Notes

Notes

INTRODUCTION

Note that 18th-century spelling, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation vary widely, and in quotations from primary sources, the author has harmonized discrepancies with modern usage. For example, George Whitefield’s original line, “Young Men’s Heads are ſtuff’d with Heathen Mythology, Chriſt or Chriſtianity is ſcarce ſo much as named amonſt them” is here rendered as “Young men’s heads are stuffed with heathen mythology. Christ or Christianity is scarce so much as named amongst them.” [Whitefield, Fifth Journal, 65] The intent is to provide greater readability at some expense of the antique flavor of the original text. All such sources are cited in the notes that follow.

“as the term has been used as an ‘attack word’ for hundreds of years”—J. Justin Gustainis, “Demagoguery and Political Rhetoric: A Review of the Literature” (Rhetoric Society Quarterly 20:2 (1990), 155). The author also provides an extensive list of examples of historical demagogues.

“In the Middle Colonies like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, there were too few clergymen”—Martin Lodge, “The Crisis of the Churches in the Middle Colonies, 1720–1750” (The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 95:2 (1971), 199–200).

“churches had become insular and hidebound, and delayed or denied admission to those”—Stephen Grossbart, “Seeking the Divine Favor: Conversion and Church Admission in Eastern Connecticut, 1711–1832” (The William and Mary Quarterly; 46:4 (1989), 731).

“American pastors had to fight and scrape for their income from skinflint congregations”—Lodge, “The Crisis of the Churches,” 203, 204, 218; Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), 155–158.

“Pastors were paid so little, they couldn’t even provide for their families”—James Schmotter, “Ministerial Careers in Eighteenth-Century New England: The Social Context, 1700–1760” (Journal of Social History 9:2 (1975), 261).

“the pastors they did encounter typically delivered dry, airless sermons that argued the finer points of theology”—Lodge, “The Crisis of the Churches,” 215–216.

“Organized religion seemed on the verge of collapse when the Great Awakening . . . rescued the floundering churches”—ibid., 198.

“Historian Joseph Tracy invented this term for the movement in 1842”—Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction” (The Journal of American History 69:2 (1982), 307).

“he can rightly be labeled Anglo-America’s first modern celebrity”—Harry Stout, “George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin: Thoughts on a Peculiar Friendship” (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Series, 103 (1991), 10.

“‘psychological earthquake’ of the Great Awakening”—Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee, 187.

“the Revolution was effected before the war commenced” to “This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affection of the people”—John Adams, Letter to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818 (National Archives, Founders Online, accessed at founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6854).

CHAPTER 1: DISSECTING THE HEART

The starting point for any research on Benjamin Franklin is bound to be his Autobiography (reprinted for the Library of America; New York: Vintage, 1987), which not only covers this period in his late youth, but is an excellent source for his thoughts on George Whitefield, the printing business, and views of religion generally. Most other biographical sources minimize his relation to Whitefield, so good secondary sources include articles written by John R. Williams, “The Strange Case of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Whitefield” (The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 102:4 (1978), 399–421); and David T. Morgan, “A Most Unlikely Friendship—Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield” (The Historian, 47:2 (1985), 208–218). Frank Lambert’s excellent “Subscribing for Profits and Piety: The Friendship of Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield” (The William and Mary Quarterly 50:3 (1993), 529–554) describes the mutual business interests of the two men in promoting the latter’s revival tours; and Harry Stout’s “George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin: Thoughts on a Peculiar Friendship” (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Series, 103 (1991), 9–23) reviews their overlapping personal interests in the context of their respective faiths and public personas. Additional historical context is offered in Peter Charles Hoffer, When Benjamin Franklin Met the Reverend Whitefield: Enlightenment, Revival, and the Power of the Printed Word (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2011); and Leonard Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2, 1735–1744 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960).

George Whitefield’s Journals are essential to understanding the man and his ministry, though they exist in several forms. The most comprehensive is the complete set from 1738–1741 republished by Banner of Truth Trust (Carlisle, PA, 1960), in a handy single reference guide. However, these collected volumes are based on editions Whitefield “corrected” and bowdlerized more than a decade after they were written, largely to downplay his zeal and, critics would argue, arrogance in some of the entries. For a more accurate edition, the original seven journals in pamphlet form must be consulted. For this chapter, the crucial one is the fifth volume, titled A Continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s Journal, from His Embarking After the Embargo, to His Arrival at Savannah in Georgia (London: W. Strahan, 1740), which presents the minister’s voyage to and initial travels in the New World in a full, unexpurgated narrative.

The Sermons of George Whitefield (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 2009) further illuminate his dramatic oratory on the stump, in this case “Abraham Offering Up His Son Isaac” (pp. 15–25). Contemporary interpretations of Whitefield range from adulatory to mildly dubious. In the former category, Arnold Dallmore, a Baptist preacher, devoted many years of his life to honoring Whitefield with the extensive, often uncritical George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1970). A more critical, though still laudatory, modern view is Thomas Kidd’s George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), following on his excellent The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2007). A shorter treatment of similar ideas is Jerome Dean Mahaffey’s The Accidental Revolutionary: George Whitefield and the Creation of America (Waco, TX: Baylor Univ. Press, 2011).

Some of the most important research on Whitefield in recent decades has come from Harry Stout, who provides a comprehensive look at his performative aspects in The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 1991), while in The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), Stout offers a broad historical view of Whitefield and other itinerants in 18th-century society. Another scholar, Frank Lambert, depicts Whitefield’s role in mass communications and popular culture in the colonial era, in Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999) and “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), as well as his article, “‘Pedlar in Divinity’: George Whitefield and the Great Awakening, 1737–1745” (The Journal of American History 77:3 (1990), 812–837).

Other key studies that focus on related aspects of Whitefield include Jessica Parr, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of an American Icon (Jackson, MI: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2015); Nancy Ruttenburg, “George Whitefield, Spectacular Conversion, and the Rise of Democratic Personality” (American Literary History 5:3 (1993), 429–458); and Susan O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755” (American Historical Review 91:4 (1986), 811–832). For an incisive look at the Anglican counterreaction to Whitefield, see Gerald Goodwin, “The Anglican Reaction to the Great Awakening” (Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 35:4 (1966), 343–371).

For perspective on the difficulties facing ministers in colonial America, and the often antagonistic attitudes of their parishioners, see James Schmotter, “Ministerial Careers in Eighteenth-Century New England: The Social Context, 1700–1760” (Journal of Social History 9:2 (1975), 249–267); and Martin Lodge, “The Crisis of the Churches in the Middle Colonies, 1720–1750” in Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, 4th edition, ed. by Stanley Katz, et al. (New York: McGraw-Hill (1993), 581–604). The crises caused by ministerial itinerancy, which Whitefield exemplified, are explained in Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1994); and T. H. Breen and Timothy Hall, “Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rhetoric and Experience of Social Change in Eighteenth-Century New England” (American Historical Review 103:5 (1998), 1411–1439). A wider perspective on American religion is offered in Sydney Ahlstrom’s magisterial A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), especially “Part III: A Century of Awakening and Revolution,” pp. 261–384.

CHAPTER 1 REFERENCES:

“20,000 people near Bristol”—Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 532.

“80,000 in Hyde Park”—Stout, Divine Dramatist, 84.

“table tops, open windows, courtyards, hills, wagons, and marketplaces”—Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 532.

“He called his approach ‘preaching without doors’”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 65.

“preached to upwards of a million Britons”—Stout, Divine Dramatist, 85.

“Creator of the Universe” to “peculiar Doctrines”—Franklin, Autobiography, 78–79.

“This was his ‘bold and arduous project of arriving at moral Perfection’”—ibid., 79–81.

“helped found one of the colonies’ first subscription libraries and volunteer fire companies”—Daniel Gifford, “Was Benjamin Franklin the Father of American Philanthropy?” National Museum of American History, accessed at americanhistory.si.edu/blog/benjamin-franklin-philanthropy.

“he faced real competition from Andrew Bradford”—Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 544.

“He had also created a juggernaut with Poor Richard’s Almanack”—Hoffer, When Benjamin Franklin, 35.

“Whitefield had recently arranged for the publication of his sermons in serial form”—Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 534.

“the evangelical publisher James Hutton had achieved a signal success”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 52, 78.

“transnational publicity network to advertise”—Hoffer, When Benjamin Franklin, 50–51.

“Franklin had also put his hard-earned cash into ventures”—Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 536.

“He would also be the primary publisher of Whitefield’s journals, at prices five times that of the sermons”—ibid., 533–534.

“delivered the sacrament to the ship’s crew, and shared with them the spirit of Christ in a great ‘love-feast’”—Whitefield, Journal (Fifth), 16.

“polluted, proud, and treacherous heart” to “at the remembrance of my sins”—ibid., 15–17.

“remembrance of my humiliations” to “Amazing that the High and Lofty One”—ibid., 24–26.

“Anglican churchmen called them ‘young quacks’ and fanatics”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 63, 66.

“Some parishioners might argue with their ministers over matters of long-held doctrine”—Schmotter, “Ministerial Careers,” 257.

“heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans”—quoted in Lodge, “Crisis of the Churches,” 593n.

“His friend William Seward had spread the word of his journey, writing hundreds, perhaps thousands of letters”—Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity,” 814–817.

“As he climbed the steps of the courthouse on Market Street, he looked out on a crowd of 6,000 people”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 89.

– “Take now thy son” to “Adieu, adieu, my son”—Whitefield, Sermons, 17–21; Stout, Divine Dramatist, 93–94.

“The angel of the Lord called unto him from heaven and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham’”—Whitefield, Sermons, 21–22.

“Faith and salvation were paramount, and no amount of questioning or equivocation could change that”—ibid., 24–25.

“I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty-thousand”—Franklin, Autobiography, 105.

“it meant that Whitefield might well have drawn upwards of 25,000 people or more to his British sermons”—ibid.

“Franklin made plans to publish twenty-four volumes of Whitefield’s sermons in two volumes”—Williams, “The Strange Case,” 404.

“They claimed that with his soft features, effusive tears, and ‘clear and musical voice,’”—Stout, Divine Dramatist, 95.

“Hark! He talks of a sensible New Birth—then belike he is in labour”—Mahaffey, Accidental Revolutionary, 51.

“the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers”—Franklin, Autobiography, 102.

“I esteemed the essentials of every religion, and being to be found in all the religions”—ibid., 78.

“You know my house, if you can make shift with its scanty accommodations”—ibid., 104.

“[T]he only people fit for such an enterprise, it was with families of broken shopkeepers”—ibid., 103.

“his fellow Methodists John and Charles Wesley, who had come to Georgia several years before”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 42–45.

“everything from brass candlesticks, nails, duck and goose shot, to rugs and blankets, buttons and silk”—Pennsylvania Gazette, November 8, 1739, quoted in Franklin, Papers v.2, 241–242.

– “I silently resolved he should get nothing from me” to “At any other time, Friend Hopkinson”—Franklin, Autobiography, 103–104.

“old, grey-headed disciple and soldier of Jesus Christ”—Whitefield, Journal (Fifth), 31.

“the established Presbyterian Synod was as much an adversary to Tennent as the established Church of England”—Stout, Divine Dramatist, 102–103.

“Though we are but few, and stand alone”—Whitefield, Journal (Fifth), 31.

“what God had done for our souls” to “The devil and carnal secure ministers”—ibid., 34–35.

– “railing against the regular clergy” to “enthusiastically mad”—Goodwin, “Anglican Reaction,” 358.

“So when he came to ask Commissary William Vesey”—Parr, Inventing George Whitefield, 46–48.

“He was nothing less than ‘an open enemy to religion’”—Goodwin, “Anglican Reaction,” 359.

“What manner of spirit are the generality of the clergy possessed with?”—Whitefield, Journal (Fifth), 37.

“Itinerancy held bad stock with the authorities”—Hall, Contested Boundaries, 6–7.

“he would tell the kids to ‘go to Heaven without them!’”—Breen and Hall, “Structuring,” 1428.

“He spoke in a range of settings, from the grand Wall Street Presbyterian Church in New York”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 91–94.

“never before heard such a searching sermon” to “my soul was humbled”—Whitefield, Journal (Fifth), 35.

CHAPTER 2: THE WAY TO IMPERIAL HEAVEN

George Whitefield has attracted much more scholarly interest in recent decades than Gilbert Tennent, perhaps unfairly. Tennent’s contributions to the revival movements in colonial America are extensive, and still under-researched. One of the better attempts to explain Tennent, within the context of the European evangelical tradition, is Milton 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: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1986). Coalter’s book is one of the few book-length treatments of the New Brunswick preacher, but other valuable research can be found in Archibald Alexander, ed., Biographical Sketches of the Founder, and Principal Alumni of the Log College (Princeton, NJ: J. T. Robinson, 1845), which is the rare book to detail the lives and ministry of the father William Tennent and his sons; as well as articles by James Bennett, “‘Love to Christ’: Gilbert Tennent, Presbyterian Reunion, and a Sacramental Sermon” (American Presbyterians 71:2 (1993), 77–89), focusing on his later conciliatory approach; and Kristen Fischer, “‘Religion Governed by Terror’: A Deist Critique of Fearful Christianity in the Early American Republic” (Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 125:3 (2010), 13–26), a look at the general theological style of preaching terror.

Many of Gilbert Tennent’s sermons are extant, and through these we can get the best picture of him as a revivalist. Some of the most bracing imagery of sin and redemption can be found in The Necessity of Religious Violence in Order to Obtain Durable Happiness (New York: William Bradford, 1735) and especially A Solemn Warning to the Secure World, from the God of Terrible Majesty, or, the Presumptuous Sinner Detected, His Pleas Considered, and His Doom Displayed (Boston, 1735), whose title alone provides a capsule view of his theology.

For more on the Tennent family’s relationship with, and conflicts within, the Presbyterian church—and the complex factions arrayed in that church—see Janet Fishburn, “Gilbert Tennent, Established Dissenter” (Church History 63:1 (1994), 31–49), covering his status as fomenter of trouble and later reconciler in the sect; Elizabeth Nybakken, “New Light on the Old Side: Irish Influences on Colonial Presbyterianism” (Journal of American History 68:4 (1982), 813–832), a comprehensive discussion on the alliances and conflicts within the factions; and Leonard Trinterud, The Reforming of an American Tradition: A Reexamination of Colonial Presbyterianism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949), still the best overall look at the subject.

George Whitefield’s exploration of the South is detailed in the fifth of his journals, titled A Continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s Journal . . . (London: W. Strahan, 1740), which offers the clearest view of his checkered perspective on the region and the construction of his orphanage, as well as his growing number of conflicts with Anglican officials. A small portion of this chapter also includes reference to the sixth journal, A Continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s Journal, After His Arrival at Georgia . . . (London: W. Strahan, 1741). For a view on the content of Whitefield’s preaching at the time, see Sermons on Important Subjects (London: Thomas Tegg, 1841), of which Sermon XLVII is the most important for this chapter.

Whitefield’s feelings about his ministry in the context of the South are also detailed in George Whitefield’s Letters, 1734 to 1742, republished by Banner of Truth Trust (Chatham, UK: 1976), from which the December 15, 1739, letter to Gilbert Tennent is excerpted. A separately published, and greatly controversial, letter was his anti-Tillotson missive, A Letter from the Reverend Mr. Whitefield in Georgia, to a Friend in London, Showing the Fundamental Error of a Book Entitled, The Whole Duty of Man (Charles Town, SC: Peter Timothy, 1740), later printed in London, New York, and Philadelphia.

David Morgan Jr. looks critically at this period in the minister’s life in “The Consequences of George Whitefield’s Ministry in the Carolinas and Georgia, 1739–1740” (The Georgia Historical Quarterly 55:1 (1971), 62–82) and in “George Whitefield and the Great Awakening in the Carolinas and Georgia, 1739–1740” (The Georgia Historical Quarterly 54:4 (1970), 517–539), while Richard Cox, in “Stephen Bordley, George Whitefield, and the Great Awakening in Maryland” (Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 46:3 (1977), 297–307), shows how provocative, and infuriating, the Grand Itinerant could be to those who didn’t support his ministry.

