Eleven The Awakeners
After his dismissal from the pulpit in Northampton, Jonathan Edwards lingered in town with his family for a year. As the months passed, the locals became ever more suspicious of him. Rumors circulated of his alleged schemes to manipulate his parishioners to his own ends, and the town folk claimed he had “sinister views” and a “tyrannical spirit” that made him a menace. They even voted to revoke a grant of pastureland they had previously given him, which damaged his finances and made it all the more essential that he find a new job. Adding to his worries: he and his wife Sarah had ten surviving children, some of whom they still had to support.
His former parish’s unfair treatment of him, coupled with his role as a target for critics of the revival, drove him to write Misrepresentations Corrected, and Truth Vindicated, in which he laid out a careful defense of his actions at Northampton and rebutted the charges made against him. He said his enemies had caricatured his ideas for determining the spiritual state of church members and had attacked him with specious logic and false claims. He said they meant to “exhibit my scheme to the world in a ridiculous light” and defame whatever reputation he had left.
Although some wags claimed he was a man out of step with the times and a clumsy master of his parish, Reverend Edwards’s real problem was that he was a perfectionist. He had expected great things from the people of Northampton in the 1730s and again in the next decade, and he could never accept that they would fail to live up to his high standards. They would backslide, return to their wretched ways, and glory in greed and hedonism and everything else he despised, and he chastised them for it. They would make excuses for their wickedness, speak with forked tongues, and engage in the most blatant hypocrisies, and he condemned them for it and compared them to heathens and apostates. He had done all he could to persuade them, and finally resorted to judging their souls himself. As a result, he had to look for new work.
He found it on the frontier of far western Massachusetts in Stockbridge—as an Indian missionary. It was a surprising turn for him, to seek a position in the sparsely settled hinterlands, but after the mission’s previous pastor died, Edwards consulted with his family and a ministerial council and accepted the role.
He planned to educate the children of the Mohawk people in Christianity and oversee a boarding school where they would be fed and clothed and taught vocational skills. Although he viewed the Mohawk as degenerate in their ignorance of Christ, he saw many of his white peers as worse for having heard the gospel and rejecting it. And after his recent struggles, Edwards had such a negative opinion of his fellow Britons, as well as the French and Dutch, that he told his Indian audiences that Europeans had willfully prevented their education, “for as long as they keep you in ignorance . . . ’tis more easy to cheat you in trading with you.” He knew how notoriously western traders had behaved—defrauding the Natives and abusing their trust—and called Anglican missionaries in particular “great bigots” for their actions. All of this gave rise to understandable fears among the Mohawk and other tribes in the Iroquois Confederacy that “if they sent their children to English schools, the English would enslave them.” Trust was hard to come by in relations between the peoples, but Edwards was willing to try.
Edwards oversaw a small group of Mohawk boys and girls, and their instruction in reading, spelling, math, and sacred music, as well as scripture. His six-year-old son, Jonathan Jr., took an even greater interest in the mission than his father, and had several young Indian friends and was better versed in Mahican and Mohawk than English. The reverend even considered grooming him to be a missionary. As for the rest of his family, though, several older Edwards children did not move to Stockbridge, and stayed behind in Northampton, since the cost and stress of uprooting them from their home would be considerable. Through all these changes, the Edwardses lacked for money: his wife Sarah and their daughter had to make silk-paper fans for extra cash, and the reverend so lacked for writing paper that he was reduced to scrawhng on their discarded scraps.
Other problems developed. While Edwards found some success as an overseer of the Indian school, many Mohawk parents took their children back to the land for sugaring season, making attendance erratic at the mission. Worse, the behavior of some British colonial officials was nothing less than barbaric to Native peoples, making them even more distrustful of white interlopers. These factors, along with the meager pay and difficulties of living on the frontier, made Edwards’s work as a missionary challenging enough. But what made it unsustainable was the drumbeat of another round of imperial warfare with France.
In the coming conflict, the question of Indian allegiance was paramount. Britons outnumbered the French in frontier settlements, but for years the French had worked at securing the alliance of Native peoples against the spread of British settlement. Edwards recognized how essential the Indians in Stockbridge (as well as the larger and more dominant groups of Iroquois) would be in batthng the king’s enemies in the war to come, but he also knew how miserably British leaders had failed them. He wrote that the Indians would surely become “a sore scourge to use as a just punishment of our cruelty to their souls and bodies, by our withholding the Gospel from ’em, defrauding them of their goods, prejudicing them against Christianity by our wickedness; and killing of multitudes of them, and easily diminishing their numbers with strong drink.” For good reason, Edwards worried his family would be on the edge of the war zone.
In the mid-1750s his fears were realized, as the conflict erupted into violence in multiple places along the frontier, and one of them was near Edwards’s own house: soldiers built a stockade surrounding it and prepared for an onslaught of enemy warriors. With troops lodged in their own home, Jonathan and Sarah sent some of their children to live with relatives in Bethlehem, Connecticut, and Jonathan found himself pressed between the need to mission to the remaining Mohawk and to protect and provide for his family. The stress of it all gave rise to illness, and the reverend became gravely sick for seven months, plagued by weakness and fever, and lost so much weight he resembled a skeleton.
Terror gripped the community as fears of an Indian uprising led to talk of conspiracies and even outright panic, fed by rumors of town folk being tomahawked and murdered. Stockbridge Indians became targets for the rumors, even though other Natives were to blame for the attacks that had occurred; and this only encouraged them to distrust the European colonists even more and to flee the area. Meanwhile, the “friendly” British soldiers devoured the Edwards family’s food and supplies and forced the reverend to petition the General Court to reimburse him for the nearly one thousand meals, fodder for 150 horses, and seven gallons of rum the soldiers had consumed.
