Five The Creature in the Egg
Doubt plagued Sarah Wheaten. She considered herself a moral and upright woman, with an open heart and a searching soul, but still she couldn’t allay her troubles. She longed for happiness and prayed for relief from her suffering, but she found little solace. She had accepted God’s grace in her early twenties and had converted to Christ in a beautiful moment of transcendence, but her woes had only magnified since then, along with her doubts. “I knew I was a dreadful backslider, and had dealt treacherously with God,” she wrote. She remained in a constant tumult, “some times revived, and sometimes sunk, and dejected.”
Living in Newport, Rhode Island, and only twenty-six years old in 1740, Sarah had already endured a lifetime’s worth of pain. Rheumatism made her hands ache terribly, she suffered from chronic headaches and fatigue, and she sometimes found it difficult to walk or even see. Doctors had prescribed everything from liquid mercury to “corrosive plasters,” but those had not cured her. She endured bouts of vomiting and diarrhea and high fevers, which sometimes worsened with her medical treatment. And to this was added the pain of widowhood. She had married a sailor at seventeen, but he died soon after, and she now had to care for herself and her eight-year-old son.
She worked as a schoolteacher and housekeeper, but the money was always meager, never enough to survive, and too often she found herself indigent and dependent on public charity. The contrast between her life and those of her fellow citizens was stark. All around her were the fruits of Newport’s commercial economy: a busy harbor, prosperous merchants, and prodigious wealth built on the shipbuilding industry and the transatlantic slave trade. Although some women became clerks and shopkeepers, and others sold dry goods and craftwork, Sarah’s health made her unfit for most of these occupations, and what work she had was often exhausting.
Teaching school, keeping house, and raising a son might seem like a trial even for an able-bodied woman, yet Sarah did so despite her physical infirmities—and even managed to write, prolifically. She expressed her joy and fear and sorrow and hope on page after page of letters and notes and even a memoir she planned to write about her challenging existence. She described her simple pleasures of playing cards with friends, singing popular songs, and attending dances, while also revealing the ruinous state of her health and manifold fears for the future—and the way she understood the majesty of God.
In tolerant Rhode Island, she could worship at any Christian church she desired. But she chose to be a Congregationalist because her parents had raised her in the church and because this faith spoke to her. How else could she explain her life? What would otherwise account for the trials she had endured but her inherent sinning and her soul’s perilous state? Calvinism provided the answer as no other theology could.
She knew friends who had been raised as Quakers, who worshipped in a great meetinghouse in the city. They rejected the idea of original sin and felt the essence of the divine within as an “inner light,” and women could speak in their meetings. Her church elders told her such notions were heresy: the apostle Paul demanded that women be silent in the churches, and they would stand accused of “enthusiasm” should they act otherwise. Sarah did not dispute the point. Thus, while she had much to say, she confined her exultation of God to the written, not the spoken, word.
Such was her condition when George Whitefield came to Newport in September.
As she wrote, “God in mercy sent his dear servant Whitefield here, which in some measure stirred me up.” The Itinerant brought his signature style of preaching laced with hope and joy and drama, and for a few months his memory enlivened her spirit. But by the winter it began to sink again—and that’s when Gilbert Tennent arrived.
Unlike the wondrous drama Whitefield presented, Gilbert did not come to uplift or entertain his congregants. He came to shock them into submission. He delivered his sermons with blunt and angry words and rough, numbing cadences, his voice hectoring his listeners and mocking their claims to piety. As he saw it, they lived in hatred of God, and their devotions were false and corrupt. Their only hope was to confess their sins and plead for God’s mercy, and pray that he would bestow it upon them. Otherwise they would spend eternity in the fiery furnace.
This message shocked Sarah and crushed her spirit. Perhaps this traveling minister was right, that her assorted miseries were just punishment for her crimes, her sins against God that she didn’t even realize she had committed. “I questioned the truth of all I had experienced, and feared I had never yet passed through the pangs of the New Birth, or ever had one spark of grace.”