Frank Lambert is the essential scholar for analyzing the communications and marketing strategies of Whitefield, as well as his press agent William Seward, in several key works: “The Great Awakening as Artifact: George Whitefield and the Construction of Intercolonial Revival, 1739–1745” (Church History 60:2 (1991), 223–246), and the books Inventing the “Great Awakening” and “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770. Similarly, Harry Stout discusses the theater of Whitefield’s sermons, along with the theater of his conflicts with the church, in The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Supplementary sources include Arnold Dallmore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival and Thomas Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father. Also valuable, especially for uncovering long-forgotten letters and esoterica about the preacher, is the classic by Luke Tyerman, The Life of the Reverend George Whitefield (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1876).

Whitefield’s complex relationship to slavery is laid out in Stephen Stein, “George Whitefield on Slavery: Some New Evidence” (Church History 42:2 (1973), 243–256), in which he acts as both proponent and antagonist of the inhuman practice, and in Jessica Parr, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of an American Icon, which looks at his ministry through the lens of racial conflict in colonial America.

Ben Franklin’s Autobiography is an essential source for the Founding Father, but is less helpful in detailing his business affairs and his contributions to the spread of evangelical Christianity. More information is available in Leonard Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2, 1735–1744, though the best sources—aside from Franklin’s own testimony—are in the earlier-mentioned John R. Williams, “The Strange Case of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Whitefield”; Frank Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits and Piety: The Friendship of Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield”; and Harry Stout, “George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin: Thoughts on a Peculiar Friendship.”

Additional background information for this chapter is drawn from Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World, describing just how divisive the practice of itinerancy could be; Michael Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), comparing the American and British versions of Christian revival; and Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967), which describes the roots of the rebellious temperament reaching back into this era.

CHAPTER 2 REFERENCES:

“a rousing sermon that left people weeping for nearly two hours”—Parr, Inventing George Whitefield, 48.

“Members of some fifteen different sects watched him orate”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 94.

“In 1718 his father had brought him and his three brothers”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 2–3.

“Presbyterians and other nonconformists could not hold public office”—Nybakken, “New Light,” 818.

“the establishment of the Church of England was weak in the Middle Colonies”—Bailyn, Ideological, 248–249.

“The leaders who vexed him came from the ‘Old Side,’ comprising Scottish and Irish immigrants”—Fishburn, “Established Dissenter,” 34; Nybakken, “New Light,” 821.

“Built in the woods of Neshaminy, Pennsylvania”—Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 59.

“and to me it seemed to resemble the school of the old prophets”—Alexander, Biographical Sketches, 15.

“His conviction of his sin, danger, and misery”—ibid., 129.

“He had seen how the Old Siders repeatedly attacked and undermined the Log College”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 48–52.

“He had watched them try to thwart the ordination of his brother, Charles”—Fishburn, “Established Dissenter,” 43.

“no person became a true believer without first experiencing the terror”—Bennett, “Love to Christ,” 78.

“From the Dutch Reformed minister Theodorus Frelinghuysen”—ibid., 77.

“Sluggish souls are overgrown with corruptions”—Tennent, Necessity of Religious Violence.

“Would it not cause intolerable pain”—Tennent, Solemn Warning, 230.

“But is it not still more dreadful”—ibid.

“ignorance, negligence, self-love, inconsideration, pride”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 44.

“Men must be frightened out of hell with the law”—Crawford, Seasons of Grace, 86.

“terrors first, comfort second”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 45.

“We have a description of the way to the Imperial Heaven”—Tennent, Necessity of Religious Violence.

“They were important members of the Synod whom Gilbert was trying to convert”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 62–64.

“your sermons have much confirmed the truths of Christ”—Letter from Gilbert Tennent to George Whitefield, Dec. 1, 1739, quoted in Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity, 156.

“I love and honor you in the bowels of Jesus Christ. You are seldom out of my thoughts”—George Whitefield to Gilbert Tennent, Letters, 138.

“[H]is language is mean and groveling” to “he is a very wretched divine”—Cox, “Stephen Bordley,” 304–307.

“in these parts Satan seems to lead people captive at his will”—George Whitefield to Gilbert Tennent, Letters, 138.

“Here there are no great towns”—ibid.

“what an indifferent manner everything was carried on” to “I cried mightily to the Lord”—Whitefield, Journal (Fifth), 72.

“virtually no local or private life”—Stout, “Peculiar Friendship,” 12.

“And like other Methodist reformers, Whitefield felt uncomfortable”—Stout, Divine Dramatist, 157–158.

“she would oversee the Georgia orphanage in his absence”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 104.

“how well pleased the devil was with every step she took” to “suffer them not to go on in such a carnal security”—Whitefield, Journal (Fifth), 77.

“Masters reigned over their bondsmen with depraved cruelty”—Parr, Inventing George Whitefield, 67.

“Even worse in Whitefield’s view was the lack of spiritual instruction”—Stein, “Whitefield on Slavery,” 244.

“he had argued slavery should be made legal”—Stout, Divine Dramatist, 61.

“their other ‘false and unscriptural’ beliefs, which he criticized in his letters”—Whitefield, Letters, 140.

“hut full of negroes” to “in great peril of our lives”—Whitefield, Journal (Fifth), 78.

“completing a journey on foot, on horseback, and by canoe over 1,200 miles”—Stout, Divine Dramatist, 99.

“destitute and abandoned children could receive shelter and nourishment”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 101–102.

“He threatened to denounce the trustees publicly”—ibid.

“In response, he provided a full list of contributors, but failed to break down”—Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity, 177–178.

“They claimed he was little more than a merchandiser of religion, a ‘retailer of trifles’ and a ‘pedlar of divinity’”—ibid., 179–180.

“It often pleases me to reflect how Christ’s kingdom is securely carried on in spite of men and devils”—Whitefield, Letters, 151.

“I have not had much enlargement in preaching, since I have been here”—ibid., 150.

“Our great men had much rather spend their money in a playhouse”—Whitefield, The Great Duty of Charity Recommended, quoted in Sermons on Important Subjects, 527.

“Go on now, you rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you”—ibid., 528.

“the planter Hugh Bryan had even told him the writings of the theologian John Tillotson”—Williams, “Strange Case,” 408.

“The local church in Charles Town, St. Philip’s, had barred him from speaking”—Morgan, “George Whitefield and the Great Awakening,” 525.

“Dissent had begun openly breaking out in nonconforming pulpits”—ibid., 524.

“killed twenty whites, and met defeat at the hands of the colonial militia”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 98.

“a good soldier of Jesus Christ”—Whitefield, Journal (Second), 14.

“conservative as Dr. Johnston [sic], as vehement as Swift”—Andrew T. Nelson, quoted in Morgan, “Consequences,” 70.

“an arrant jumble of contradiction” to “a warm, frantic, enthusiastic brain”—Morgan, “Consequences,” 69.

“his dismissal of Anglican protocol like following the Book of Common Prayer”—ibid., 67.

“Garden threatened him with violations of canon law”—Whitefield, Journal (Sixth), 11.

“Get you out of my house”—ibid.

“he devoted one-quarter of the column text to him”—Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 538.

“with 2,500 volumes ordered in the colonies”—ibid., 541.

“when his bias became too obvious, he was forced to deny the charges”—Williams, “Strange Case,” 408.

“he had rented the troupe’s ballroom in advance and locked it”—Lambert, “Artifact,” 236.

“the performers’ season had actually ended”—Williams, “Strange Case,” 409.

“the article is allowed to be literally true, yet by the manner of expression”—Pennsylvania Gazette, May 8, 1740, quoted in Franklin, Papers v.2, 258.

“‘books of piety and devotion’ over secular tomes”—Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 539.

“be willing to do the divine will, and you shall know it”—George Whitefield to Benjamin Franklin, Letters, 226.

“pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction”—Franklin, Autobiography, 104.

“Upon Whitefield’s visits to Philadelphia, he would be a guest in Franklin’s own home”—Stout, “Peculiar Friendship,” 21.

“Instead they applied to everyone, including many people so often ignored in holy discourses”—ibid., 20.

“He owned several slaves in his early life and advertised them for sale in the Gazette”—“Benjamin Franklin Petitions Congress,” Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives, accessed at www.archives.gov/legislative/features/franklin.

“[Some slaves] have been, upon the most trifling provocation”—Tyerman, Life of the Reverend, 354.

“slothful shepherds and dumb dogs”—ibid.

“sold more copies to missionaries than any other volumes”—Lambert, “Artifact,” 231.

“have built their hopes of salvation on a false bottom” to “false divinity and fundamental errors”—Whitefield, A Letter from the Reverend Mr. Whitefield, 3–10.

“knew no more of true Christianity than Mahomet”—Pennsylvania Gazette, April 10, 1740, quoted in Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 542–543.

“no real Christian at heart”—Whitefield, A Letter from the Reverend Mr. Whitefield, 10.

“I never knew any good to come from the meetings of priests”—Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 542–543.

“admired Tillotson more than any other theologian”—Williams, “Strange Case,” 408.

“You may make what use you will of it”—Whitefield, A Letter from the Reverend Mr. Whitefield, 10.

“Franklin gave the entire front page of the Gazette to the Tillotson attack”—Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 543.

CHAPTER 3: INCREDIBLE RHAPSODIES

Though literary scholars regard Jonathan Edwards’s sermons as the prime examples of homiletic art in colonial America, the sermons of Gilbert Tennent were arguably more influential in inspiring what we now call the Great Awakening. Foremost among these is doubtless The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry (Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin, 1740), a rhetorical blast that helped trigger the revival, along with Whitefield’s ministry. Providing context for this event is Milton Coalter, Jr., Gilbert Tennent: Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies, and Charles Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (Gloucester, MA.: Peter Smith, 1958). For additional material on the ministry of Gilbert Tennent, see A Historical Sketch of the First Presbyterian Church in the City of New Brunswick (New Brunswick, NJ: J. Terhune & Son, 1852). A rundown on the struggle between rival Presbyterian factions can be found in Elizabeth Nybakken, “New Light on the Old Side: Irish Influences on Colonial Presbyterianism.”

For an overview of the mystical side of the Tennent family’s beliefs, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), which provides a compelling take on the role of the supernatural in native religions; as does Douglas Winiarski, “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport: Heavenly Visions and the Radical Awakening in New England” (The William and Mary Quarterly 61:1 (2004) 3–46). A more detailed view of the family’s spirituality and cosmology is in Archibald Alexander, ed., Biographical Sketches of the Founder, and Principal Alumni of the Log College. Major sources for the narrative of William Tennent Jr. include Elias Boudinot, Life of the Reverend William Tennent, Formerly Pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Freehold, New Jersey (New York: Robert Carter, 1847), and Boudinot’s complementary text, Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend William Tennent (Philadelphia: Freeman Scott, 1827). Archibald Alexander, in Biographical Sketches, also provides an overlapping account of William Tennent’s deathly experience, though qualifies it as a product of rational science instead of supernatural faith. For more on the Tennent ally, James Davenport, see Harry Stout and Peter Onuf, “James Davenport and the Great Awakening in New London” (Journal of American History 70:3 (1983), 556–578), or

The first major historical treatment of the Great Awakening, and one that still has value for its myriad anecdotes, letters, and observations, is Joseph Tracy’s The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (Boston: Charles Tappan, 1845). Whitefield figures prominently in that volume, and even more so in Luke Tyerman’s excellent The Life of the Reverend George Whitefield. Other previously mentioned treatments of the minister’s life that provide a good overview of his period in his life include Frank Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770; Harry Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism; and Thomas Kidd, in both George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father and The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America.

Still, the best way to understand Whitefield’s ministry is to read his own, original views of it in the early editions of his Journals. For this chapter, the key volumes are the sixth journal, A Continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s Journal, After His Arrival at Georgia . . . , and the seventh, A Continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s Journal, from a Few Days After His Return to Georgia to His Arrival in Falmouth (London: W. Strahan, 1741). Both contain Whitefield’s strong initial feelings about his experiences, before he revised such feelings to make them more hospitable in later editions. A good supplementary source is George Whitefield’s Letters, 1734 to 1742, from Banner of Truth Trust. One key letter, from May 24, 1740, is his response to John Wesley’s own Arminian leanings, which are well summarized in the groundbreaking sermon, Free Grace (London, 1740).

The Grand Itinerant’s ongoing struggles with Anglican authorities are recounted in Gerald Goodwin, “The Anglican Reaction to the Great Awakening,” and in the words of the commissaries themselves who excoriated him from the pulpit. One of the first such scoldings is Archibald Cummings’s Faith Absolutely Necessary but Not Sufficient to Salvation Without Good Works (Philadelphia: Andrew Bradford, 1740). A more famous reproach is Alexander Garden’s influential Take Heed How Ye Hear (Charles Town, 1740). A larger volume expressing the weight of the Commissary Garden’s denunciation is Six Letters to the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, etc. (Boston: T. Fleet, 1740), containing pamphlets, letters, and assorted missives obsessively deriding him.

Whitefield’s Georgia orphanage was a controversial topic at the time he built it, and it inspired much debate in the Southern low-country. Some of these disputes are covered in David Morgan Jr., “The Consequences of George Whitefield’s Ministry in the Carolinas and Georgia, 1739–1740,” and in Neil O’Connell, “George Whitefield and the Bethesda Orphan-House” (Georgia Historical Quarterly 54:1 (1970), 41–62). Other perspectives on Whitefield’s activities in the South include Frank Lambert, “‘I Saw the Book Talk’: Slave Readings of the First Great Awakening” (Journal of Negro History 77:4 (1992), 185–198), and Leigh Eric Schmidt, “‘The Grand Prophet,’ Hugh Bryan: Early Evangelicalism’s Challenge to the Establishment and Slavery in the Colonial South” (South Carolina Historical Magazine 87:4 (1986), 238–250).

Supplemental and background sources for this period in the early Awakening include Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, as well as Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), and Edwin Gaustad and Leigh Eric Schmidt, The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

CHAPTER 3 REFERENCES:

“fits of weeping and fainting, and experiencing ‘unusual bodily motions’”—Maxson, Great Awakening, 55.

“Nottingham was a test case . . . lacking a minister after the previous one had died”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 64.

“‘New Testament prophet of Christ’s coming,’ not unlike John the Baptist.”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 121.

“grief for the injuries that have been done to the Church of God”—Tennent, Danger sermon, 2.

“An ungodly ministry is a great curse and judgment” to “heaps of Pharisee-teachers”—ibid., 3.

“ they might hold powerful offices, but ‘they had no experience of the New Birth. O sad!’”—ibid., 6.

“polished with wit and rhetoric” to “zeal, fidelity, peace, good order, and unity”—ibid., 9.

“are cold and sapless, and as it were freeze between their lips”—ibid., 9–10.

“our blessed Lord informs us that he came not to send peace on earth”—ibid., 25.

“doubtlessly damnably wicked in their manner of performance”—ibid., 10.

“While some are sincere servants of God, are not many servants of Satan”—ibid., 25.

“Does not the spiritual man judge all things?” to “let those who live under the ministry of dead men”—ibid., 30–31.

“But more damaging they thought was how he goaded parishioners to cause trouble in the pews”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 66–67.

“He had already adapted the style of George Whitefield”—Bonomi, Under the Cope, 144.

“when Ben Franklin published it throughout the colonies”—ibid., 258, note 32.

“Some of his allies had even erected for him a stage upon Society Hill”—Tyerman, Life of the Reverend, 372–373.

“Depending on the day, 15,000 or even 20,000 worshippers came to hear him orate”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 115; Whitefield, Journal (Sixth), 20.

“he looked to erect a school and housing for slaves”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 110.

“Through Andrew Bradford, he published a pamphlet”—Lambert, Pedlar, 174–175.

“What wild, distracted notions are these?”—Cummings, Faith sermon, 10.

“Such vile and slanderous invectives are crimes doubtless”—ibid., 13.

“Some they have made stark mad”—ibid., 25–26.

“Little do my enemies think what service they do me”—Whitefield, Journal (Sixth), 26.

“I do not despair of seeing people bring his works”—Whitefield, Journal (Sixth), 19.

“to whom the Philadelphia Synod had denied ordination”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 57.

“all of this emotional labor had done foul things to his health”—Whitefield, Journal (Sixth), 27.

“[c]ovetous, proud boasters, self-willed blasphemers”—Tyerman, Life of the Reverend, 381.

“I abhor controversy and disputation” to “the more I am opposed, the more joy I feel”—ibid.

“They saw divine intervention in their ministries”—Butler, Awash, 184.

“imagined themselves as direct participants in an unfolding cosmic drama that was rapidly drawing to its apocalyptic close”—Winiarski, “Souls Filled,” 39.