In July 1755 the news from the front took a darker turn, as General Edward Braddock met defeat and death near Fort Duquesne and the British army suffered a devastating loss—which not only damaged the war effort against the French, but imperiled the survival of the settled towns of the frontier, including Stockbridge. Many Native troops, aside from the Mohawk, had already deserted to fight with the French, and the entire war effort threatened to become a grand imperial debacle. Edwards blamed the disaster on the sins of his own people: “God is indeed frowning upon us everywhere; our enemies get up above us very high, and we are brought down very low. . . . God is making us, with all our superiority in numbers, to become the object of our enemies’ almost continual triumphs and insults.”
It did seem like a cruel cosmic joke, that Edwards had been forced to leave his longtime home because of the distrust of his parishioners; and when he found a position in which he gained the trust of the locals, war intervened to destroy whatever goodwill he had earned. But he did not feel pity for himself and kept trying to do his duty. He remained resolute in putting his faith in God’s hands.
Luckily, God had other plans for Jonathan Edwards than killing him on the front lines of a war zone. Though the conflict with the French would escalate, and draw ever closer to Stockbridge, the death that took him away from the frontier was not his own, but that of Aaron Burr Sr. (father of the future vice president). Burr had been the president of the recently chartered College of New Jersey, but more importantly, he was Edwards’s own son-in-law and the husband of his daughter Esther. When Burr expired at only forty-one years of age, the news shocked the Edwards family and the community, and drove the college trustees to offer the vacant presidency to Edwards himself.
It seemed like an easy choice to offer the job to Edwards, but the reverend agonized over it. In a lengthy letter, he offered the trustees a long list of his flaws. He informed them of his sickly nature, and his “childish weakness and contemptibleness of speech, presence and demeanor; with a disagreeable dullness and stiffness, much unfitting me for conversation, but more especially for the government of a college”—among other regrettable traits like his poor education in algebra, higher math, and the Greek classics. In fact, Edwards wondered why the trustees were even considering him for such a job, given his many failings. He was honored by the offer but couldn’t immediately accept it. Instead he put the choice in the hands of a council of ministers. They in turn deliberated over whether the first major evangelist of the revival should lead the first major American college founded by dissenters.
The College of New Jersey at Princeton was a bastion of New Light philosophy and scholarship. Its first president had been the moderate Presbyterian Jonathan Dickinson and its second, Burr, had learned divinity under the influence of Edwards himself. A local revival had recently broken out at the college—one of the few hot spots for religion in the northern colonies in the 1750s—and many felt that no better figure could keep the revival burning than the great evangelist himself. So whatever weaknesses Edwards may have thought he had paled in comparison to the monumental presence he would have at the school, and the opportunity he could afford to future ministers who wanted to learn at his knee. The council recommended he leave Stockbridge and take the position.
Samuel Hopkins, who had studied under Edwards during the revival, described his mentor’s reaction to the decision: “he appeared uncommonly moved and affected with it, and fell into tears on the occasion; which was very unusual for him.” Hopkins would carry the torch for Edwards’s gospel for the next generation, but for now he was pleased to see him so justly rewarded for his life’s service, and to take the next step in his career: “He girded up his loins, and set off from Stockbridge for Prince-Town in January.”
The presidency of the College of New Jersey held great promise: it would allow him once again to fully provide for his family, and to redeem his reputation from recent struggles. He had great plans for his new role, too, and an array of treatises and sermons to write on some of his favorite topics. Among these were proud defenses of old-fashioned faith and pointed criticisms of new heresies.
In a recent letter to Edward Wigglesworth at Harvard, Edwards had warned of the liberalism of men like Jonathan Mayhew, whose work he saw as a danger to the survival of Calvinism. He published defenses of Congregational doctrines against the criticism of Mayhew and others, including The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, nearly 400 pages of theology that updated and reinforced Protestant orthodoxy. He wrote important works like The Freedom of Will, laying out his view of predestination and explaining how true human freedom was an illusion, since no one could be independent of God’s will. And he had great plans to show the unity of Christian ideas in The Harmony of the Old and New Testament, and to sum up his career as a revivalist with his magnum opus, History of the Work of Redemption. But before he could finish any of those things, he died.
No sooner had he settled in as the president of the College of New Jersey in winter 1758, than he became aware of a smallpox outbreak at Princeton. Knowing the devastating toll the disease could take, Edwards chose to have his family inoculated against the disease. His daughter Lucy had recently contracted smallpox and survived, and Edwards didn’t wish any of his other children to suffer the same fate, or worse. However, while the vaccinations turned out well for other family members, for Edwards the cure became the disease. He contracted smallpox soon after receiving the treatment and realized he would be dead very soon. He settled his estate and asked that any money that would have been spent on a lavish funeral instead be given to the poor. A few weeks later he met his end—without regret or anger and with full acceptance of the Lord’s will. He had only been the college’s president for a month when he expired.
A short time after, his daughter Esther caught a fever and died, and by the end of the year, his wife Sarah had died of dysentery. It was a grim conclusion to the family’s struggles, but it did not diminish their legend. Even in death, they remained one of the best-known families in American religion. Edwards in his writings had lauded them as examples of piety and grace and, in Sarah’s case, holiness in her conversion to Christ. In the coming years, his son Jonathan Jr. would continue his father’s ministry and ensure that the family name would live on. And the deceased pastor’s own writings would do the rest, providing thousands of pages of ardent and complex defenses, justifications, exhortations, and explanations of the greatest religious revival America had yet known, and building the intellectual foundation for upheavals yet to come.
