mr. John Livingston Minister of the Gospel. n.p., 1727. Loskiel, George Henry. History of the Mission of the United Brethren among the Indians in North America. London, 1794. Lowell, John. The Advantages of God’s Presence with His People in an Expedition Against their Enemies. Boston, 1755. Manross, William Wilson, ed. The Fulham Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library: American Colonial Section Calendar and Indexes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Mather, Azariah. The GOSPEL-Minister Described, by the IMPORTANT DUTY of his OFFICE. New London, CT, 1725. Mather, Cotton. Small Offers Towards the Service of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness. Boston, 1689. ———. The Wonderful Works of God Commemorated. Boston, 1690. ———. A Midnight Cry. Boston, 1692. ———. Things to be Look’d For. Boston, 1692. ———. Reasonable Religion: The Truth of the Christian Religion, Demonstrated. Boston, 1700. ———. Le Vrai Patron des Saines Paroles. Boston, 1704.



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———. Reason Satisfied and Faith Established: The Resurrection of a Glorious Jesus Demonstrated. Boston, 1712. ———. Things to Be More Thought Upon. Boston, 1713. ———. Malachi, or the Everlasting Gospel Preached unto the Nations. Boston, 1717. ———. The Tryed Professor. Boston, 1719. ———. The Accomplished Singer. Boston, 1721. ———. India Christiana. Boston, 1721. ———. Une Grande Voix du Ciel à la France. Boston, 1725. ———. Ratio Disciplinae Fratrum Nov-Anglorum. A Faithful Account of the Discipline Professed and Practised; In the Churches of New England. Boston, 1726. ———. Manuductio ad Ministerium. Boston, 1726. ———. Suspiria Vinctorum: Some Account of the Condition to which the Protestant Interest in the World is at this Day Reduced. . . . Boston, 1726. ———. Boanerges. A Short Essay to preserve and strengthen the Good Impressions Produced by Earthquakes. . . . Boston, 1727. ———. Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1957. ———. Magnalia Christi Americana, 2 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1967. ———, et al. A Course of Sermons on Early Piety. Boston, 1721. Mather, Increase. A Discourse Proving that the Christian Religion is the only True Religion. Boston, 1702. Mayhew, Jonathan. A Sermon Preach’d in the Audience of His Excellency William Shirley, Esq. Boston, 1754. ———. Election Sermon. Boston, 1754. ———. Two Discourses Delivered October 9th, 1760. . . . Boston, 1760. ———. The Snare Broken. Boston, 1767. Meiners, Eduard. Kort ontwerp van de leere der waarheid, 8. druk. Groningen, 1735. Mellen, John. The Duty of all to be Ready for Future Impending Events. Boston, 1756. Minkema, Kenneth P. “A Great Awakening Conversion: The Relation of Samuel Belcher.” The The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 44 (January 1987): 125–26. ———. “The Lynn End ‘Earthquake’ Relations of 1727.” The New England Quarterly 69 (September 1996): 473–99. Nichols, John, ed. Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols. London: Nichols, Son & Bentley, 1817–58. Norton, John. The Orthodox Evangelist. London, 1654. Osborn, Sarah. Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn. Samuel Hopkins, ed. Worcester, 1799. Pears, Thomas C., Jr., ed. Documentary History of William Tennent and the Log College. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1940. ——— and Guy Klett, eds. “Documentary History of William Tennent and the Log College.” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 28 (March 1950): 37–64. Perry, Stevens, ed. Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church, 5 vols. Hartford, CT: AMS Press, 1870–78.

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Bowden, Henry Warner. American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Boyer, Paul S. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Brauer, Jerald C. “Types of Puritan Piety.” Church History 56 (March 1987): 39–58. Brekus, Catherine Anne. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. ———. Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Breen, T. H. “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century.” Past and Present 119 (May 1988): 73–104. Bridenbaugh, Carl. Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952. ———. Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. Brockway, Robert W. A Wonderful Work of God: Puritanism and the Great Awakening. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2003. Brown, Richard D. Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Brown, Richard Maxwell. The South Carolina Regulators. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Buckroyd, Julia. Church and State in Scotland, 1660–1681. London: John Donald Publishers, Ltd., 1980. Bumsted, J. M. “Revivalism and Separatism in New England: The First Society of Norwich, Connecticut, as a Case Study.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 24 (October 1967): 588–612. ———, ed. The Great Awakening: The Beginnings of Evangelical Pietism in America. Waltham, MA: Ginn-Blaisdell Publishing Co., 1970. ——— and John E. Van de Wetering, What Must I Do To Be Saved? The Great Awakening in Colonial America. Hinsdale, IL: Dryden Press, 1976. Burleigh, J. H. S. A Church History of Scotland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960. Bushman, Richard L. From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. ———. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Butler, Jon. “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600– 1760.” The American Historical Review 84 (April 1979): 317–46. ———. “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction.” The Journal of American History 69 (September 1982): 305–25. ———. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. ———. Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Calloway, Colin G., ed. The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994.

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Carr, Lois Green, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds. Colonial Chesapeake Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Carroll, Peter N., ed. Religion and the Coming of the American Revolution. Waltham, MA: Ginn-Blaisdell Publishing Co., 1970. Carson, Cary, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994. Chamberlain, Ava. “The Grand Sower of the Seed: Jonathan Edwards’s Critique of George Whitefield.” The New England Quarterly 70 (September 1997): 368–85. Clark, Charles E. The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Clark, J. C. D. The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Coalter, Jr., Milton J. “The Radical Pietism of Count Nicholas Zinzendorf as a Conservative Influence on the Awakener, Gilbert Tennent.” Church History 49 (March 1980): 35–46. ———. Gilbert Tennent, Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Coffman, Ralph J. Solomon Stoddard. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. Cogliano, Francis D. No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. Conforti, Joseph A. “The Invention of the Great Awakening, 1795–1842.” Early American Literature 26, no. 2 (1991): 99–118. ———. “Mary Lyon, the Founding of Mount Holyoke College, and the Cultural Revival of Jonathan Edwards.” Religion and American Culture 3 (Winter 1993): 68–89. Cook, Edward M., Jr. The Fathers of the Town: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Cooper, Jr., James F. “Enthusiasts or Democrats? Separatism, Church Government, and the Great Awakening in Massachusetts.” The New England Quarterly 65 (June 1992): 265–83. Corrigan, John. The Prism of Piety: Catholic Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Covey, Cyclone. “Puritanism and Music in Colonial America.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 8 (July 1951): 378–88. Cowing, Cedric B. “Sex and Preaching in the Great Awakening.” American Quarterly 20 (Autumn 1968): 624–44. ———. The Great Awakening and the American Revolution: Colonial Thought in the 18th Century. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971. Crane, Elaine Forman. Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.