Even though she had been reborn, she could not get away from the idea that her life had been one of defiance, not acceptance, of the Lord. Her spiritual mentor Reverend Nathaniel Clap—whom Whitefield had called “a good old Puritan”—had told her of her condition before God: “My sins, from my cradle, were ranked in order before my eyes, and they appeared dreadful. I saw the depravity of my nature; and how I was exposed to the infinite justice of an angry God.” Gilbert Tennent reinforced her chronic sense of dread, and she could not abide it.
Thoughts of being a backslider and a hypocrite plagued her for months. By the time Gilbert returned to Newport at the end of winter, to preach the terrors twenty-one times in town, her fears began to overwhelm her. This time, he decried such menaces as “singing songs, dancing, and foolish jesting,” with special scorn reserved for the “dancing Christian,” who had no cause to be reveling when life was so short and miserable.
How many of these additional sins was she guilty of? How much incalculable damage to her soul had she done without fully understanding it? She did not know and could only respond to Gilbert’s preaching with a new commitment to her faith: She resolved not to engage in any frivolous pursuits, and to redouble her commitment to spiritual purity. For a time this resolution sufficed, but still the menacing thoughts of hell and sin and damnation returned. Finally, in “very dark and melancholy circumstances,” she wrote to the reverend and pleaded for help.
Gilbert wrote back presently. “I like your experiences well. They seem to me to be scriptural and encouraging,” he wrote. For it was only natural to be distressed about sinning and it showed her commitment to holiness. Ultimately, the covenant God made with those reborn in him would not be broken, for “though they have played the harlot with many lovers; yet they may return to their first husband. Though God may hide his face for a little moment, yet with everlasting loving kindness will he return.” She found solace in his words, and release at last from some of her lingering doubts. Gilbert had whipped her into a state of terror, but he also gave her just enough comfort to suggest that a kind and just God would eventually save her.
Eventually. But for the moment, the pain continued. Her brother soon died from an unexpected illness, and her teaching began to falter. “After this my business failed, and I found I could not keep my room where I lived; and which way to turn, I knew not.” Now homeless and destitute, Sarah stood at the precipice of survival. But her cosmic fears had at least abated, and she “was persuaded God would point out some way for me.”
Sarah wasn’t alone in her suffering. An economic slump in New England had entered its third decade, with currency values plummeting and the cost of living rising ever higher. The price of wheat reached an all-time high—putting it out of reach as a food staple for many—and the real price in sterling of everything from butter and molasses to shoes, clothing, and firewood had doubled or tripled. Sailors, artisans, and laborers who had once competed for jobs now found themselves suited “only for the lower life.” If they ended up in penury, they might be put to labor in a workhouse or, as in Boston, ejected from the city entirely. Despite this, growing numbers of paupers filled the streets and gave the city an air of destitution.
Native New Englanders worried over the waves of Scots-Irish and Germans arriving in America, many of them desperate for work and, the natives feared, looking to displace them from their jobs. Meanwhile, epidemics of diphtheria and malaria raged, and the death rate recently exceeded the birth rate in Boston. Grimmer news came from abroad in the War of Jenkins’ Ear, as British armies fell in defeat to the Spanish at Cartagena, and most of the 3,500 men recruited from Massachusetts to fight for the Crown did not return.
The waves of bad news allowed fear and anxiety to spike in many towns, as parish preachers issued dire warnings of the end times, and an apocalyptic tone crept into their sermons. The economy, the war, the poverty, the decline in moral values—it all suggested divine punishment for their transgressions. And as time passed without relief, soon many started to believe the great New England experiment, and God’s wondrous covenant with his people, would collapse in utter failure, and hardship and wickedness would achieve brutal success.
These were the conditions that Sarah Wheaten and other New Englanders faced as they witnessed Gilbert Tennent on his revival tour in the hard winter of 1741.
