1

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.

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Copyright © 2015 by John Howard Smith

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 Contents

Notes and Abbreviations vii

Prefaceix
Introduction: The Problem of the First Great Awakening 1

PART I: “NO SMALL APPEARANCES OF A DIVINE WORK” 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” 197
9 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 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 rewrit-
ing and rethinking, thus giving proof to Heraclitus’s fabled dictum (as para-
phrased 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 ele-
ments 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 insight-
ful 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 Awaken-
ing, 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 dedi-
cated 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 predeces-
sors, 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 ‘pietis-
tic 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 Presby-
terians 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 height-
ened lack of public piety and personal religious devotion led many ministers
to worry about spiritual declension, while the educated classes found them-
selves attracted to atheism, Deism, Unitarianism, and Universalism, thus con-
firming 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 immigra-
tion 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 ratio-
nalism on Protestant Christian theology, formalism in church services, and
status consciousness and “worldliness” among the clergy of nearly all denom-
inations 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 reviv-
als 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 cit-
ies 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 alter-
natives 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 denomina-
tional schisms, the most famous of which was the sundering of the Presby-
terian 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 Presby-
terians 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 Awak-
ening 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 tempo-
rary 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 historiogra-
phy 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 con-
vincing 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 reviv-
alism and the advent of what early nineteenth-century Jeffersonian evan-
gelicals 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 Awak-
ening 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 heav-
ily 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 multi-
layered event, while Carl Bridenbaugh argued that religion and politics were
intricately intertwined in the Awakening in ways that prefigured the Revolu-
tion.6 Alan Heimert extended this line of interpretation substantially in the
highly influential Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awaken-
ing to the Revolution (1966). The success of the First Great Awakening, he
asserted, was nothing less than an American declaration of intellectual inde-
pendence 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,” encour-
aging 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 deter-
mined 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 Awaken-
ing 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 revival-
ism, religious “enthusiasm,” and ministerial identity.11 Works dealing with the
European, especially Scottish and Scots-Irish, influences on American reviv-
alism 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 evangelical-
ism 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 profu-
sion 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 iden-
tify 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 overwhelm-
ing 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 Awak-
ening as peculiar to New England and nowhere else. That similar and even
simultaneous influences sparked revivalism in New England and elsewhere
 Introduction 7

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 chrono-
logical 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 Awak-
ening 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 pos-
sibility that the Awakening might have involved religions other than Chris-
tianity 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 Awaken-
ing. 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 inclu-
sive 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 hav-
ing—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 devel-
opments 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 immedi-
ately 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 the-
ology 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.
 Introduction 9

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 interpre-
tation of early American Christianity, but in a larger sense it is a response to
McLoughlin’s burning question about the pietistic impulse in American his-
tory, 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 Ameri-
can 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, Personali-
ties, 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 Ori-
gins 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. Love-
joy, 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 (Cam-
bridge: 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.
 Introduction 11

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 Specula-
tions,” Reviews in American History 11 (June 1983), 161–71.
9. Patricia U. Bonomi and Peter Eisenstadt, “Church Adherence in the Eigh-
teenth-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 Intercolo-
nial 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 Uni-
versity 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, Jona-
than 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 Phe-
nomenon,” 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 Men-
ard, 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: Jona-
than Edwards and James Dana on the Freedom of the Will,” The Journal of the His-
tory 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 South-
ern 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 Evangeli-
cal 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 Nativ-
ism 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 Awak-
ening, 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 Com-
munity 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
 Introduction 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 (Janu-
ary 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 Eigh-
teenth-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 (Char-
lottesville: 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 Nativ-
ist 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 Sav-
ior’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 Puri-
tan 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 Heimert-
Butler 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 Awaken-
ing, 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 fore-
going 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 experi-
ences 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 ter-
rible & 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
18 Chapter 1

theories about chemical and thermal imbalances within the ground—were var-
iously interpreted as “wonders,” as opposed to something natural and explica-
ble 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 con-
tinuance, 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 advan-
tage 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 Awak-
ening 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.
 “Vital Piety” 19

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 coloniz-
ing 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 read-
ing 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 reviv-
alism 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 adher-
ence 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 mysti-
cism, 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
20 Chapter 1

from varieties of proto-Pietist and Pietist-like movements that emerged previ-

ously. 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 pow-
ers 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 founda-
tion, and these took on greater appeal among people coping with an acceler-
ating 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, theol-
ogy 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 salva-
tion, 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
 “Vital Piety” 21

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 vari-
ously 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 Calvin-
ism, 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.” Emphasiz-
ing communitarianism, Labadist mysticism and millenarian perfectionism
uniquely drew adherents from a wide cross section of central European soci-
ety, 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 mysti-
cism 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 bor-
dered 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 theoso-
phy, 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 char-
acteristic 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 mys-
tical devotion to Christ and the Bible. “Once a Christian has freed himself
from the allurements of the world,” F. Ernest Stoeffler summarized, once he
22 Chapter 1

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, kneel-
ing, 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 super-
stition. 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 rela-
tionship 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
 “Vital Piety” 23

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 satis-
factory, precise definitions of both Puritanism and Pietism are elusive. Mysti-
cism 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 obedi-
ence; 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 con-
flated piety with intricate explications of the process of conversion, sanctifica-
tion, 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 distinc-
tion 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,
24 Chapter 1

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 appear-
ing 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 preci-
sionism 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 per-
sonal 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 Puri-
tan 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 conver-
sion, 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 Bun-
yan (1628–1688), whose The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684) represents a
literary apotheosis within Puritan Pietism.14
 “Vital Piety” 25

The theological apogee of Puritan Pietism was reached with the publication
of two seminal works by Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667): The Rule and Exer-
cises 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 ascen-
dancy during the Cromwellian Protectorate, Taylor’s aesthetic brand of Puri-
tan 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. Christian-
ity 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 calisthen-
ics 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
26 Chapter 1

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 denomi-
nations 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 Prot-
estant churches. The other responsibility abdicated by the churches had been
education, to which Francke dedicated himself, building a school for impov-
erished 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 orig-
inally 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 trea-
tises 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 propagat-
ing Franckean Pietism. While this cannot be construed as revivalism, it did
 “Vital Piety” 27

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: suffer-
ing 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. Obtain-
ing 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 unregen-
erate to hear sermons, pray, and worship with the saints. The Cambridge
Platform (1648) sought to settle these disputes, but new ones over the sacra-
ment 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
28 Chapter 1

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 conser-
vative 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 fruit-
ful 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 two-
volume 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-Reforma-
tion. Mather saw in the works of the continental Pietists an identical convic-
tion, fully confirmed in his reading of Böhme’s English translation of Pietas
 “Vital Piety” 29

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 Protestant-
ism 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 exagger-
ated 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”) formu-
lated 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 Effu-
sion 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. Hutter-
ites, 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 read-
ily 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 Ger-
man and Dutch immigration, Germantown grew steadily after 1700, with the
30 Chapter 1

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 cen-
tury 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 inevita-
bly 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 influ-
enced 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
 “Vital Piety” 31

Tjaden (1693–1726) and Johan Verschuir (1680–1737), who were nick-

named “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, conver-
sion 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 neces-
sary 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, con-
ferring 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 sev-
enteenth 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 con-
ceived of conversion as processing by discrete stages, Frelinghuysen spoke
about the same process which for him centered on rigorous and anxious self-
examination. Introspection should lead to anxiety and then to despair, equat-
ing 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
32 Chapter 1

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 conver-
sion, 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 peo-
ple, 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 coun-
tenancing some element of merit to individual action in the process of salva-
tion. 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 predes-
tination,” 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 Fri-
sian Catechism (1718), which posited a two-part process of conversion that
begins when “a convicted sinner first turns from Satan to God” and is com-
pleted 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. Frelin-
ghuysen argued against such a possibility by stressing the need for constantly
renewing one’s relationship to God in the practice of piety. Inspired by Tay-
lor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, Frelinghuysen viewed life as a constant
trial to demonstrate one’s worthiness before God while beset with opportuni-
ties 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.
 “Vital Piety” 33

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 convic-
tion 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 obses-
sion 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 settle-
ments 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 mem-
bers, he was even more exacting about who might share in communion, per-
ceiving 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 earth-

quake is an unusual effect of the power of God, serving to inspire with ter-
ror,” 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
34 Chapter 1

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 Congre-
gational Church. Their conversion narratives, as with many others presented
throughout New England following the earthquake, are replete with the lan-
guage 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 emo-
tion that a new generation of Protestant clergymen hoped to inflame among
a colonial population distracted from religion by an increasingly diversify-
ing ethnic composition, democratizing political transitions, rising economic
prosperity, the expansion of the consumer marketplace, and the intellectual-
ism 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: Mysterious-
ness in Earthquake Sermons,” Journal of the History of Ideas 43 (July–September
 “Vital Piety” 35

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 Awak-
ening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 57–63.
6. On the Counter-Reformation, see Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholi-
cism, 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 Com-
ing 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 Reli-
gion 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 Ques-
tion 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
36 Chapter 1

Pietism, 24–70; Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises, Containing Such Direction as is Gath-
ered 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 Ele-
ment 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 seventeenth-
and 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 Cov-
enant 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.
 “Vital Piety” 37

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 Intellec-
tuals, 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); Psal-
terium 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. (Philadel-
phia: 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
38 Chapter 1

Nijhoff, 1967), 11–37, 97–103; William Teellinck, De worstelinghe eenes bekeerden

sondaers (Vlissingen, 1631), 162; Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, Drie predica-
tien (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 bun-
delken 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 Dem-
onstration 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 Angli-
can, Trott devoted himself to eradicating heterodoxy, unbelief, and indiffer-
ence 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 Busi-
ness 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 sociocul-
tural 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 influen-
tial 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
40 Chapter 2

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 human-
ism, 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 “Angli-

cization” 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 reflec-
tions 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 manu-
factured 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 col-
lect the accoutrements of gentility. The overall standard of living steadily
improved, and the colonists matched their economic maturation to a burgeon-
ing 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
 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 41

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 conti-
nental 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 socio-
economically vibrant. Nevertheless, the old Puritan ideals of religious mis-
sion, 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 theo-
logical and ecclesiological variations in the early years of the eighteenth
century, blurring distinctions between Separatists, nonseparating Congrega-
tionalists, and Presbyterians. The revised charter of Massachusetts (1691)
stipulated that “there shall be a liberty of conscience allowed in the wor-
ship 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 mem-
bers 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
42 Chapter 2

century, middle-colony ethnic and social pluralism increased in the eigh-

teenth 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, gener-
ated 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 excep-
tion 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 Scots-
Irish immigrants in the early eighteenth century.5
A marked religious pluralism mirrored the relative ethnic diversity charac-
teristic 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 domi-
nated 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 nomi-
nally 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
 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 43

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 attractive-
ness 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 luxu-
riousness 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
44 Chapter 2

comprised the great bulk of the Lower South’s economic output, while naval
stores, lumber, and livestock made up the rest. Concentrating on the produc-
tion 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 distribu-
tion 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 institu-
tions. 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 Low-
country 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 Angli-
cans 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 repu-
tation for laxness and questionable morals. The parish system created enor-
mous 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 lackadaisi-
cal 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 read-
ers 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
 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 45

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 com-
munity 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 profes-
sional 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 colo-
ny’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 common-
place as a means of transmitting information and exchanging ideas through-
out 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
46 Chapter 2

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 pro-
paganda, 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 conscious-
ness 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 com-
plained 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
 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 47

Advantages, to stir up Opposition and Contention.” The ceremony of ordina-

tion evolved from one of Spartan simplicity to one of increasing elaborate-
ness 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 poi-
soned relations between what had become two discrete factions. But profes-
sionalization 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 over-
whelming 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 balanc-
ing 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 Confes-
sion of Faith (1680). Critics of Puritanism characterized it as a gloomy theol-
ogy 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 Calvin-
ists 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
48 Chapter 2

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 salva-
tion 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 investigat-
ing 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 confu-
sion 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 wide-
spread belief that Arminian theology had infiltrated New England’s Congre-
gationalist 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 seri-
ously 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
 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 49

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 under-
current 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 Minis-
terium 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 anx-
ious, 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
50 Chapter 2

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 profess-
ing 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 consoli-
dated 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
 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 51

The shock of war, economic distress, and political anxieties all served to
convince reluctant clergy and laity to revisit their opposition to the Half-
way 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 unwill-
ing 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 eigh-
teenth 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 mortal-
ity 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 atten-
tion 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.
52 Chapter 2