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Crawford, Michael J. “Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared.” Journal of British Studies 26 (October 1987): 361–97. ———. Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Creel, Margaret W. “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs. New York: New York University Press, 1989. Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Curran, Robert Emmett. Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014. Currier, John J. History of Newburyport, Massachusetts . . . 1764–1905. Newburyport, MA: John J. Currier, 1906. Daniels, Bruce C., ed. Town and County: Essays on the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978. Davies, Horton. Worship and Theology in England, 5 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961–75. Davis, Natalie Z. Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays by Natalie Zemon Davis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975. Davis, Thomas J. “The New York Slave Conspiracy of 1741 as Black Protest.” The Journal of Negro History 56 (January 1971): 17–30. Debus, Allen G. and Michael T. Walton, eds. Reading the Book of Nature: The Other Side of the Scientific Revolution. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1998. Delfs, Arne. “Anxieties of Influence: Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch.” The New England Quarterly 70 (December 1997): 601–15. Demos, John Putnam. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Donaldson, Gordon. The Scottish Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. Dow, F. D. Cromwellian Scotland, 1651–1660. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979. Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Drake, Frederick C. “Witchcraft in the American Colonies.” American Quarterly 20 (Winter 1968): 694–725. Drake, James D. King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Dwight, Sereno Edwards. The Life of President Edwards. New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1830. Earle, Carville and Ronald Hoffman. “Staple Crops and Urban Development in the Eighteenth-Century South.” Perspectives in American History 10 (1976): 7–78. Ekirch, A. Roger. “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966.

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———. “The North Carolina Regulators on Liberty and Corruption, 1766–1771.” Perspectives in American History 11 (1977–1978): 199–256. ———. “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729– 1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Eltis, David. “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 53 (January 2001): 15–46. Farrelly, Maura Jane. Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Fawcett, Arthur. The Cambuslang Revival: The Scottish Evangelical Revival of the Eighteenth Century. London: Banner of Truth, 1971. Febvre, Lucien. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. Beatrice Goldfarb, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Feist, Timothy. “‘A Stirring among the Dry Bones’: George Whitefield and the Great Awakening in Maryland.” Maryland Historical Magazine 95 (Winter 2000): 388–408. Ferguson, William. Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977. Fishburn, Janet F. “Gilbert Tennent, Established ‘Dissenter.’” Church History 63 (March 1994): 31–49. Fisher, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Fisher, Elizabeth W. “‘Prophecies and Revelations’: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania Magazine for History and Biography 109 (July 1985): 299–333. Fisher, Linford D. The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Fix, Andrew. “Radical Reformation and Second Reformation in Holland: The Intellectual Consequences of the Sixteenth-Century Religious Upheaval and the Coming of a Rational Worldview.” Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (Spring 1987): 63–80. Fogleman, Aaron Spencer. “Jesus is Female: The Moravian Challenge to the German Communities of British North America.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 60 (April 2003): 295–332. Frantz, John B. “The Awakening of Religion among the German Settlers in the Middle Colonies.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 33 (April 1976): 266–88. Frazier, Patrick. The Mohicans of Stockbridge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Frey, Sylvia R. and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African-American Protestantism in the American South and the British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Friedman, Jerome. Blasphemy, Immorality, and Anarchy: The Ranters and the English Revolution. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987. Gallay, Allan. “The Origins of Slaveholders’ Paternalism: George Whitefield, the Bryan Family, and the Great Awakening in the South.” The Journal of Southern History 53 (August 1987): 369–94.



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Gaustad, Edwin S. The Great Awakening in New England. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. ——— and Philip L. Barlow. New Historical Atlas of Religion in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gentles, Ian. The New Model Army in England, Scotland and Ireland, 1645–1653. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Gewehr, Wesley M. The Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740–1790. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1930. Gildrie, Richard P. The Profane, the Civil & the Godly: The Reforming Synod of 1679 and the Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679–1749. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Gilje, Paul. The Road to Mobacracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Godbeer, Richard. Sexual Revolution in Early America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Goen, C. C. Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962. Gragg, Gerald. From Puritanism to the Age of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Grainger, Brett Malcolm. “Vital Nature and Vital Piety: Johann Arndt and the Evangelical Vitalism of Cotton Mather.” Church History 81 (December 2012): 852–72. Grasso, Christopher. A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Greenberg, Douglas. “Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America.” American Journal of Legal History 26 (October 1982): 293–325. Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Guelzo, Allen C. “From Calvinist Metaphysics to Republican Theory: Jonathan Edwards and James Dana on the Freedom of the Will.” The Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (July 1995): 399–418. Gunderson, Joan R. “The Search for Good Men: Recruiting Ministers in Colonial Virginia.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 48 (December 1979): 453–64. ———. “The Non-Institutional Church: The Religious Role of Women in EighteenthCentury Virginia.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 51 (December 1982): 347–57. Gura, Philip F. A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. ———. Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical. New York: Hill & Wang, 2005. Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Hall, Michael G., Lawrence H. Leder, and Michael G. Kammen, eds. The Glorious Revolution in America: Documents on the Colonial Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964.

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Hall, Timothy. Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Haller, William. The Rise of Puritanism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. ———. “The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714–1796).” Church History 61 (December 1992): 408–21. Hanson, Charles P. Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Harlan, David. The Clergy and the Great Awakening in New England. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1980. ———. “The Travail of Religious Moderation: Jonathan Dickinson and the Great Awakening.” Journal of Presbyterian History 61 (Winter 1983): 411–26. Harmelink III, Herman. “Another Look at Frelinghuysen and His ‘Awakening.’” Church History 37 (December 1968): 423–38. Harper, George. “Clericalism and Revival: The Great Awakening in Boston as a Pastoral Phenomenon.” The New England Quarterly 57 (December 1984): 554–66. Hatch, Nathan O. “The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 31 (July 1974): 407–30. Hartdagen, Gerald E. “The Vestries and Morals in Colonial Maryland, 1692–1776.” Maryland Historical Magazine 63 (December 1968): 360–78. Harvey, David and Gregory Brown, eds. Common People and Their Material World: Free Men and Women in the Chesapeake, 1700–1830. Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Research Publications, 1995. Hatch, Nathan O. “The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 31 (July 1974): 407–30. ———. The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. ———. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Headley, J. T. The Chaplains and Clergy of the Revolution. New York: Charles Scribner, 1864. Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. Heitzenrater, Richard P. Mirror and Memory: Reflections on Early Methodism. Nashville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989. Herskovits, Frances S., ed. The New World Negro by Melville J. Herskovits. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966. Heyrman, Christine D. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Hill, Christopher. “Puritans and ‘The Dark Corners of the Land.’” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 13 (1965): 77–102.