Reverend Edwards might have become the most renowned college president in America had he lived. As it was, he briefly led an institution that would grow into a citadel of dissent, a seminary for New Light ministers, and a breeding ground of future troublemakers against royal officials. And this wasn’t surprising, for the College of New Jersey had its roots in a small but controversial wooden structure in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania: the original Log College of William Tennent Sr.
The elder Tennent had died in 1746, and his influential college foundered with him, but its ideals lived on in the College of New Jersey, which was chartered only six months after his death. Many graduates and associates of the Log College became trustees of the new college, and like the little wooden school, the new one’s mission was to train ministers with “experimental knowledge” in the Christian faith. It was to be nondenominational, and to draw students throughout the colonies from dissenting ranks. But that feature also made it a threat to the Church of England, which tried to prevent it from being chartered and, failing that, pushed the governor of New Jersey to give it control of its governance. Such overt attempts to meddle led to outrage among school authorities.
The Anglicans had good cause to worry, for the College of New Jersey became a rock of nonconformity and a thorn in the side of Anglicanism. And one of its greatest champions was no friend to the Church of England, but a confirmed opponent: Gilbert Tennent, the original Son of Thunder.
Although Gilbert still carried the nickname among revivalists, he had long since ceased to be a source of thunder in the pulpit: He had adopted a measured tone and an appearance of moderation. However, even if he no longer marshaled the thunder, he could not avoid it. In 1745 he became its literal target when lightning struck him inside his home. The bolt sheared bricks off the chimney, tore through the house, melted his belt buckle, and ripped his shoes. Though he survived his injuries, his enemies pointed to his electrocution as evidence of divine disfavor. But Gilbert saw it differently, and wrote a sermon, All Things Come Alike to All, that attempted to examine why the Lord had nearly killed him.
He explained the event by not explaining it. He had no answers for why God did what he did. It was all part of a mysterious plan of which humans were ignorant, and at some point one had to stop demanding answers to unanswerable riddles. “God’s paths are in the great deep, and his footsteps are not known. The Almighty sometimes hides the face of his Throne, and makes darkness his pavilion.” Gilbert’s life had gone in strange directions after the revival, and he could do little but follow them, no matter where they led.
After his embarrassment at the hands of radicals like James Davenport, and relocation to Philadelphia from his longtime home in New Brunswick, Gilbert’s rhetoric had changed with the times. He quenched much of his hellfire, and he no longer spoke of people’s bones being torn apart at the Lord’s whim, and their hearts ripped out like carrion, and other horrific images. He even subdued his talk of the damnation awaiting the unconverted, not because he no longer believed it, but because he thought it came perilously close to substituting his judgment for God’s. In fact, he had learned that too much zeal could be destructive, and could endanger the cause he loved: promoting experimental religion and rebirth in Christ.
Over twenty years until the mid-1760s, Gilbert preached to a congregation that included the governor of Pennsylvania and other important officials. He spoke in a somber fashion, without browbeating his listeners, and wore a proper pulpit gown and wig. He spoke with extensive notes and reused many of his old sermons, to avoid the risk of any errant phrases littering his message.
He once again attracted the attention of Ben Franklin, who had printed the famous works that had gained him a fearsome reputation throughout the colonies. Now, Franklin had his eye on the New Building where Gilbert preached. He offered to assume control of the building for use as a proposed nondenominational college, in exchange for freeing Gilbert’s congregation of the substantial debts they had accrued while operating it as a church. Gilbert accepted the offer, knowing he would have to quickly raise funds to build a new church—and one of the first people he asked to donate was Franklin.
Franklin was too canny to put his own money into supporting the Presbyterian cause that he had rejected in his youth. But he did provide Gilbert with some good advice for fundraising—asking everyone from close allies to sworn enemies to drum up the money—and within a few years the minister had succeeded in creating a fancy new home for the Second Presbyterian Church, complete with glittering chandeliers and an elegant steeple. To those who felt the creation of the building undercut the low-church piety and hardscrabble faith Gilbert had once preached, he offered an answer that could have come straight from a high-born Anglican cleric: “in cities where there is a greater resort of persons of honor, distinction, and polite taste, the structures of a religious kind should be adorned with greater beauty and exactness, than in obscurer places.” The contrast with the humble log house where he had found his faith couldn’t have been clearer.
He also reconciled part of the church he had once helped divide. He created an alliance with other moderate revivalists to form the New York Synod, which became a rival to the Philadelphia Synod that was dominated by Old Siders. This added another contradiction to Gilbert’s life, which was increasingly full of them: He preached in Philadelphia for a synod based in New York, to a congregation made up of elites he had once belittled, in a church rich with ornaments he once decried as fripperies. His transformation was thereby complete, and anyone ignorant of recent history could have scarcely imagined him as a Son of Thunder, aside from his lightning scars.
Still, however much he embraced moderation, it did not free him from the attacks of his Old Side foes. Despite his efforts to become an honored gentleman of the cloth, he preached in a city dominated by those who had battled him over matters of faith. He could not break free of this entanglement, and he knew that to advance the mission of his church, he had to reconcile the bonds he had once casually severed.
In his 1749 sermon Irenicum Ecclesiasticum, or “The Church of Peace,” Gilbert offered a gesture of reconciliation to the warring Presbyterians. He minimized their theological differences, and claimed it was “absurd and blasphemous” to accept divisions between people of faith. “Schisms and divisions, my brethren, do not only expose the church to contempt and scorn, but likewise to a total dissolution, to entire ruin, and destruction.” The new Gilbert had no use for dissension and wished only to unite people once more in a spirit of “humility, weakness and love.” However, while the old holy warrior now seemed to put down his sword, he still needed an enemy. He praised how “the visible church strikes a dread, a panic, into the hearts of all her foes, like an army with banners . . . and drawn up in battalia.” Gilbert might have proclaimed the value of love, but his heart remained militant.