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 over-
whelming majority of settlers in most of the English colonies in 1700 were
either English or of English descent, but after 1700 the proportion of non-
English immigrants profoundly increased to include Germans, Scots-Irish,
Scots, and forcibly imported Africans and Afro-Caribbean slaves, among oth-
ers. 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 organiza-
tion 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 Northamp-
ton church in February 1728/29, the strict standards established by the Cam-
bridge 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 Eng-
land 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 reaf-
firmed 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
 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 53

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 Congrega-
tionalist churches, but also a cause for worry for Anglican parsons such as
Devereux Jarratt of Virginia, who noted that his parishioners feared approach-
ing 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 Profane-
ness” 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, licen-
tiousness, 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
54 Chapter 2

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 Christian-
ity. 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 Christian-
ity 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 popular-
ity of magic and occultism was not limited to the common folk, however. The
learned dabbled in alchemy and astrology, eagerly collecting works by alche-
mists, 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 determin-
ing the best times to plant various crops. While eighteenth-century skepticism
and Enlightenment rationalism reduced the intelligentsia’s interest in magic
 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 55

and occultism, it did not have a similar effect at the popular level, where sub-
tler 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, intermit-
tently 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 ele-
ments 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 gradual-
ist 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 (husband-
wife, 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 rejec-
tion 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 civiliza-
tion—meaning the destruction of their Indian identities and reconstruction
along English lines. Unlike the Jesuits, the English did not bother to com-
pletely 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, adapt-
ing 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
56 Chapter 2

priest diviners enlisted to help or to harm using their spiritual and pharma-
cological 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 intellectu-
als. 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 Revo-
lution and Enlightenment rationalism, though Christian-Pagan syncretism
maintained its grassroots popularity, as evidenced by the continued pres-
ence 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 medi-
cine, 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 keep-
ing 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 British-
American colonists, variously influenced by American Indian and African/
African-American beliefs and practices.31


 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 57

The two decades or so preceding the First Great Awakening witnessed

the British-American colonies taking their first confident steps into moder-
nity. 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 formal-
ism 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 institutionaliza-
tion 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 Arminian-
ism 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
58 Chapter 2

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 Maga-
zine of History and Biography 91 (October 1967), 401–18; Frederick B. Tolles, Meet-
ing 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 Phila-
delphia, 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: Princ-
eton 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 Chesa-
peake, 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
 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 59

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 (King-
sport, 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 Mis-
conduct 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 Dio-
cese 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 Transfor-
mation 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 Cen-
tury (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994); Kevin M. Sweeney, “High-
Style Vernacular: Lifestyles of the Colonial Elite,” ibid.; Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As
Various as Their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans (New
60 Chapter 2

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, School-
ing, 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,” Ameri-
can Antiquarian Society, Proceedings 71 (1961), 117–18; J. William T. Youngs Jr.,
“Congregational Clericalism: New England Ordinations before the Great Awaken-
ing,” 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 Dif-
ficulty 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, quo-
tations 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 Scho-
lasticism 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
 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 61

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, Demon-
strated (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 (Univer-
sity 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
62 Chapter 2

Processions of 1679, 1680 and 1681,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti-
tutes 21 (January–June 1958), 104–18; John Miller, Popery and Politics in England,
1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Dan Beaver, “Con-
science 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 Revolu-
tion: 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 Colo-
nies,” 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 Enforce-
ment, and Social Control in Colonial America,” American Journal of Legal History
26 (October 1982), 293–325; Richard M. Brown, “The American Vigilante Tradi-
tion” 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.
 “Looseness, Irreligion, and Atheism” 63

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 Prob-
lem 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., Read-
ing 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 Quar-
terly 20 (Winter 1968), 694–725; Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlighten-
ment: 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 Antebel-
lum South, rev. ed. (1978; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 1, quo-
tation 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 imme-
diate 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
66 Chapter 3

The radical Celtic Presbyterian revivals of the seventeenth century consti-

tute 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 pre-
vent 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 desta-
bilize 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 num-
ber 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 reform-
ers 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
 “Communion Times” 67

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 Congrega-
tion, drew up The Confession of Faith Professed and Believed by the Prot-
estants 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 con-
sular 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 subordi-
nate 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 exac-
erbated 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 hold-
ing 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 cel-
ebrated revival at Shotts in western Scotland in 1630, lasting several days.
68 Chapter 3

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 min-
istries when they resigned or were expelled from their pulpits in the 1610s. A
trickle of radical Presbyterian clergy from Scotland began to lay the founda-
tion for revivals identical to those then going on in Scotland. The Six-Mile-
Water 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 Angli-
can and liberal Presbyterian observers. Ulster threatened to explode with radi-
cal 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 Crom-
well’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 fol-
lowed 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 Covenant-
ers rebelled, left the established church, and resorted to “conventicles” in the
countryside, with their ministers preaching in the open air, much as in the
 “Communion Times” 69

revivals earlier in the century. Laws banning conventicles and to enforce reli-
gious 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 presby-
teries 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 Presby-
terianism 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 nineteenth-
century Kentucky, James McGready, would describe, in sometimes grue-
some 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
70 Chapter 3

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 tribu-
lations 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 conven-
ticles 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 conflu-
ences” 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 mem-
bership, 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
 “Communion Times” 71

unwarranted contempt and refused to administer any sacraments to those

related to him by blood or marriage, and had said that he would only admin-
ister 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 estrange-
ments 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 behav-
ioral 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
72 Chapter 3

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’ author-
ity. 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 chroni-
cler 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 land-
scape. A history of animosity between the Scottish and English immigrants
and their immediate descendants permeated the colony’s politics, exacer-
bated by land disputes between English settlers and East Jersey’s Scottish
proprietors. This played out significantly in the Keithian Schism, which
 “Communion Times” 73

erupted between English and Scottish Friends over a variety of theological

arguments that also divided Friends in Britain at the same time, and precipi-
tated 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 Angli-
can 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 origi-
nally 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
74 Chapter 3

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 mem-
bership, which required an explanation of his reasons for leaving the Angli-
can 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 profes-
sion.” 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 contro-
versial and short lived.16
In 1722, Tennent was considered as a candidate for rector of Yale Col-
lege, 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 wander-
ing 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, Ten-
nent 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
 “Communion Times” 75

“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, fol-
lowing the template of the Scottish holy fairs, emphasized the believer’s need
for preparation prior to approaching the Lord’s Table. Initially, the com-
municant 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 complet-
ing 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 par-
took 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 cloth-
ing 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
76 Chapter 3

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 Ten-
nent 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 Pietis-
tic 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, Wil-
liam 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
 “Communion Times” 77

assured by Christ that “he would give me a Crumb” of mercy. William, how-
ever, 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 assem-
bly “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 mem-
bers of the congregation began fervently crying out “under the Impressions of
Terror and Love.” The Tennents did not have long to celebrate their evangeli-
cal 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
78 Chapter 3

visionary experiences in solitary jaunts into the woods. One such episode hap-
pened 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 com-
munity 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 congre-
gation 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 Assem-
blies 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
 “Communion Times” 79

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 appar-
ent 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 imagi-
nary 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 impi-
ous 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 min-
istry in a scathing sermon, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry (1740),
in which he damned all antirevivalist clergy as “Pharisee-Teachers,” “hypo-
critical 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 congrega-
tion 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
80 Chapter 3

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 believ-
ers 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 exis-
tence 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 espe-
cially, they said, was as delicate and helpless as an infant, and the demands
of maintaining collective spiritual wellbeing meant that there can be no balk-
ing 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 compre-
hend 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
 “Communion Times” 81

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 experi-
ences, 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 sea-
sons,” 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 presby-
tery from among the scattered churches along the Raritan and Delaware val-
leys, 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 Ten-
nents 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 begin-
ning 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 White-
field 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 con-
nected 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 phi-
losophy. 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 advo-
cate 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.
82 Chapter 3

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 Uni-
versity 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 Scot-
land, 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: Publica-
tions 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 Scots-
Irish import, when the evidence suggests a simultaneous development. See also
David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644: The Triumph of the Cov-
enanters (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973); idem, Revolution and Counter-
Revolution 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.
 “Communion Times” 83

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 Awak-
ening (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
84 Chapter 3

Presbyterian Historical Society 28 (March 1950), 48, 78, 83; Frank Lambert, Invent-
ing 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 Rela-
tions 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 Sal-
vation, 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 New-
Londonderry (Philadelphia, 1744), 8, 10.
24. Blair, A Short and Faithful Narrative, 12, 14–15; Prince, The Christian His-
tory, 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” minis-
ters 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 hav-
ing 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 ser-
mon 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 audi-
ence to effect a change in their dispositions toward their souls. Better to focus

85
86 Chapter 4

upon the fragility of life and the likely certainty of damnation and hellish tor-
ment. 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 gap-
ing 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 dis-
graces 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 theologi-
cal 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,
 “A Glorious Work of God’s Infinite Power” 87

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 star-
tled 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 Con-
necticut 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 grand-
father’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: licen-
tiousness . . . 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
88 Chapter 4

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 Northamp-
tonites 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, indebted-
ness, 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 spiri-
tual inadequacy or out of simple complacency. By the 1720s, New England
 “A Glorious Work of God’s Infinite Power” 89

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 regu-
larly 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 con-
gregation’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 through-
out 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 unaccompa-
nied 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 con-
gregation 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. Calvin-
ist 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
90 Chapter 4

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 cosmopolitan-
ism of early eighteenth-century New England, connected as it was to a larger
Anglo-European Atlantic World exposing New Englanders—and the British-
American 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 parish-
ioners 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 Sing-
ing, a clerical society for its promotion was founded in Boston, and numer-
ous 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 distrac-
tion. Better to be genuinely devout and tone deaf, than be a vain songbird.
 “A Glorious Work of God’s Infinite Power” 91

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 govern-
ment generated during the first years of his pastorate, and the efforts of inex-
perienced “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 disposi-
tion 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 genera-
tion 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 con-
version. As set down by the English theologian William Perkins (1558–1602)
and generally accepted by the first-generation New England Congregational-
ists, conversion and grace involved a ten-step process that began with atten-
dance 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 recur-
rent battles with doubt, and eventually ends with grace. Solomon Stoddard
preached that in most cases one does not achieve grace until near death, and
92 Chapter 4

then only after lingering through each stage for many years at a time. Timothy
Edwards, who embraced revivalism at East Windsor, questioned the neces-
sity 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 con-
gregation, 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 prod-
uct of a wave of popular apocalyptic anxiety ignited by the “visionary” exhor-
tations 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
 “A Glorious Work of God’s Infinite Power” 93

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 accu-
rate 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 exer-
cised 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
94 Chapter 4

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 “remark-
able 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 intermed-
dling 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, accord-
ing 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 religi-
osity 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,
 “A Glorious Work of God’s Infinite Power” 95

suggested to Edwards that he enlarge the letter into a formal account for pos-
sible 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 Reforma-
tion . . . 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 col-
leagues 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 emerg-
ing 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 parish-
ioners, 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 prevail-
ing conventional wisdom of the time that presumed that older unregenerate
men—being hardened by worldliness and a naturally higher degree of obsti-
nacy—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 over-
carefulness 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
96 Chapter 4

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 last-
ing 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 deter-
mine 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
 “A Glorious Work of God’s Infinite Power” 97

unsurprisingly inflamed longstanding family and political rivalries. As else-

where 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 congre-
gation, 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 Northamp-
tonites 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 summa-
rized 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 Mys-
terious (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 alle-
gorical inventions. Jesus Christ is recast as a morally and ethically enlight-
ened 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
98 Chapter 4

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 bibli-
cal 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 sab-
bath of the world” was near at hand, and since 1723 had been compiling
private notes on how historical events fit into an overtly apocalyptic frame-
work. The “Notes on the Apocalypse,” from which he hoped to create a
 “A Glorious Work of God’s Infinite Power” 99

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 particu-
lar 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 fanati-
cism. Timothy Cutler reported to an English correspondent in 1735 that at
Northampton “Conversions are talked of, ad nauseam. . . . Sadness and hor-
ror 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 melan-
choly” 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
100 Chapter 4

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 persis-
tently 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. Revivalist-
minded ministers in New England began investigating the possibilities of
renewing the missionary work in the early 1730s, soliciting funds from con-
tacts 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, Hop-
kins, 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
 “A Glorious Work of God’s Infinite Power” 101