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Hinrichs, Carl. Preußentum und Pietismus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1971. Hoerder, Dirk. People and Mobs: Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780. New York: Academic Press, 1977. Hoffer, Peter Charles. Law and People in Colonial America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Hoffman, Ronald and Peter Albert, eds. Religion in a Revolutionary Age. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994. Hofstadter, Richard. America at 1750: A Social Portrait. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. Holifield, E. Brooks. The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. ———. Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Horsch, John. Menno Simons: His Life, Labors, and Teachings. Scottsdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1916. Humphrey, David C. From King’s College to Columbia, 1746–1800. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Hunter, Charles E. “The Delaware Nativist Revival of the Mid-Eighteenth Century.” Ethnohistory 18 (Winter 1971): 39–49. Ingle, H. Larry. First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Irwin, Joyce. “Anna Maria van Schurman: From Feminism to Pietism.” Church History 46 (March 1977): 48–62. ———. “The Theology of ‘Regular Singing.’” The New England Quarterly 51 (June 1978): 176–92. Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Israel, Jonathan I. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Jackson, Harvey H. “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement in Colonial South Carolina.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 43 (October 1986): 594–614. Johnson, Richard R. Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–1715. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981. Jones, Colin, Malyn Newitt, and Stephen Roberts, eds. Politics and People in Revolutionary England: Essays in Honour of Ivan Roots. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Jones, George Fenwick, trans. “John Martin Boltzius’ Trip to Charleston, October 1742.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 82 (April 1981): 87–110. Jordan, Winthrop D. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550– 1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Juster, Susan. Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

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Kidd, Colin. British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Kim, Sung Bok. Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Knappen, M. M. “The Early Puritanism of Lancelot Andrewes.” Church History 2 (June 1933): 95–104. Krahn, Cornelius. Dutch Anabaptism: Origin, Spread, Life and Thought, 1450–1600. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968. Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Culture in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Lacey, Barbara. “The World of Hannah Heaton: The Autobiography of an Eighteenth-Century Connecticut Farm Woman.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 45 (April 1988): 280–304. ———. The World of Hannah Heaton: The Diary of an Eighteenth-Century New England Farm Woman. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. Lambert, Frank. “‘Pedlar in Divinity’: George Whitefield and the Great Awakening, 1737–1745.” The Journal of American History 77 (December 1990): 812–37. ———. “The Great Awakening as Artifact: George Whitefield and the Construction of Intercolonial Revival, 1739–1745.” Church History 60 (June 1992): 223–46. ———. “Subscribing for Profits and Piety: The Friendship of Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 50 (July 1993): 529–54. ———. “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. ———. “The First Great Awakening: Whose Interpretative Fiction?” The New England Quarterly 68 (December 1995): 650–59. ———. Inventing the “Great Awakening”. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. ———. “‘I Saw the Book Talk’: Slave Readings of the First Great Awakening.” The Journal of African American History 77 (Winter 2002): 12–25. Lamont, Stewart. The Swordbearer: John Knox and the European Reformation. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991. Landsman, Ned C. “Revivalism and Nativism in the Middle Colonies: The Great Awakening and the Scots Community in East New Jersey.” American Quarterly 34 (Summer 1982): 149–64. ———. Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Lanternari, Vittorio. The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults. New York: New American Library, 1965. LeBeau, Bryan F. Jonathan Dickinson and the Formative Years of American Presbyterianism. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Lee, Hyun Sang and Allen C. Guelzo, eds. Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999.



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Lee, Maurice, Jr. Government by Pen: Scotland under James VI and I. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1980. ———. The Road to Revolution: Scotland under Charles I, 1625–1637. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1985. Leiby, Adrian C. The Early Dutch and Swedish Settlers of New Jersey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964. Lemmon, Sarah M. “The Genesis of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese in North Carolina, 1701–1823.” North Carolina Historical Review 28 (October 1951): 426–62. Lemon, James. The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. Lepore, Jill. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in EighteenthCentury Manhattan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Leventhal, Herbert. In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 1976. Levy, Leonard W. Emergence of a Free Press. New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1985. Lindman, Janet Moore. “Acting the Manly Christian: White Evangelical Masculinity in Revolutionary Virginia.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 57 (April 2000): 393–416. ——— and Michele Lise Tarter, eds. A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Lippy, Charles. Seasonable Revolutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981. Lockhart, Audrey. Some Aspects of Emigration from Ireland to the North American Colonies between 1660 and 1775. New York: Arno Press, 1976. Lockridge, Kenneth. Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974. Lockwood, Rose. “The Scientific Revolution in Seventeenth-Century New England.” The New England Quarterly 53 (March 1980): 76–95. Lossky, Nicholas. Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher, 1555–1626. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Love, W. DeLoss. Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Lovelace, Richard F. The American Pietism of Cotton Mather. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. Lovejoy, David ed. Religious Enthusiasm and the Great Awakening. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969. ———. The Glorious Revolution in America. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1972. Lowance, Mason I. and David Watters, eds. “Increase Mather’s ‘New Jerusalem’: Millennialism in Late Seventeenth-Century New England.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 87 (1977): 343–408.

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Lydon, James G. “Philadelphia’s Commercial Expansion, 1720–1739.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 91 (October 1967): 401–18. Maclear, James Fulton. “‘The Heart of New England Rent’: The Mystical Element in Early Puritan History.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42 (March 1956): 621–52. Main, Gloria L. Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Makey, Walter. The Church of the Covenant, 1637–1651. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1979. Marietta, Jack D. The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. Marini, Stephen A. Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Marsden, George. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Martin, Joel. The Land Looks after Us: A History of Native American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Maxson, Charles H. The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1920. McAnear, Beverly. “College Founding in the American Colonies, 1745–1775.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42 (June 1955): 24–44. McCusker, John J. and Russell R. Menard. The Economy of British America, 1607– 1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. McGregor, J. F. and Barry Reay, eds. Radical Religion in the English Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. McKerrow, John. History of the Secession Church. Edinburgh: A. Fullerton, 1854. McLoughlin, William G. “The American Revolution as a Religious Revival: ‘The Millennium in One Country.’” The New England Quarterly 40 (March 1967): 99–110. ———. New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. McManus, Douglas R. Colonial New England: A Historical Geography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Martin, James Kirby. Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Mead, Sidney. “From Coercion to Persuasion: Another Look at the Rise of Religious Liberty and the Emergence of Denominationalism.” Church History 25 (December 1956): 317–37. ———. “Through and Between the Lines.” Journal of Religion 48 (July 1968): 274–88. Meriwether, Robert L. The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729–1765. Kingsport, TN: Southern Publishers, 1940. Merrens, Harry Roy. Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Historical Geography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964.