He began to preach of battle outside the pulpit, too, exhorting all Presbyterians to support the creation of a colonial militia, and proclaiming the value of defensive war. When the conflict with France resumed in the mid-1750s, Gilbert joined with his foes in calling for military preparation against the Catholic enemy. While he no longer wanted to wage battles against those of his own faith, he embraced the call to arms against the Pope’s legions. He knew that warfare could affirm the shared beliefs of all Presbyterians, and make their differences seem small in comparison.
Ultimately, however, Gilbert’s attempt to reconcile with his foes did not succeed with martial rhetoric alone. He could only reunite the church with the power of numbers—in the form of ordained ministers and British pounds.
In 1753 Gilbert Tennent and Samuel Davies embarked on a fateful trip to the old country, to raise money for the endowment of the College of New Jersey. The trustees had tried to use public lotteries and domestic donations to fund the institution, but the New Jersey legislature banned the former and the latter proved insufficient. Only donors in Britain could contribute enough money to support the New Light institution, and the evangelists would have to woo them to part with their pounds in person.
It would be an arduous trip. Gilbert’s wife and mother had recently died, and he was overcome with grief and in a foul mood. Moreover, he remembered how the Tennent family had once fled Great Britain to avoid its all-powerful bishops and magistrates, and with the visit he would be back in their rationalist, decadent lair. Even the character of Presbyterianism seemed foreign to him—divided by liberal churchmen influenced by natural religion and fiery enthusiasts who thought Gilbert had gone soft in his middle age. Nonetheless, when he and Davies arrived at Christmas, they went to work.
Over the next year they scoured the islands from England and Scotland to the Tennent homeland of Ireland. They sought audiences with local synod leaders, legislators, royal officials, and anyone with money who might be interested in promoting colonial piety from a distance of 3,500 miles. They split up and toured the places where each was more popular and knocked on countless doors and met with people of both substantial and middling wealth, through tireless and numbing efforts. As Davies put it, “I never engaged in such a series of wasting fatigues and dangers as our present mission is attended with. . . . I have walked in the tedious, crowded streets of London from morning to evening, till my nature has been quite exhausted; and I have been hardly able to move a limb.” And then they returned home, exhausted from the kind of monotonous money-begging that only George Whitefield seemed to enjoy.
They succeeded beyond expectation. Their original goal had been to collect 300 pounds for the college, but within the first three months they had already tripled that amount, and in the end may have raised as much as 3,000 pounds in the mission. It was a great sum to fund a college for reborn pastors, and it paid off in ways that multiplied as the years passed.
With such ample funding, the College of New Jersey could now afford to educate more ministers in its seminary and train more men to spread the New Birth throughout America. And because each new divinity degree meant filling a new pulpit, the ranks of revival men quickly grew: In 1745 the divided ranks of Presbyterian pastors were roughly equal, but by 1758 there were three times as many New Siders as Old Siders. The success of the College of New Jersey in handing the power to the revivalists was invaluable, and the traditionalists had no choice but to capitulate.
The terms of the long-awaited Presbyterian reunion were charitable to the losing side, on the surface. With Gilbert as moderator overseeing the terms of unification, the church committees decreed that convulsions in worship, divine revelations, and enthusiastic madness were to be condemned; arguments over doctrine were minimized and papered over; and “all former differences and disputes are laid aside and buried.” But despite these good words, there was no doubt the New Side pastors had triumphed. The unified sides confirmed the value of an experimental faith in Christ and approved of revivals as “a blessed work of the Holy Spirit.” William Tennent’s long-held goal of reforming the church on his terms had found success, and his son had accomplished it with grit, legwork, passion, and money.
Gilbert Tennent died five years after the reunion. His legacy as a reborn Christian turned zealous minister, turned fearsome demagogue, turned moderate evangelist would remain controversial for decades afterward. But beyond his role in the revival, much more lasting was his influence as an educational trustee and fundraiser. For his College of New Jersey did not lose its influence after it led the New Side to victory in the figurative Presbyterian war; it also played a prominent role in the actual war to come.
In the first twenty years of the school’s existence, it graduated ninety-seven “highly articulate and unusually vocal” Presbyterian ministers who took public stands on matters spiritual and, increasingly, political. It gave degrees to dozens of important lawyers and doctors of prominence, and many key legislators and governors of the future American nation. Indeed, ninety-four of its graduates would ultimately take arms against Britain (against only eight loyalists), and more than one hundred would serve in political office for the new republic, with five becoming members of the Constitutional Convention. Of course, it was never Gilbert Tennent’s goal to create a cradle of sedition against the British government; he only wanted to train reborn men of the cloth to fill pulpits. But as with everything in the revival, the result was unexpected—the rise of the first major dissenting college in America, a bulwark of nonconformity against the Church of England, and a breeding ground for future revolutionaries.
The College of New Jersey was not alone as a groundbreaking school. It had a rival in an institution called the Academy of Philadelphia, based in the very New Building where Gilbert Tennent and George Whitefield had once preached. Its founder had an independent view of religion and had designed the Academy as a nonsectarian refuge for students of a variety of beliefs, and a bastion of free thought. Once again, Ben Franklin had put an innovative idea into practice.