Persuaded to travel to the region by George Whitefield, Gilbert’s itinerary was nothing less than heroic. He spent three months traveling from major cities like Boston to small outposts on the frontier. Often unable to go by horseback through the fearsome weather, he trudged through snow and ice—even in snowshoes—to get from one isolated village to another. With just a small entourage, including the young revivalist Daniel Rogers, he arrived at dissenting meetinghouses with little advance notice, much less the glowing newspaper reviews and testaments Whitefield had received. The nuances of the established Congregational Church eluded him as much as the snowbound geography. Still, despite the weather and his unfamiliarity with the region, in the frigid temperatures his preaching of terrors burned hot.
While Whitefield had primed New Englanders well for the New Birth, nothing prepared them for Gilbert’s oratory. Over dozens of sermons, he spread his incendiary message over the northern colonies and left them reeling. Like Sarah, many who witnessed Gilbert on the stump were left spellbound, shocked, or shaken by his galvanic message.
He often began his discourse by insulting the piety of his congregants. He mocked them for pretending to be so devout, when he knew their hearts were dirty and corrupt. “You needn’t boast of your dead hypocritical faith; you’ll surely go to the Devil with it, if you get no better.” He praised their Puritan ancestors, who had “the simplicity and power of the religion of Christ,” and wondered why they—as modern enterprising people with so many advantages and luxuries—should fail in their duty before God. Their predecessors had made a covenant with the Lord and built a godly civilization out of heathen wilderness! And yet they had defiled it with their greed and rationalism and fashionable sense of ethics.
He called out the “Grandees” who acted as if material success guaranteed their place in heaven, but he claimed that this was really a sign of God’s anger, not his favor. He said “their prosperity lifts them up, and makes them condemn God” and quoted scripture to devastating effect: “Are ye rich? Cursed are ye in the city and in the field. . . . Whatever conceit you have of your wit or wealth, you are nevertheless wretched, poor, blind, miserable and naked.”
Like Whitefield and Edwards, Gilbert brought a sharp economic edge to his preaching and condemned the notion that having a fancy estate, or worthy genealogy, or high social status had anything to do with securing God’s favor. “What will your good parentage avail you, unless you walk in the steps of their simplicity, faith and holiness, but to aggravate your everlasting pains?” Without a confession of sin and rebirth in Christ, his listeners were doomed to roast in hell for eternity. He asked them: Could they summon the strength to admit they had allowed Satan to rule over their lives with perfidy and wickedness? Would they accept God’s grace, and admit the full weight of their sins and transform their souls?
Gilbert’s questions dissected the heart of New England. Daniel Rogers called one of his orations “the most awful awakening sermon I think I ever heard,” which he meant as high praise. Many parishioners felt the same or greater agony of body and spirit they had upon hearing Whitefield’s preaching—and expressed it with wailing and moaning, or conversely with laughter and joy.
From Benjamin Colman to Thomas Foxcroft, prominent Reformist ministers gave hearty approval to Gilbert’s preaching, and his words found special appeal at Yale, where more than half the student body were said to convert after hearing his message. As word traveled of his successes, the crowds grew larger and hundreds more people became convinced of the perilous condition of their souls. One man spoke for many in calling himself “a self-righteous, self-ruined wretch . . . who deserved hell.” He loved that Gilbert promised him rebirth.
Common pastors prospered by his ministry. One reported that, after his visit, he saw more converts in a week than he had in a career’s worth of preaching. Among those who discovered the power of the Holy Ghost were “boys and girls, young men and women, Indians and Negroes, heads of families and aged persons” and almost anyone else who wanted to save their souls and be at peace with God instead of living under threat of his terrifying wrath.