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Merritt, Jane T. “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in Pennsylvania.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 54 (October 1997): 723–46. ———. At the Crossroads: Indians & Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700– 1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Middlekauff, Robert. The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Middleton, Simon and Billy G. Smith, eds. Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Miller, C. William. Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Printing, 1728–1766: A Descriptive Bibliography. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974. Miller, John. Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Miller, Perry. “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity.” Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Publications 31 (1937): 247–300. ———. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939. ———. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. ———. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956. Minkema, Kenneth P. “The Lynn End ‘Earthquake’ Relations of 1727.” The New England Quarterly 69 (September 1996): 473–99. Monaghan, Jennifer E. Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Moorhead, James H. “Between Progress and Apocalypse: A Reassessment of Millennialism in American Religious Thought, 1800–1880.” The Journal of American History 71 (December 1984): 524–42. Morgan, David. “The Great Awakening in North Carolina, 1740–1775: The Baptist Phase.” The North Carolina Historical Review 45 (July 1968): 264–83. Morgan, Edmund S. “New England Puritanism: Another Approach.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 18 (April 1961): 236–42. ———. The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962. ———. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963. ———. The Puritan Family: Religion & Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (1944), rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. ———. “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 24 (January 1967): 3–43. ———. Review of Religion and the American Mind, by Alan Heimert. The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 24 (July 1967): 454–59. Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Murray, Iain. Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography. Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1987.

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Murray, Judith Sargent. The Life of Rev. John Murray. Boston: Universalist Publishing House, 1870. Murrin, John M. “No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculations.” Reviews in American History 11 (June 1983): 161–71. Nash, Gary B. Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681–1726. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. ———. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Newcomb, Benjamin H. Political Partisanship in the American Middle Colonies, 1700–1776. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. Niebuhr, Richard. The Kingdom of God in America. New York: Willett, Clark, 1937. Noll, Mark A. “Observations on the Reconciliation of Politics and Religion in Revolutionary New Jersey: The Case of Jacob Green.” Journal of Presbyterian History 54 (Summer 1976): 217–37. ———. “Ebenezer Devotion: Religion and Society in Revolutionary Connecticut.” Church History 45 (September 1976): 293–307. ———. Christians in the American Revolution. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1977. ———. One Nation under God? Christian Faith and Political Action in America. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. ———, David W. Babbington, and George A. Rawlyk, eds. Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Norton, Mary Beth. “My Resting Reaping Times: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine’ Activities.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (Winter 1976): 512–29. Notestein, Wallace. A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718. New York: American Historical Association, 1911. Nybakken, Elizabeth J. “New Light on the Old Side: Irish Influences on Colonial Presbyterianism.” The Journal of American History 68 (March 1982): 813–32. ———. “In the Irish Tradition: Pre-Revolutionary Academies in America.” History of Education Quarterly 37 (Summer 1997): 163–83. Oberholzer, Emil, Jr. Delinquent Saints: Disciplinary Action in the Early Congregational Churches of Massachusetts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1956. O’Brien, Susan. “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755.” The American Historical Review 91 (October 1986): 811–32. Olson, Alison G. “Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and the Question of Religious Diversity in Colonial New England.” The New England Quarterly 65 (March 1992): 93–116. Osgood, Herbert Levi. The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, 4 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1924–25. Ozment, Steven E. The Age of Reform, 1520–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.



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Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974. Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Woolverton, John F. Colonial Anglicanism in North America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984. Worthen, Molly. Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Young, Alfred F., ed. The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism. De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976. Youngs, Jr., William T. “Congregational Clericalism: New England Ordinations before the Great Awakening.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 31 (July 1974): 481–90. ———. God’s Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700– 1776. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Zollmann, Carl. American Church Law. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co., 1933.

Index

Abercrombie, Maj. Gen. James, 225 Aborn, Abigail, 17, 34 Aborn, Elizabeth, 17, 34 Aborn, Martha, 17, 34 Abraham (Moravian slave preacher), 211 Act of Toleration (1689), 114, 273, 279 Act of Union (1707), 65, 69; and Oath of Abjuration (1712), 69 Adams, Amos, 238 Adams, Charles Francis, 161 Adams, Eliphalet, 46, 251 Adams, John, 242, 299 African religions, 200–2, 206 African-American religion, 54–56, 200, 216–19; and syncretism, 202; slave preachers, 199, 220 African Americans, 54–56, 121–22, 144, 160, 193, 200, 220, 274, 278, 279, 286, 289; early Christianization attempts, 54, 203–6, 209–11; evangelization of during the First Great Awakening, 122–23, 209, 211–19, 273, 289–90 Allen, John, 297 American Indians, 144, 220, 248, 279; religions of, 248–50; Christianization of, 56, 157, 185, 227, 250–55, 256–58, 262–65, 282; Anglo-American educational

initiatives, 251–52; pan-Indian identity movements, 250; nativist religious revitalization, 258–66; apocalypticism, 264. See also specific individuals and tribes American Revolution, 219, 242, 264, 290 Amherst, Sir Jeffrey, 261 Andrewes, Lancelot, 25 Andros, Sir Edmund, 50 Anglicanism, 2 Anglicization, 40, 45, 139 Anti-Catholicism, 226–27, 228–30, 299; and Pope’s (Guy Fawkes’s) Day, 228 Apocalypticism, 164, 210, 226, 234–36, 300 Arminianism, 18, 47–48 Arminius, Jacobus, 20 Arndt, Johann, 21 Arnold, Benedict, 295 “Assinsink Prophet.” See Wangomend Astrology, 41, 55, 58 Atheism, 51–52, 56 Atlantic slave trade, 202–3 Backus, Isaac, 141, 142, 180, 284, 299 Ballentine, John, 157 Baptists, 2, 272, 276–80, 283; “General Baptists,” 276; German Baptists, 335