“Critics called such behavior a sign of madness or, worse to Protestants, akin to the miracles”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 73.

“this Tennent was a more relaxed soul, quieter and more hospitable”—Boudinot, William Tennent, 113.

“mellowed by a sense of the divine pity”—Maxson, Great Awakening, 32.

“Whitefield took to him immediately, when William ‘refreshed my heart’”—Whitefield, Journal (Sixth), 30.

“our hearts burn within us when we opened the Scriptures”—Whitefield, Journal (Sixth), 34.

“a pain in his breast, and a slight hectic” to “a walking skeleton”—Boudinot, William Tennent, 20.

“the eyes being sunk, the lips discolored, and the whole body cold and stiff”—ibid., 22.

“It is shameful to be feeding a lifeless corpse” to “who had been ridiculing the idea of restoring to life a dead body”—ibid., 23–24.

“I saw an innumerable host of happy beings” to “This seemed like a sword through my heart”—ibid., 29–30.

“a Pennsylvania couple had a dream he was endangered”—Butler, Awash, 184.

“the injury was done by the prince of darkness”—Alexander, Biographical Sketches, 233–234.

“the power of God was much manifested”—Whitefield, Journal (Sixth), 34.

“God has lately highly honored [him]”—ibid., 32.

“Davenport spoke with a style few had ever seen: he shouted with abandon”—Stout and Onuf, “James Davenport,” 568–570.

“[He] is looked upon as an enthusiast and a madman”—Whitefield, Journal (Sixth), 32.

“I abhor the thoughts of it”—ibid., 37.

“some worshippers ‘seemed affected as those that are in fits’” to “most worthy preachers of our dear Lord Jesus”—ibid., 38–39.

“thousands cried out, so that they almost drowned my voice” to “they seemed like persons awakened by the last trump”—ibid., 43–44.

“A certain Reverend Francis Alison rose to challenge Whitefield”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 117.

– “I believe he was an enemy to God” to “asked God to grant him a humble heart”—Whitefield, Journal (Sixth), 45–46.

“Sometimes I think it best to stay here” to “I dread your coming over to America”—George Whitefield to John Wesley, Letters, 182.

“The children are industrious. We have now in the house near one hundred yards of cloth”—Whitefield, Journal (Sixth), 55.

“weight of their sins” to “they are even now in frequent agonies”—ibid., 53–54.

“not a moment of innocent recreation, though necessary to the health”—Morgan, “Consequences,” 76.

“he would neither give an account of his finances nor consult with the trustees’ secretary”—O’Connell, “Bethesda Orphan-House,” 51.

“the orphanage was in the hands of a ‘parcel of wild enthusiasts.’”—Schmidt, “Grand Prophet,” 240.

“Whitefield relied on him to aid the financing of Bethesda”—Lambert, “I Saw the Book Talk,” 186.

“raptures of joy from the rays of divine light and love”—Kidd, Great Awakening, 217.

“had some infernal spirit been sent to draw my picture”—Whitefield, Journal (Seventh), 6–7.

“he compared him to social radicals like the Ranters”—Whitefield, Journal (Seventh), 7; Garden, Take Heed sermon.

“the reformation and correction of his manners and excesses”—court writ to Whitefield, quoted in Tracy, Great Awakening, 78.

“Whitefield and his attorney duly appeared in court”—Morgan, “Consequences,” 67–68.

“an unregenerate man, an enemy to God, and of a like spirit”—Goodwin, “Anglican Reaction,” 364.

“since the gospel was not preached in the church”—Whitefield, Journal (Seventh), 8.

“Whitefield had respectfully written to him and another important cleric”—George Whitefield to Jonathan Edwards, Letters, 121; George Whitefield to Benjamin Colman, ibid., 120.

“weeklies carried extensive coverage of the revival”—Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity,” 814.

“fertile soil of heresy and schism”—Gaustad and Schmidt, Religious History of America, 70.

“old-fashioned Congregationalists denounced as ‘the sewer of New England’”—Ahlstrom, Religious History, 154.

“looked like a good old Puritan, and gave me an idea”—Whitefield, Journal (Seventh), 18.

“as he ‘perceived fresh emanations of divine light’”—ibid., 23.

“Whitefield replied, ‘I believed they were’”—ibid., 24–25.

“4,000 people in Colman’s own meetinghouse,” etc.—ibid., 26.

“roamed around the portable field pulpit at will”—Stout, Divine Dramatist, 119.

“I felt much of the divine presence in my own soul” to “There was more of the presence of God through the whole visitation”—Whitefield, Journal (Seventh), 26–27.

“The Spirit of the Lord was upon them all” to “ragged and becoming extremely ill”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 125.

“many (especially women) were thrown down and trod upon”—Stout, Divine Dramatist, 1z19.

“God was pleased to give me presence of mind” to “I gave notice I would immediately preach upon the Common”—Whitefield, Journal (Seventh), 27.

CHAPTER 4: THE BURNING AND SHINING LIGHTS

Studies on Jonathan Mayhew have been infrequent in the literature, but several authors have endeavored to give the minister his proper respect in reference to his later importance in prerevolutionary America. Among them are Charles Akers, in Called Unto Liberty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), which provides a thoughtful look at Mayhew’s background, education and early interest in the New Birth, along with the more recent J. Patrick Mullins, Father of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution (Lawrence, KS: Univ. of Kansas Press, 2017), a fine introduction to the minister that puts his accomplishments in historical context. Additional works mentioned in this chapter that relate to him include Clinton Rossiter, “The Life and Mind of Jonathan Mayhew” (William and Mary Quarterly 7:4 (1950), 531–558), a broad overview of his career, and Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), in which the author puts the theologian as a forerunner to that liberal denomination, which would see notable growth closer to the end of the eighteenth century.

The works of Jonathan Edwards are the best introduction to the reverend’s thoughts on Calvinism, free will, predestination, and myriad other subjects. The list of his critiques, analyses, and sermons is lengthy, but for this chapter, two works are paramount. His Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton (London: John Oswald, 1737) is still the quintessential guide to the nature of revivals in the early Great Awakening. His direct and penetrating writing makes the volume much more worthwhile than similar accounts of the time. Also key are the Copies of the Two Letters Cited by the Rev. Mr. Clap (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1745), which are valuable for his post-Awakening perspective on events that later proved to be controversial; Edwin Gaustad’s “The Theological Effects of the Great Awakening in New England” (Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40:4 (1954), 681–706) places the Northampton revival in the context of the wider movement toward revival in the region, especially as it related to the religious philosophy of the time. The template for “preaching terrors”—for which Edwards would become particularly notable—was set early on by Edwards’s grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. His sermon The Efficacy of the Fear of Hell, to Restrain Men from Sin codifies the importance of terrifying potential converts into a state of fear and despair, only after which they can accept God’s grace.

For a look at Edwards’s criticism of the economics and social inequality of New England, Mark Valeri’s “The Economic Thought of Jonathan Edwards” (Church History 60:1 (1991), 37–54) is a penetrating overview that details his concerns over community welfare in an age of burgeoning capitalism. His jaded early view of George Whitefield appears in Ava Chamberlain, “The Grand Sower of the Seed: Jonathan Edwards’s Critique of George Whitefield” (New England Quarterly 70:3 (1997), 368–385), a breakdown of his sermon that castigated Whitefield’s ministry through metaphor, even as he offered full-throated support to the revival movement in general.

Alexander Garden did not need to use metaphor to condemn Whitefield, and his Six Letters to the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield is a bracing and nasty series of public missives that assign his nemesis to the lowest level of sinners. Not quite as vicious, The Querists was the Old Line Presbyterian faction’s anonymous attempt to deride the Grand Itinerant’s preaching. Whitefield’s defenses along with those of his other allies are included in the comprehensive volume Extract of Sundry Passages Taken Out of Mr. Whitefield’s Printed Sermons, Journals and Letters, etc. (Philadelphia: J. Oswald, 1741). Unfortunately, unlike the New Side Presbyterians, many Old Siders did not have a flair for drama or incisive writing, and these interrogations devolve into a ponderous lecture about Calvinist dogma and nitpicking about clerical vestments and the proper role of attorneys. For a full and detailed explanation of how Whitefield became enmeshed in such inter-Presbyterian conflicts, see Leonard Trinterud’s excellent The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-Examination of Colonial Presbyterianism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949).

George Whitefield’s own Journals, of course, provide a good look at the last phase of his second trip to America. The seventh volume, A Continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s Journal, from a Few Days After His Return to Georgia to His Arrival in Falmouth, is most useful here, as are his various Letters in the Banner of Truth Trust edition mentioned earlier. Other, modern perspectives on the Itinerant include Harry Stout’s Divine Dramatist, for its lively narrative about his travels and sermonizing; Thomas Kidd’s George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father, for its diligent research into its subject’s tumultuous history; and Arnold Dallmore’s George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival, for its comprehensive, if occasionally too reverent, perspective on his ministry. David Morgan Jr. focuses on Whitefield’s orphanage work and conflicts with Alexander Garden in both “The Consequences of George Whitefield’s Ministry in the Carolinas and Georgia, 1739–1740” and “George Whitefield and the Great Awakening in the Carolinas and Georgia, 1739–1740.”

George Whitefield attracted numerous up-and-coming revivalists toward his entourage, and the most notable of these turned up in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. The rise of Daniel Rogers, the former tutor who became a popular revivalist, is described in Thomas Kidd’s “Daniel Rogers’ Egalitarian Great Awakening” (Journal of the Historical Society 7:1 (2007), 111–135), a good introduction to the young minister’s life. Studies of the much more controversial James Davenport are perhaps fewer than there should be, but among the most relevant are Harry Stout and Peter Onuf, “James Davenport and the Great Awakening in New London,” which details the troubled rise of the Long Island preacher, and Robert Cray, Jr., “James Davenport’s Post-Bonfire Ministry, 1743–1757” (The Historian 59:1 (1996), 59–73), which provides reference to his early career as well. In South Carolina, Hugh Bryan became quite notable after Whitefield led his conversion, and some of his exploits are discussed in Harvey Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement in Colonial South Carolina” (William and Mary Quarterly 43:4 (1986), 594–614). A good complementary work, already cited, is Leigh Eric Schmidt, “‘The Grand Prophet,’ Hugh Bryan: Early Evangelicalism’s Challenge to the Establishment and Slavery in the Colonial South.” The last rising evangelist mentioned in the chapter is Andrew Croswell, whose Answer to the Rev. Mr. Garden’s First Three Letters to the Rev. Mr. Whitefield (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741) helped to promote him as a defender of Whitefield and established an early marker for growing anti-Anglican sentiment in America.

General overviews of the early Great Awakening also inform the narrative of this chapter. The most important of these are the previously cited Nancy Ruttenburg, “George Whitefield, Spectacular Conversion, and the Rise of Democratic Personality”; Edwin Gaustad, “The Theological Effects of the Great Awakening in New England”; Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America; Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening”; and Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People. Other key works include Erik Seeman, Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999), a useful study for analyzing that often-fraught relationship at the time; Edmund Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), which provides a contrasting view of the Great Awakening from a traditionalist minister; and Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), the signature volume that began the debate over whether the Great Awakening led to the American Revolution. Heimert attests that it did, and provides compelling evidence for it, though that evidence is also selective, which makes his book as controversial today as when it came out more than a half-century ago.

CHAPTER 4 REFERENCES:

CHAPTER 5: THE CREATURE IN THE EGG

The subject of the first section of this chapter, Sarah Haggar, became Sarah Wheaten upon marriage to her first husband, and under her remarried name wrote Memoirs of the Life of Sarah Osborn, later edited by Rev. Samuel Hopkins (Worcester, MA: Leonard Worcester, 1799). It’s an engrossing statement of faith and perseverance in difficult times, of which there were many for her during the Great Awakening. A recent modern analysis of Osborn’s life and writings comes to us by way of Catherine Brekus, whose Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2013) provides context for the fervent revivalism that she and her peers experienced. It’s also one of the better discussions of what the Great Awakening meant for poor and working-class women of the era. For additional research on women’s struggles and opportunities in Osborn’s hometown in mid-18th century America, see Christina Hodge, “Widow Pratt’s World of Goods: Implications of Consumer Choice in Colonial Newport, Rhode Island” (Early American Studies 8:2 (2010), 217–234). Gary Nash offers further context on the economic and social crises of New England in the same era, which would later have an explosive effect, in The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979).

Gilbert Tennent’s tour of Boston and New England is one of the signature moments of the revival movement. However, he left very little in the way of written documentation of his travels, and most of what we know about them comes from letters, journals, and reports from those who witnessed him (as noted in the sources that follow). His core message is reflected in the sermon The Righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees Considered (Boston: J. Draper, 1741), in which he drew from the Book of Matthew to excoriate New Englanders for their sins; also see his earlier A Solemn Warning to the Secure World, from the God of Terrible Majesty. Subsequent research and perspective on his preaching derive from Leonard Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-Examination of Colonial Presbyterianism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949), still the best and most authoritative examination of the trials of the Presbyterian Church during the revival era. Supplementary sources include those previously mentioned, including Milton Coalter, Jr., Gilbert Tennent: Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies, one of the few monographs on Tennent’s ministry; Charles Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies, an excellent overview of the tumult in the church; and Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, discussing the nexus of those three combustible elements.

The schism in the Presbyterian Church, of which Gilbert Tennent was both cause and object, is detailed in the works above, but primary sources are also critical to understanding the legislative schemes and machinations of both sides. Much of this can be found in the Synod and presbytery annals from The Records of the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1904), which despite its name mostly covers the colonial era from 1706–1788, in voluminous pages of reports, minutes, and embedded documents. The most important of these found in that source is the Protestation of Robert Cross (entered June 1, 1741), which forced the revivalists out of the church on shaky theological and legal grounds. For additional data on the breach, see the Donegal Presbytery Minutes, vol. 1 (Presbyterian Historical Society (1930), 253-258), and for biographical information on the putative cause of the rupture, Alexander Craighead, see his family’s autobiography, written by Rev. James Craighead, The Craighead Family: A Genealogical Memoir . . . (Philadelphia: [privately printed], 1876).

The radical period of the Great Awakening begins in earnest in mid-1741 after Gilbert Tennent’s tour of New England and intensifies through the following two years. Some of the better sources that describe the “enthusiasm” and frenzy the revival unleashed at the time include David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), which puts such behavior in the context of related Protestant uprisings from 17th-century Puritans to later Quakers; Douglas Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2017), a compendium of personal testaments of religious revival and social upheaval, and the best grassroots look at the Great Awakening; the previously noted Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World, a look at the threat to the social hierarchy itinerant evangelizing presented to the colonies; and Eugene White, “Decline of the Great Awakening in New England” (New England Quarterly 24:1 (1951), 35–52), depicting how the more extreme elements of the revival ended up coopting it and undercutting its reputation among more moderate elements of society. For a look at nascent ideas of abolition, and the rigid defenses of slavery within the church, see Kenneth Minkema and Harry Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Anti-Slavery Debate, 1740–1865” (Journal of American History 92:1 (2005), 47–74).

Most of the aforementioned sources also include information on the radical ministry of Andrew Croswell, but for a more detailed monograph on the pastor’s doings, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, “‘A Second and Glorious Reformation’: The New Light Extremism of Andrew Croswell” (William and Mary Quarterly 43:2 (1986), 214–244), or any of his writings of the era, of which Answer to the Rev. Mr. Garden’s First Three Letters to the Rev. Mr. Whitefield (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741) is the most colorful in its invective. Croswell’s close ally, James Davenport, is only mentioned incidentally in this chapter, but for an overview see the earlier cited “James Davenport and the Great Awakening in New London” by Harry Stout and Peter Onuf. For a look at Tennent, Davenport, and Croswell’s radical ideas of education in a revival ministry, see Richard Warch, “The Shepherd’s Tent: Education and Enthusiasm in the Great Awakening” (American Quarterly 30:2 (1978), 177–198).

Other research on the period derives from sources that examine the structural, ecclesiastical, and social underpinnings of the Great Awakening. The most important of these are W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), which also examines the parallel to British and European revival movements; Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, and Edwin Gaustad and Leigh Eric Schmidt, The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today, two comprehensive perspectives on the spiritual changes that marked the era; and Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, one of the most well-researched volumes on that epoch.

CHAPTER 5 REFERENCES:

“some times revived, and sometimes sunk, and dejected”—Osborn, Memoirs, 43.