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 nego-
tiations 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 fund-
ing from donors throughout England and New England. A village nestled in
ceded Housatonic land was incorporated as Stockbridge in 1737, to be popu-
lated 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 lead-
ing 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 revival-
ism 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 attend-
ing 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 salva-
tion 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.”
102 Chapter 4

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 seventeenth-
century New England Calvinism under Edwards’s encouragement estab-
lished 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-Amer-
ican 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
 “A Glorious Work of God’s Infinite Power” 103

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: Faith-
fully 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 Eighteenth-
Century 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: North-
eastern 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 Narra-
tive, 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, Febru-
ary 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 Settle-
ment 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.
104 Chapter 4

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 prog-
ress 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., Illus-
trations 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 colo-
nies 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
108 Chapter 5

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 ser-
mon 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 down-
played—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 elic-
iting fervent emotional reactions from many in the audience, Franklin’s resis-
tance 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 Dela-
ware River, and made it to Front Street before he could no longer hear White-
field’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 there-
fore 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 religi-
osity, as “Methodists” emerged from a group of Oxford University theology
 “Many Thousands Flocking to Hear Him Preach the Gospel” 109

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 divin-
ity 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 teen-
ager, 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 con-
viction 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 reli-
gion 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
110 Chapter 5

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 Method-
ists’ 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 par-
ish” 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 White-
field’s Church of England colleagues admonished them for treading unin-
vited 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
 “Many Thousands Flocking to Hear Him Preach the Gospel” 111

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. Dur-
ing his further theological studies, he parted company with the Wesleys when
he embraced the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, convinced that Armin-
ianism 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 ser-
mons 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
112 Chapter 5

the hunger for material goods. Advances in education and literacy expanded
the market for books and pamphlets, which became less expensive and con-
sequently 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 country-
side 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. News-
papers 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 calcula-
tions 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; con-
trary to the laws of the land,—he goes strolling about the kingdom, . . . preach-
ing 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 estab-
lished clergy.

The Weekly Miscellany again devoted nearly another issue, on May 26, dis-
paraging not just Whitefield, but also the Wesleys, who were implied to be
 “Many Thousands Flocking to Hear Him Preach the Gospel” 113

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 evan-
gelical revivals in the early summer of 1739 and reprinted them, spreading
accounts of Whitefield’s revivals up and down the Eastern Seaboard. White-
field 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, Moor-
fields, and Kennington, along with the inflated crowd estimates. Whereas
Whitefield noted in his Journals that the crowd at Kingswood numbered
114 Chapter 5

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 concern-
ing 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 White-
field’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 will-
ingly 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 pass-
ing 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 pri-
mary 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 Dis-
senters 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 com-
munity was formed in the 1730s. In the months before his arrival in America
 “Many Thousands Flocking to Hear Him Preach the Gospel” 115

in 1739, George Whitefield became the gravitational center of this new com-
munity 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 Presbyte-
rian 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 eventu-
ally 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 Com-

plexion, 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 Judg-
ment. 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
116 Chapter 5

November 2. Although Pennsylvania was a Quaker colony, its liberal stance

on religious toleration allowed the Presbyterian Church to become domi-
nant 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 Ameri-
can 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 atmo-
sphere. 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 appear-
ances indicates just how receptive the colonists were to revivalism, whereas
 “Many Thousands Flocking to Hear Him Preach the Gospel” 117

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 dif-
ficulties 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 enlighten-
ing, 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 bor-
row, 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 out-
right 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
118 Chapter 5

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 sum-
marily 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 spiri-
tual 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 “subver-
sive 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 let-
ters to advertise the evangelist’s coming as well as excoriating slave owners
 “Many Thousands Flocking to Hear Him Preach the Gospel” 119

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 Com-
missary, 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 meeting-
house 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 southeast-
ern 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 spiritu-
ally 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, White-
field 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 fel-
low 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.”
120 Chapter 5

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 optimis-
tically 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
 “Many Thousands Flocking to Hear Him Preach the Gospel” 121

concomitant impiety of South Carolina’s planter gentry. Whitefield’s “Com-

posures 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 Solemni-
ties 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
122 Chapter 5

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 preach-
ing 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 homi-
nem attack upon Whitefield, whom, he charged, “assumes the Character of
an Apostle” and espoused a theology tainted by “old and exploded Doc-
trines 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,
 “Many Thousands Flocking to Hear Him Preach the Gospel” 123

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 satis-
fied 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 accusa-
tions personally, and accounts of this “trial” were reported in many major
newspapers. Standing—according to historian Harry S. Stout—“like Ste-
phen 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 sub-
mission 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 Dis-
senter 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 con-
cluded 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
124 Chapter 5

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 clergy-
men 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 Uni-
versity 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 Camis-
ard beliefs in preference for particular aspects of Moravian theology and practice.
8. See Richard P. Heitzenrater, Mirror and Memory: Reflections on Early Meth-
odism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989). The Wesleyans, being more
beholden to Moravian influence than Whitefield had been comfortable with, grew rap-
idly in England throughout the 1740s and 1750s, as well as in the American colonies.
 “Many Thousands Flocking to Hear Him Preach the Gospel” 125

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 Cul-
ture, 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: Princ-
eton 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: Green-
wood 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 two-
couple 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
126 Chapter 5

authority over Anglican parishes in groups of two or three colonies bordering one
another. Blair oversaw Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, while Garden over-
saw 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 thirty-
year-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 simi-
larly 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 bless-
ing: 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 predestina-
tion 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 unre-
generate might in fact revel in heavenly bliss while the apparently godly may

127
128 Chapter 6

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 Testa-
ment 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 pror-
evivalist 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 him-
self. 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
 “Blessed be God that Hath Done It!” 129

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, White-
field visited Timothy Cutler, former Yale “apostate” and Anglican Com-
missary, 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 appear-
ance, 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 fac-
ulty 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
130 Chapter 6

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 let-
ter 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 fam-
ily 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 Col-
man 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 not-
ing 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
 “Blessed be God that Hath Done It!” 131

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 conver-
sation; 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] counte-
nances. . . .” 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
132 Chapter 6

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 cre-
ate a stir and draw impressive crowds. At East Windsor, Whitefield’s preach-
ing 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 fol-
low up his visits to stoke “the divine fire.” Once again, Belcher became pain-
fully 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
 “Blessed be God that Hath Done It!” 133

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 enthusi-
asm 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 eschatologi-
cal 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 radi-
cally 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 evi-
dence 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 patron-
ized them as best he could, he was a much disliked governor often at log-
gerheads 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 stand-
ing 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
134 Chapter 6

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 Dis-
senting 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 conver-
sion narratives that substantiated their belief that the revivals were genuine
manifestations of God’s Spirit in the lives of converts. By means of this reviv-
alist 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
 “Blessed be God that Hath Done It!” 135

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 news-
papers. 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 gos-
pel 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 White-
field 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 promo-
tional 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’ gener-
ally 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-of-
mouth. 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
136 Chapter 6

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. Accord-
ing 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 cen-
tral 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 confer-
ence that the revivals were a magnificent and unprecedented transatlantic
phenomenon.16
Prorevivalists concerned themselves very deeply with depicting the Awak-
ening as a coherent story spanning the Atlantic, but the patchwork nature of
stitching snippets of newspaper accounts with short pieces written by revival-
ist 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 reviv-
als. 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 chro-
nology. Antirevivalists would be silenced, he expected, “when witnesses are
sufficient as to their characters, their numbers, and their means of informa-
tion; [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
 “Blessed be God that Hath Done It!” 137

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 addi-
tion, 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 pas-
sage 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
138 Chapter 6

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 con-
ceded 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 “Enthusia-
stick 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 Dis-
cretion.” Here is a cross-section of those most potently affected by revival-
ism, 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 adher-
ents came from the ranks of immigrants from northern Ireland and parts of
southern Scotland—most of them impoverished and scorned, eking out liv-
ings 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
 “Blessed be God that Hath Done It!” 139

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 like-
wise saw the revivals as a positive development, though wary of emotional
excess. However, the bulk of the higher leadership working in and near Phila-
delphia, 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 high-
est 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 particu-
lar 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
140 Chapter 6

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 Scots-
Irish, rejected the idea that the maintenance of Presbyterian theology and
discipline required the replication of Scots-Irish or Scottish social institu-
tions 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 ori-
entation. 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 radical-
ism, 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 minis-
ter 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 west-
ern frontier. In this regard, the long tradition of Scottish revivalism contrib-
uted to a greater propensity for evangelicalism among the settlers of the more
rural pockets of New Jersey and the hinterlands of Pennsylvania. The estab-
lishment 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
 “Blessed be God that Hath Done It!” 141

“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 appear-
ance 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 Preach-
ers [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 impres-
sion 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 min-
istered 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 com-
mon 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 prorev-
ivalists and antirevivalists. For some, the central issue was ecclesiological:
membership standards, church discipline, access to communion, or ministe-
rial 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 exces-
sively 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 evangelical-
ism 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 unregen-
erate alike who languished under the guidance of unconverted ministers.
In The Righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees Consider’d (1741),
142 Chapter 6

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 unregener-
ate 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 Bed-
lam, 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 Mor-
tals,” 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 congre-
gation debated the validity of itinerancy and lay exhortation. The Saybrook
Platform abrogated the Cambridge Platform (1648), standardizing Congre-
gationalist doctrine and discipline through the establishment of regional
“consociations” that centralized ecclesiastical authority in Connecticut, tak-
ing 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 minis-
ters 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 through-
out eastern New England, Backus came to lead a separatist congregation at
Titicut, Massachusetts, that became its own church in 1748.27
 “Blessed be God that Hath Done It!” 143

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 enthu-
siastic 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 surround-
ing 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, adver-
tising 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 invita-
tions 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 follow-
ing 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,
144 Chapter 6

especially at the Quaker and Baptist meetinghouses nearby. When the mem-
bers 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 Indi-
ans. 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 temporar-
ily 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.
 “Blessed be God that Hath Done It!” 145

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: Wil-
liam 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 Spiri-
tual 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 Awaken-
ing 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 Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 104–05.
15. Francis G. Walett, “The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1739–1744,” Proceed-
ings 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.
146 Chapter 6

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 Awak-
ening, 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 Separat-
ism 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 Soci-
ety, Philadelphia; Judith Sargent Murray, The Life of Rev. John Murray (Boston,
1832), 146.
 “Blessed be God that Hath Done It!” 147

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 pre-
pared 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 danger-
ous 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
150 Chapter 7

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 indica-
tive of the bulk of revivalist preachers and their audiences. Historians
of the Awakening have likewise followed their lead, mentioning exces-
sive 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 engen-
dered other forms of radicalism, with deep implications for the future of
American religious history.3


 “Glorious Distraction” 151

“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 replace-
ment 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 perse-
vere 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 encour-
age and generate “many Adversaries” and that “religion may receive some
wounds in the house of her friends.” Keeping a detailed watch over exces-
sive 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 subse-
quent 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 meet-
inghouse and into a nearby home. This account, transcribed by Samuel Phil-
lips 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
152 Chapter 7

Hell,” the tumult lasting well above two hours as Edwards patiently exhorted
the most anxious. The tumult gradually subsided, and many went home feel-
ing 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, neverthe-
less 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 White-
field’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] Concern-
ing the City of our God in the Latter day.”6
The more mystical excesses attending the revivals had already become fre-
quent 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 awaken-
ing . . . 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 con-
cerns 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,
 “Glorious Distraction” 153

& 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 fam-
ily 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 counte-
nance 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 extremi-
ties 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 eighteenth-
century American society that was significantly more multilayered and com-
plex. 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
154 Chapter 7

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 Meet-
ing 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 pro-
fusion 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]
 “Glorious Distraction” 155

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.” Itiner-
ant 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 peek-
ing 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 vision-
ist 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 pay-
ing their homage and adoration to them.” Dumbstruck before the holy maj-
esty, 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 hor-
ror, 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
156 Chapter 7

“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 expe-
rience 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 dis-
solving 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 mental-
ity. 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 persua-
sive 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,”
 “Glorious Distraction” 157

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, scrupu-
lously 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. Indi-
ans 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, god-
less 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 experi-
ences. 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
158 Chapter 7

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 judg-
ments 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 irascibil-
ity 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, shamefaced-
ness, 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 edifica-
tion,” 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 brim-
ming 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
 “Glorious Distraction” 159