336 Index

29, 236, 266; Regular Baptists, 276, 283, 288; Charleston Baptist Association, 283; Congaree Baptist Association, 288; Philadelphia Association, 276, 284, 283, 288; Sandy Creek Baptist Association, 288; Separate Baptists, 214–15, 276–280, 284, 286, 287–88, 289; Swiss Baptists, 236; and antislavery, 279, 286–87, 289 Barber, Jonathan, 178, 210 Barbot, John, 203 Barnard, John, 39 Barton, Thomas, 237 Bartow, John, 74 Baxter, Richard, 24 Bay Psalm Book, 90 Bayly, Lewis, 24, 25 Bedgegood, Nicholas, 284 Behavioral excesses, 133–34 Belcher, Jonathan, 100, 128, 129–30, 133 Belcher, Joseph, 132 Belcher, Samuel, 132–33 Bellamy, Joseph, 214, 239 Benedict XIII, 230 Benedict XIV, 235 Benezet, Anthony, 211 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 6 Bertholf, William, 30 Bill for the General Rights and Liberties (1692), 52 Bird, Samuel, 235–36 Blair, Hugh, 120 Blair, James, 119 Blair, John, 273 Blair, Samuel, 78, 137, 273; Fagg’s Manor seminary, 273, 274 Böhme, Anthony Wilhelm, 28; Pietas Hallensis (1707), 29 Böhme, Jacob, 22 Bolton, Robert, 121 Bolzius, Johann Martin, 168 Book of Revelation, 100, 134, 155, 165, 230, 234, 235, 240, 241, 301

Bosomworth, Thomas, 208 Botsford, Edmund, 288 Bound, Nicholas, 24 Braddock, Edward, 237 Bradford, John, 22 Brainerd, David, 157, 247, 253, 260 Brainerd, John, 258 Brauer, Jerald C., 23 Brekus, Catherine A., 285 Bridenbaugh, Carl, 4 Brockwell, Charles, 154–55 Bromfield, Edward, 28 Brown, John, 18 Browne, Isaac, 216 Bryan, Hugh, 207–9, 210, 281 Bryan, Jonathan, 207–8, 210, 281 Buell, Samuel, 143, 181, 184 Bulkley, Peter, 163 Bull, William, 211 Bumsted, J. M., 5 Bunyan, John, 25 Burnet, William, 74 Burr, Aaron, Sr., 186, 235 Burroughs, Jeremiah, 24 Buse, Stephen, 155 Bushman, Richard L., 5 Butler, Jon, 4, 5, 202, 301 Byles, Mather, Sr., 234 Cabot, Marston, 152 Caldwell, John, 181–82, 274 Calvert, Benedict, 230 Calvert, Charles, 5th Baron Baltimore, 231 Calvin, John, 66 Calvinism, 47–49; “catholick” Calvinism, 48 Cambridge Platform (1648), 27, 47, 50, 142 Cambuslang, Scotland, revival (1742), 175 Camisards, 111 Campbell, John, Earl of Loudon, 225 Carroll, Charles of Carrollton, 231 Catawba Indians, 282

Index

Chanler, Isaac, 283 Charles I, 27, 68 Charles II, 29, 50, 68 Chauncy, Charles, 150, 161–62, 174, 192; on Gilbert Tennent, 176; and James Davenport, 178; and enthusiasm, 133; as antirevivalist, 178–79, 181–82; and Jonathan Edwards, 176, 178; and Seasonable Thoughts, 173, 177–78; and George Whitefield, 176, 181, 182, 184; and The Earth Delivered from the Curse, 233–34 Cheraw Indians, 282 Cherokee Indians, 213, 262, 282 Cherokee War (1759–1761), 282, 283 Church of England, 69; in the BritishAmerican colonies, 42, 44–45, 50, 74, 266, 272, 289 Church of Scotland, 65, 66–70, 73; National Covenant, 67, 68; in Ireland, 68–69 Civil millennialism, 186 Clap, Nathaniel, 128 Clap, Thomas, 46, 183 Clark, Charles E., 46 Clarke, Samuel, 186 Classis of Amsterdam, 71 Clay, Margaret Meuse, 285–86 Cleaveland, John, 298 Coalter, Milton J., Jr., 76 Cole, Nathan, 127, 145 College of New Jersey, 191, 284 College of Philadelphia, 225 College of Rhode Island, 191 College of William and Mary, 119, 191 Colman, Benjamin, 18, 52, 94, 99, 100, 115, 130, 134, 179, 181, 207 Commission for Indian Affairs (Massachusetts), 101 Conant, Sylvanus, 235 Concert of Prayer, 232 Conestoga Indians, 247 Confession of Faith (1680), 47, 50 Congregationalism, 1–2; ordination in, 46–47

337

Conway, Edwin, 214 Cooper, Mary, 143–45 Cooper, Samuel, 240 Cooper, William, 207 Cotton, John, 90 Counter-Reformation, 21, 23, 29, 236 Covenant renewals, 150 Covenanters, 65, 68–70, 73, 140 Cowing, Cedric B., 162 Craighead, Alexander, 282 Cromwell, Oliver, 68 Croswell, Andrew, 140, 163–64, 178, 187, 192 Cummings, Archibald, 116 Cutler, Timothy, 92, 99, 129, 161 Davenport, James, 2, 140, 141, 143, 151, 173, 177, 190, 192, 255, 275; arrests and trials for disturbing the peace, 151; New London book burning, 149–51, 175; Confession and Retraction, 176, 180; rejection of radicalism, 176, 177–78, 179 Davies, Samuel, 235, 236, 274–76, 277, 282; evangelization of African Americans, 212–15 Davis, Elnathan, 284 Dawson, William, 214, 215, 274 Deerfield raid (1704), 87, 100 Deism, 2, 40, 48, 97–98 Delaware Indians, 247, 253, 256, 261 “Delaware Prophet.” See Neolin Denominational growth, 52 Devotion, Ebenezer, 151 Dickinson, Jonathan, 138, 166, 186–88; A Display of God’s Special Grace, 187; and Andrew Croswell, 187; The Danger of Schisms and Contentions, 186; The Reasonableness of Christianity, 186–86; The Witness of the Spirit, 186; and Gilbert Tennent, 186, 188; and George Whitefield, 117 Dod, John, 24 Dominion of New England, 30, 50

338 Index

Douglas, William, 163 Downame, John, 24 Dreams and visions, 79; 152–60, 163–65; as defining features of the Awakening, 150, 165. See also Edwards, Sarah Pierpont; Moravians Dubard, Frederick, 211 Dutartre family, 161 Dutch Reformed Church, 2, 30–31 Dwight, Sereno Edwards, 159 Dyer, Henry, 155 Earthquakes, 17–18; Lynn End Earthquake (1727), 17–18, 33–34; Cape Ann Earthquake (1755), 233–34 Economic growth (British-American), 40, 45, 51; in the Middle Colonies, 41–42; in New England, 40–41; in the southern colonies, 43–44 Edward VI, 23 Edwards, Esther (daughter of Jonathan Edwards), 87, 88, 130 Edwards, Jerusha (daughter of Jonathan Edwards), 130 Edwards, Jonathan, 2, 18, 48, 52, 87–89, 115, 141, 160, 174, 226, 229, 275, 301; and Regular Singing controversy, 89–91; theological orientation, 91–92; and Northampton revival (1734), 48, 92–96; and Charity sermons, 97–98; and apocalypticism, 98–99, 192, 133, 232–33; visionary experience of, 100; and revivalism, 132, 135, 152–53, 159–60, 192, 232; and Suffield revival, 151–52; The Distinguishing Marks, 175; A Faithful Narrative, 92–93, 95, 113, 114, 134, 207; A History of the Work of Redemption, 98; An Humble Attempt . . ., 233–34; Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 85–86, 101–2, 128, 131–32, 152, 176, 182; Some