“Rheumatism made her hands ache terribly”—Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World, 91.

“She worked as a schoolteacher and housekeeper, but the money was always meager”—Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World, 1–4, 89.

“a busy harbor, prosperous merchants, and prodigious wealth built on the shipbuilding industry and the transatlantic slave trade”—Minkema and Stout, “Edwardsean Tradition,” 26; Nash, Urban Crucible, 182.

“Although some women became clerks and shopkeepers”—Hodge, “Widow Pratt,” 221.

“She described her simple pleasures of playing cards with friends”—Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World, 120.

“She knew friends who had been raised as Quakers”—ibid., 24.

“God in mercy sent his dear servant Whitefield here”—Osborn, Memoirs, 43.

“He delivered his sermons with blunt and angry words”—White, “Decline of the Great Awakening,” 36.

“I questioned the truth of all I had experienced”—Osborn, Memoirs, 43.

“whom Whitefield had called ‘a good old Puritan’”—Whitefield, Journal (Seventh), 18.

“My sins, from my cradle, were ranked in order before my eyes”—Osborn, Memoirs, 21.

“singing songs, dancing, and foolish jesting”—ibid., 45.

“very dark and melancholy circumstances”—ibid., 47.

“I like your experiences well. They seem to me to be scriptural and encouraging”—Letter from Gilbert Tennent to Sarah Wheaten, quoted in Osborn, Memoirs, 48.

“though they have played the harlot with many lovers”—ibid., 48.

“After this my business failed” to “was persuaded God would point out some way for me”—ibid., 50.

“The price of wheat reached an all-time high”—Nash, Urban Crucible, 112–114, 174.

“If they ended up in penury, they might be put to labor in a workhouse”—ibid., 125–26.

“Native New Englanders worried over the waves of Scots-Irish and Germans”—ibid., 103–4.

“epidemics of diphtheria and malaria raged”—Lockwood, “Birth, Illness and Death,” 112, 124 n5.

“the death rate recently exceeded the birth rate in Boston”—Nash, Urban Crucible, 104.

“most of the 3,500 men recruited from Massachusetts to fight for the Crown”—ibid., 169–172.

“He spent three months in the region traveling from major cities like Boston”—Trinterud, Forming, 101.

“He arrived at dissenting meetinghouses with little advance notice”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 74.

“You needn’t boast of your dead hypocritical faith”—Tennent, Righteousness, 15.

“the simplicity and power of the religion of Christ”—ibid., 4.

“but he claimed that this was really a sign of God’s anger—not his favor”—Tennent, Solemn Warning, 34–35.

“their prosperity lifts them up” to “Are ye rich? Cursed are ye in the city and in the field”—ibid., 176, 190.

“What will your good parentage avail you, unless you walk in the steps”—Tennent, Righteousness, 7.

“the most awful awakening sermon I think I ever heard”—Kidd, Great Awakening, 96.

“Many parishioners felt the same or greater agony of body and spirit”—White, “Decline of the Great Awakening,” 37.

“his words found special appeal at Yale”—Trinterud, Forming, 101.

“a self-righteous, self-ruined wretch . . . who deserved hell”—Kidd, Great Awakening, 96–97.

“he saw more converts in a week than he had in a career’s worth of preaching”—Tyerman, Life of the Reverend, 424–25.

“boys and girls, young men and women, Indians and Negroes”—ibid.

“a monster! Impudent and noisy, and told them all they were damned, damned, damned!”—White, “Decline of the Great Awakening,” 37.

“his groundbreaking Danger of an Unconverted Ministry sermon appeared in print for the first time in New England”—Warch, “Shepherd’s Tent,” 179.

“stone-blind and stone-dead” to “plain evidences of experimental religion”—Tennent, Danger sermon, 13, 16.

“150 New England towns including Boston became swept up in his revival”—Ahlstrom, Religious History, 286.

“observers noticing outbreaks of piety in the streets”—Tyerman, Life of the Reverend, 425.

“spelled doom for the Congregational monopoly in New England”—Gaustad and Schmidt, Religious History, 61.

“[m]ultitudes were awakened, and several had received great consolation”—Kidd, Great Awakening, 99.

“the first clergyman who preached west of the Susquehanna [River]”—Craighead, Craighead Family, 42.

“they made the woods ring, most sweetly singing and praising God”—ibid.

“throngs of listeners heard him declaim against his enemies on the court”—Trinterud, Forming, 100.

“accusing them by name of whoremongering, drinking excessively, lying and breaking the Sabbath”—Bonomi, Under the Cope, 148.

“in the most scurrilous and opprobrious terms”—ibid.

“The judges now accused Craighead of slander and incitement”—Trinterud, Forming, 100.

“The mayhem then spread throughout the area”—Bonomi, Under the Cope, 149.

“The Synod had already struck a blow the year before”—Trinterud, Forming, 97.

“wounded and grieved at our very hearts, at the dreadful divisions”—Protestation, quoted in Records of the Presbyterian Church, 157.

“the doctrines of the New Side men were heretical”—Maxson, Great Awakening, 79.

“They pronounced them ‘guilty of schism’”—Protestation, quoted in Records of the Presbyterian Church, 158.

“The Old Side had taken a controversial, possibly illegal action”—Trinterud, Forming, 107.

“It was an act of ‘supreme disorder’”—Maxson, Great Awakening, 74.

“He quickly organized two new, independent presbyteries”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 84–85.

“It was a misfit bunch upon which to build a new sect”—Trinterud, Forming, 110–12.

“Others facing more resistance jettisoned their parish entirely”—Maxson, Great Awakening, 78–79.

“The revivalists also surged into regions where no ministers had been ordained”—ibid., 76–77.

“turbulence, shattered and divided congregations, and a rash of slanderous reports”—Bonomi, Under the Cope, 147–48.

“wild rabble” to “‘social leveling’ threatened to collapse the hierarchy”—ibid.

“But who were the best men now that so many in this new church were women”—Hall, Contested Boundaries, 56–59.

“multitudes in the gospel net”—ibid., 73.

“filled their converts with ‘contempt of their betters’ and pitted ‘husbands against wives . . .’”—Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm, 196.

“Every low-bred, illiterate person can resolve cases of conscience”—Nash, Urban Crucible, 215–216.

“demanding that the New Side adopt the Solemn League and Covenant” to “independent Covenanters movement”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 93.

“encouraged New Side parishioners to leave their pastors”—Ward, Protestant Evangelical, 273.

“he claimed sin could be expiated by ‘the body’s fermentation in the grave’”—Trinterud, Forming, 115.

“Jesus Christ fights for the Moravian brethren”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 161.

“Whereupon the holy man, in the fear of the Lord, deflowered her”—Kidd, Great Awakening, 92.

“In some meetinghouses they popped up and occupied the deacon’s seat”—Hall, Contested Boundaries, 53.

“Frequently these ‘guests’ interrupted the proceedings”—White, “Decline of the Great Awakening,” 37.

“for ignorant young converts to take upon them authoritatively” to “rise up and crush the enthusiastic creature in the egg”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 94.

“His first acquaintance with the New Birth came in the mid-1730s”—Schmidt, “New Light Extremism,” 217.

“enemies to the work of God”—Warch, “Shepherd’s Tent,” 180.

“an education aboard a British warship was better than that of a New England college”—ibid.

“He compared him to a ‘zealous lady’ overcome with the Holy Spirit” to “a harvest indeed for Romish missionaries!”—Kidd, Great Awakening, 121.

“Over a little more than a week, the brash and unbridled evangelizer converted thirty-eight people”—Schmidt, “New Light Extremism,” 218.

“my former objections against singing were presently sung away”—ibid.

“the great city Nineveh” to “breeding up exhorters”—ibid., 218–219.

“I doubt not, but if you were to die tonight, three-quarters of you would be damned to Hell”—Winiarski, Darkness Falls, 148.

“a man may live in all the commandments and ordinances” to “old, grey-headed sinners”—ibid., 149.

“the fervors and frenzies of this teacher had answerable effects”—Kidd, Great Awakening, 139.

“everyone delivering the yell he was particularly inspired with”—ibid.

“God hates every one of you, as he does the devils and damned spirits in Hell”—Winiarski, Darkness Falls, 149.

“Some of them followed Croswell to Charlestown, Massachusetts”—Kidd, Great Awakening, 139.

“he condemned the abusive treatment of prisoners and the horrors of slavery”—Nash, Urban Crucible, 211.

“Croswell repeated his performance with the added touch of stripping off his shirt”—Hall, Contested Boundaries, 53.

“by the quart or tankard” to “red-hot comets”—Schmidt, “New Light Extremism,” 221.

CHAPTER 6: ANIMAL SPIRITS

The most important volume for the study of Ben Franklin’s life and business at the climax of the Great Awakening is undoubtedly Leonard Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2, 1735–1744, which details his letters, transactions, proposals, and selections from Poor Richard’s Almanack, as well as valuable excerpts from the Pennsylvania Gazette. Related first-person testimony from Franklin is available in his Autobiography, though it was published well after the events described in the chapter. Useful secondary sources include Frank Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits and Piety: The Friendship of Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield”; David T. Morgan, “A Most Unlikely Friendship—Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield” (The Historian 47:2 (1985)); and Edmund Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), the best short biography of the man and more insightful than many of the longer, more contemporary volumes.

Franklin’s dealings with the Presbyterian Church, especially its established ministers, were often fraught, and some of this history is revealed in Leonard Labaree, “Franklin and the Presbyterians,” (Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 35:4 (1957) 217–227). Valuable primary sources that offer a look into Franklin’s frustrations with the church leadership, and underscore his freethinking views, include his “Dialogue Between Two Presbyterians,” April 10, 1735 (in Leonard Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2), and A Defense of the Rev. Mr. Hemphill’s Observations: or, an Answer to the Vindication of the Reverend Commission (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1735). For useful background information on the trial of Rev. Hemphill and the lingering fallout of the episode, see Merton A. Christensen, “Franklin on the Hemphill Trial: Deism Versus Presbyterian Orthodoxy” (The William and Mary Quarterly, 10:3 (1953) 422–440), and William Barker, “The Hemphill Case, Benjamin Franklin and Subscription to the Westminster Confession” (American Presbyterians 69:4 (1991) 243–256). Jacquelyn C. Miller illuminates Franklin’s ambivalent but often supportive relation to the Society of Friends in “Franklin and Friends: Benjamin Franklin’s Ties to Quakers and Quakerism” (Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 57:4 (1990) 318–336).

The thoughts and philosophy of Jonathan Edwards are best analyzed from the reverend’s own pen, and his voluminous works provide ample opportunity to study him from a variety of angles. The requisite starting point for many is his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741), which continues to draw significant commentary and interpretation nearly three centuries later. Some of the better analysis includes Christopher Lukasik, “Feeling the Force of Certainty: The Divine Science, Newtonianism, and Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’” (The New England Quarterly 73:2 (2000) 222–245), and Edward J. Gallagher, “‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’: Some Unfinished Business” (The New England Quarterly, 73:2 (2000) 202–221). Edwards’s explanation of the revival, and apology for some of its excesses, is the centerpiece of his Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741), which anticipates some of the criticism his adversaries would later launch against religious enthusiasm and his qualified defense of it.

An even more influential work, though written several years after the events in the chapter, is A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, in Three Parts (Philadelphia: James Crissy, 1821), originally published in 1746. It lays out many of the arguments Edwards used to draw an emotional response from his listeners and is still greatly influential among some evangelical communities in the U.S. Helpful background material on the reverend and this essential period in the history of his ministry include Mark Valeri, “The Economic Thought of Jonathan Edwards”; and the biographies by George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2003), and Philip Gura, Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005).

In contrast to Edwards, Gilbert Tennent begins to fade from public attention and controversy after the peak of the revival. His tumultuous history, both among his fellow New Side evangelicals and the factions in the Presbyterian Church, is laid out in Milton Coalter, Jr., Gilbert Tennent: Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies, as well as the previously mentioned Janet Fishburn, “Gilbert Tennent, Established Dissenter,” which reveals some of the paradoxes in his character and his ultimate refuge among the moderates after his days as a radical came to an end. One key sermon that illustrates Tennent’s turn to a more conservative approach is The Necessity of Holding Fast the Truth (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1743), which contains some of his most damning criticism against the Moravian sect and others who incurred his displeasure. For a look at the back-and-forth controversy over Tennent’s contradictory statements, see the anonymously scribed The Examiner; or, Gilbert Against Tennent (Boston: John Hancock, 1743). In response, Tennent lays out a somewhat unconvincing defense in The Examiner, Examined; or, Gilbert Tennent, Harmonious (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1743). Worthwhile supplementary material on the minister can be found in Frederick Brink, “Gilbert Tennent, Dynamic Preacher” (Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 32:2 (1954) 91–107).

Other research on Gilbert Tennent that illustrates his challenges after the revival met firm opposition in 1742 includes Eugene White, “Decline of the Great Awakening in New England”; and Richard Webster, A History of the Presbyterian Church in America, from Its Origin Until the Year 1760 (Philadelphia: Joseph Wilson, 1857). Perhaps the most aggressive attack on Tennent, Whitefield, and the other revivalists during the Great Awakening is Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1743), which figures more prominently in Chapter 7.

The ministry of James Davenport was and continues to be one of the most contentious aspects of the revival. Since the reverend has relatively few modern defenders—and scant support even among writers of the 1740s whose work has survived—readers should examine stories of his frenzied performances with a critical eye. Still, even with extra attention to the veracity of source material, there’s little doubt Davenport at his height was either mentally disturbed or a reckless agitator or both. Some of the best sources on his ministry include the previously mentioned Harry Stout and Peter Onuf, “James Davenport and the Great Awakening in New London”; Robert Cray, Jr., “James Davenport’s Post-Bonfire Ministry, 1743–1757”; and Richard Warch, “The Shepherd’s Tent: Education and Enthusiasm in the Great Awakening.” The turmoil at Yale College, which he exacerbated and profited from, is further detailed in Norman Pettit, “Prelude to Mission: Brainerd’s Expulsion from Yale” (The New England Quarterly 59:1 (1986) 28–50), and Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, with Annals of the College History, October, 1701–May, 1745 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1885).

Davenport’s role in the wider social and religious changes of the era has attracted much scholarship, both as a harbinger of sectarian individualism and a sign of coming political revolution. For various perspectives on these subjects, see C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), an excellent source for the rising Separatist sects following the revival; Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), examining such changes in the rural landscape of Connecticut; and Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield, which contains numerous excerpts from personal testimonies and reactions to Davenport during the era. Authors Patricia Bonomi, in Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, and Gary Nash, in The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution, provide a contemporary view of how the Great Awakening’s effects echoed among social classes and threatened the hierarchy of colonial order.

Finally, for valuable background information on the changes brought to America at the height of the revival, see Edmund Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795, a biography of a strong critic of the New Lights; as well as Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” and Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America.

CHAPTER 6 REFERENCES:

“the alteration in the face of religion here is altogether surprising”—Pennsylvania Gazette, quoted in Franklin, Papers v.2, 287.

“His printing house now sold volumes on the life of Whitefield”—Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 542.

“great variety of Bibles, Testaments, Psalters, spelling books, primers, hornbooks. . . .”—Advertisement in Pennsylvania Gazette, May 20, 1742, quoted in Franklin, Papers v.2, 361.

“One third of everything he printed in the early 1740s concerned the evangelical revival.”—Labaree, “Franklin and the Presbyterians,” 224.

“He printed a Querists III pamphlet attacking Gilbert Tennent”—Franklin, Papers v.2, 314n.

“Gilbert passed on the offer because the pamphlet was ‘stuffed with satire and burlesque.’”—Letter from Gilbert Tennent to Benjamin Franklin, September 22, 1741, quoted in Franklin, Papers v.2, 314.

“In 1741 alone he published forty-six books and pamphlets on the revival”—Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits,” 544.

“payback for earlier years when Bradford had been postmaster”—Franklin, Papers v.2, 275n.

“rules of honor and the laws of humanity”—ibid., 275–281.

“Among the divines there has been much debate”—Poor Richard’s Almanack, quoted in Franklin, Papers v.2, 338.

“in his younger days in Boston, he had ceased going to services on Sunday”—Labaree, “Franklin and the Presbyterians,” 219.

“became skeptical of organized religion and instead embraced teachings that would later be labeled ‘Deist.’”—D. Morgan, “A Most Unlikely Friendship,” 213.

“he would make public charity the guiding principle of his life”—E. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, 24.