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 manifest-
ing 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 swal-
lowed 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, fol-
lowing 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 crit-
ics 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 espe-
cially 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,
160 Chapter 7

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 con-
gregation, 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, con-
sciously 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 his-
tory of women in the First Great Awakening. Her spiritual journey, meticu-
lously 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, physi-
cal 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 Puri-
tan theologians. Male evangelicals, initially highly critical of her religious
 “Glorious Distraction” 161

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 cor-
respondence 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
162 Chapter 7

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 fornica-
tion 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 con-
fessions, 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 “Tes-
timony” 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 vocaliza-
tions of the newly converted and the spiritually enlivened “gross disorders,”
 “Glorious Distraction” 163

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 fre-
quently 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 legisla-
tion 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 antire-
vivalists. 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 disap-
provingly 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
164 Chapter 7

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 transmit-
ted through visions and dreams. The bizarre behavior exhibited by some radi-
cal 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 Protes-
tant 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 pre-
dictions 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 antino-
mian sectarian groups, members of which had reported celestial spirit jour-
neys 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 assur-
ance 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 Pente-
cost, and fancied themselves to be central characters in an unfolding cosmic
spectacle that was rapidly approaching the apocalyptic final act. Seventeenth-
century 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
 “Glorious Distraction” 165

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 Revela-
tion. While they were grounded in biblical literalism and a venerable primi-
tivist 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 predestinar-
ian 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 prorev-
ivalists 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
166 Chapter 7

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 Euro-
American conceptions of sexuality and gender roles.
The Moravian theology was unusually Christocentric, the bulk of an adher-
ent’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 espe-
cially, 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 Mora-
vian 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
 “Glorious Distraction” 167

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 congre-
gation 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 appli-
cative 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 Testa-
ment are little more than servants and instruments of Satan—irrational, unde-
serving 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 preach-
ing, 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 conver-
sion efforts, particularly in the small northern European enclaves of the
Delaware Valley, can be found in the vituperative tone of their public crit-
ics. 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
168 Chapter 7

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 Awaken-
ing, and this was no less true in Pennsylvania’s German communities, partic-
ularly 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 con-
trol 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 tradition-
alist 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 damna-
tion and eternal torment in hell fundamentally shaped the early modern West-
ern 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.
 “Glorious Distraction” 169

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 pos-
sessed 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 conserva-
tives and Old Lights. As worrying as church divisions and outright separa-
tions 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 Whee-
lock, March 16, 1741, April 15, 1741; Winiarski, “Jonathan Edwards,” 697, 738–39.
170 Chapter 7

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 His-
tory 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,
 “Glorious Distraction” 171

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 Evan-
gelical 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 Dis-
cipline 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 Uni-
versity 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
172 Chapter 7

(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 popu-

larity and influence, a damning indictment hit Boston bookstore shelves,
Charles Chauncy’s Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-
England. 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 fall-
ing 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 evan-
gelicals 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 oppo-
nents of revivalism were obstructing God’s work, blinded by careerism and

173
174 Chapter 8

“worldliness.” This war raged not just in printed versions of sermons deliv-
ered 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 pre-
dominant 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 Bed-
ford, Massachusetts, he noticed “a Stir among the Women” and later discov-
ered 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 contin-
ued 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, par-
ticularly 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,
 “Unhappy Contention” 175

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, impu-
dent, 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 denounc-
ing 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
176 Chapter 8

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 over-
whelmingly 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 “hire-
lings” 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 them-
selves 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 sub-
jects, 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 moder-
ated 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 Pas-
tors 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
 “Unhappy Contention” 177

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 Testi-
mony, 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 Testi-
mony 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 separat-
ism 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 New-
England (1743). Chauncy’s exhaustive dissertation is a deep arranging of his-
torical and theological arguments to discredit fervent religious immoderation.
In standard antirevivalist fashion, he decried the evangelicals’ censorious-
ness, 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 preach-
ers, 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 them-
selves 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
178 Chapter 8

becoming the quintessential radical New Light whose antics were attrib-
uted alike to others who variously did and did not subscribe to his meth-
odology. 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, neverthe-
less 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 per-
sonal 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 let-
ters 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 Conversa-
tion 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 fol-
lowed 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 reli-
gious 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
 “Unhappy Contention” 179

Having made amends with the most influential moderate New Lights, Dav-
enport then published a self-effacing apology, the Confession and Retrac-
tions, 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 dra-
matic 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 Impar-
tial 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 admon-
ishment, asked Solomon Williams to include passages from it in future print-
ings 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 noto-
rious for his wild-eyed zeal and confrontational preaching style. Gilman
supported Woodberry, even when his exhortations generated “Some great
180 Chapter 8

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 Awaken-
ing, 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
 “Unhappy Contention” 181

“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 after-
ward, 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 col-
leagues 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 mod-
erates Colman, Sewall, Foxcroft, and Prince that he did not aim to encourage
separations, and they welcomed him back to their pulpits. Whitefield itiner-
ated 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 presump-
tion 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
182 Chapter 8

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 unscrip-
tural 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 materialis-
tic hedonism of recent years, from which the unawakened would be rescued
through a confusing mixture of fear mongering and the promise of redemp-
tion. 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 minis-
ters” could be numbered among them. Whitefield acknowledged that “some
occasions of offence” marred his last visit, but he thought that for the most
 “Unhappy Contention” 183

part “nothing . . . appeared but a pure, divine power . . . without any extraor-
dinary 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 White-
field 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 congrega-
tions. 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 assem-
bly, 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 everlast-
ing 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
184 Chapter 8

that their work was biblically sanctioned. However, many more acerbic anti-
Whitefield essays flooded Boston print shops and appeared in area newspa-
pers, 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 new-
lights,” 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 impli-
cations 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, enjoy-
ing 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 ser-
mon 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 fast-
ing 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
 “Unhappy Contention” 185

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 doctri-
nal 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 suggest-
ing that God’s mind could be swayed by good works, while antinomianism
186 Chapter 8

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 sup-
port 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 uncomfort-
able position. In 1739, Aaron Burr, Sr., converted to New Light evangelical-
ism 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 them-
selves free to vilify and condemn one minister because they think him lack-
ing 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 anti-
revivalist 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
 “Unhappy Contention” 187

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 exer-
tions, 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 acknowl-
edges 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 salva-
tion 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 acknowledg-
ing what he presumed to be Dickinson’s good intentions, Croswell neverthe-
less 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,
188 Chapter 8

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 presump-
tions 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 expand-
ing 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 News-
Letter 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 ear-
lier 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 follow-
ing 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 sup-
porters and detractors. Newspaper publishing, which had been scant and
 “Unhappy Contention” 189

desultory between 1690 and 1730, increased substantially during the Awak-
ening’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 effu-
sion 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 appear-
ance 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 sig-
nificantly increased subscription rates for most of those papers printed in the
early 1740s, and can be credited with the establishment of several new week-
lies 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 bal-
anced 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 theo-
logical 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
190 Chapter 8

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 appear-
ing 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 min-
isterial office and proper order in the churches. Itinerancy came under attack
in the Boston Evening-Post in 1743, describing—alongside pat depreca-
tions 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 Evening-
Post 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’ influ-
ence upon the lay readership was most crucial, the radical evangelicals were
forced toward moderation—as with James Davenport, whose antics were
 “Unhappy Contention” 191

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-intellectual-
ism and cultivation of “unlearned” ministry, revivalist Presbyterians and Bap-
tists 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 Col-
lege 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, spear-
headed 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 fac-
tors 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 pus-
tules 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 con-
tinue 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
192 Chapter 8

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 propor-
tion, 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 reviv-
als 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 antirevival-
ists, 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 exten-
sive, 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 Awaken-
ing 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
 “Unhappy Contention” 193

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 New-

England (Boston, 1743), 77; Edwin S. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New
England (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 93–97; Charles Lippy, Seasonable Revo-
lutionary: The Mind of Charles Chauncy (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981), 36–37.
2. Journal of Rev. Israel Loring, March 24, 1743, Sudbury Archives, transcrip-
tion, 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 Reli-
gion 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 Massachusetts-
Bay 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.
194 Chapter 8

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 Retrac-
tions (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 Awaken-
ing, 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
 “Unhappy Contention” 195

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. Ran-
dolph, 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 Awaken-
ing, 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 Awaken-
ing,” American Presbyterians 63 (Winter 1985), 347; Jonathan Dickinson, The Rea-
sonableness 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 Ten-
nent, 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
196 Chapter 8

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 Univer-
sity 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 Post-
Boy, 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 Awak-
ening 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. Fol-
lowing 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 White-
fieldian 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 regen-
eration 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
200 Chapter 9

skeptical masters and others to evangelical Christianity. Little does that mat-
ter. 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 bud-
ding conviction that evangelicalism carried within it the seeds of the abolition
of slavery. Prior to the 1730s, the overwhelming majority of white clergy-
men 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 White-
field’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 mas-
sive 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 Amer-
icans 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 Low-
country, 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 pre-
sumptions 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 any-
thing other than a single type of paganism—each identical to the others for all
intents and purposes. However, significant differences divided the theologies
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 201

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, Mand-
inkes, 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 well-
established overland trade routes crisscrossing northern Africa.3
In stark contrast to the essentially dualistic worldview of Western Euro-
peans, 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 every-
thing 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 con-
duit 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
202 Chapter 9

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 repre-
sents, 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 the-
ologies borrowed and adapted from Christian liturgies and native Indian reli-
gions 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 discontinu-
ity 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 Indi-
ans—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, theol-
ogy, 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 eighteenth-
century advocates for the Christianization of African Americans perceived
the situation, but a supposed absence of systematic religious beliefs and prac-
tices does not entail the absence of beliefs and practices in and of themselves,
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 203

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 inevitabili-
ties 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 colo-
nial 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 appre-
hensions of apparitions.”8
Slaveholders and the small number of clergymen who advocated Chris-
tianization 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 repres-
sive micromanagement of their lives than they already endured, to say noth-
ing 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 produc-
tivity. Pre-Christian slave religions seem rarely to have been a cause of much
concern among slaveholders in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centu-
ries, in spite of missionaries’ emphasis on the inherent dangers of allowing
204 Chapter 9

non-Christian religions to persist in the slave quarters. Nevertheless, revival-

ism 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 fixa-
tion upon liberation in this life rather than in the next, while others consid-
ered 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 Christian-
ity 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
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 205

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 Chris-
tians, and Henry Laurens opined the following year, in a letter to Moravian
missionary John Ettwein, that the reason for this was because planters con-
sidered “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 colo-
nists 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
206 Chapter 9

teaching native Africans English well enough to understand the complexi-

ties 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 compar-
ing 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,” estab-
lishing 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.
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 207

“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 occa-
sional 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 move-
ments 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 read-
ing. While teaching slaves to read was not illegal, it was still considered a
208 Chapter 9

dangerous act in light of the recent Stono Rebellion the previous year. After
a catastrophic fire in November destroyed hundreds of homes and commer-
cial 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 indict-
ment 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 Prov-
ince.” 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 wel-
fare. 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 ram-
pant, 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
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 209

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 errati-
cally. 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 legisla-
ture, 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 cor-
respondent concluded, “Whitefieldism in its native tendency.” When offi-
cers 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
210 Chapter 9

ensuing weeks—ten in all—and the frequency of conflagrations in so rela-

tively 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 sus-
pects arrested posthaste. More trials followed, as did more arrests and a third
round of trials throughout the summer. Altogether, 160 slaves and twenty-
one 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 lib-
eration, and enough manifested such a conviction that Old Light and Angli-
can 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 con-
verted,” 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 conver-
sion 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 afore-
mentioned 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,
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 211

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 pos-
sibly 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 Anglican-
elite 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
212 Chapter 9

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 Chris-
tianization 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 leader-
ship. However, white resistance succeeded in squelching the evangelical fire
before it could spread far or wide. Such was not the case when they endeav-
ored 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 evangelical-
ism’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” regu-
larly 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.
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 213

However, just as Anglicans in South Carolina reminded slaves and reas-

sured planters that conversion did not amount to legal or literal equality with
whites, so also did Davies stress the necessity of slave submission to mag-
isterial authority and acceptance of their racial inferiority. One planter com-
mented 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 mission-
aries 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 con-
vinced about the benefits of a Christianized slave work force, and of how his
214 Chapter 9