But just as the praise and success for Gilbert’s New England tour became widespread, the antipathy it aroused became more vocal. One of Whitefield’s foes, Boston commissary Timothy Cutler, led the way by calling Gilbert “a monster! Impudent and noisy, and told them all they were damned, damned, damned! This charmed them! And in the dreadfullest winter that I ever saw, people wallowed in the snow night and day for the benefit of his beastly brayings, and many ended their days under these fatigues.” As if being accused of causing suicides were not enough, Gilbert was attacked for unleashing mass hysteria and shattering clerical norms—his itinerant preaching violating parish boundaries, his oratory wild and uncontrolled, and his appearance without wig and robes offending custom and decency. Opponents of the revival spoke of him in ever more caustic language, claiming he provoked “animal convulsions” that would incite the lower orders of society, and they only increased their venom when his sermons met with greater success.
After Gilbert’s tour, his groundbreaking Danger of an Unconverted Ministry sermon appeared in print for the first time in New England (a year after its Philadelphia printing). This intensified the momentum of his revival and provided a template for new evangelists to follow. In print his words in the pulpit echoed all the more powerfully, with sharp attacks on pastors who were “stone-blind and stone-dead” to the gospel truth. His solution: Evangelical churches would have to replace colleges like Harvard and Yale for training a new, more passionate kind of minister who possessed “plain evidences of experimental religion.”
In the weeks and months that followed, 150 New England towns including Boston became swept up in his revival, with observers noticing outbreaks of piety in the streets and fervent worship in the pews. Many opponents of the revival lost their grip on long-held congregations, and laypeople demanded that converted men should minister to them, instead of the sinfully unredeemed preachers he had condemned. Power struggles erupted over the control of parishes, and frequently the congregants won, securing the leadership of more committed, zealous men to guide their souls. And when they didn’t succeed, many worshippers defiantly formed their own churches, which started to divide friends and neighbors into warring camps, and “spelled doom for the Congregational monopoly in New England.” The opposing sides took up names that expressed their cloven identity: the New Lights, the champions of Christian revival, versus the Old Lights, the protectors of order and tradition. And just as Whitefield had called Gilbert “a burning and shining light,” now the preaching of the two men in just six months had sparked thousands more hot and radiant souls to follow their lead.
How thankful Gilbert was to Whitefield for the opportunity to go north! He wrote to him in England expressing his gratitude, exulting over the shock his ministry had caused, as “[m]ultitudes were awakened, and several had received great consolation.” It was a massive social and spiritual upheaval, and in many respects Gilbert’s greatest moment as a preacher. Yet it ended all too quickly, because soon after his tour finished, he returned to the Middle Colonies to find the Presbyterian establishment in revolt against him.
The cause was one Alexander Craighead. He was a Presbyterian of the New Side who sermonized at the Middle Octorara Church in frontier Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, where he was said to be “the first clergyman who preached west of the Susquehanna [River].” His parishioners knew him as a fiery proponent of the New Birth, someone who could provoke weeping in his audience and lead souls toward salvation with his fury. Yet he could also be strangely gentle. Craighead had joined Whitefield’s entourage on his recent tour, and as they traveled to different small towns, “they made the woods ring, most sweetly singing and praising God.”
The zeal of Craighead was unmatched, and when he felt pastors of neighboring congregations didn’t preach with enough of it, he invaded their parishes to provide his own. He called out any parishioners he judged to be sinners and refused to baptize the infants of unconverted parents. His actions not only divided his own church into competing factions, they got him in trouble with the Donegal Presbytery that oversaw his ministry. In short order they referred him to trial and asked him to account for his actions. But Craighead would have none of it.