By this time, Franklin had moved on from promoting religious revivals. Doing so in the previous decade had benefited him handsomely, enabled him to eclipse his rival Andrew Bradford, retire from his print operation, and put it in the hands of his business partner. He had cultivated many other interests at the time—developing an early hospital and insurance company, acting as alderman and colonial assemblyman, trying to create a militia to protect Pennsylvania, and most famously, conducting electrical experiments and inventing the lightning rod, for which he earned a Copley Medal from the Royal Society. And increasingly, he began to argue for the alliance of the colonies in a defensive union, against frontier Indians or whomever else his countrymen feared might have designs on them.
Franklin also set about undermining the control of the colony by the Penn family—the “proprietary party.” No longer sympathetic to common Quakers, the party had mismanaged the affairs of Pennsylvania, and Franklin tried to strip them of their power to spend money and appoint magistrates, and to defend citizens from their taxation. In response the proprietors called Franklin “the chief author and grand abettor” of sedition, and an anarchist and republican who threatened the power of the elite. Of course, Franklin was none of these things, but that didn’t prevent the party from exacting its revenge: through the influence of Anglican clerics, they heaped scorn upon him as a public menace and forced him out as president of the Academy of Philadelphia.
Yet the days of the proprietors were numbered, as were those of other colonial aristocrats. The Penn family and their allies in the Church of England lost important elections and saw their forces divided in the assembly, and the cleric who had become provost of the Academy, William Smith, so offended Quaker assemblymen that they had him arrested and jailed for libel. Franklin had a quiet hand in many of these actions, demonstrating his skill for both diplomacy and coercion.
Franklin also maintained a friendly correspondence with leading writers, scientists, and statesmen of the time, while keeping up with his longtime friends and associates—including one who returned to America in the 1750s to preach a bit of old-fashioned Calvinism. The man’s reputation had preceded him, and he held great appeal among dissenters, so Franklin didn’t have to publicize his return. America knew George Whitefield well, and was happy to welcome him back.
Even though his and Franklin’s business dealings were now largely in the past, the two men remained friends and correspondents. Whitefield lauded Franklin for his scientific experiments and, now that he had mastered the physical world, encouraged him to explore the spiritual world through the New Birth. Franklin evaded his attempts at conversion, but still appreciated conversing with someone who genuinely believed what he preached. He even proposed they settle a new colony on the Ohio River, with the prospect of business and evangelical opportunities for both. Franklin wrote, “What a glorious thing it would be, to settle in that fine country a large strong body of religious and industrious people! . . . In such an enterprise I could spend the remainder of life with pleasure; and I firmly believe God would bless us with success.”
In an era when divisions of faith and politics had separated many friends into opposing camps, these two oddly matched men had proved to be reliable stalwarts for each other. Whitefield and Franklin may not have found common cause in orthodox religion, but they did in their distrust of institutions and hierarchies. They despised privilege divorced from merit, and the way the colonies were often run by toadies for the Crown and their corrupt apprentices. Whether in matters of God or country, they had resolved to undermine the aristocracy, and for more than a decade, through revival and upheaval, they had done just that.
Regarding those times of turmoil, Whitefield had been rewriting his past and selling it in a new form to the public through the work of John Gillies, a historian and minister in the Church of Scotland. Gillies wrote sympathetically of the Grand Itinerant, and in his book Historical Collections Relating to Remarkable Periods of the Success of the Gospel, he linked Whitefield’s revivals with the spiritual upheavals of the past, including the Acts of the Apostles in the Bible. Gillies also accumulated Whitefield’s writings in preparation for a biography—carefully removing the parts of his Journals that had infuriated his foes and sowed controversy. In so doing, Gillies gave Whitefield a more moderate image as a figure of peace and unity; this expurgated version of his life would have a profound influence over the way he would be seen by coming generations.
The affirmations of Ben Franklin, the writings of John Gillies, the support of dissenters, all of it shaped Whitefield’s reputation, along with the successful conversion of thousands of Americans whom he had enflamed during the revival. His reinvigorated popularity was especially apparent on one of his recent trips, in a broadside that celebrated him with fulsome praise:
Is blessed Whitefield come again?
Our heart does now rejoice,
We pray good people all attend
And hear his lovely voice.
For fourteen years he has been tried
By enemies and friends;
And now upon this new return
The heavenly sound it rings.
Yet even as Whitefield cleaned up his image in America as a figure of grace and piety, he still felt the need to remove his mask on occasion and speak bitter words against his enemies. Like Gilbert Tennent, he couldn’t resist war rhetoric, and when the French and Indian War broke out, he tried to rally the colonists with every ounce of venom he could summon. He railed against “an insulting, enraged and perfidious enemy” that had been responsible for “horrid butcheries and cruel murders” using Indians to fight the battles of priests. He wrote of martyrs slaughtered, innocents devastated, and enemies in league with the devil—all to fuel the hatred of French Catholics as he had once fueled the hatred of Jacobites. Some of his rhetoric was even more scalding than it had ever been, to unite Americans of all Protestant sects against a common foe and cast himself as an icon of patriotism to the Crown.
With their stark imagery, his exhortations also recalled the fury he had aimed at Anglican clerics fifteen years before. This was classic Whitefield—feeding the fire anew, condemning his enemies to hell, renouncing sin and reveling in the New Birth. He may no longer have condemned the unconverted with the same vigor, but what did it matter now that he rallied Americans against another foe, the Pope’s armies? He was a Calvinist among Calvinists, and spoke to his thousands of followers with a simple ecumenical appeal that was equal parts sweetness and terror—an irresistible combination to dissenting Christians with an axe to grind.
However, what worked brilliantly in the New World proved to be controversial at home. He discovered this hard lesson whenever he returned to Britain, where far from a figure of piety and devotion, he was the subject of ridicule.