“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 Low-
country 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 “swell-
ing 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 dur-
ing 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 hand-
ful 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, suf-
fering ruthless mockery and suppression from government and church author-
ities 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
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 215

impoverished subsistence farmers and emerging commercial tobacco grow-

ers 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 through-
out the southern colonies suffered no small measure of harassment and offi-
cial 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 Wil-
liamsburg, “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” punish-
ment. 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 par-
ticular 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 overwhelm-
ing response Separate Baptists in particular received from slave converts.
216 Chapter 9

African-American audiences responded enthusiastically to evangelization,

but as Rhys Isaac pointed out, the Christianization of African America can-
not 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 tradi-
tions 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 power-
ful 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 writ-
ers 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 hav-
ing 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.”
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 217

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 pos-
session of my soul.”30
Christianized slaves in the southern colonies creatively blended remem-
bered and reconceived African beliefs and practices with the new religion,
and here the Baptists’ success in netting black converts cannot be under-
stated. 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 conjur-
ers 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 quar-
ters came mainly from Protestant hymns and sermons as well as the Bible,
and employed “African styles of singing.” They tended to be of the call-
and-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,
218 Chapter 9

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 ante-
cedents 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 con-
jure’s power derived from satanic forces, though conjure itself was techni-
cally 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 evangeli-
cals complied with those dictates and agreed upon their necessity, there was
only so much that anyone could do to prevent slaves from equating conver-
sion with liberation. George Whitefield reminded both white and black audi-
ences 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 lib-
eration 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 Chris-
tianity, but also one that spoke implicitly of freedom not just in the world to
come, but in this world now.33
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 219

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 mysti-
cal 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 White-
field’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.
220 Chapter 9

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 communi-
ties, 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 progres-
sive 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 mis-
sionaries 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 Insti-
tution” 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: Univer-
sity 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.
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 221

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 Com-
mission 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: Uni-
versity of South Carolina Press, 1997), 29–30; Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evan-
gelical 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
222 Chapter 9

Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York . . . (New York, 1744), quoted in Peter
Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Com-
moners, 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 Coun-
terpoint, 424; Richard J. Hooker, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the
Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itiner-
ant (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 Afro-
Moravian 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.
 “I Claim Jesus Christ to Be My Right Master” 223

26. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 1982), 162–72. See also Chapter 12.
27. James Ireland, The Life of the Reverend James Ireland (1819, reprint Harrison-
burg, 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 Particu-
lars, 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 wag-
ing 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
226 Chapter 10

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 destruc-
tion 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 pror-
evivalists thought they were witnessing the beginning of the final preparatory
phase of the millennial reign of the saints before Jesus Christ’s second com-
ing. 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 evan-
gelicals, 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 sud-
denly shifted downward. Arminianism and rationalism seemed to be growing
increasingly fashionable, and, as both cause and consequence of this intellec-
tual 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 through-

out 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
 “A Salvation from Heaven” 227

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 sav-
ing Indian souls and more about preventing the Catholics from gaining more
converts. The Spanish had been working fairly assiduously at native conver-
sion for over a century before the English planted their first North American
colonies, and the French had made some inroads among the Northern Algon-
quians 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 pros-
elytize 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
228 Chapter 10

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 rev-
elry, 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 Congrega-
tionalist, 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 gen-
eral 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 exor-
cisms 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 rela-
tive 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
 “A Salvation from Heaven” 229

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 read-
ers 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 Con-
gregational 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 exten-
sive correspondence network in Britain and the Continent, strongly advocated
the public reporting of Catholic persecution of Protestants as goads to ener-
gizing 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 quicken-
ing 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 men-
tality 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
230 Chapter 10

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: chal-
lenged 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 pro-
prietary 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 Brit-
ain, 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 “Jaco-
bite” 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 con-
flict 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 mid-
century, as evidenced by increasing social, political, and economic coopera-
tion 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
 “A Salvation from Heaven” 231

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 “favour-
able 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 elec-
tions intended to echo papist political manipulation in Europe, the newspaper
also reported that along the frontier Catholic landowners and tenant farm-
ers 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 anti-
Catholicism 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
232 Chapter 10

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 undertak-
ing, 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 immi-
nent 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 Aix-
la-Chapelle in 1748, New Englanders felt betrayed. Edwards urged patience
 “A Salvation from Heaven” 233

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 exis-
tential threat posed by the French papists to the north, while not a few lay-
men 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, tyran-
nical 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 seem-
ingly 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 top-
pled 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 pos-
sible 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 interpreta-
tion, 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
234 Chapter 10

explained that earthquakes “give proof of the presence of God with his ser-
vants to make way for their salvation.” In a later sermon, The Earth Deliv-
ered 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 destruc-
tion 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 eigh-
teenth-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 reli-
gious 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 Anglo-
America 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
 “A Salvation from Heaven” 235

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 Bene-
dict 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 ral-
lying 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 Anglo-
American 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 com-
mencement 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 govern-
ment 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 Catholi-
cism 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
236 Chapter 10

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 reli-
gious—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 genera-
tion 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. Protestant-
ism 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 Sub-
jects.” Any sort of apathy or conscience-bound neutrality was thus greeted
with contempt and charges of abetting the Antichrist.23
 “A Salvation from Heaven” 237

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 mass-
book? 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 super-
stition 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,” recount-
ing 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
238 Chapter 10

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 south-
ernmost 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 out-
side 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 embar-
rassing lack of coordination plagued the Anglo-American war effort from the
start, in spite of the fact that northern Calvinists kept reminding their audi-
ences that the fate of Protestantism itself hung in the balance.26
The Calvinism of the New Lights suffuses the militant, yet also self-
accusatory 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 Penn-
sylvania 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 Sacri-
fices 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
 “A Salvation from Heaven” 239

of the Redcoats. While salty language and crude manners was not unex-
pected 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 vic-
tory. Writing in his journal in 1758 during the siege of Fort Carillon (Fort
Ticonderoga), Rea averred, regarding the loss of Fort William Henry the pre-
vious 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 impe-
rial 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 cal-
culations 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
240 Chapter 10

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 con-
fided 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 sur-
vived 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 cap-
ture of Québec, and the rapid collapse of Franco-American defenses that fol-
lowed, 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 sweep-
ing before His chosen American people. The defeats underwent reinterpreta-
tion 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 congre-
gation 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 fruit-
ful 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, announc-
ing 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
 “A Salvation from Heaven” 241

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 expand-
ing 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 redis-
covered 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 proselytiz-
ing in New England in ways that alarmed Congregationalists and Presbyteri-
ans 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
242 Chapter 10

Ezra Stiles of Connecticut, convinced of a manifest plot to establish an

American episcopate, delivered a famous sermon, A Discourse on the Chris-
tian Union, at Boston in April 1760 calling for the union of the Congrega-
tional 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 persua-
sive argument for a union of the dissenting churches met with an enthusi-
astic 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 interpre-
tations 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
 “A Salvation from Heaven” 243

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, Anti-
Catholicism, 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 Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 29–33.
9. Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” WJE, 16:797; Cotton Mather, Sus-
piria 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.
244 Chapter 10

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 Dread-
ful 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 Prot-
estant’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; The-
odorus 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 Uni-
versity Press, 1990), 148.
22. Alexander V. Campbell, The Royal American Regiment: An Atlantic Micro-
cosm (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 56–72.
23. Chauncy Graham, Some Few Reasons Suggested, why the Heathen are at Pres-
ent 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
 “A Salvation from Heaven” 245

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 Brook-
line (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 Suc-
cess 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, Personali-
ties, 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 Uni-
versity Press, 1984), 221–26.
 Chapter 11

“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 Susque-

hanna River town of Juniata, “a devout and zealous reformer,” as the mission-
ary 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 com-
munities 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 gov-
ernments 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 rak-
ing 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
248 Chapter 11

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 aggres-
sive 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 Mora-
vian Indians into the capital.2
Indian peoples, most of them living on the Pennsylvania frontier, under-
went their own religious awakening in the years surrounding and within the
Seven Years’ War. “Prophets” itinerated throughout the backcountry preach-
ing 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 Coun-
try, 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 galvaniz-
ing 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 mate-
rial 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
 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” 249

spirit realm, to which all return upon death. As in nearly all religions, spiri-
tual 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 natu-
ral 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 impor-
tant 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 ani-
mals 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 direc-
tion. 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 greedi-
ness, 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 consid-
erably 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
250 Chapter 11

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’ self-
determination 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 unfamil-
iar 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 nego-
tiated 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 ven-
tured 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 like-
minded 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 popula-
tions 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
 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” 251

influence was leaking southward out of Canada and into northern Algon-
quian 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 reli-
gion, 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 Ser-
geant and Timothy Woodbridge. Unlike most such experiments—which were
largely a replication of John Eliot’s “praying towns” of the previous cen-
tury—the Stockbridge Mahicans sought Christian conversion and baptism,
and this success attracted additional funding and support from the Massachu-
setts 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
252 Chapter 11

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 missionar-
ies 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 Prot-
estant missionaries who made any sustained Christianization effort. Conver-
sions 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
 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” 253

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 indiffer-
ence, 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 crea-
tures, 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 Indi-
ans 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 min-
isters 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 Lon-
don. 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. Accord-
ing 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 “noth-
ing 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 instru-
ment 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 . . .
254 Chapter 11

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 com-
munities. 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 mis-
sionaries, 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 Insinua-
tions 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 guid-
ance 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, Whee-
lock 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 mod-
erate, 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 mission-
ary 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
 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” 255

Occom had begun to run up against a common obstacle for Christian mis-
sionaries in Indian country: Calvinist Christianity’s lack of appeal. Intoler-
ant of gradualism, much less the syncretic blending of Christian and Indian
religious ideas and practices that French Jesuits used effectively as a conver-
sion 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 communi-
ties, 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 “impru-
dent scheme.” Better to concentrate upon white settlers living in the back-
country 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 respect-
ful distance from colonial towns. In some cases, the choice of denomi-
national 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
256 Chapter 11

“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, Shika-
lemmy, 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 fundamen-
tally 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 instruc-
tive 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 Protes-
tant denominations perceived Christ’s blood only as a powerful metaphor of
his personal sacrifice and the promise of salvation. However, Moravian ven-
eration 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 over-
runs 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
 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” 257

disease epidemics to such a degree that they were willing to latch onto any-
thing 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 extraordi-
nary gesture of trust, seeking relief from a smallpox outbreak then scything
through the capitol of Iroquoia. Indians in the face of such crises found mean-
ing 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 origi-
nal 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 Teedy-
uscung, 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 pun-
ish 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 envi-
ronment of social and political disorder, Indian leaders closely managed their
258 Chapter 11

peoples’ experiences with Christianity. Many like Teedyuscung harnessed

Christianity quite successfully as a political means to defend their communi-
ties’ independence from the powerful Iroquois League through making trea-
ties with Christian colonial governments. Some, however, readily accepted
Christianity as a viable approach to expressing their belief in the supernatu-
ral. Regardless of the strategy, Indian leaders sought what would best ben-
efit 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 require-
ments. 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 sim-
ply 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, mis-

sionary Conrad Weiser reported the strange appearance of a “seer” who
pronounced scathing admonitions against all Indian people. This charis-
matic 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
 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” 259

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 Christi-
anity, 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 accom-
modated 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 pan-
Indianism, 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 divi-
sions, 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 Wyo-
ming Woman and Papounhan, but he was to date the most militant against
the British and Anglo-Americans, using a chart or map to explain graphi-
cally how contact with whites spiritually weakened Indians. He too believed
260 Chapter 11

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 consump-
tion, 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 radi-
cal 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 proph-
ets, 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
 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” 261

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 dic-
tation 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 testi-
mony 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 glow-
ing 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 ush-
ered 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 reca-
pitulated 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 admon-
ished Neolin. The Master was angry with his Indian children for their neglect
262 Chapter 11

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 depen-
dence 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 pro-
cess 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 sympa-
thizers among the Shawnees, Delawares (both Unami and Munsee), Wyan-
dots, 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.
 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” 263

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 Anglo-
Americans 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 follow-
ers into confused disarray. Divisions that already existed between those who
agreed with the rejection of all European technology, trade goods, and influ-
ences 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 corrup-
tion 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 mul-
tiplied very fast.” The Shawnees stoutly refused to allow Christian missionar-
ies 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 lead-
ership. 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 communi-
ties 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 Anglo-
American 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
264 Chapter 11