Thoughts . . ., 158–59, 160, 173, 175–76; and Stockbridge mission, 100–1, 253; death of, 191–92 Edwards, Jonathan, Jr. (son of Jonathan Edwards), 98 Edwards, Lucy (daughter of Jonathan Edwards), 191 Edwards, Morgan, 276, 286 Edwards, Sarah Pierpont (wife of Jonathan Edwards), 130, 158–60, 191 Edwards, Timothy (father of Jonathan Edwards), 86–87, 89, 92, 132 Eells, Nathaniel, 182 Eisenstadt, Peter, 5 Elder, John, 140 Eliot, Andrew, 182–83 Eliot, John, 101, 227, 250 Ellis, Jonathan, 237 English Civil War, 68 English Reformation, 66 Episcopate (American), 242 Erskine, Ebenezer, 65 Erskine, John, 98 Ettwein, John, 205 Evidentialism, 40 Filmer, Sir Robert, 91 Finley, Samuel, 235 Fish, Joseph, 178, 192 Folk religion, 2, 54–56 Forbes, Eli, 240 Foxcroft, Thomas, 181, 187, 188, 241; Apology in Behalf of the Revd. Mr. Whitefield, 184 Foxe, John, 22, 157 Francke, August Hermann, 25, 26–27, 28 Franklin, Benjamin, 107–8, 116, 123–24 Frelinghuysen, Theodorus Jacobus, 30–33, 72, 235; and Klagte against him, 70–71; and Jacobus Schuurman, 71, 163; and pietism, 31–34; and George Whitefield, 117

Index

French and Indian War. See Seven Years’ War French Prophets. See Camisards Fresenius, Johann Phillip, 166 Frey, Sylvia R., 200 Frink, Thomas, 181 Frisian Catechism (1718), 32 Furman, Richard, 288 Gano, John, 283–84 Garden, Alexander, 162, 211; and George Whitefield, 119, 120, 121–23, 124, 129, 130 Gaspée incident, 297 Gaustad, Edwin S., 4, 42 Gee, Joshua, 176–77 Gentleman’s Magazine (London), 115 Gentleman’s Monthly (London), 137 George II, 230 George III, 219, 298 Germantown (Pennsylvania), 29–30 Gilbert, William, 209 Gillies, John, 136–37 Gilman, Nicholas, 153–54, 179–80, 190 Glorious Revolution (1688–1689), 30, 50, 230 Gooch, William, 273, 274 Goodwin, Thomas, 24 Goen, C. C., 4 Gookin, Nathaniel, 17 Gordon, James, 212 Gowing, Martha, 34 Graham, Chauncy, 236, 238 Graves, Hannah Cave, 285 Green, William, 279 Grimes, Moses, 218 Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw, 216, 217 Guy Fawkes’s Day. See AntiCatholicism Guyse, John, 94–95, 114, 134 Hale, John, 51 Hales, John, 218 Halfway Covenant, 27, 47, 49, 50, 88

339

Halfway Synod (1662), 27, 50, 51 Hall, Joseph, 24 Hamilton, Patrick, 66 Hart, Oliver, 271, 283, 284, 288 Harvard College, 48, 49, 118, 129, 191 Hatch, Nathan O., 5 Hawley, Joseph, II, 99 Hazard, Rawley, 280 Heaton, Hannah, 156–57 Heimert, Alan, 4–5, 298 Hempstead, Joshua, 185 Henry VIII, 22 Henry, Patrick, 273–74 Hervey, James, 109 Hide, Jedidiah, 141 Historiography, 3–7 Hobby, William, 238 Holifield, E. Brooks, 47 Hopkins, Samuel, 100, 152 Housatonic Mahican Indians, 100, 101, 251 Humanism, 40 Humphries, David, 204 Hunter, Robert, 53, 74 Hutchinson, Anne, 27, 93, 177 Hutson, William, 120, 281–82 Hutterites, 29 Impartial Examination of Mr. Davenport’s Retractions, 179 Independents, 2 Ireland, James, 214, 215, 278 Iroquois Nations, 235, 238, 257, 258, 264 Islam, 202 Isaac, Rhys, 216, 280, 289 Jackson, Harvey, 212 James I/VI, 67 James II, 50 James V, 67 Jarratt, Devereux, 53, 275–76 Jenkins, Robert, 231–32 Jenks, Samuel, 240 Jesuits. See Society of Jesus

340 Index

Joachim of Fiore, 29 John, Philip, 219 Jones, Benjamin, 233 Jones, David, 263 Jones, Jenkin, 138

Labadie, Jean de, 21 Lambert, Frank, 111 Landsman, Ned C., 73 Lane, Tiden, 284 Langdon, Samuel, 240 Lathrop, Mary, 142 Laud, William, 68 Laurens, Henry, 206 Lee, William, 215 Le Jau, Francis, 205, 219 Liele, George, 289 Leisler’s Rebellion (1688–1691), 30, 50 Leland, John, 214, 277 Locke, John, 69 Log College, 74, 78, 118, 191, 273 Logan, James, 73–74 Lord, Benjamin, 141, 142 Loring, Israel, 174 Louisbourg campaign (1745), 184, 232 Lucas, Eliza, 209 Luther, Martin, 66, 227 Lutheran Church, 2, 42

Marshall, Abraham, 288 Marshall, Daniel, 276–77, 287, 288 Marshall, Eunice, 285 Martyn, Charles, 206 Mary of Guise, 66 Mary I, 22 Mary, Queen of Scots, 66 Maryland, 230–31 Massachusetts Bay Company, 27 Mather, Azariah, 49 Mather, Cotton, 27, 28–29, 48, 51, 90, 229; and Magnalia Christi Americana, 28; and Manuductio Ad Ministerium, 49; and The Terror of the Lord, 34 Mather, Increase, 28 Mather, Richard, 90 Mather, Samuel, 159 Maxson, Charles H., 4 Mayhew, Experience, 251 Mayhew, Jonathan, 234, 237, 240 McGready, James, 69 McLaurin, John, 232 McLoughlin, William G., 1, 300 Meacham, Joseph, 85 Meiners, Eduard, 31 Melanchthon, Philip, 20 Mellen, John, 235 Mennonites, 30; Amish, 42 Metacomet’s War (1675–1676), 28, 100 Methodism, 22, 110, 125 n. Millennialism, 98–99, 133, 176, 239 Miller, C. William, 116 Miller, Perry, 4, 23 Mills, Jedidiah, 141 Mohegan Indians, 253 Montauk Indians, 254, 255 Moorhead, John, 176 Moravians, 29, 111, 140, 165–68, 212, 255–58, 260 Morris, Samuel, 272, 273, 274 Mulkey, Philip, 287–88 Murray, John, 145