Thanks to a popular play, The Minor, which described a scheming charlatan named Dr. Squintum, the many British foes of Whitefield now applied that nickname to him. Whitefield’s lazy eye made him seem to fit the character’s name, and his hellfire preaching made him seem like a relic in the rationalist, materialist world of Britain. As one character described Dr. Squintum, “this here doctor is capable of seeing two sides of a thing at once, and keeps one eye upon earth and the other upon heaven.” Other characters described a leering hypocrite who prattled about the New Birth while groping at prostitutes, and who pummeled audiences with his stern words while violating all the scruples he preached. Crude pamphlets and low poems followed, including this bit of doggerel describing his antics:
Of all the knaves and all the fools
That ever left the public schools
To make the honest poor their tools
The worst is Dr. Squintum. . . .
“Do nothing and be saved,” he cries
His stupid audience close their eyes
And groan in concert to the lies
Of the canting Dr. Squintum.
As this tune, “Friendly Advice for Dr. Squintum,” became popular among the working class as a broadside against his dignity, Whitefield reacted with pained sarcasm, writing, “I am now mimicked and burlesqued upon the public stage. . . . All hail such contempt!” The attacks seemed particularly hurtful since Whitefield was raised in the company of actors and had proved to be a brilliant dramatic performer himself in the pulpit. But now those who might have been his allies in a different life showered him with disdain. Even artists like William Hogarth joined in, offering engravings like Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism: A Medley, in which enthusiastic madness holds sway as a mad preacher reigns over the turmoil, with actual lines from Whitefield’s poetry providing ironic commentary. Thus, the passage of years had been unkind to the Itinerant in the land of his birth. Whereas in his early days he had inspired fear and awe in his enemies, now he brought forth mirth and mockery. It wasn’t surprising he spent so much time across the Atlantic as an honorary American.
By the 1760s, Franklin, too, was facing trouble in his home country. He was ensnared in the increasingly nasty business of Pennsylvania politics, working with the Quaker party in the Assembly against the no-longer-Quaker proprietors of the colony and their high church allies. Adding to the animosity, Franklin tried to strip the proprietors of their control over the colony and put it in the hands of royal governors—even as violence erupted on the Pennsylvania frontier.
Some of these problems derived from the end of the war against the French in 1763, when an uprising of Indians against British policies led to Pontiac’s Rebellion, followed by violent encounters between white settlers and Natives in the Ohio country and western Pennsylvania. In the most notorious case, a group of vigilantes called the Paxton Boys slaughtered a group of Christian Indians and began marching toward Philadelphia, with an eye toward killing the 140 Indians who had fled to the city for safety. Franklin took the lead against those he called “Christian White Savages” and hastily organized a militia to keep the Boys from ransacking the city.
Philadelphia filled with dread. Not only did the threat of mob rule raise the locals’ anxiety, but an economic recession and desperate living conditions increased the possibility of anarchy. Although British troops quashed the Paxton Boys, their threat became another point of contention between Quakers, who saw them as zealous fanatics, and Presbyterians, who defended their right to self-defense, since many of the Boys shared their faith. Franklin interpreted the melee as a disaster for civilized behavior and warned of “violent parties and cruel animosities” that might cause bloodshed between the factions. He was drawn into another round of verbal warfare, with his high church enemies calling him a lecher and a corrupt tool of the Quakers, and his allies spreading bile against their opposers, calling them reptiles and toads, liars and schemers. The Presbyterians especially came in for abuse, labeled as “Piss-brute-arians” in one pamphlet.
By this time the incitement and division of the revivalists and their foes had been fully incorporated into politics, as “religious groups split among political lines and clergymen became parapolitical leaders.” Such battles gave the impression that the conflicts of the 1740s had never ended, just resumed with new factions. Internal dissension could be held at bay as long as there was a foreign enemy to fight—from the Spanish to the French to frontier Indians—but when such wars abated, domestic rivals turned on each other with pent-up aggression. And when they weren’t fighting each other, they battled the policies of the British government, and its seemingly endless demand for money.
The most pressing need after the French and Indian War had been to address the massive imperial debt that had accrued, and to pay for the presence of ten thousand soldiers to guard British North America. Franklin had proposed a clever scheme to Parliament creating a loan office that would offer paper-money credit at a 6 percent annual interest rate. Such a plan could raise money from colonists without unnecessarily provoking them, and reduce some of the red ink that threatened to overwhelm colonial government. But Parliament ignored Franklin’s thoughtful idea and passed the Stamp Act instead.
This disastrous plan was designed to raise money by requiring revenue stamps to be purchased for a huge quantity of printed materials—everything from newspapers and pamphlets to legal contracts, college diplomas, and playing cards. Franklin knew the plan would be politically unpalatable and an obstacle for reestablishing peace between the rulers and the ruled. He was right: riots broke out in many cities and towns, and colonies like Virginia passed resolutions calling the Act unfair and illegal. Many colonists resolved to fight the official action in the streets if necessary.
To try to limit the damage, Parliament called on Franklin to explain and clarify the grievances of his countrymen. It was a logical choice, for while he had sometimes thwarted the will of royal officials in Pennsylvania, he managed to strike an even-tempered pose that gave his opinions a veneer of respectability—and he knew a good number of legislators who could help undo the act. But when Ben Franklin came to London to state his case, he did not come alone. George Whitefield came too, ready to provide moral support.
In many ways it was the highlight of their relationship. No longer bound by simple monetary interests, the two men had shared a great deal in their twenty-five-year friendship. They had faced off against their adversaries, been buffeted in political and religious conflicts, and witnessed great social changes that they themselves had helped engineer. And now they shared a stage at the center of the British imperial world.