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 Inde-
pendence, 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 civiliza-
tions following revivalist failure—but no subsequent Delaware or Shawnee
prophet really needed to explain to disciples and sympathizers the dire con-
sequences 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 lat-
ter, 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. Conse-
quently, a strict return to the old rituals and theologies was practically impos-
sible, 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 acquir-
ing 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
 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” 265

loss of territory and gain protection from Pennsylvania’s proprietary author-

ity. That non-Christian Indians acquainted with Christianity opted to incor-
porate 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 colo-
nists almost exactly mirror one another: the former arising out of profound
distress, population decrease, mass refugee migrations, and overall contrac-
tion, 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 Awaken-
ing 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 unifica-
tion 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 congratu-
lated themselves upon the realization that their reinvigorated efforts to con-
vert 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
266 Chapter 11

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 hand-
ful of New England Baptists likewise found receptive audiences in the back-
country, 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 African-
American 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.
 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” 267

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 Archae-
ology of the Montauk, 2nd ed. (Stony Brook, NY: Suffolk County Archaeological
Association, Nassau County Archaeological Committee, 1993), 238; Eleazar Whee-
lock to George Whitefield, March 11, 1756, in Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awak-
ening: 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 His-
torical 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 Mis-
sions: 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 Ameri-
can 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
268 Chapter 11

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 Brain-
erd (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 Resis-
tance, 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
 “More Like True Religion Than Any I Ever Observed” 269

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 Uni-
versity 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 sweet-
ness . . . 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, emotion-
ally 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 charis-
matic Christianity, carried by New Light Baptist and New Side Presbyterian

271
272 Chapter 12

itinerants from Pennsylvania, ran up against fierce opposition from the estab-
lished church—in this case the Church of England, but refused to be extin-
guished. 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 instru-

mental 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 circum-
vent mandatory church attendance laws and the penalties for doing so, which
 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord” 273

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 per-
mit 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 enthu-
siastic 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 demand-
ing 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 danger-
ous firebrands. Disdainful of the recognized social and religious order, they
274 Chapter 12

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 “expe-
riences 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 & beat-
ing 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 Pres-
byterian 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 him-
self a thoroughgoing Moderate during his tenure in Virginia, discouraging
excessive enthusiasm and distancing himself from radical revivalists. Never-
theless, 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 encourage-
ment of radical enthusiasm. “Sundry Irregularities have attended the Work of
God” in New England, admitted Davies, but it “did not attend it in Pennsyl-
vania.—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 Bur-
gesses 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
 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord” 275

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 evan-
gelical 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 gener-
ally 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 itiner-
ants 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
276 Chapter 12

increasingly became a standard feature of the Methodist conversion process.

Jarratt and Davies both worked to conform evangelicalism to Anglican doc-
trine, 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 sat-
isfaction 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 Bap-
tists 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 theo-
logically 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 crimi-
nal nature. A thoroughgoing antienthusiast, Thomas denied that his meetings
dissolved into pious mayhem or that his preaching induced “horrid vocifera-
tions and obstreperous commotions.” For that kind of outrageousness, he sug-
gested, 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, embrac-
ing 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
 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord” 277

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 com-
pared 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,” accord-
ing 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 min-
ister, 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 fur-
ther 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 Banish-
ment 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
278 Chapter 12

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 ridi-
cule 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 atten-
dance at horse races and cockfights they had abandoned. James Ireland, a
Scottish immigrant schoolmaster who eagerly participated in the pleasure-
seeking culture of Tidewater, Virginia, and then converted to Baptist asceti-
cism, 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
 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord” 279

Baptists rejected Virginia’s planter-led patriarchalism, as well as the Angli-

can 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 author-
ity 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
280 Chapter 12

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 African-
American participation as exhorters and preachers, relegating them to the
status of simple worshippers. In time, white church leaders cultivated respect-
ability 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, empha-
sizing 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 provo-
cation,” 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 magis-

trate 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
 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord” 281

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 Breed-
ing—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 Sav-
ages,” and many of them “eaten up by Itinerant Teachers, Preachers, and
Imposters from New England and Pennsylvania—Baptists, New Lights, Pres-
byterians, 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, inter-
spersed 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 reviv-
alism that the Tennents were popularizing in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,
but the marked lack of settled ministers and churches left the Carolina Scots-
Irish 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 Scots-
Irish 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 Poco-
taligo 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
282 Chapter 12

2d. thots. you may Deferr sendg ye Negroe till I talk furthr abot it.” Hutson
and other southern evangelicals sharpened the division between African-
American 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 Indiffer-
ency. 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 desul-
tory 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 Wood-
mason, 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
 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord” 283

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 pos-
ture—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 Enthusi-
asm, 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 suc-
cess 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 White-
field 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 instru-
mental 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 audi-
ence 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.
284 Chapter 12

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 Bedge-
good, 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 mid-
Atlantic 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, con-
firmed in his dim assessment by a fractious year spent as pastor of the turbu-
lent 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 col-
leagues. 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 mysti-
cal 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
 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord” 285

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 posi-
tions as eldresses—an extreme rarity in eighteenth-century American Chris-
tianity. 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 counter-
parts in their service to the churches, performing baptisms, conducting reli-
gious 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 author-
ity 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 intel-
ligent 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
286 Chapter 12

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 com-
petitors, 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 deacon-
esses 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 speak-
ing publicly as though they held a male elder’s authority, they were nonethe-
less acknowledged as informal church leaders by their congregations.31
The Separate Baptists’ endorsement of female religious leadership devel-
oped from the distinctive culture of southern evangelicalism. While New
England’s traditionalist patriarchalism had begun to dissolve under the influ-
ences 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
 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord” 287

deference to the planter elite as integral to the maintenance of proper Chris-

tian 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 Angli-
canism 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 Conga-
ree 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
288 Chapter 12

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 implica-
tions that the evangelicals targeted women in order to exploit their suppos-
edly 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 Bap-
tists 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 Regu-
lar 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 some-
thing to bar the Baptists from operating in Georgia. He was also concerned
 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord” 289

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 cri-
tiques 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
290 Chapter 12

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 prerevolution-
ary 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, Invent-
ing 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 His-
tory 59 (June 1990), 158; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 150.
 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord” 291

6. Patrick Henry to William Dawson, June 8, 1747, in Kidd, The Great Awaken-
ing, 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 Awaken-
ing 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 Masculin-
ity 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, Transforma-
tion 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:
292 Chapter 12

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 Awaken-
ing 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: Con-
version 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, Transforma-
tion 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 Genea-
logical 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.
 “The Seed of Dissention and Discord” 293

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 His-
tory of New England from 1620 to 1804 (Philadelphia, PA: American Baptist Publica-
tion 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 (Rich-
mond: Virginia Baptist Board of Missions and Education, 1955), 35–36; John Tay-
lor, 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 Pil-
grims, 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.
294 Chapter 12

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,” South-
western 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: Begin-
nings 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 link-
ing up with Arnold at Québec. “[T]he safety and welfare of the whole Con-
tinent,” 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. Deal-
ing 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
296 Conclusion

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 Awaken-
ing. At once mutually contradictory and complimentary, its unique combina-
tion 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 appre-
hension 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 spec-
tacle. 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 through-
out 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 malign-
ing the dead, but to the degree to which evangelicalism had gone mainstream.3
 Conclusion 297

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 commemorat-
ing 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 conclud-
ing 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 Anglo-

American 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 reli-
gious 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 con-
nection 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 dis-
tributor, 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. Neverthe-
less, in good New England Calvinist fashion, he reminded his Boston audi-
ence 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 appre-
hended, 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
 Conclusion 299

spiritual Edification.” Similar notes were struck by Isaac Backus, who force-
fully 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 econo-
mies 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, persecu-
tion, 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 actu-
ally 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 convic-
tion 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 embel-
lished 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 Genera-
tion 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 ser-
mons 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 his-
tory 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, evan-
gelical mentality. It forms much of the nucleus of American exceptional-
ism, 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
 Conclusion 301

purifying light that would banish the darkness of despotism and caesaropa-
pacy 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 histori-
ans 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 intellec-
tual history. Evangelical historians believe that the advent of modern evan-
gelicalism 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 Angli-
canism 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 move-
ments sprung out of the Awakening and continued through the American Rev-
olution, exploding still further in the Second Great Awakening of the 1800s.14
An understanding of the First Great Awakening is critically anteced-
ent 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.
302 Conclusion

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 Ameri-
can 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, Bene-
dict 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 Rela-
tion 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 Continen-
tal 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,
 Conclusion 303

Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England (Char-
lottesville, 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 evangelical-
ism 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).
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305
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 Index

Abercrombie, Maj. Gen. James, 225 initiatives, 251–52; pan-Indian

Aborn, Abigail, 17, 34 identity movements, 250; nativist
Aborn, Elizabeth, 17, 34 religious revitalization, 258–66;
Aborn, Martha, 17, 34 apocalypticism, 264. See also
Abraham (Moravian slave preacher), specific individuals and tribes
211 American Revolution, 219, 242,
Act of Toleration (1689), 114, 273, 279 264, 290
Act of Union (1707), 65, 69; and Oath Amherst, Sir Jeffrey, 261
of Abjuration (1712), 69 Andrewes, Lancelot, 25
Adams, Amos, 238 Andros, Sir Edmund, 50
Adams, Charles Francis, 161 Anglicanism, 2
Adams, Eliphalet, 46, 251 Anglicization, 40, 45, 139
Adams, John, 242, 299 Anti-Catholicism, 226–27, 228–30,
African religions, 200–2, 206 299; and Pope’s (Guy Fawkes’s)
African-American religion, 54–56, 200, Day, 228
216–19; and syncretism, 202; slave Apocalypticism, 164, 210, 226,
preachers, 199, 220 234–36, 300
African Americans, 54–56, 121–22, Arminianism, 18, 47–48
144, 160, 193, 200, 220, 274, 278, Arminius, Jacobus, 20
279, 286, 289; early Christianization Arndt, Johann, 21
attempts, 54, 203–6, 209–11; Arnold, Benedict, 295
evangelization of during the First “Assinsink Prophet.” See Wangomend
Great Awakening, 122–23, 209, Astrology, 41, 55, 58
211–19, 273, 289–90 Atheism, 51–52, 56
Allen, John, 297 Atlantic slave trade, 202–3
American Indians, 144, 220, 248,
279; religions of, 248–50; Backus, Isaac, 141, 142, 180, 284, 299
Christianization of, 56, 157, 185, Ballentine, John, 157
227, 250–55, 256–58, 262–65, Baptists, 2, 272, 276–80, 283; “General
282; Anglo-American educational Baptists,” 276; German Baptists,

335
336 Index

29, 236, 266; Regular Baptists, Bosomworth, Thomas, 208

276, 283, 288; Charleston Baptist Botsford, Edmund, 288
Association, 283; Congaree Baptist Bound, Nicholas, 24
Association, 288; Philadelphia Braddock, Edward, 237
Association, 276, 284, 283, 288; Bradford, John, 22
Sandy Creek Baptist Association, Brainerd, David, 157, 247, 253, 260
288; Separate Baptists, 214–15, Brainerd, John, 258
276–280, 284, 286, 287–88, 289; Brauer, Jerald C., 23
Swiss Baptists, 236; and antislavery, Brekus, Catherine A., 285
279, 286–87, 289 Bridenbaugh, Carl, 4
Barber, Jonathan, 178, 210 Brockwell, Charles, 154–55
Barbot, John, 203 Bromfield, Edward, 28
Barnard, John, 39 Brown, John, 18
Barton, Thomas, 237 Browne, Isaac, 216
Bartow, John, 74 Bryan, Hugh, 207–9, 210, 281
Baxter, Richard, 24 Bryan, Jonathan, 207–8, 210, 281
Bay Psalm Book, 90 Buell, Samuel, 143, 181, 184
Bayly, Lewis, 24, 25 Bulkley, Peter, 163
Bedgegood, Nicholas, 284 Bull, William, 211
Behavioral excesses, 133–34 Bumsted, J. M., 5
Belcher, Jonathan, 100, 128, Bunyan, John, 25
129–30, 133 Burnet, William, 74
Belcher, Joseph, 132 Burr, Aaron, Sr., 186, 235
Belcher, Samuel, 132–33 Burroughs, Jeremiah, 24
Bellamy, Joseph, 214, 239 Buse, Stephen, 155
Benedict XIII, 230 Bushman, Richard L., 5
Benedict XIV, 235 Butler, Jon, 4, 5, 202, 301
Benezet, Anthony, 211 Byles, Mather, Sr., 234
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 6
Bertholf, William, 30 Cabot, Marston, 152
Bill for the General Rights and Caldwell, John, 181–82, 274
Liberties (1692), 52 Calvert, Benedict, 230
Bird, Samuel, 235–36 Calvert, Charles, 5th Baron Baltimore,
Blair, Hugh, 120 231
Blair, James, 119 Calvin, John, 66
Blair, John, 273 Calvinism, 47–49; “catholick”
Blair, Samuel, 78, 137, 273; Fagg’s Calvinism, 48
Manor seminary, 273, 274 Cambridge Platform (1648), 27, 47,
Böhme, Anthony Wilhelm, 28; Pietas 50, 142
Hallensis (1707), 29 Cambuslang, Scotland, revival (1742),
Böhme, Jacob, 22 175
Bolton, Robert, 121 Camisards, 111
Bolzius, Johann Martin, 168 Campbell, John, Earl of Loudon, 225
Book of Revelation, 100, 134, 155, Carroll, Charles of Carrollton, 231
165, 230, 234, 235, 240, 241, 301 Catawba Indians, 282
 Index 337