Mackemie, Francis, 81 Marrow of Modern Divinity, The, 69

Naesman, Gabriel, 167 Narragansett Indians, 250, 253

Kahnawake Mohawks, 87 Katapelleecy, 262 Kidd, Thomas S., 6, 7, 8 King George’s War (1744–1748), 184, 228–29, 231–32, 271 King Philip’s War. See Metacomet’s War Kingsley, Bathsheba, 157–58, 159 Kinnersly, Ebenezer, 138 Knox, John, 66–67; and the Confession of Faith, 67; and the First Booke of Discipline, 67; and the Lords of the Congregation, 67 Koch, Johannes, 24

Index

Nash, Gary B., 5 Native Americans. See American Indians National Covenant (Scotland), 69 Neolin, 261–63 “Newcomer,” 263 New England Company, 250–51 New Divinity movement, 6, 88 Newspapers (British), 112–13, 114, 136 Newspapers (colonial), 45–46, 112–14, 174, 188–91; and news about revivals, 135–37; Boston Gazette, 190, 228; Boston Evening-Post, 180, 181, 189; Boston Weekly News-Letter, 188, 190, 228, 229; Boston Weekly Post-Boy, 190, 209; Maryland Gazette, 230–31; New-England Weekly Journal, 113–14, 135–36, 228; New York Gazette, 115; Pennsylvania Gazette, 138, 188, 189, 190, 218, 233; Philadelphia Gazette, 116; SouthCarolina Gazette, 120–21, 122, 163, 189, 190, 210–11; Virginia Gazette, 215, 279, 280 New York City slave conspiracy (1741), 122, 209–10 Niantic Indians, 253 Nicholson, Francis, 204 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 1 Ninigret, 251 Noll, Mark A., 5, 6 North Hartford Association, 153 Nybakken, Elizabeth, 139 O’Brien, Susan, 114 Occom, Samson, 253–55 Occultism, 40, 54–55, 56 Ogle, Robert, 208 Ogle, Samuel, 119 Oneida Indians, 255 Osgood, Herbert Levi, 1, 4 Otseningo Seer, 258, 264 Palatine Germans, 30, 42 Papounhan, 259

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Paracelsus, 54 Park, Joseph, 253 Parker, James, 210 Parkman, Ebenezer, 46, 135, 153 Parrington, V. L., 4 Parsons, Jonathan, 181 Pastorius, Daniel Francis, 29 Pearsall, R., 134–35 Pierpont, Benjamin, 89 Pelot, Francis, 283, 284 Pemberton, Ebenezer, 117 Penn, John, 247 Penn, William, 29 Pepperell, Sir William, 184 Pequot Indians, 251 Perkins, William, 23, 25, 91 Pierpont, Benjamin, 90 Pierson, John, 186 Pietism, 18, 19, 34, 39; European, 20–27, 29; American, 27–33 Pitt, William, 212, 227 Pomeroy, Benjamin, 132, 181 Pontiac, 262 Pontiac’s War (1760–1765), 254 Population growth (colonial), 2, 31, 41–42, 43, 53, 58 Post, Christian Frederick, 260, 261 Potter, Elam, 143 Potter, Nathaniel, 238 Pratt, Isaac, 153 Presbyterianism (colonial), 138–39, 272, 273; and Presbytery of New Brunswick, 78, 137, 183; and Presbytery of New Castle, 273, 274; schism (1741), 139–40; “New Side,” 137, 140; “Old Side,” 139, 140; and Synod of New York, 137, 139–40, 266; and Synod of Philadelphia, 42, 74, 76, 117, 137, 139, 273; reunion (1758), 241 Prince, Thomas, Sr., 53, 72, 132, 135, 181; and The Christian History, 2, 79, 136–37, 182, 192, 252 Print culture (colonial), 45, 47 Providentialism, 40 Pugh, Evan, 284, 288

342 Index

Puritan “Great Migration,” 49 Puritanism, 22–24, 27–28, 41; Separatists (Pilgrims), 28, 42 Quakers. See Society of Friends Quebec Act, 298, 299 Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), 87, 228–29 Raboteau, Albert J., 56, 201, 216, 218 Ramus, Petrus, 24 Randolph, John, 215 Rationalism, 18, 21, 48, 54, 56 Rea, Caleb, 239 Read, James, 277 Reading, Philip, 234–35, 237, 238 Reed, Mary, 155 Reese, Joseph, 287–88 Reformation, 66; English, 66; Scottish, 66; and Peasants’ Revolt, 133–34 Reformed Church, 42 “Reformer,” 247, 258 Reforming Synod (1679), 28, 50 Regnier, Johann Franz, 165–66 Richardson, William, 282–83 Roan, John, 273, 274 Robinson, William, 273 Rogers, Daniel, 155, 180, 181, 184, 219–20 Rogers, Richard, 24 Rous, Francis, 24 Rowland, John, 138 Royal African Company: British, 203; French, 203 “Royal Americans,” 236 Rutman, Darrett B., 5 Salem witch hunt, 28, 51, 164 Salter, Richard, 182 Savage, Samuel Phillips, 151 Savin, Thomas, 219 Saybrook Platform (1708), 142 Scattameck, 263 Schurman, Anna Maria van, 21 Scientific Revolution, 56

Scioto conference (1769), 263–64 Scots-Irish: in the Middle Colonies, 137, 139, 236; in the southern colonies, 281 Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, 139 Scougal, Henry, 109 Sergeant, John, 101 Secker, Thomas, 241 Second Indian War, 100 Semple, Robert, 285, 289 Separatism, 141–45; and Gilbert Tennent, 141 Sensbach, Jon S., 212 Seven Years’ War, 2, 145, 192, 225–26, 234–41, 247–48, 260–61, 271, 290 Sewall, Joseph, 181 Seward, William, 115–16, 118, 121, 123 Sexuality, 159–63, 165, 288 Shawnee Indians, 261, 262, 263 Shepard, Thomas, 157 “Shepherd’s Tent,” 142, 183, 190 Shippen, William, 191 Shirley, William, 190, 226, 232, 238 Shotts revival (1630), 67 Shurtleff, William, 183 Sibbes, Richard, 24 Six-Mile-Water Revival (1625), 68 Slave conspiracy, New York (1741), 123, 210–11 Slavery, 273 Smith, Edward (Bishop of Down), 73 Smith, Hezekiah, 284 Smith, Josiah, 53, 120–21, 123, 210 Smith, Lisa H., 189 Smith, William, 225 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 52, 74, 154, 204, 205–6, 241–42, 250–51 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 28 Society in London for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, 214 Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 205, 254