“served principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another”—Stout, “Peculiar Friendship,” 16.

“morality or virtue is the end, faith only a means to obtain that end”—Franklin, “Dialogue,” in Papers v.2, 33.

“delivered with a good voice, and apparently extempore, most excellent discourses”—Franklin, Autobiography, 95–96.

“unqualified for any future exercise of his ministry within our bounds”—Barker, “Hemphill Case,” 248.

“teaching of a religion based on the law of nature”—ibid., 250.

“a virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian”—Franklin, “Dialogue,” in Papers v.2, 33.

“Asses are grave and dull Animals”—Franklin, “Defense of Rev. Mr. Hemphill.”

“even became a trustee in charge of the New Building, since he belonged to no sect”—E. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, 59.

“Many of Franklin’s closest friends were Quakers”—Miller, “Franklin and Friends,” 320.

“While he was not a subscriber to their doctrine of the ‘inner light’”—ibid., 322.

“Franklin found it difficult to accept that such a divine figure could ever be actively involved in his life”—Stout, “Peculiar Friendship,” 20.

“though the general government of the universe is well administered”—ibid., 21.

“proportion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women”—Miller, “Franklin and Friends,” 321.

“In the winter the failure of the local currency exchange caused economic panic”—Pennsylvania Gazette, January 8, 1741, quoted in Franklin, Papers v.2, 316.

“In May a biblical-style plague of ‘black worms or caterpillars’ emerged from the earth”—Pennsylvania Gazette, May 27, 1742, quoted in Franklin, Papers v.2, 361.

“During an October election, a crowd of up to eighty sailors attacked magistrates and constables”—Pennsylvania Gazette, October 7, 1742, quoted in Franklin, Papers v.2, 363–364.

“he repeatedly denounced the practice of theft—not only simple larceny and fraud”—Valeri, “Economic Thought,” 48–49.

“creating ‘national calamities’ that fed injustice and ‘threatens us with ruin’”—ibid., 47, 49.

“God oftentimes gives those men that he hates great outward prosperity”—ibid., 52.

“Edwards felt some resentment at the effect he achieved: his theatrics, his impromptu passions”—Lukasik, “Feeling the Force,” 232–233.

“employing a rhythmic structure that repeated and reinforced his points”—Gallagher, “Unfinished Business,” 219–220.

“Newtonian physical gravity could reflect God’s own emphasis on moral gravity”—Lukasik, “Feeling the Force,” 223, 228.

“any lively and vigorous exercise of the will or inclination of the soul”—Edwards, Religious Affections, pt.1, 4.

“the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot”—Edwards, Sinners sermon, 7.

“Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead”—ibid., 12.

“mere pleasure . . . keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood”—ibid., 14.

“he held the sinner in his hands like one might hold a spider—dangling by a thin thread over the chasm of hell”—ibid., 15–16.

“greatest earthly potentates” to “bear the dreadful wrath of that God that is now angry with you every day”—ibid., 19, 24.

“The wrath of the almighty GOD is now undoubtedly hanging over [a] great part of this congregation”—ibid., 25.

“The congregants did not literally run for their lives, but they did fill the church with great weeping and moaning”—Kidd, Great Awakening, 104–105; Gallagher, “Unfinished Business,” 219.

“It also considerably advanced his name, as America’s leading theologian”—Lukasik, “Feeling the Force,” 234.

“In recent months the college had become a battleground between New and Old Light students”—Pettit, “Prelude to Mission,” 34.

“roaring that thousands of persons roasting in the devil’s kitchen”—White, “Decline of the Great Awakening,” 40.

“some praying, some exhorting and terrifying. Some singing, some screaming, some crying, some laughing”—Stout and Onuf, “James Davenport,” 569.

“His ancestor John Davenport was the town’s cofounder and its first pastor”—Tracy, Great Awakening, 237.

“James himself had graduated from Yale at the top of his class”—Dexter, Biographical Sketches, 447.

“dead of heart, a blind leader of the blind” and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”—E. Morgan, Gentle Puritan, 32; Kidd, Great Awakening, 118.

“no student could say ‘the rector, either of the trustees or tutors are hypocrites, carnal or unconverted men’”—Pettit, “Prelude to Mission,” 34–35.

“He called the outbreaks of untamed emotion strange and unusual”—Edwards, Distinguishing Marks, 5.

“tears, trembling, groans, loud outcries, agonies of body, or the failing of bodily strength”—ibid., 9.

“‘extraordinary effects on persons’ bodies’ occurred in the midst of spiritual conversions”—ibid., 14–15.

“Grace dwells with so much corruption, and the new man and the old man subsist together”—ibid., 33.

“during the reign of Oliver Cromwell in England when ‘vital religion’ held sway”—ibid., 37.

“For it was an extraordinary event ‘from the Spirit of God’”—ibid., 62.

“more striking than what occurred six years before at Northampton”—ibid., 78.

“Davenport’s antics and Edwards’s sermons empowered the radical students”—Pettit, “Prelude to Mission,” 35–36.

“In this atmosphere, the authorities found it impossible to contain the disruptions”—Warch, “Shepherd’s Tent,” 184.

“They called it the Shepherd’s Tent, and Allen set up classes on the second story of a convert’s house”—ibid., 183.

“Davenport brought his donations back to New London and funneled them into his ‘Nursery of True Converts’”—ibid., 185–86.

“All the applicants had to do was to pass a rigorous screening process to weed out the unconverted”—Stout and Onuf, “James Davenport,” 571.

“Young male and female revivalists prayed together”—Warch, “Shepherd’s Tent,” 187–188.

“Critics decried New Light schools like Davenport’s as ‘castles or colleges in the air’”—Stout and Onuf, “James Davenport,” 571–572.

“The Shepherd’s Tent represented a real threat to the legitimacy of classical education”—Warch, “Shepherd’s Tent,” 187.

“Davenport already encouraged black and white, men and women, poor and rich, Indian and colonist”—Cray, “Post-Bonfire Ministry,” 62.

“By the fall of 1742, it had moved on to Rhode Island and attracted ever more attention”—Warch, “Shepherd’s Tent,” 187–88.

“With Davenport he could only watch helplessly as the Long Island minister committed acts”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 95.

“I cannot justify the excessive heat of temper which has sometime appeared in my conduct” to “Alas for it! My soul is sick for these things”—Webster, History of the Presbyterian Church, 189.

“damnable errors and confusions”—ibid., 190–91.

“So instead of keeping the letter to himself, he sent it to Thomas Clap”—White, “Decline of the Great Awakening,” 41.

“Old Light critics delighted in Gilbert’s his admission of the faults of the revival”—ibid.

“They created a caricature of him as a merciless sadist”—Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts, 127.

“promoted schism with his ugly rhetoric”—ibid., 148.

“One anonymous New Englander published a pamphlet titled The Examiner; or Gilbert Against Tennent”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 113–15.

“Tennent has been severely censured in Boston where someone took all the arrows”—ibid., 113.

“Gilbert responded with The Examiner, Examined; or Gilbert Tennent, Harmonious”—ibid., 119.

“Gilbert had already rebuked him and his group for antinomianism”—Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 243.

“nonsense and contradiction” to “detestable doctrine”—Tennent, The Necessity of Holding Fast the Truth, second sermon, 32, 36.

“God’s children who strove to be ‘nearest the mind of Jesus Christ’”—Coalter, Son of Thunder, 111.

“Your high opinion of the Moravians and attempts to join with them shocks me exceedingly”—Kidd, America’s Spiritual, 197.

“In May a new law outlawed itinerant preaching in the colony”—Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee, 186.

“If found guilty of breaking the law, transgressors were subject to fines, arrest and exile”—Bonomi, Under the Cope, 163.

“Soon, the authorities forbade New Light separatist congregations from legal protection”—ibid.

“The press followed his actions closely” to “shocking scenes of horror and confusion”—Boston News-Letter, July 1, 1742.

“strange and unaccountable manner”—Goen, Revivalism and Separatism, 22.

“After the first day’s hearing, the reverend and his associates left the meetinghouse”—ibid., 22–23.

“disturbed in the rational faculties of his mind, and therefore to be pitied and compassionated”—ibid., 23.

“an association of ministers decided to bar him from their pulpits”—Bonomi, Under the Cope, 150.

“where any congregation is in peace, the devil is their ruler”—Stout and Onuf, “James Davenport,” 566.

“were murdering souls by thousands and by millions”—ibid., 573.

“hands extended, his head thrown back, and his eyes staring up to heaven”—Nash, Urban Crucible, 210.

“so red hot, that I verily believe they would make nothing to kill opposers”—Bonomi, Under the Cope, 150.

“it is impossible to relate the convulsions into which the whole country is thrown”—Nash, Urban Crucible, 212.

“strong attempts to destroy all property, to make all things common, wives as well as goods”—ibid., 210.

“Instead, his congregation censured him for spending so much time outside his parish”—Goen, Revivalism and Separatism, 24.

“By this time, Davenport suffered from inflammatory ulcers and bodily weakness”—Tracy, Great Awakening, 252–53.

“some extraordinary discovery and assurance of the very near approach of the end of the world”—Stout and Onuf, “James Davenport,” 574.

“one such mission was to purge his followers of their wicked possessions”—Tracy, Great Awakening, 249.

“shouted and sang ‘Hallelujah!’ and ‘Glory to God!’ and imagined their authors being tortured in hell”—Boston Evening-Post, April 11, 1743.

“scarlet cloaks, velvet hoods, fine laces, and every thing that had two colors”—Warch, “Shepherd’s Tent,” 191.

“the calf you have made is too big”—Boston Evening-Post, April 11, 1743.

“under the influence of an evil spirit, and that God had left him”—Stout and Onuf, “James Davenport,” 575.

“Appalled by the spectacle, most of his local acolytes deserted him”—ibid., 578.

“drive learning out of the world, and to sow it thick with the dreadful errors”—Warch, “Shepherd’s Tent,” 195.

CHAPTER 7: DAGGERS AND DRAWN SWORDS

One of the few monographs available on Charles Chauncy is Edward Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705–1787 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1980), which is a good short overview of the Old Light minister’s career, but far from comprehensive enough to analyze his wide-ranging, often critical perspective. For greater detail on this, see his published sermons: Enthusiasm Described and Cautioned Against (Boston: J. Draper, 1742), which also includes a letter condemning James Davenport after the radical’s intemperate appearance at Chauncy’s house; Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1743), the most important primary work that undercut the revival; Ministers Cautioned Against the Occasions of Contempt (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1744), which Chauncy delivered at a ministerial convention and which fed the fears of his peers that the colonial world seemed to be going mad from unchecked enthusiasm; and The Wonderful Narrative: Or, a Faithful Account of the French Prophets, Their Agitations, Extasies, and Inspirations (Glasgow: Robert Foulis, 1742), a pointed comparison between the excesses of the revival and another spiritual uprising earlier in the eighteenth century.

Other key works that touch on topics related to the Old Lights include Jonathan Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1742), which provided the impetus for Chauncy to write Seasonable Thoughts in response; Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America, in which Chauncy is an early figure who shaped the rhetoric and theology of what would become an important liberal movement; Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World, an overview of why the traditionalists were so frightened by the specter of itinerant preachers and lay exhorters; David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution, a classic text covering similar ground on a longer time scale; and Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution, the foremost modern defense of the revival and still a key text for those historians who see the New Lights as protorevolutionaries and the Old Lights as hidebound elitists.

Women in colonial America have been underrepresented in the historical literature, a condition that has only started to change over the last several decades. Sarah Osborn (née Wheaten) became one of the key female authors whose works have survived, and her saga is revealed in her own Memoirs of the Life of Sarah Osborn, as noted in . A more comprehensive, contemporary edition of those memoirs is available in Catherine Brekus, ed., Sarah Osborn’s Collected Writings (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2017), an excellent introduction to her view of Christianity. Brekus provides an excellent biographical look at Osborn, putting her in the context of her time and the tumultuous colonial world she lived in, with Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America.

Most of what historians know about Susanna Anthony is seen through the lens of minister Samuel Hopkins, who, as with Sarah Osborn’s biography, redacted parts of her life story to make it more palatable for contemporary readers. His version of The Life and Character of Miss Susanna Anthony (Portland, ME: Lyman, Hall & Co., 1810) is a worthy place to begin research about her, keeping his own bias in mind. For a closer look at the intimate relationship of Sarah and Susa, see Familiar Letters Written by Mrs. Sarah Osborn and Miss Susanna Anthony (Newport, RI: Newport Mercury, 1807), which provides a compelling window into ecstatic Christianity, despite nearly all the letters being undated and hard to place in time.

Modern views of the struggles and achievements of women in early America have shed light on their role in enthusiastic forms of worship. Some of the better volumes include Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), and Catherine Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1998). For detailed perspectives on the economic and social position of women during the era, see Mary Beth Norton, “The Evolution of White Women’s Experience in Early America” (The American Historical Review 89:3 (1984), 593–619), and Barbara Lacey, “Gender, Piety, and Secularization in Connecticut Religion, 1720–1775” (Journal of Social History 24:4 (1991), 799–821). Many similar themes also appear in the story of a Puritan woman from a century earlier, in Eve LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), a biography of the spiritual trailblazer who became a legend and target for later generations of Congregationalists.

Douglas Winiarski is one of the best current historians of the grassroots revival in Christianity. Through countless case studies, he has created a compendium of eighteenth-century enthusiastic worshippers and their ministers. His two key works for this chapter include “Souls Filled with Ravishing Transport: Heavenly Visions and the Radical Awakening in New England” and the monumental Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England. Other authors have also written of the outbreak of passion and ecstasy at the height of the Great Awakening, among them Jon Butler in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, and Michael Crawford in Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context. For the measured perspective of Jonathan Edwards about what does and does not constitute legitimate emotion in church services (as well as those phenomena that are beyond judgment) see his Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, which predates the events in this book, and his contemporary Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God and the later Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England.

The curse of slavery in the colonies has attracted increasing attention from scholars in recent decades, with research showing just how fundamental the practice was to the economy and hierarchy of prerevolutionary America. Dozens of critical volumes examine human bondage during the era; those which are the most relevant to the context of this book include Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution, a broad perspective on key urban issues including enslavement, and the same author’s “Slaves and Slave Owners in Colonial Philadelphia” (The William and Mary Quarterly 30:2 (1973), 223–256). Also valuable is Frank Lambert’s “‘I Saw the Book Talk’: Slave Readings of the First Great Awakening,” for its discussion of what the evangelical movement meant to black men and women held in bondage; Thomas Kidd, “Daniel Rogers’ Egalitarian Great Awakening,” a short biography of the New Light preacher who crossed racial boundaries; and Kenneth Minkema’s “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery” (Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002), 23–59), an overview of the lengths to which preachers like Edwards went to justify their own use of forced labor. For a look at one of the most violent and unfair manifestations of colonial racism, see Serena Zabin, ed., The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings, with Related Documents (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004).

Comparatively less scholarship has examined the role of Indians and indigenous people in the Great Awakening, but for now the most essential volume remains Linford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012). This book also covers Andrew Croswell’s role in missionary activities to Native tribes, and for a broader look at his radical form the gospel, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, “‘A Second and Glorious Reformation’: The New Light Extremism of Andrew Croswell.” The reverend’s own incendiary, sometimes crazed, writing provides another avenue to view his ministry, and the key volumes include Mr. Croswell’s Reply to a Book Lately Published, Entitled, A Display of God’s Special Grace (Boston: Rogers and Fowles, 1742), a rather venomous attack on Jonathan Dickinson’s moderate stance on the revival; The Apostle’s Advice to the Jaylor Improved: Being a Solemn Warning Against the Awful Sin of Soul Murder (Boston: Rogers and Fowles, 1744), Croswell at his most garrulous, summoning martial imagery against those who opposed him; A Second Defence of the Old Protestant Doctrine of Justifying Faith . . . (Boston: Rogers and Fowles, 1747), summarizing the importance of faith as the key to salvation; and The Heavenly Doctrine of Man’s Justification Only by the Obedience of Jesus Christ (Boston: Green and Russell, 1758), his post-Awakening analysis of the role of faith in Christianity. Several critical contemporary comments about the reverend appear in Richard Webster, A History of the Presbyterian Church in America, from Its Origin Until the Year 1760.

Lastly, for previously cited discussions of the changes wrought by the Great Awakening on the colonies and the nascent growth of American populism, see Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America; and Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765.