Chanler, Isaac, 283 Conway, Edwin, 214

Charles I, 27, 68 Cooper, Mary, 143–45
Charles II, 29, 50, 68 Cooper, Samuel, 240
Chauncy, Charles, 150, 161–62, 174, 192; Cooper, William, 207
on Gilbert Tennent, 176; and James Cotton, John, 90
Davenport, 178; and enthusiasm, Counter-Reformation, 21, 23, 29, 236
133; as antirevivalist, 178–79, Covenant renewals, 150
181–82; and Jonathan Edwards, 176, Covenanters, 65, 68–70, 73, 140
178; and Seasonable Thoughts, 173, Cowing, Cedric B., 162
177–78; and George Whitefield, Craighead, Alexander, 282
176, 181, 182, 184; and The Earth Cromwell, Oliver, 68
Delivered from the Curse, 233–34 Croswell, Andrew, 140, 163–64, 178,
Cheraw Indians, 282 187, 192
Cherokee Indians, 213, 262, 282 Cummings, Archibald, 116
Cherokee War (1759–1761), 282, 283 Cutler, Timothy, 92, 99, 129, 161
Church of England, 69; in the British-
American colonies, 42, 44–45, 50, Davenport, James, 2, 140, 141, 143,
74, 266, 272, 289 151, 173, 177, 190, 192, 255, 275;
Church of Scotland, 65, 66–70, 73; arrests and trials for disturbing the
National Covenant, 67, 68; in peace, 151; New London book
Ireland, 68–69 burning, 149–51, 175; Confession
Civil millennialism, 186 and Retraction, 176, 180; rejection
Clap, Nathaniel, 128 of radicalism, 176, 177–78, 179
Clap, Thomas, 46, 183 Davies, Samuel, 235, 236, 274–76,
Clark, Charles E., 46 277, 282; evangelization of African
Clarke, Samuel, 186 Americans, 212–15
Classis of Amsterdam, 71 Davis, Elnathan, 284
Clay, Margaret Meuse, 285–86 Dawson, William, 214, 215, 274
Cleaveland, John, 298 Deerfield raid (1704), 87, 100
Coalter, Milton J., Jr., 76 Deism, 2, 40, 48, 97–98
Cole, Nathan, 127, 145 Delaware Indians, 247, 253, 256, 261
College of New Jersey, 191, 284 “Delaware Prophet.” See Neolin
College of Philadelphia, 225 Denominational growth, 52
College of Rhode Island, 191 Devotion, Ebenezer, 151
College of William and Mary, 119, 191 Dickinson, Jonathan, 138, 166,
Colman, Benjamin, 18, 52, 94, 99, 100, 186–88; A Display of God’s
115, 130, 134, 179, 181, 207 Special Grace, 187; and Andrew
Commission for Indian Affairs Croswell, 187; The Danger of
(Massachusetts), 101 Schisms and Contentions, 186; The
Conant, Sylvanus, 235 Reasonableness of Christianity,
Concert of Prayer, 232 186–86; The Witness of the Spirit,
Conestoga Indians, 247 186; and Gilbert Tennent, 186, 188;
Confession of Faith (1680), 47, 50 and George Whitefield, 117
Congregationalism, 1–2; ordination in, Dod, John, 24
46–47 Dominion of New England, 30, 50
338 Index

Douglas, William, 163 Thoughts . . ., 158–59, 160, 173,

Downame, John, 24 175–76; and Stockbridge mission,
Dreams and visions, 79; 152–60, 100–1, 253; death of, 191–92
163–65; as defining features of the Edwards, Jonathan, Jr. (son of Jonathan
Awakening, 150, 165. See also Edwards), 98
Edwards, Sarah Pierpont; Moravians Edwards, Lucy (daughter of Jonathan
Dubard, Frederick, 211 Edwards), 191
Dutartre family, 161 Edwards, Morgan, 276, 286
Dutch Reformed Church, 2, 30–31 Edwards, Sarah Pierpont (wife of
Dwight, Sereno Edwards, 159 Jonathan Edwards), 130,
Dyer, Henry, 155 158–60, 191
Edwards, Timothy (father of Jonathan
Earthquakes, 17–18; Lynn End Edwards), 86–87, 89, 92, 132
Earthquake (1727), 17–18, 33–34; Eells, Nathaniel, 182
Cape Ann Earthquake (1755), Eisenstadt, Peter, 5
233–34 Elder, John, 140
Economic growth (British-American), Eliot, Andrew, 182–83
40, 45, 51; in the Middle Colonies, Eliot, John, 101, 227, 250
41–42; in New England, 40–41; in Ellis, Jonathan, 237
the southern colonies, 43–44 English Civil War, 68
Edward VI, 23 English Reformation, 66
Edwards, Esther (daughter of Jonathan Episcopate (American), 242
Edwards), 87, 88, 130 Erskine, Ebenezer, 65
Edwards, Jerusha (daughter of Jonathan Erskine, John, 98
Edwards), 130 Ettwein, John, 205
Edwards, Jonathan, 2, 18, 48, 52, Evidentialism, 40
87–89, 115, 141, 160, 174, 226,
229, 275, 301; and Regular Filmer, Sir Robert, 91
Singing controversy, 89–91; Finley, Samuel, 235
theological orientation, 91–92; Fish, Joseph, 178, 192
and Northampton revival (1734), Folk religion, 2, 54–56
48, 92–96; and Charity sermons, Forbes, Eli, 240
97–98; and apocalypticism, 98–99, Foxcroft, Thomas, 181, 187, 188, 241;
192, 133, 232–33; visionary Apology in Behalf of the Revd.
experience of, 100; and revivalism, Mr. Whitefield, 184
132, 135, 152–53, 159–60, 192, Foxe, John, 22, 157
232; and Suffield revival, 151–52; Francke, August Hermann, 25,
The Distinguishing Marks, 175; 26–27, 28
A Faithful Narrative, 92–93, 95, Franklin, Benjamin, 107–8, 116,
113, 114, 134, 207; A History of 123–24
the Work of Redemption, 98; An Frelinghuysen, Theodorus Jacobus,
Humble Attempt . . ., 233–34; 30–33, 72, 235; and Klagte
Sinners in the Hands of an against him, 70–71; and Jacobus
Angry God, 85–86, 101–2, 128, Schuurman, 71, 163; and pietism,
131–32, 152, 176, 182; Some 31–34; and George Whitefield, 117
 Index 339

French and Indian War. See Seven Halfway Synod (1662), 27, 50, 51
Years’ War Hall, Joseph, 24
French Prophets. See Camisards Hamilton, Patrick, 66
Fresenius, Johann Phillip, 166 Hart, Oliver, 271, 283, 284, 288
Frey, Sylvia R., 200 Harvard College, 48, 49, 118, 129, 191
Frink, Thomas, 181 Hatch, Nathan O., 5
Frisian Catechism (1718), 32 Hawley, Joseph, II, 99
Furman, Richard, 288 Hazard, Rawley, 280
Heaton, Hannah, 156–57
Gano, John, 283–84 Heimert, Alan, 4–5, 298
Garden, Alexander, 162, 211; and Hempstead, Joshua, 185
George Whitefield, 119, 120, Henry VIII, 22
121–23, 124, 129, 130 Henry, Patrick, 273–74
Gaspée incident, 297 Hervey, James, 109
Gaustad, Edwin S., 4, 42 Hide, Jedidiah, 141
Gee, Joshua, 176–77 Historiography, 3–7
Gentleman’s Magazine (London), 115 Hobby, William, 238
Gentleman’s Monthly (London), 137 Holifield, E. Brooks, 47
George II, 230 Hopkins, Samuel, 100, 152
George III, 219, 298 Housatonic Mahican Indians, 100,
Germantown (Pennsylvania), 29–30 101, 251
Gilbert, William, 209 Humanism, 40
Gillies, John, 136–37 Humphries, David, 204
Gilman, Nicholas, 153–54, 179–80, 190 Hunter, Robert, 53, 74
Glorious Revolution (1688–1689), 30, Hutchinson, Anne, 27, 93, 177
50, 230 Hutson, William, 120, 281–82
Gooch, William, 273, 274 Hutterites, 29
Goodwin, Thomas, 24
Goen, C. C., 4 Impartial Examination of Mr.
Gookin, Nathaniel, 17 Davenport’s Retractions, 179
Gordon, James, 212 Independents, 2
Gowing, Martha, 34 Ireland, James, 214, 215, 278
Graham, Chauncy, 236, 238 Iroquois Nations, 235, 238, 257,
Graves, Hannah Cave, 285 258, 264
Green, William, 279 Islam, 202
Grimes, Moses, 218 Isaac, Rhys, 216, 280, 289
Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw,
216, 217 Jackson, Harvey, 212
Guy Fawkes’s Day. See Anti- James I/VI, 67
Catholicism James II, 50
Guyse, John, 94–95, 114, 134 James V, 67
Jarratt, Devereux, 53, 275–76
Hale, John, 51 Jenkins, Robert, 231–32
Hales, John, 218 Jenks, Samuel, 240
Halfway Covenant, 27, 47, 49, 50, 88 Jesuits. See Society of Jesus
340 Index

Joachim of Fiore, 29 Marshall, Abraham, 288

John, Philip, 219 Marshall, Daniel, 276–77, 287, 288
Jones, Benjamin, 233 Marshall, Eunice, 285
Jones, David, 263 Martyn, Charles, 206
Jones, Jenkin, 138 Mary of Guise, 66
Mary I, 22
Kahnawake Mohawks, 87 Mary, Queen of Scots, 66
Katapelleecy, 262 Maryland, 230–31
Kidd, Thomas S., 6, 7, 8 Massachusetts Bay Company, 27
King George’s War (1744–1748), 184, Mather, Azariah, 49
228–29, 231–32, 271 Mather, Cotton, 27, 28–29, 48, 51,
King Philip’s War. See Metacomet’s 90, 229; and Magnalia Christi
War Americana, 28; and Manuductio Ad
Kingsley, Bathsheba, 157–58, 159 Ministerium, 49; and The Terror of
Kinnersly, Ebenezer, 138 the Lord, 34
Knox, John, 66–67; and the Confession Mather, Increase, 28
of Faith, 67; and the First Booke of Mather, Richard, 90
Discipline, 67; and the Lords of the Mather, Samuel, 159
Congregation, 67 Maxson, Charles H., 4
Koch, Johannes, 24 Mayhew, Experience, 251
Mayhew, Jonathan, 234, 237, 240
Labadie, Jean de, 21 McGready, James, 69
Lambert, Frank, 111 McLaurin, John, 232
Landsman, Ned C., 73 McLoughlin, William G., 1, 300
Lane, Tiden, 284 Meacham, Joseph, 85
Langdon, Samuel, 240 Meiners, Eduard, 31
Lathrop, Mary, 142 Melanchthon, Philip, 20
Laud, William, 68 Mellen, John, 235
Laurens, Henry, 206 Mennonites, 30; Amish, 42
Lee, William, 215 Metacomet’s War (1675–1676), 28, 100
Le Jau, Francis, 205, 219 Methodism, 22, 110, 125 n.
Liele, George, 289 Millennialism, 98–99, 133, 176, 239
Leisler’s Rebellion (1688–1691), 30, 50 Miller, C. William, 116
Leland, John, 214, 277 Miller, Perry, 4, 23
Locke, John, 69 Mills, Jedidiah, 141
Log College, 74, 78, 118, 191, 273 Mohegan Indians, 253
Logan, James, 73–74 Montauk Indians, 254, 255
Lord, Benjamin, 141, 142 Moorhead, John, 176
Loring, Israel, 174 Moravians, 29, 111, 140, 165–68, 212,
Louisbourg campaign (1745), 184, 232 255–58, 260
Lucas, Eliza, 209 Morris, Samuel, 272, 273, 274
Luther, Martin, 66, 227 Mulkey, Philip, 287–88
Lutheran Church, 2, 42 Murray, John, 145