Franklin did not miss his opportunity. He defended Americans’ popular sovereignty to the Parliamentarians and described how they remained loyal subjects of the king, even if they had no interest in paying unjust taxes. The legislators interrogated him about the violence in the colonies and the threat of mob rule. He did not justify such behavior, but he told them Americans had the right to resist their mistreatment. The legislators asked, if the Stamp Act were repealed, would the colonists then acknowledge Parliament’s right to tax them? Franklin said, “No, never . . . they will never do it, unless compelled by force of arms.” And he added, “No power, how great soever, can force men to change their opinions.”
Whitefield sat in awe of Franklin’s performance. He credited his friend with playing a major part in getting the Stamp Act repealed, and said, “Dr. Franklin has gained immortal honor by his behavior at the bar of the House. His answer was always found equal to the questioner. He stood unappalled, gave pleasure to his friends, and did honor to his country.” But while Franklin may have impressed his English friends in London, he faced much more contention when he returned to America.
Franklin had made sure to have his notes and a transcript of his questioning published in Philadelphia, which made his answers widely known and his words subject to close inspection. Soon enough, Franklin’s adversaries noticed that he had suggested Parliament might be able to tax the foreign trade of Americans, and had played down their feelings of revolt and seemed to hedge against their independent spirit. Word even got out that he had recommended a friend to be a revenue agent before the Stamp Act was repealed—a sure mark of hypocrisy. Thus, more than a few colonists figured that, if Franklin wasn’t quite a traitor, he had at least done his fellow Pennsylvanians a disservice and deserved censure for his actions. But as he came under fire, the one person who had the most power to defend him, and stood willing to do it, was Whitefield.
The Grand Itinerant doubtless remembered how, at the nadir of his own reputation in America in the mid-1740s, Franklin had testified to his honor, lauding his integrity and character in the pages of the Pennsylvania Gazette. Now, Whitefield returned the favor by offering rousing praise for his friend—saying he “spoke very heartily and judiciously in his country’s behalf”—and offering a firsthand testament to the thrilling words he had spoken to Parliament. And since the Englishman Whitefield was more popular in America than the native son Franklin (just as their roles were reversed in Britain), the preacher’s defense had a salutary effect, preventing the name of Franklin from being further sullied and reinforcing his own reputation for truth and integrity. As one critic wrote, “[W]ho would dare deny Mr. Whitefield’s authority—will the Church? Will the Presbyterians?”
In his later life, Franklin would fully recover his reputation and grow more comfortable in Europe, first as a colonial emissary in London, then, after the outbreak of war, as a minister to France. His countless achievements and accomplishments would become known to every schoolchild in America, his face and name adorning cities, roads, buildings, and currency. But his role in promoting the great evangelical revival would be largely forgotten by posterity, even though that accomplishment—long before most of his others—would be the first that set Americans down an independent course. It imbued in them a spirit of dispute and contention, and a flair for violence and schism, that proved essential to stirring feelings of revolution. Thus, unlike almost any other Founding Father, Ben Franklin played a role at every stage in creating a new America, from planting the seeds of revolt in the 1740s to seizing the fruit of independence thirty years later.
Unlike Franklin, who lived for decades after his testimony against the Stamp Act, Whitefield lasted only a few years. In Britain, he reconciled with fellow Methodists like John Wesley, though they disputed many questions of faith, and grew ever more committed to the reform of the Church of England even as its likelihood grew ever more distant. He knew that the high churchmen’s domineering ways would eventually get the better of them in America, where they had continually pushed for the appointment of a bishop with broad powers. Whitefield now echoed the feelings of his dissenting friends, knowing Anglican policies would continue to breed resistance and feelings of revolt. It was one subject even he and his theological foe Jonathan Mayhew could agree on: The Church of England had no business creating an episcopacy to oversee the colonies, and doing so would only encourage further resistance from American Protestants.
In 1769 Whitefield left Britain for the last time. He arrived in Charleston and began preaching to wide acclaim. His longtime nemesis, Alexander Garden, had died a dozen years earlier, so there was no one with the authority or the will to drag him before an ecclesiastical court or otherwise impugn his reputation. He visited his orphanage at Bethesda and oversaw the creation of a related academy. Here, young slaves would be taught to read and learn artisan skills while also receiving the catechism of Christianity.
However, the reason there were slaves at all at Bethesda owed much to Whitefield himself—his constant demands for forced labor resulted in the legalization of Georgia slavery at the turn of the 1750s, and Whitefield’s operation had greatly profited by it. Forty percent of Savannah’s population now included enslaved laborers, and Whitefield included himself among the ranks of the slave owners he had once condemned. The irony was bitter and invited a certain heavenly comeuppance, though Whitefield would not be alive to witness it. The orphanage took flame in 1773 after being hit by a lightning bolt and burned to the ground.
By this time, his wife Elizabeth had long ceased to administer the orphanage directly—and in fact did not even visit America after 1749. She and Whitefield thus spent months or even years apart, he traveling and preaching in Scotland, England, and the colonies, and she running the ministry operations from London. He called her his “yoke-fellow,” which largely summed up how he viewed her, or in one critic’s words as a “treasured but distant ally.” She had suffered far more as his wife than even she could have expected, enduring not only her husband’s cold and decorous demeanor, but no fewer than four miscarriages and the death of an infant son. Yet she persisted through these trials, and never lost her faith in a heavenly reward for her struggles. Indeed, through the 27 years of their marriage, she grew to have much more affection for Whitefield’s ministry than for the man himself—and others knew it, too. In 1754, the reformed James Davenport wrote to her, asking, “Shall I now sympathize with you, under the frequent and sometimes long absence of your dear husband? Or shall I not rather?” Given the indifference the Whitefields had for each other, it may have been better the Grand Itinerant spent much of his time overseas.