CHAPTER 7 REFERENCES:

CHAPTER 8: THE BOW OF JONATHAN

George Whitefield’s return to America in 1744 was one of the most contentious episodes of the Great Awakening. His travels are not covered in the main body of his seven Journals, but are touched on in his Unpublished Journal, which was later published in Church History (7:4 (1938), 297–345). Unfortunately, the now more circumspect Whitefield does not make for a very revealing narrator of his journey, so other supplementary material provides a better window into this episode in his life. Douglas L. Winiarski, in “‘A Jornal of a Fue Days at York’: The Great Awakening on the Northern New England Frontier” (Maine History 42:1 (2004), 46–85), offers a useful look at his initial visit to York, and the potential revival he could have enflamed there. John Gillies, in the Memoirs of Reverend George Whitefield (Middletown: Hunt & Noyes, 1839), also illuminates this period, with much favorable treatment given to the reverend; while the more balanced Luke Tyerman, The Life of the Reverend George Whitefield, is a later and more useful source that offers criticism where needed. Contemporary, previously cited research is drawn from Harry Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism; and Thomas Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father and The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America.

For a view of the controversial role Whitefield played in his own Anglican church, and the way that church turned against the revival in part because of the Itinerant’s actions, see Gerald Goodwin, “The Anglican Reaction to the Great Awakening” and Martin Lodge, “The Crisis of the Churches in the Middle Colonies, 1720-1750.” For a discussion of the contrast between the theology and practical application of the contrasting belief systems of Anglicanism and Puritanism/Congregationalism, see Alan Kantrow, “Anglican Custom, American Consciousness” (The New England Quarterly 52:3 (1979) 307–325).

A primary source that offers one of the most damning accounts of Whitefield’s doings is The Testimony of the President, Professors, Tutors and Hebrew Instructor of Harvard College in Cambridge, Against the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, and His Conduct (Boston: T. Fleet, 1744)—long-overdue revenge from that college for the brickbats the Itinerant had once given to it. Whitefield’s response to his critics is offered in his various apologies (in the sources cited above), but particular attention should be given to his sermon Britain’s Mercies, and Britain’s Duty (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1746), which isn’t an apology per se, but does show how the minister had to adapt his rhetoric to be more acceptable to an American audience of the time—i.e., by issuing harsh anti-Catholic invective. For a different kind of response to criticism, see Gilbert Tennent, The Necessity of Studying to Be Quiet, and Doing Our Own Business (Philadelphia: William Bradford: 1744), the best example of that pastor’s newfound turn toward moderation. Other valuable research on post-radical Tennent can be found in Milton Coalter, Jr., Gilbert Tennent: Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies; Janet Fishburn, “Gilbert Tennent, Established Dissenter”; and Frederick Brink, “Gilbert Tennent, Dynamic Preacher.”

Another pastor who came to moderate his behavior after a radical phase was Hugh Bryan, whose troubles in South Carolina are covered in Leigh Eric Schmidt, “‘The Grand Prophet,’ Hugh Bryan: Early Evangelicalism’s Challenge to the Establishment and Slavery in the Colonial South,” and in Harvey Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement in Colonial South Carolina.” Whitefield’s own problems in the South included others’ attacks on his orphanage and his role as a budding slaveholder. For more on these issues, see Alfred Aldridge, “George Whitefield’s Georgia Controversies” (The Journal of Southern History 9:3 (1943), 357–380), and Stephen Stein, “George Whitefield on Slavery: Some New Evidence.” Whitefield’s other significant Southern legacy was his tumultuous relationship with his own Anglican church; his struggles with Alexander Garden can be found in earlier chapters, but for the wider impact of his and others’ anti-Anglican rhetoric, see Noah Hobart, A Sermon Delivered at the Ordination of the Reverend Mr. Noah Welles (Boston: D. Henchman, 1747), and Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962).

An adversary of Whitefield, Jonathan Mayhew is a critical figure in American political and religious history who begins his rise during this chapter, but his biographical sources remain thin—and none are contemporaneous. The best is still Charles Akers, Called unto Liberty, which puts him in the proper context as a theological maverick, and the more recent J. Patrick Mullins, Father of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution, is also useful for fillings in the gaps with modern research. The outdated Alden Bradford, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, D.D. (Boston: C.C. Little & Co., 1838), is a bit of a relic, though includes some helpful information and anecdotes. See also Clinton Rossiter, “The Life and Mind of Jonathan Mayhew,” for an in-depth discussion of his philosophy and ministry; and the sermon of Ebenezer Gay, The Alienation of Affections from Ministers Considered, and Improved (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1747), which inaugurated Mayhew’s career in controversy.

Supplementary sources that offer useful insights and details on the revival’s peak and later decline include Harry Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), one of the all-around best volumes on early American religion; Edwin S. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965), also excellent, and concisely written; the previously mentioned Frank Lambert, “The Great Awakening as Artifact: George Whitefield and the Construction of Intercolonial Revival, 1739–1745,” regarding the publicity and marketing of evangelical religion in colonial America; and Eugene White, “Decline of the Great Awakening in New England,” in which the major figures of the era are either forced to apologize, retreat into exile, or face consequences from the law.

Finally, incisive analyses of the transformation of religion, and its intertwining with the politics of the era, can be found in the following volumes: C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening; Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People; Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765; and Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution.

CHAPTER 8 REFERENCES:

CHAPTER 9: THE REVOLT FROM WITHIN

The definitive volume on Separatism, and the way it transformed much of frontier and inner British North America, is C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening. With countless case studies and examples of the growth of dissenting religion in the aftermath of the Great Awakening, Goen’s work is still unparalleled. Also useful for illuminating different aspects of this transformation are Catherine Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching America, 1740–1845, with its emphasis on the social changes attendant in the post-Awakening years; and Rhys Isaac, “Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists’ Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765 to 1775” (The William and Mary Quarterly 31:3 (1974), 345–368), an excellent overview of just what made the sect so threatening to colonial powers, in advance of the revolution to come.

Related works already mentioned in these notes that provide further clarity on Separatism and the sects that arose from the revival include Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People; Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America; Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765; David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution; and Edmund Morgan, Benjamin Franklin.

Andrew Croswell’s ministry did not end with the revival, and it took new and curious directions in the years to come. Still the best overview of his career is Leigh Eric Schmidt, “‘A Second and Glorious Reformation’: The New Light Extremism of Andrew Croswell,” though it’s also worthwhile to explore the starthng invective and colorful language of the minister in his primary works. Some of these were mentioned in

Croswell was far from the only Northeasterner to decry British policy in the later 1740s, as the era became known for its turmoil in both spiritual and civic arenas. One of the best descriptions of the conflicts of major towns and cities is Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution, though other volumes also provide evidence of the shaky foundation of imperial rule. These include Edward Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705–1787, and J. Patrick Mullins, Father of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution. See also Charles Chauncy, Civil Magistrates Must Be Just, Ruling in the Fear of God (Boston: Massachusetts Bay House of Representatives, 1747), as an early call for greater colonial liberties, and Chris Beneke, “The Critical Turn: Jonathan Mayhew, the British Empire, and the Idea of Resistance in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Boston” (Massachusetts Historical Review 10 (2008), 23–56), which summarizes many of the grievances colonists had against royal governors and magistrates, and the consequences of expressing them.

A good introduction to the controversy over the elevation of an Anglican bishop to the church in America can be found in Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775. Helpful background sources also include Joseph S. Tiedemann, “Presbyterianism and the American Revolution in the Middle Colonies” (Church History 74:2 (2005), 306–344), and Don R. Gerlach, “Champions of an American Episcopate: Thomas Secker of Canterbury and Samuel Johnson of Connecticut” (Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 41:4 (1972), 381–414).

The Knowles Riots are among the lesser known events that contributed to the growth of Anglo-American strife before the Revolution, at least for general readers. Still the best analysis of these riots is unquestionably John Lax and William Pencak, “The Knowles Riot and the Crisis of the 1740s in Massachusetts,” in Contested Commonwealths: Essays in American History, ed. William Pencak (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh Univ. Press, 2011), an article originally written in 1976. Denver Brunsman has also done commendable, more recent work and discovered additional sources that help to explain the riots; see his “The Knowles Atlantic Impressment Riots of the 1740s” (Early American Studies 5:2 (2007), 324–366), and “Subjects vs. Citizens: Impressment and Identity in the Anglo-American Atlantic” (Journal of the Early Republic 30:4 (2010), 557–586). Other worthy, if more general, perspectives can be found in Christopher Magra, “Anti-Impressment Riots and the Origins of the Age of Revolution” (International Review of Social History, 58:21 (2013), 131–151), and Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America” (The William and Mary Quarterly 27:1 (1970), 3–35). One key source of much of the tension that led to the violence was the Pyrrhic victory (for colonials, at least) at Louisbourg; a good overview of the conflict can be found in Douglas Edward Leach, “Brothers in Arms? Anglo-American Friction at Louisbourg, 1745–1746” (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 3:89 (1977), 36-54). For a contemporaneous British view of these troubles, from the perspectives of the future and then-current governors, see Thomas Hutchinson, The History of Massachusetts from the First Settlement Thereof in 1628 Until the Year 1750, vol. 2 (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1795), and Charles Henry Lincoln, ed., Correspondence of William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts and Military Commander in America, 1731–1760 (New York: Macmillan, 1912). A more general treatment of the conflicts inherent to American colonial cities is laid out in Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1955).

Aside from his Harvard thesis, which is lost to history, there is no better explication of the early thoughts of Samuel Adams than the piece he likely wrote under a pseudonym: Amicus Curiae, An Address to the Inhabitants of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New-England . . . (Boston, 1747). Rare issues of the Independent Advertiser newspaper are also essential for their insight into the mind of the young protorevolutionary. For comprehensive biographies of the man, few modern works have the scope and sheer amount of quoted material found in William Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1865). However, one current volume well worth seeking out is John Alexander, Samuel Adams: The Life of an American Revolutionary (Lanham, MD; Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), a straightforward look at Adams’s rise and the events that shaped his ideas of tyranny and rebellion. Also compelling is John Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1936), which establishes Adams as a radical figure in enflaming public opinion before the war, using tactics that were both underhanded and brilliant.

CHAPTER 9 REFERENCES:

CHAPTER 10: HOLY GROUND

Although Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is the sermon that attracts most of the literary and theoretical commentary about Jonathan Edwards, many religious scholars and modern evangelicals consider A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1746) to be his most important work. This analysis of the role of the human mind and emotions in spiritual conversion continues to influence Christian philosophy and writing more than 270 years after it was written. Another classic volume from the post-revival period is Edwards’s Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd (Boston: D. Henchman, 1749), which shows its author using the biography of another minister to find a new balance between the religion of mind and the commitment of the heart. Both this and Religious Affections should be considered the starting points for any study of Edwards, along with his various works on the earlier revivals, including Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England. Also relevant to this chapter is An Humble Inquiry into the Rules of the Word of God . . . (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1749), especially interesting for its catalog of rules designed to measure true conversions, which put into practice encouraged Edwards’s parishioners to relieve him of his duties as their pastor.

Supplemental works that offer useful perspectives on the reverend’s ministry during this time include Nathan Hatch, “The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution,” in Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, 4th edition, ed. by Stanley Katz et al. (New York: McGraw-Hill (1993), 581–604), as well as Mark Valeri, “The Economic Thought of Jonathan Edwards,” for Edwards’s frustrations over, and reaction to, economic conditions in New England; and Kenneth Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” an illustration of his shameful role as a slave owner and his assorted justifications for it. Other helpful background sources include Harry Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England; and Douglas Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England.

In contrast with Reverend Edwards, the “amiable heretic” Reverend Jonathan Mayhew has not attracted as much attention for his religious writing outside of Unitarian and other liberal circles in recent decades. However, his political sermons—of which there are several key examples—continue to draw interest from scholars. One of the most important is A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers: with Some Reflections on the Resistance Made to King Charles I (Boston: D. Fowle, 1750), the focus of

For worthy commentary and historic background on Mayhew’s incendiary sermons, see Bernard Bailyn, Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), as well as Chris Beneke, “The Critical Turn: Jonathan Mayhew, the British Empire, and the Idea of Resistance in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Boston,” which puts the reverend in the context of the tumultuous period of the mid-18th century and all its economic miseries and social disorder. Also see Joseph Tiedemann, “Presbyterianism and the American Revolution in the Middle Colonies,” for the Calvinist perspective on this era and the similar contentious reaction to it.

Biographies of Jonathan Mayhew from the 19th century are generally not helpful for understanding the minister, and offer little more than extended quotations from his work. Better are the contemporary sources such as J. Patrick Mullins, Father of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution, the latest biography that brings the evidence up to date; and the classic by Charles Akers, Called unto Liberty, and Clinton Rossiter’s “The Life and Mind of Jonathan Mayhew.”

The growing hostility of American colonists toward the Church of England is a subject known to scholars of prerevolutionary America but has figured in almost no popular renderings of that history. Nonetheless, understanding how anti-Anglican feeling expanded in the 1740s is critical to any study of the era. The key volume for this is still Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775, a comprehensive view of how native ideas on Anglicanism bred revolutionary sentiments. Other useful sources for the time include Henry Wilder Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel, from the Puritan Age of New England to the Present Day, vol. 2 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1896), with mention of the construction of, and resistance to, that important structure; and John Beach, A Calm and Dispassionate Vindication of the Professors of the Church of England . . . (Boston: J. Draper, 1749), which provided the high church’s defense of its expanding power, in an answer to Noah Hobart’s controversial Sermon Delivered at the Ordination of the Reverend Mr. Noah Welles, mentioned in

Other relevant secondary sources previously mentioned include Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution; Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America; and Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. Furthermore, Alan Heimert, in Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution, is particularly trenchant in writing about the intersection of evangelical radicalism and colonial stirrings of revolt, though he tends to unfairly dismiss the contributions of liberal ministers like Jonathan Mayhew in fostering revolutionary sentiments.

Finally, the scholarship on the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell is obviously voluminous, and will not be mentioned in detail here. The sources for the Puritan Revolution and the Lord Protector largely relate to their influence in America, both during the mid-17th century and in the century afterward. The best of these is Alfred Young, “English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism,” in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London: Humanities Press Intl., 1991), an essential article on a little-known subject, and partly drawn from his equally influential “Pope’s Day, Tar and Feathers, and Cornet Joyce, Jun.: From Ritual to Rebellion in Boston, 1745–1775” (Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History 27 (1973), 27–59). Another useful study on Pope’s Day, as a symbol of colonial ritual, is Francis Cogliano, “Deliverance from Luxury: Pope’s Day, Conflict and Consensus in Colonial Boston, 1745–1765” (Studies in Popular Culture 15:2 (1993), 15–28).

The Puritan commander did not attract uniform praise in the colonies, especially outside New England, and for a look on the complex reaction to his legacy, see Rock Brynner, “Cromwell’s Shadow over the Confederation: The Dread of Cyclical History in Revolutionary America” (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 3:106 (1994), 35–52). For a look at how New Englanders returned to the home country to fight in his forces, Harry Stout, “The Morphology of Remigration: New England University Men and Their Return to England, 1640–1660” (Journal of American Studies 10:2 (1976), 151–172), is the definitive study. Background information on Massachusetts and the social conditions that burnished the legend of the Lord Protector include Thomas Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts from the First Settlement Thereof in 1628, Until the Year 1750 (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1795), and Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People. For the second US president’s quotations on Cromwell’s long shadow, see John Adams, Diary, April 4–10, 1786, in Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, accessed at www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/diary.

CHAPTER 10 REFERENCES

CHAPTER 11: THE AWAKENERS

The life of Jonathan Edwards was well chronicled, by himself and others, and he left a detailed record of his thoughts and beliefs. Unlike evangelists like George Whitefield, whose actions and motivations have been subject to continued speculation, those of Edwards are solid and well known. The best modern biography, and most detailed, is George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2003), which offers a balanced and thoughtful perspective on his ministry. To delve into the theological implications of Edwards’s work, consult Perry Miller’s classic Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Morrow, 1949), though note that Miller’s technical examination of the minister’s theology is aimed more at scholars than general readers. An interesting alternative written by a primary source, is Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1765), with the author having studied under the Calvinist master. Hopkins also wrote useful volumes on Sarah Osborn and Susanna Anthony, covered in earlier chapters.