Mackemie, Francis, 81 Naesman, Gabriel, 167

Marrow of Modern Divinity, The, 69 Narragansett Indians, 250, 253
 Index 341

Nash, Gary B., 5 Paracelsus, 54

Native Americans. See American Park, Joseph, 253
Indians Parker, James, 210
National Covenant (Scotland), 69 Parkman, Ebenezer, 46, 135, 153
Neolin, 261–63 Parrington, V. L., 4
“Newcomer,” 263 Parsons, Jonathan, 181
New England Company, 250–51 Pastorius, Daniel Francis, 29
New Divinity movement, 6, 88 Pearsall, R., 134–35
Newspapers (British), 112–13, 114, 136 Pierpont, Benjamin, 89
Newspapers (colonial), 45–46, 112–14, Pelot, Francis, 283, 284
174, 188–91; and news about Pemberton, Ebenezer, 117
revivals, 135–37; Boston Gazette, Penn, John, 247
190, 228; Boston Evening-Post, Penn, William, 29
180, 181, 189; Boston Weekly Pepperell, Sir William, 184
News-Letter, 188, 190, 228, 229; Pequot Indians, 251
Boston Weekly Post-Boy, 190, Perkins, William, 23, 25, 91
209; Maryland Gazette, 230–31; Pierpont, Benjamin, 90
New-England Weekly Journal, Pierson, John, 186
113–14, 135–36, 228; New York Pietism, 18, 19, 34, 39; European,
Gazette, 115; Pennsylvania Gazette, 20–27, 29; American, 27–33
138, 188, 189, 190, 218, 233; Pitt, William, 212, 227
Philadelphia Gazette, 116; South- Pomeroy, Benjamin, 132, 181
Carolina Gazette, 120–21, 122, 163, Pontiac, 262
189, 190, 210–11; Virginia Gazette, Pontiac’s War (1760–1765), 254
215, 279, 280 Population growth (colonial), 2, 31,
New York City slave conspiracy 41–42, 43, 53, 58
(1741), 122, 209–10 Post, Christian Frederick, 260, 261
Niantic Indians, 253 Potter, Elam, 143
Nicholson, Francis, 204 Potter, Nathaniel, 238
Niebuhr, H. Richard, 1 Pratt, Isaac, 153
Ninigret, 251 Presbyterianism (colonial), 138–39,
Noll, Mark A., 5, 6 272, 273; and Presbytery of New
North Hartford Association, 153 Brunswick, 78, 137, 183; and
Nybakken, Elizabeth, 139 Presbytery of New Castle, 273, 274;
schism (1741), 139–40; “New Side,”
O’Brien, Susan, 114 137, 140; “Old Side,” 139, 140; and
Occom, Samson, 253–55 Synod of New York, 137, 139–40,
Occultism, 40, 54–55, 56 266; and Synod of Philadelphia, 42,
Ogle, Robert, 208 74, 76, 117, 137, 139, 273; reunion
Ogle, Samuel, 119 (1758), 241
Oneida Indians, 255 Prince, Thomas, Sr., 53, 72, 132, 135,
Osgood, Herbert Levi, 1, 4 181; and The Christian History, 2,
Otseningo Seer, 258, 264 79, 136–37, 182, 192, 252
Print culture (colonial), 45, 47
Palatine Germans, 30, 42 Providentialism, 40
Papounhan, 259 Pugh, Evan, 284, 288
342 Index

Puritan “Great Migration,” 49 Scioto conference (1769), 263–64

Puritanism, 22–24, 27–28, 41; Scots-Irish: in the Middle Colonies,
Separatists (Pilgrims), 28, 42 137, 139, 236; in the southern
colonies, 281
Quakers. See Society of Friends Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, 139
Quebec Act, 298, 299 Scougal, Henry, 109
Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), 87, Sergeant, John, 101
228–29 Secker, Thomas, 241
Second Indian War, 100
Raboteau, Albert J., 56, 201, 216, 218 Semple, Robert, 285, 289
Ramus, Petrus, 24 Separatism, 141–45; and Gilbert
Randolph, John, 215 Tennent, 141
Rationalism, 18, 21, 48, 54, 56 Sensbach, Jon S., 212
Rea, Caleb, 239 Seven Years’ War, 2, 145, 192, 225–26,
Read, James, 277 234–41, 247–48, 260–61, 271, 290
Reading, Philip, 234–35, 237, 238 Sewall, Joseph, 181
Reed, Mary, 155 Seward, William, 115–16, 118, 121, 123
Reese, Joseph, 287–88 Sexuality, 159–63, 165, 288
Reformation, 66; English, 66; Scottish, Shawnee Indians, 261, 262, 263
66; and Peasants’ Revolt, 133–34 Shepard, Thomas, 157
Reformed Church, 42 “Shepherd’s Tent,” 142, 183, 190
“Reformer,” 247, 258 Shippen, William, 191
Reforming Synod (1679), 28, 50 Shirley, William, 190, 226, 232, 238
Regnier, Johann Franz, 165–66 Shotts revival (1630), 67
Richardson, William, 282–83 Shurtleff, William, 183
Roan, John, 273, 274 Sibbes, Richard, 24
Robinson, William, 273 Six-Mile-Water Revival (1625), 68
Rogers, Daniel, 155, 180, 181, 184, Slave conspiracy, New York (1741),
219–20 123, 210–11
Rogers, Richard, 24 Slavery, 273
Rous, Francis, 24 Smith, Edward (Bishop of Down), 73
Rowland, John, 138 Smith, Hezekiah, 284
Royal African Company: British, 203; Smith, Josiah, 53, 120–21, 123, 210
French, 203 Smith, Lisa H., 189
“Royal Americans,” 236 Smith, William, 225
Rutman, Darrett B., 5 Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts, 52, 74,
Salem witch hunt, 28, 51, 164 154, 204, 205–6, 241–42, 250–51
Salter, Richard, 182 Society for the Promotion of Christian
Savage, Samuel Phillips, 151 Knowledge, 28
Savin, Thomas, 219 Society in London for Promoting
Saybrook Platform (1708), 142 Religious Knowledge among the
Scattameck, 263 Poor, 214
Schurman, Anna Maria van, 21 Society in Scotland for the Propagation
Scientific Revolution, 56 of Christian Knowledge, 205, 254
 Index 343

Society of Friends (Quakers), 2, 29, 42, The Righteousness of the Scribes

145, 164, 236; and Keithian Schism, and Pharisees Consider’d, 141–42;
72–73 renounces radicalism, 141, 188–89
Society of Jesus, 55, 228, 250–51, 255 Tennent, John, 2, 74, 76–77
Spangenberg, August Gottlieb, 166, Tennent, William, Jr., 2, 72, 74,
256–57 76–77, 140
Spener, Philipp Jakob, 25 Tennent, William, Sr., 2, 66, 72, 73–75,
Spring, Samuel, 295 117, 140, 273
Stamp Act, 298 Testimony and Advice of an Assembly
State of Religion in New-England, The, of Pastors, The, 177, 183
175 Testimony of the Pastors of the
Stearns, Martha, 285 Churches in the Province of
Stearns, Shubal, 276–77, 284–85, 288 Massachusetts-Bay in New England,
Stevens, Hubbard, 155 The, 176–77
Stiles, Ezra, 150, 191, 300; A Discourse Thirty Years’ War, 22, 29, 226
on the Christian Union, 241–42; Thomas, David, 276, 277
The United States Elevated to Glory Thomas, Isaiah, 137
and Honor, 300–1 Tjaden, Sicco, 30–31
Stirling, James, 119 Toland, John, 97
Stockbridge Mahican mission, 251 Toleration Act (1689), 52
Stoddard, John, 100 Tracy, Joseph, 4
Stoddard, Solomon, 52, 86–87, 91–92, Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 232
157, 227–28 Treaty of Paris (1763), 248
Stoeffler, F. Ernest, 21 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 29
Stono Rebellion (1739), 120–21, 208 Trismegistus, Hermes, 54
Stout, Harry S., 123 Trott, Nicholas, 39, 88
Stuart, James Edward, 230 Trumbull, Benjamin, 131
Stuart Restoration (1660), 49
Symmes, Thomas, 90 Unitarianism, 2, 40
Synod of Dort (1618–1619), 21 Unitas Fratrum. See Moravians
Universalism, 2, 40
Taylor, Jeremy, 25; Holy Dying, 25, Ury, John, 210
32; Holy Living, 25, 32
Taylor, John, 285 Varnod, Francis, 203, 206
Teata, 263 Verschuir, Johan, 31
Teedyuscung, 257–58 Vindication of the Reverend
Teellinck, William, 24, 31 Mr. George Whitefield, A, 184
Tennent, Charles, 119 Volck, Alexander, 166–67
Tennent, Gilbert, 2, 53, 74, 75–78, Voltaire, 233
79–81, 102, 115, 156, 165, 173, 175,
181, 186, 192; and middle-colony Wabanaki Indians, 100, 227
revivals, 137–38, 140, 141–42; Wadsworth, Daniel, 153
and Theodorus Frelinghuysen, Wakatomica, 262
72, 76–77; The Danger of an Waller, John, 278
Unconverted Ministry, 79, 140; Wallmann, Johannes, 20–21
344 Index

Walter, Thomas, 90 128–30, 132–33, 134, 199, 219;

Wampanoag Indians, 250 and Jonathan Edwards, 130–31;
Wangomend, 259–60, 262, 263 A Faithful Narrative of the Life
Ward, W. R., 7 and Character . . ., 113; Journals,
Wardell, Nathaniel, 190 107, 113, 116, 118, 183; Some
War of the Austrian Succession. See Remarks on a Pamphlet, 175;
King George’s War and slavery, 121–22, 207–8, 281;
War of the Spanish Succession. See second preaching tour (1744), 181,
Queen Anne’s War 184–86, 192, 273; death of, 296–97
Washington, George, 233, 295 Wilkinson, Christopher, 45
Watts, Isaac, 94–95, 114, 134, 157, 184 Williams, Elisha, 75
Weberites, 211–12 Williams, Eunice, 87
Weekly History, The, 199 Williams, Israel, 239–40
Weekly Miscellany (London), 113 Williams, Roger, 27, 250
Weigel, Valentine, 21 Williams, Solomon, 178, 179, 237, 254
Weiser, Conrad, 258 Williams, Stephen, 100, 131, 151
Wemyss, George, 70 Willison, John, 65
Wesley, Charles, 109 Winthrop, John, 90
Wesley, John, 95, 109–10, 111, Wodrow, Robert, 70
212, 275 Women, 92–95, 145, 158, 160, 166,
Westerkamp, Marilyn J., 93 287–88; in church leadership,
Wheatley, Phillis, 300 279–80, 286–87, 288. See also
Wheelock, Eleazar, 85, 130, 132, Salem witch hunt
141, 143, 151, 152, 156, 178, 253, Wood, Betty, 200
255; and Moor’s Charity School, Woodberry, Richard, 179–80, 190
254; and Samson Occom, 255; and Woodbridge, Timothy, 101
“Wheelock Narrative,” 155–56 Woodmason, Charles, 280–81, 282–83,
Whitefield, George, 2, 95, 102, 286, 287–88
107–8, 127, 128, 135, 138, 160, Wright, John, 214
162, 173, 175, 182–83, 272, 274, “Wyoming Woman,” 258–59
275, 283; and the “Holy Club,”
108–11; early preaching career, Yale College, 48, 49, 74, 87, 118, 183,
110–12; as self-promoter, 111–13; 191; “Yale apostasy” (1722), 52
and Bethesda Orphanage, 107,
110, 118, 122–23, 186, 207, 210, Zeisberger, David, 260
281; and Tennent family, 117–18, Zinzendorf, Count Nicholaus Ludwig
119, 137, 186; first preaching von, 135, 165, 166, 167, 188, 256
tour (1739–1740), 115–24, 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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