Elizabeth died in 1768 of complications of a fever, and Whitefield mourned her loss publicly. He grieved over the loss of his “right hand” in the ministry and the valuable role she played in spreading the gospel. But to one intimate observer, Cornelius Winter, who traveled with him, Whitefield did not seem overly troubled: “Her death set his mind much at liberty.” In the end he could offer her his loyalty and decorum as a public figure; his spiritual advice as a man of God; his zeal for revival as a fellow Christian. But he could never offer her love and devotion, or the semblance of a real marriage. He had given his heart to God, and left none to share with anyone else.
In the spring of 1770 Whitefield set out for the North, long the place of his greatest appeal. As he traveled up the coast, the mood of the colonies about the mother country changed, from toasts to the health of the king in Georgia to conspicuous silence or even outright hostility past the Chesapeake. He preached to packed congregations in Philadelphia thick with mixed crowds of dissenters, and received thanks from locals who remembered how he had defended the name of Ben Franklin from charges of disloyalty.
Also in the Middle Colonies, he dined with his old friend William Tennent Jr. Many decades before, young Tennent had died and been brought back to life in a mysterious resurrection. Now Whitefield, with mortality on his mind, inquired if Tennent was ready to meet the Lord again, since he had reached old age. But instead of a gentle agreement, Whitefield received a surprising rebuke: “I have no wish about it,” Tennent said. “No, sir, it is no pleasure to me at all; and if you knew your duty, it would be none to you. I have nothing to do with death. My business is to live as long as I can, and as well as I can.” This was not the answer the Itinerant expected, and it brought him to silence. Whitefield realized he had to work as hard as he could with the time he had left, and dreaming of his heavenly reward wasn’t only presumptuous, it verged on pride and blasphemy.
He continued on to Boston and the Puritan homeland, which were astir in violence and reaction against the policies of the British government. He wrote in a letter, “Poor New England is much to be pitied; Boston people most of all. How grossly misrepresented!” He saw the British army occupying the town and the common folk suffering at its hands, and decried “the great mischiefs the poor pious people suffered lately through the town’s being disturbed by the soldiers.” He admired Bostonians for the fortitude and the way they kept the Sabbath holy better than any other town folk he knew, and it disgusted him that such people of God could be abused by the imposition of brute force.
Yet despite the intimidating atmosphere, he preached well and received huzzahs for his ministry, enjoying the company he kept and touring the region at a breakneck pace—which may have done severe damage to his health. He sweated in the pulpit and took ill with colds and fever. He traveled on horseback through rough and dismal conditions, and still managed to proclaim the gospel to anyone who wanted to hear it. He woke up in the night with “a violent lax, attended with retching and shivering” and still pushed on, preaching in small towns and waysides and spreading the word of God to anyone who wasn’t already well acquainted with it. He drove himself to exhaustion repeatedly, became fatigued and breathed with difficulty, and still kept up his testimony to the New Birth. He met with overwhelming popularity as an honorary son of America and friend to dissenters everywhere, and the support he received pushed him through the summer even as his health collapsed. And when the summer ended, so did he.
In a little town called Newburyport, George Whitefield died on the last day of September 1770. He met his end in the parsonage of a Presbyterian church, where in his final days he had asked to be buried in a crypt under the altar. Unlike Jonathan Edwards, however, Whitefield did not donate money for his funeral to the poor, but instead spent it on an elaborate ceremony complete with cortege and mile-long procession. Six thousand people attended, a considerable turnout for an 18th-century funeral, and the clerics and common folk lionized the Grand Itinerant as an evangelist beyond compare and a sanctified man who had earned the right to sit at the Lord’s Table. Thus, a priest of the state religion of Britain died in an occupied colony in America, and was buried not in a grand church of his own faith in London, but among dissenters in an obscure church in a little-known hamlet. The contradictions of Whitefield were many and complex, even after his death.
The same held true for the honors he received at his passing. Ben Franklin, despite being a foe of Calvinism, did not equivocate in lauding its foremost defender as a man whose “integrity, disinterestedness, and indefatigable zeal in prosecuting every good work, I have never seen equaled, I shall never see exceeded.” More curiously, Whitefield’s passing brought forth elegies from a number of black and African writers, preachers and activists, many of whom had been enslaved. Prominent figures like John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and Phillis Wheatley offered hearty praise of Whitefield. Wheatley composed a famous poem in which she gave hosannas to her fellow Methodist:
Thy lessons in unequal’d accents flow’d
While emulation in each bosom glow’d
Thou didst, in strains of eloquence refin’d
Inflame the soul, and captivate the mind. . . .
Towards America—couldst thou do more
Than leave thy native home, the British shore,
To cross the great Atlantic’s wat’ry road,
To see America’s distress’d abode?
Like others who praised the Itinerant, Wheatley became an abolitionist—even though Whitefield’s record on slavery was checkered at best, and depraved at worst, and he had been instrumental in the legalization of slavery in Georgia and owned human beings himself. However, to those black Americans who offered their good words, the honors were not strictly for Whitefield but rather for the revival he had unleashed. For even though Whitefield was an enemy of liberation, his evangelism had altered countless aspects of American life and transformed them in ways he could not have expected. Groups like enslaved people who had once been excluded from Christianity now partook in it, studied it, and drew their own lessons from it, often contrary to the views of those who claimed to own them. And it was this version of the gospel—the New Birth and its radical effect on those who experienced it—that shook social bonds and threatened the hierarchy of the wealthy and powerful. And in the years before the revolution, the people seizing on those transformative effects and giving them new momentum were none of the original awakeners like Whitefield. They were the New Lights who took his gospel and did something else with it entirely.