If the details of Edwards’s life are fairly well agreed upon, the import of his theology remains subject to debate. The reverend has been held up as an example of everything from early political liberalism and “Enlightenment” Calvinism to the rhetoric of religious terror and reactionary anti-intellectualism. An online search will deliver whatever version of Edwards you desire, but some of the better supplemental reading on the minister for this chapter includes Edwin Gaustad, “The Theological Effects of the Great Awakening in New England,” a well-reasoned look at the results of his and other ministers’ ideology of revival; Kenneth Minkema and Harry Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Anti-Slavery Debate, 1740–1865,” following the long-term results of his preaching on subjects of slavery and liberation; and Rachel Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2008), putting his missionary work in context with that of others on the colonial frontier. For capsule biographies of Edwards as well as Aaron Burr Sr. in their educational roles, see the Trustees of Princeton University, “The Presidents of Princeton University: Jonathan Edwards,” accessed at www.princeton.edu/pub/presidents/edwards/.

Ultimately the best approach to understand the great theologian is to read his work personally, without the filter of other interpreters. Most of it remains extant and can be found online or in divinity libraries. His key works mentioned in this chapter include Misrepresentations Corrected, and Truth Vindicated, a defense against those who attacked him at Northampton; The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1758), a good late example of his Calvinist traditionalism; A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of That Freedom of Will (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1754), a rejoinder to those who elevate human free will over God’s own powers; and The Harmony of the Old and New Testament, in Stephen R. C. Nichols, Jonathan Edwards’s Bible: The Relationship of the Old and New Testaments (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), a fragmentary analysis of his notes in preparation for what might have been a towering work of theology. An even bigger undertaking, The History of the Work of Redemption, only exists in pieces, but the best modern discussion of it can be found in William Scheick, “The Grand Design: Jonathan Edwards’ History of the Work of Redemption” (Eighteenth-Century Studies 8:3 (1975), 300–314)

Gilbert Tennent has attracted much less attention than Edwards, partly because of his glaring contradictions over the course of his life, and partly because his spiteful revival sermons remain distasteful to modern readers. The best overview of the Presbyterian stalwart is Milton Coalter Jr., Gilbert Tennent: Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies, supplemented by articles from Janet Fishburn, “Gilbert Tennent, Established Dissenter,” and Frederick Brink, “Gilbert Tennent, Dynamic Preacher.” The results of his ministry are also covered in the classic volumes by Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People; Charles Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies; and Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind. For a look at how his faith intersected with the politics of Anglicanism in the era, see Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775.

Some of Tennent’s writings continue to impress, though he’s not as fluid or accessible an author as Jonathan Edwards. For his defense of God’s mystery after the lightning strike that nearly killed him, see All Things Come Alike to All (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1745); for his attempt to reconcile the Presbyterian church, see Irenicum Ecclesiasticum, or a Humble Impartial Essay Upon the Peace of Jerusalem (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1749); and for a review of his revised theology later in his career, and his defense of his ornate church, see The Divine Government Over All Considered (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1752). His trip to Great Britain is covered in the biographical works mentioned above, though for the perspective of his traveling companion, see George William Pilcher, ed., The Reverend Samuel Davies Abroad, The Diary of a Journey to England and Scotland, 1753–55 (Urbana, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1967). Note that Davies also fueled the imagination and rhetoric of the young Patrick Henry (covered in the postscript to this book). Finally, a worthy investigation of how the united Presbyterian church encouraged rebellion in the colonies is laid out in Joseph S. Tiedemann, “Presbyterianism and the American Revolution in the Middle Colonies.”

Edmund Morgan’s Benjamin Franklin remains a favorite source for biographical data on the Founding Father, but for more detailed primary sources, see Leonard Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 6, April 1755–September 1756 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), among other worthy volumes in the series. For a closer examination of the backbiting atmosphere in which he practiced politics, consult W. Shirley and James Hutson, “Benjamin Franklin and Pennsylvania Politics, 1751-1755: A Reappraisal” (The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 93:3 (1969), 303-371); and Theodore Thayer, Pennsylvania Politics and the Growth of Democracy (Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1953). Further discussion of the tumultuous circumstances of poor government in the Middle Colonies can be found in Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. A transcript of Franklin’s interrogation in Parliament over colonists’ views of the Stamp Act is included in David Brion Davis and Steven Mintz, eds., The Boisterous Sea of Liberty: A Documentary History of America from Discovery through the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).

The friendship of Franklin and George Whitefield remains a puzzle to many scholars, and a source of speculation over how each may have affected the beliefs of the other, or not. The finest works that cover their relationship, from a variety of perspectives and in some detail, include Harry Stout, “George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin: Thoughts on a Peculiar Friendship”; David T. Morgan, “A Most Unlikely Friendship—Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield”; and Frank Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits and Piety: The Friendship of Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield.” Much of this information is similarly covered in Peter Charles Hoffer, When Benjamin Franklin Met the Reverend Whitefield: Enlightenment, Revival, and the Power of the Printed Word, which also offers extensive comments on the issues and controversies of the era.

George Whitefield attracted more attention in the 18th century than he did throughout most of the twentieth, but recent scholarship has shone more light on the most successful preacher of the New Birth. Among the better perspectives are those by Frank Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770; Thomas Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father; and The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America; and Harry Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism, each taking a particular thesis on the Grand Itinerant’s success and backing it up with considerable research and cogent argument. For a view of Whitefield’s troubled perspective and actions regarding slavery, see Jessica Parr, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of an American Icon, while a summary view of his ministry, and its revision over time, is offered by David Ceri Jones, “‘So Much Idolized by Some, and Railed At by Others’: Towards Understanding George Whitefield” (Wesley and Methodist Studies 5 (2013), 3–29).

Some older sources on Whitefield provide valuable information, especially since they include extensive quoted material not often included in the works of modern authors. The best of these is Luke Tyerman, The Life of the Reverend George Whitefield, vols. 1 and 2, which also lobs criticism at the Itinerant for his actions to legalize slavery and does not downplay the controversies of his era. By contrast, John Gillies, Memoirs of Reverend George Whitefield, is a mostly sanitized memoir of the preacher, though it does speak with a certain moral urgency and formed the basis for his legendary reputation.

Whitefield’s preaching in the Middle Colonies and New England in his later life was largely devoted to testaments to the New Birth and God’s grace, and typical examples are covered in earlier chapters. More distinctive to the time is the upswelling in his martial rhetoric, for which see A Short Address to Persons of All Denominations Occasioned by the Alarm of an Intended Invasion (London: W. Strahan, 1756), occasioned by the nationalism of the French and Indian War. Other relevant works can be found in the earlier cited Sermons on Important Subjects.

Lastly, the quoted poems and rhymes that either praise or lampoon Whitefield can be found in the following: the broadside “A Poem, on the Joyful News of the Rev. Mr. Whitefield’s Visit in Boston” (Boston: 1754), is accessible at the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.03501200; the doggerel “Friendly Advice for Dr. Squintum” is printed in Samuel Palmer, St. Pancras; Being Antiquarian, Topographical, and Biographical Memoranda (London: Samuel Palmer, 1870); and Phillis Wheatley’s ode to the Itinerant, “An Elegiac Poem on the Death of That Celebrated Divine . . .” is in The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, ed. Julian Mason Jr. (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1966; reprinted 1988).

CHAPTER 11 REFERENCES:

CHAPTER 12: THE NEW DIVINES

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, one of the few resources available to study Sarah Osborn was Samuel Hopkins’s Memoirs of the Life of Sarah Osborn. Though Hopkins’s work is compelling, it has its flaws: too much emphasis on her saintly piety, and not enough about her social struggles, as well as a dearth of information on controversies like her entanglements with Reverend Vinal and contention with critics in Newport. More comprehensive, and offering a wider perspective on the revivals she followed and led, is the excellent Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America by Catherine Brekus. A shorter treatment of the same subject, and also taking a modern view, is Charles Hambrick-Stowe, “The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714–1796),” (Church History, 61:4 (1992), 408–421). For more on the intimate relation of Osborn and her friend Susanna Anthony, see Familiar Letters Written by Mrs. Sarah Osborn and Miss Susanna Anthony, and for a primary-source biography of her, see The Life and Character of Miss Susanna Anthony.

For a glimpse at how Osborn encountered, and responded to, criticism for her activities, especially useful is Mary Beth Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times’: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine’ Activities, 1767” (Signs 2:2 (1976), 515–529). Norton also offers a perspective on the lives of colonial women in “The Evolution of White Women’s Experience in Early America.” The saga of Osborn’s relationship with the enslaved Phillis and her son Bobey is detailed in Caroline Wigginton, “Vexing Motherhood and Interracial Intimacy in Sarah Osborn’s Spiritual Diary,” (Early American Literature 47:1 (2012), 115–142).

Much valuable research on the slave population of colonial Newport has been uncovered in recent years by Keith and Theresa Stokes. Their website “God’s Little Acre: America’s Colonial African Cemetery” (www.colonialcemetery.com) provides interesting summaries of some of the figures buried there and their position as slaves in that difficult time. See the subpages for “Naming Traditions” (/names) and “Religion” (/religious-life) for research used in the current volume. Other material unearthed by the Stokeses is examined in Keith Stokes, “R.I.’s Former Slaves Achieved Great Things,” Providence Journal, December 19, 2017; and in Andy Smith, “Couple’s Burial Ground Research Details Life in Colonial Newport,” Providence Journal, Feb. 23, 2014. An earlier, more detailed analysis of the same subject is Ann and Dickran Tashjian, “The Afro-American Section of Newport, Rhode Island’s Common Burying Ground,” in Cemeteries and Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture, Richard E. Meyer, ed. (Logan, UT: Utah State Univ. Press, 1989).

Although significant data on the African Americans of early Newport has been lost, enough factual fragments have been pieced together to provide a coherent view of the slavery and oppression of the time. The socioeconomic foundation for the slave trade in town is laid out in John Michael Ray, “Newport’s Golden Age” (Negro History Bulletin 25:3 (1961), 51–57), while Sarah Deutsch, in “The Elusive Guineamen: Newport Slavers, 1735–1774” (The New England Quarterly, 55:2 (1982), 229–253), details the background and financial motivations of the slavers themselves.

Some of the above sources contain accounts of the lives of individual slaves and freedmen in Newport, and their struggles for abolition. More background on them can be found in Michael Barga, “African Union Society (Founded 1780),” VCU Libraries Social Welfare History Project, accessed at socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/religious/african-union-society/, and in the wide-ranging Christy Mikel Clark-Pujara, “Slavery, Emancipation and Black Freedom in Rhode Island, 1652–1842,” PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2009. The extraordinary life of Newport Gardner is discussed in J. Southern, The Black Perspective in Music, 4:2 (1976), 202–207.

Samuel Hopkins remains one of the most important religious figures of the Revolutionary era. The most insightful primary source is Stephen West, ed., Sketches of the Life of the Late Reverend Samuel Hopkins, D.D. (Hartford, Conn.: Hudson and Goodwin, 1803), which details the highlights of his pastoral career and his ongoing self-effacement in the face of obstacles. Less useful is Edwards Park, Memoir of the Life and Character of Samuel Hopkins, D.D., 2nd ed. (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1854), though it does contain some interesting excerpts from his work. For a more contemporary perspective, see Joseph Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008). An excellent insight into the New Divinity comes by way of Kenneth Minkema and Harry Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Anti-Slavery Debate, 1740–1865,” showing the growth of Edwards’s disciples in rejecting their leader’s allowance for slavery. Also see Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, for the relation of the New Divinity to other theological movements of the time.

Along with the testimony of African Americans, the alliance of Samuel Hopkins and Sarah Osborn became the driving force behind the movement of First Church toward abolition. A good overview of their bond is Sheryl Kujawa, “‘The Path of Duty Plain’: Samuel Hopkins, Sarah Osborn, and Revolutionary Newport” (Rhode Island History 58:3 (2000), 75–89), along with Catherine Brekus’s Sarah Osborn’s World cited earlier. For the view of Hopkins’s friend and rival, see Edmund Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795, and Stiles’s own installment sermon for Hopkins, A Discourse on Saving Knowledge, Delivered at the Instalment of the Reverend Samuel Hopkins, April 11, 1770 (Newport: Solomon Southwick, 1770).

Reverend Hopkins repeatedly offered jeremiads and denunciations of slavery which are illustrated in any number of contemporary sources, but the most important are those in which he implicates his listeners in the foul trade. A little-known but crucial document is in Jonathan Sassi, “‘This Whole Country Have Their Hands Full of Blood This Day’: Transcription and Introduction of an Antislavery Sermon Manuscript Attributed to the Reverend Samuel Hopkins” (Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 112:1 (2004): 29–92). A much more prominent treatise, and the sermon that made him famous as an early abolitionist, is A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans; Shewing It to Be the Duty and Interest of the American States to Emancipate All Their African Slaves (Norwich, CT: Judah Spooner, 1776)—still potent for its graphic imagery and unhesitating condemnation of human bondage.

CHAPTER 12 REFERENCES:

CHAPTER 13: THE BLACK REGIMENT

The revolutionary impulses of Separatist Baptists are one of the lesser-known aspects of the movement toward independence in British North America. However, though the evangelical revolt came late to the South, it had an even more lasting effect than it did in the North, and a more direct impact on the revolution. The best overview of this spiritual movement is in Rhys Isaac, “Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists’ Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765 to 1775,” still the essential study of how Separatism undermined Southern class hierarchies. Also valuable, though more general, is Ross Phares, Bible in Pocket, Gun in Hand: The Story of Frontier Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1964), and David Lovejoy, “‘Desperate Enthusiasm’; Early Signs of American Radicalism,” in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London: Humanities Press Intl., 1991). Lovejoy’s wider look at enthusiastic spiritual practices is Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution, still the definitive study. For a comprehensive view of how Separatism operated in the North, and especially on the frontier, see C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening. For the role of itinerant preaching in forcing social change, see Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World; and for how the mechanisms of revival translated into political restructuring in one colony, see Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765.

Previously cited books that provide further context to the revolutionary impact of the revivalists and their former foes include Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People; Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America; Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America; and Harry Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. The seminal volume by Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution, is a great resource for showing how New Light rhetoric fed the desire for revolt.

Andrew Croswell’s actions as a Boston preacher after the revival are little known, partially because of his status as an outcast, and partially because he doesn’t fit comfortably into standard narratives. Still, he was prescient in his social gospel and commanded a small legion of followers. Some of his history is laid out in Robert Cray, Jr., “James Davenport’s Post-Bonfire Ministry, 1743–1757,” which also covers Croswell; and the best current study, Leigh Eric Schmidt, “‘A Second and Glorious Reformation’: The New Light Extremism of Andrew Croswell.” For a glimpse of how Croswell denounced his enemies at midcentury such as Jonathan Mayhew, see his Preface to Abraham Taylor, The Insufficience of Natural Religion (Boston: J. Draper, 1755) or any of his sermons of the era.

Jonathan Mayhew was widely known throughout the North in the years before the Revolutionary War and a few decades afterward, though his name has since fallen into obscurity among the wider public. A few biographers have tried to rectify this, among them Charles Akers, in Called unto Liberty, and J. Patrick Mullins, in Father of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution, as well as Clinton Rossiter’s article, “The Life and Mind of Jonathan Mayhew.” The biographies of Mayhew from the era are either hagiographies or document collections, so they aren’t terribly useful. More valuable are the works of the preacher himself, including A Sermon Preached in the Audience of His Excellency William Shirley, Esq. (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1754), known as the 1754 election sermon, which heightened his reputation as a threat to the Crown; and A Discourse on Rev. XV 3rd, 4th, Occasion by the Earthquakes in November 1755 (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1755), in which he channeled Whitefield in threatening God’s punishment by seismic revenge. A more sedate sermon, and eulogy, is his Discourse Occasioned by the Death of King George II (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1761), which includes his high, unrealized hopes for his son as monarch.

The complex and convoluted saga of colonial episcopacy cannot be fully laid out in the current book, but for those with an interest in the long-forgotten controversy, see the definitive study, Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775. A shorter look at the same subject is Joseph Henry Allen, “The Ecclesiastical Situation in New England Prior to the American Revolution” (67–77), in Papers of the American Society of Church History (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), which also refers to the writings of East Apthorp. Mayhew’s response to Apthorp and harsh judgment of Anglican missionaries is revealed in his Observations on the Charter and Conduct of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1763).