Index

Society of Friends (Quakers), 2, 29, 42, 145, 164, 236; and Keithian Schism, 72–73 Society of Jesus, 55, 228, 250–51, 255 Spangenberg, August Gottlieb, 166, 256–57 Spener, Philipp Jakob, 25 Spring, Samuel, 295 Stamp Act, 298 State of Religion in New-England, The, 175 Stearns, Martha, 285 Stearns, Shubal, 276–77, 284–85, 288 Stevens, Hubbard, 155 Stiles, Ezra, 150, 191, 300; A Discourse on the Christian Union, 241–42; The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor, 300–1 Stirling, James, 119 Stockbridge Mahican mission, 251 Stoddard, John, 100 Stoddard, Solomon, 52, 86–87, 91–92, 157, 227–28 Stoeffler, F. Ernest, 21 Stono Rebellion (1739), 120–21, 208 Stout, Harry S., 123 Stuart, James Edward, 230 Stuart Restoration (1660), 49 Symmes, Thomas, 90 Synod of Dort (1618–1619), 21 Taylor, Jeremy, 25; Holy Dying, 25, 32; Holy Living, 25, 32 Taylor, John, 285 Teata, 263 Teedyuscung, 257–58 Teellinck, William, 24, 31 Tennent, Charles, 119 Tennent, Gilbert, 2, 53, 74, 75–78, 79–81, 102, 115, 156, 165, 173, 175, 181, 186, 192; and middle-colony revivals, 137–38, 140, 141–42; and Theodorus Frelinghuysen, 72, 76–77; The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry, 79, 140;

343

The Righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees Consider’d, 141–42; renounces radicalism, 141, 188–89 Tennent, John, 2, 74, 76–77 Tennent, William, Jr., 2, 72, 74, 76–77, 140 Tennent, William, Sr., 2, 66, 72, 73–75, 117, 140, 273 Testimony and Advice of an Assembly of Pastors, The, 177, 183 Testimony of the Pastors of the Churches in the Province of Massachusetts-Bay in New England, The, 176–77 Thirty Years’ War, 22, 29, 226 Thomas, David, 276, 277 Thomas, Isaiah, 137 Tjaden, Sicco, 30–31 Toland, John, 97 Toleration Act (1689), 52 Tracy, Joseph, 4 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 232 Treaty of Paris (1763), 248 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 29 Trismegistus, Hermes, 54 Trott, Nicholas, 39, 88 Trumbull, Benjamin, 131 Unitarianism, 2, 40 Unitas Fratrum. See Moravians Universalism, 2, 40 Ury, John, 210 Varnod, Francis, 203, 206 Verschuir, Johan, 31 Vindication of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, A, 184 Volck, Alexander, 166–67 Voltaire, 233 Wabanaki Indians, 100, 227 Wadsworth, Daniel, 153 Wakatomica, 262 Waller, John, 278 Wallmann, Johannes, 20–21

344 Index

Walter, Thomas, 90 Wampanoag Indians, 250 Wangomend, 259–60, 262, 263 Ward, W. R., 7 Wardell, Nathaniel, 190 War of the Austrian Succession. See King George’s War War of the Spanish Succession. See Queen Anne’s War Washington, George, 233, 295 Watts, Isaac, 94–95, 114, 134, 157, 184 Weberites, 211–12 Weekly History, The, 199 Weekly Miscellany (London), 113 Weigel, Valentine, 21 Weiser, Conrad, 258 Wemyss, George, 70 Wesley, Charles, 109 Wesley, John, 95, 109–10, 111, 212, 275 Westerkamp, Marilyn J., 93 Wheatley, Phillis, 300 Wheelock, Eleazar, 85, 130, 132, 141, 143, 151, 152, 156, 178, 253, 255; and Moor’s Charity School, 254; and Samson Occom, 255; and “Wheelock Narrative,” 155–56 Whitefield, George, 2, 95, 102, 107–8, 127, 128, 135, 138, 160, 162, 173, 175, 182–83, 272, 274, 275, 283; and the “Holy Club,” 108–11; early preaching career, 110–12; as self-promoter, 111–13; and Bethesda Orphanage, 107, 110, 118, 122–23, 186, 207, 210, 281; and Tennent family, 117–18, 119, 137, 186; first preaching tour (1739–1740), 115–24,

128–30, 132–33, 134, 199, 219; and Jonathan Edwards, 130–31; A Faithful Narrative of the Life and Character . . ., 113; Journals, 107, 113, 116, 118, 183; Some Remarks on a Pamphlet, 175; and slavery, 121–22, 207–8, 281; second preaching tour (1744), 181, 184–86, 192, 273; death of, 296–97 Wilkinson, Christopher, 45 Williams, Elisha, 75 Williams, Eunice, 87 Williams, Israel, 239–40 Williams, Roger, 27, 250 Williams, Solomon, 178, 179, 237, 254 Williams, Stephen, 100, 131, 151 Willison, John, 65 Winthrop, John, 90 Wodrow, Robert, 70 Women, 92–95, 145, 158, 160, 166, 287–88; in church leadership, 279–80, 286–87, 288. See also Salem witch hunt Wood, Betty, 200 Woodberry, Richard, 179–80, 190 Woodbridge, Timothy, 101 Woodmason, Charles, 280–81, 282–83, 286, 287–88 Wright, John, 214 “Wyoming Woman,” 258–59 Yale College, 48, 49, 74, 87, 118, 183, 191; “Yale apostasy” (1722), 52 Zeisberger, David, 260 Zinzendorf, Count Nicholaus Ludwig von, 135, 165, 166, 167, 188, 256 Zubly, John Joachim, 282–83, 288–89

About the Author

John Howard Smith received bachelor’s degrees in history and English from the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 1991, as well as a master of liberal arts in 1996, and his PhD from the University at Albany, State University of New York, in 2003. His first book, The Perfect Rule of the Christian Religion: A History of Sandemanianism in the Eighteenth Century, was published in 2008. He is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University–Commerce.

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