Unfortunately, one of Mayhew’s most important sermons, just before the second round of Stamp Act riots, is lost to history. Historians have pieced together some of what he said to his congregation from a variety of sources. These include his Letter to Thomas Hutchinson, August 27, 1765, in “Second Stamp Act Riots,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, accessed at https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/2532#chsect1701, and his Letter to Richard Clarke, September 3, 1765, in the New-England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 46 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1892). Thomas Hutchinson’s feelings on the matter are discussed in his History of Massachusetts from the First Settlement Thereof in 1628 Until the Year 1750, vol. 3, while the best study of the whole affair is Howard Lubert, “Jonathan Mayhew: Conservative Revolutionary” (History of Political Thought 32:4 (2011), 589–616).

The larger scope of revolutionary activity in Boston is familiar to generations of American history students; for Samuel Adams’ unique role during the era, see the biographies by John Alexander, Samuel Adams: The Life of an American Revolutionary, which depicts him as a powerful force against injustice, and John Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda, which sees him as a clever manipulator. A broader view of the tumultuous and violent spirit of the times can be found in Gary Nash, “The Transformation of Urban Politics, 1700–1764,” in Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, 4th edition, ed. by Stanley Katz, et al. (New York: McGraw-Hill (1993), 523–552), and the same author’s The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. Another worthy perspective on how feelings of revolt affected colonial life is in Bruce Tucker, “The Reinvention of New England, 1691–1770” (New England Quarterly 59:3 (1986), 315–340), and the groundbreaking study The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, by Bernard Bailyn. Edmund Morgan also provides an excellent overview of how the Calvinists of the past affected those of the 1770s in “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution” (William and Mary Quarterly 24:1 (1967), 3–43).

Charles Chauncy remains a lodestar for the formation of the liberal religious tradition in New England, for both Universalism (which adheres to many of his views) and Unitarianism (which takes them quite a bit further). For a deeper look at his theology, see Edward Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705–1787, and Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America. His sermons and writings also serve to show just how radical “Old Brick” had become by the time of revolution. For his innovative theology, created at mid-century but not revealed until after the war, see his critical works Salvation for All Men (Boston: T. and J. Fleet, 1782); The Benevolence of the Deity, Fairly and Impartially Considered (Boston: Powars and Willis, 1784); and his magnum opus, The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations, Made Manifest by the Gospel Revelation (London: Charles Dilly, 1784). All became foundational documents for New England liberalism.

Chauncy’s scathing attacks on British policies and the events of the day are evident in just about any major sermon he preached in the years before the war. He was particularly enflamed over the progress of Anglican episcopacy and missionary efforts, and a series of sermons and tracts show his bitter judgments: The Appeal to the Public Answered, in Behalf of the Non-Episcopal churches in America (Boston: Kneeland and Adams, 1768); A Compleat View of Episcopacy, as Exhibited from the Fathers of the Christian Church (Boston: D. Kneeland, 1771); and Letter to a Friend, Containing Remarks on Certain Passages in a Sermon . . . (London: S. Bladon, 1768). Perhaps the most potent piece appeared after the Boston Massacre, for which Chauncy reserved some of his strongest rhetoric, Trust in God, The Duty of a People in a Day of Trouble (Boston: D. Kneeland, 1770).

John Adams was one of the keenest of the founders in analyzing the role of religion and politics in colonial America, and several of his writings are mentioned in the chapter. For his understanding of religious enthusiasm, see “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, vol. 3 (Boston: Little and Brown, 1851). For his laudatory view of Jonathan Mayhew and the revolutionary impulses of the era, see the Letter to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818 (National Archives, Founders Online, accessed at founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6854); and the Letter to the Inhabitants of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, February 6, 1775 (National Archives, Founders Online, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-02-02-0072-0004). His wife’s witness to a sermon by Charles Chauncy can be found in her Letter to John Adams, August 14, 1776, in Charles Francis Adams, Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams, During the Revolution (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1875).

CHAPTER 13 REFERENCES:

“Barefaced attempts to manipulate the electorate resulted in the passage of laws”—Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee, 268–269.

“One observer asked ‘how ridiculous is the sight and sound’ of clergymen”—Nash, “Transformation,” 543.

“the poor and working classes became energized in the pews”—ibid., 544.

“many drifted toward New Light evangelism, and still others embraced Separatist Baptism”—Goen, Revivalism and Separatism, 202–203.

“the Separatist Baptists worshipped in two and a half times more churches”—Ahlstrom, Religious History, 293.

“They conquered the frontier and built meetinghouses”—Goen, Revivalism and Separatism, 298–299.

“By the 1760s the Separatist Baptists had perfected a system for seeding the countryside”—Hall, Contested Boundaries, 123–124.

“especially in Virginia, where they battled mobs and hostile authorities”—Kidd, Great Awakening, 246–248.

“the Anglican gentry, who charged them with being ‘ignorant enthusiasts’”—Hall, Contested Boundaries, 125–126.

“Black and Indian preachers, too, served as deacons and exhorters”—Kidd, Great Awakening, 250.

“everything from extensive feet-washing and laying on of hands to ‘kisses of charity’”—Bonomi, Under the Cope, 184.

“some roaring on the ground, some wringing their hands, some in ecstasies”—Phares, Bible in Pocket, 80.

“it appealed to rural Christians who had little interest in formal sermonizing”—Isaac, “Evangelical Revolt,” 354.

“the radical Baptists demanded the Church of England be disestablished over the colonies”—Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 257–259.

“Some pastors saw the conflicts with royal officials through the lens of apocalyptic Millenarianism”—Lovejoy, “Desperate Enthusiasm,” 221.

“I believe it will be found universally true, that no great enterprise for the honor”—J. Adams, “Dissertation,” 452.

“champion a radical, experiential faith . . . defiantly outside the religious mainstream”—Cray, “Post-Bonfire Ministry,” 69.

“He had few allies in town, and regularly heard ‘the ministers are all against you,’”—Schmidt, “New Light Extremism,” 242.

“his attacks on the liberalism of colleges like Harvard”—ibid., 241.

“had since tied his own theology to the rationalism of Isaac Newton and Enlightenment philosophers”—Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 114–115.

“Christ acted as a mediator between humans and God, and was his subordinate”—ibid., 116–118.

“daring attempts to confute and ridicule the doctrines once delivered to the saints”—Croswell, Preface to Insufficience.

“divine right of monarchy [and] . . . the despotic, unlimited power of kings”—Mayhew, Sermon Preached to William Shirley, 4.

“loyalty and slavery mean the same thing. . . . to prepare us for the dutiful reception”—ibid., 20–21.

“Do I see Christianity banished for Popery! The Bible, for the Mass book!”—ibid., 37–38.

“these sermons would stand as the apotheosis of revolutionary preaching in New England”—Stout, New England Soul, 242.

“a nation where infidelity, irreligion, corruption and venality, and almost every kind of vice”—Mayhew, Discourse on Earthquakes, 66.

“dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and IDOLATERS”—ibid., 47.

“he became stricken with smallpox and survived, then faced painful kidney stones”—Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 105.

“He grieved the loss of his father and sometimes mentor Experience Mayhew”—ibid., 111.

“lamented the demise of one of the good ones in his Discourse Occasioned by the Death of King George II”—Mullins, Father of Liberty, 92–93.

“confirm the apprehensions which I have all along had concerning the [king]”—ibid., 155.

“he overheard a rumor of Governor Francis Bernard accepting a small bribe from a petitioner”—ibid., 97, 103–106.

“dagger aimed at the heart of Puritan tradition in America’”—Akers, Called unto Liberty, 181.

“he saw a great opportunity to proselytize to Indians who lived there”—Griffin, Old Brick, 132.

“equating New England nonconformity not only with superstition”—Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 255.

“narrow, censorious and bitter spirit that prevails in too many of the Episcopalians among us”—Mayhew, Observations, 155.

“recalled how ‘furious episcopal zealots’ had done the same thing in the previous century”—ibid., 157.

“this blind bigot is for setting up an Inquisition against the religion of the nation”—Mullins, Father of Liberty, 133; Akers, Called unto Liberty, 185, 190.

“a most foul-mouthed bespatterer of our church and our missionaries in print”—Akers, Called unto Liberty, 177.

“rope of sand; there is no union, no authority among us; we cannot even summon a convention”—Griffin, Old Brick, 132.

“they would act tactfully and respect the native traditions and faiths of the king’s subjects”—Mullins, Father of Liberty, 140.

“high churchmen compared his work to ‘the devil’s thunderbolt’”—ibid.

“won for himself a transatlantic reputation as the champion of British Nonconformity”—Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, 242.

“Mayhew’s controversies ‘spread an universal alarm against the authority of Parliament’”—J. Adams, Letter to Hezekiah Niles.

“By the summer boycotts against British-made products became widespread”—Morgan, “Puritan Ethic,” 8.

“turmoil erupted when a mob of Bostonians hung effigies of the colony’s stamp collector”—Nash, Urban Crucible, 293–294.

“but did use passages from the Bible to tell his congregation that in any nation”—Mullins, Father of Liberty, 160.

“slaves are bound to labor for the pleasure and profit of others”—ibid., 161; Lubert, “Conservative Revolutionary,” 599–600.

“For colonists to be stripped of their rights by the imperial overlords or distant legislature”—Akers, Called unto Liberty, 203–204.

“This time the angry masses broke into the homes of several royal officials and ransacked them”—Nash, Urban Crucible, 294.

“The lieutenant governor was inside dining with his family when the mob approached”—Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts, 124; Alexander, Samuel Adams, 32.

“elite bankers and royal officials, who called them a ‘herd of fools, tools and sycophants’”—Nash, Urban Crucible, 297.

“he was excited to [violence] by this sermon, and that he thought he was doing God service”—Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts, 123.

“one of the most seditious sermons ever delivered, advising the people to stand up”—Mullins, Father of Liberty, 164–165.

“I had rather lose my hand, than be an encourager of such outrages”—Akers, Called Unto Liberty, 206.

“He warned against ‘abusing liberty to licentiousness’”—ibid.

“[I]f his zeal, at any time, betrayed him into too great a severity of expression”—ibid., 221.

“he was a shining example for his brethren in the ministry to follow”—ibid., 222.

“a Whig of the first magnitude, a clergyman equaled by very few of any denomination in piety”—J. Adams, Letter to the Inhabitants.

“to draw the character of Mayhew would be to transcribe a dozen Volumes”—J. Adams, Letter to Hezekiah Niles.

“Adams would later claim that there were five critical figures who drove America toward revolution”—Rossiter, “Life and Mind,” 531.

“many in the British government saw him as nothing less than ‘the most dangerous man in America’”—Nash, Urban Crucible, 352.

“many of his artisan and shipyard worker allies in the Sons of Liberty had rioted in recent months”—Miller, Pioneer in Propaganda, 52.

“he was hardly their puppet master, and was careful not to call for outright violence”—Alexander, Samuel Adams, 34.

“the Loyal Nine, a group of upper-middle-class merchants”—Miller, Pioneer in Propaganda, 52–53.

“the religion and public liberty of a people are so intimately connected”—Heimert, American Mind, 359.

“He aimed his message at the commoners of Boston, lauding their struggle for liberty”—Nash, Urban Crucible, 361.

“mankind is governed more by their feelings than by reason”—Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm, 225–226.

“Americans from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs invested the age-old Puritans”—Morgan, “Puritan Ethic,” 7.

“there is no truth, no mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land”—Tucker, “Reinvention,” 338.

“scarcely a patriot club was without a divine who lent an odor of sanctity”—Miller, Pioneer in Propaganda, 37.

“RIGHTS that had been dearly paid for by a vast expense of blood, treasure and labor”—Griffin, Old Brick, 140.

“That fine preacher, called a teacher / Of Old Brick Church the First”—ibid., 141.

“He exalted ‘the power and wisdom of the infinitely benevolent Creator’”—Chauncy, Benevolence, 203.

“who the author of this controversial tract was, along with Chauncy’s code word for it: ‘the pudding’”—Wright, Unitarianism, 191.

“all of life and part of life after death is a process of trial and discipline”—ibid., 195.

“an occasion of pride, haughtiness, tampering with princes, and advising and helping forward”—Chauncy, Letter to a Friend, 21.

“reminding readers of the growing threat to their liberties”—Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, 308.

“scuffles between Boston rope makers and the occupying British army led to crowds hurling taunts”—Alexander, Samuel Adams, 104–106.

“Figures at the highest levels of the British government blamed Sam Adams for the Boston Massacre”—Miller, Pioneer in Propaganda, 186.

“Sam Adams, however, tried the soldiers in the Boston Gazette under the name ‘Vindex,’”—ibid., 188–189.

“if I was to be one of the jury upon [a soldier’s] trial, I would bring him in guilty”—Griffin, Old Brick, 146.

“the streaming blood of many slaughtered, and wounded innocents”—Chauncy, Trust in God, 35.

“God would not suffer the town and land to lie under the defilement of blood!”—ibid., 36.

“advise, persuade, propagandize, comment on the times, and lend the influence of his position”—Griffin, Old Brick, 151.

“an increasing number of Americans who no longer saw themselves as colonists”—ibid., 152.

“Adams excerpted the most controversial parts and had them read before the Massachusetts assembly”—Miller, Pioneer in Propaganda, 280–281.

“rebels realized it immediately, calling it ‘parliamentary despotism’”—ibid., 284.

“on December 16, 1773, some sixty or more Bostonians dressed as Indians clambered aboard ships”—Alexander, Samuel Adams, 162, 170–174.

“calling itself the Solemn League and Covenant after a Puritan alliance”—ibid., 175.

“to frustrate the designs of those who would rule [Americans] with a rod of iron”—Griffin, Old Brick, 174–175.

“The Continental Congress arranged for the nonimportation and nonconsumption”—ibid., 158.

“Chauncy concluded the reading and ‘lifted his eyes and hands to heaven’”—Abigail Adams, in Familiar Letters, 212.

“The crowd answered him,—‘Amen’”—Griffin, Old Brick, 164.

POSTSCRIPT: NOTES ON LIBERTY AND DEATH

“Henry saw Davies as ‘the greatest orator he ever heard’”—Charles Cohen, “The ‘Liberty or Death’ Speech: A Note on Religion and Revolutionary Rhetoric” (The William and Mary Quarterly 38:4 (1981), 712).

“There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations”—William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: James Webster, 1817), 123.

“With its effective mixing of Revolutionary and biblical themes, the ‘Liberty or Death’ speech”—Cohen, “The ‘Liberty or Death’ Speech,” 709.

“None of Henry’s revolutionary orations survive in print”—David McCants, “The Authenticity of William Wirt’s Version of Patrick Henry’s ‘Liberty or Death’ Speech” (The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 87:4 (1979), 389).

“Wirt relied heavily on the recollections of a lawyer named St. George Tucker”—ibid., 395–96, 398.

“Masonry was ‘at war with the fundamental principles of the social compact’”—William Wirt, Letter to the Convention of the Anti-Masonry Party, September 28, 1831.

“called him everything from a ‘roaring demagogue’ to a ‘pocket-sized Paul Bunyan’ to ‘a frontier bully’”—Michael Fellman, “The Earthbound Eagle: Andrew Jackson and the American Pantheon” (American Studies 12:2 (1971), 69).

“he broke treaties protecting Native American land rights and oversaw ‘the forced relocation’”—Alfred Cave, “Abuse of Power: Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1830” (The Historian 65:6 (2003), 1331–1332).

“It hit its peak from the 1820s to the 1840s and spread widely across the country”—Michael Barkun, “The Awakening-Cycle Controversy” (Sociological Analysis 46:4 (1985), 431–432).

“others called it ‘an expansion of religious feeling unknown in American history’”—Donald Mathews, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis” (American Quarterly 21:1 (1969), 23).

“Professional organizers and formal literature helped drive conversions”—ibid., 26, 37, 43.

“He even dismissed hoary Calvinism with his book on free will, Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts”—James Bratt, “The Reorientation of American Protestantism, 1835–1845” (Church History 67:1 (1998), 58–59).

“‘chaos as the birthpangs of a new and perfect era’ in predicting the end of the world”—Barkun, “The Awakening-Cycle Controversy,” 441.

“the Presbyterian church once again split over the practices of revivalism”—Bratt, “The Reorientation of American Protestantism,” 67.

“the flames and smoke surged amongst the burning buildings, like ocean waves”—John Hight, History of the Fifty-Eighth Regiment of Indiana Volunteer Infantry (Princeton, N.J.: Clarion Press, 1895), 411.

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