He cheerfully turned the proceeding into a circus. Even as the Old Sides who ran the presbytery adjudicated his case, Craighead held court outside the church in something he called a “tent”—really a wooden structure he had erected for his orations. There, throngs of listeners heard him declaim against his enemies on the court, accusing them by name of whoremongering, drinking excessively, lying, and breaking the Sabbath. He whipped his listeners up into such a frenzy that when the trial began, the courtroom burst into chaos, with Craighead spouting bile against the judges and the audience screaming and interrupting them “in the most scurrilous and opprobrious terms.” The judges now accused Craighead of slander and incitement and suspended him from his ministry. Undeterred, he repaired to his “tent” and mounted his defenses with new attacks against his foes. This spurred his followers to interrupt subsequent meetings of the presbytery and to castigate the men who ruled it as drunks and blasphemers. The mayhem then spread throughout the area with the New and Old Siders calling each other “dead drones,” “blackguard ruffians” and charlatans, liars, and heretics, among other choice insults.
The case attracted notoriety throughout the Presbyterian Church, and the Old Side planned to use it as a cudgel to force the revivalists into full conformance with their doctrine. The Synod had already struck a blow the year before by reducing the status of men educated by the Log College to second-class ministers—they could preach the word of Christ, but not be full members of the Synod—thus keeping control firmly in the hands of the establishment.
When the Synod met again in late May 1741, its leaders planned to finish the work of bringing the revivalists into line. The establishment pastors claimed to be “wounded and grieved at our very hearts, at the dreadful divisions, distractions, and convulsions, which all of a sudden have seized this infant church to such a degree.” They blamed this condition on their rivals, and put forth a document called a protestation that laid out all of their flaws in detail, with special censure for Gilbert Tennent and his allies like Craighead.
In order to protect the integrity of the church, they demanded the revivalists desist in their actions. They charged Gilbert’s own presbytery with violations of church law in the examination of ministerial candidates and transgressions of doctrine, rules, and order. In short, “the doctrines of the New Side men were heretical, their government anarchical, and their revival spurious.”
Gilbert and the New Side were shocked, as the Old Siders not only condemned their practices, they threatened to expel them and their sympathizers from the Synod entirely. And in a sudden, narrow vote, that is what they did. They pronounced them “guilty of schism” and cast out Gilbert, the members of his presbytery, and the other proponents of the New Birth from the “true Presbyterian Church”—and they did so without a formal proceeding, without a proper trial, and without any warning.
The public galleries erupted in outrage. Some expected bad results from the meeting, but no one expected this. The Old Side had taken a controversial, possibly illegal action by ejecting their brethren from the church, and they had succeeded. And now the revivalists had no standing with official Presbyterianism and no communion with their former church members. It was an act of “supreme disorder,” and the first major schism of a church in the colonies, though it would be far from the last.
Yet Gilbert remained undaunted. He quickly organized two new, independent presbyteries—his own at New Brunswick and a new one for Londonderry—that took in the cast-off ministers and tried to rebuild a new church in the face of their defeat. This included his father William Sr. and his brothers Charles and William Jr., as well as their controversial ally John Rowland, trailblazing evangelist Samuel Blair, and even Alexander Craighead, the spark for all the trouble. It was a misfit bunch upon which to build a new sect, but the men vowed to adhere to core tenets of Presbyterianism and mounted a public defense of their actions. And many of them took to the road.
Forcing their expulsion was the worst move the Old Side could have made. Whereas in earlier years, the revivalists were at least nominally bound to respect the parish boundaries of established preachers, now the rules were moot. Ejected from the church and barred from taking communion, men such as Rowland and Blair and the Tennents descended upon the countryside. They freely invaded the precincts of traditional ministers and made overt appeals to their congregants to cast off their corrupt authority.
They claimed such ministers were unredeemed, unbelieving, unrepentant wretches in the eyes of God. They warned their parishioners that following such pastors might lead them into hell, too. And they worked to pry these worshippers loose with the promise of salvation. The emotional appeal had a stirring effect.
Many of the Presbyterians they targeted did turn against their pastors, forcing them out of the pulpit or harassing them until they gave in to their demands to accept the New Birth. Others facing more resistance jettisoned their parish entirely and went over to a new revival meetinghouse in their area. All of this broadened the appeal of the schismatic ministers and gave the rogue congregants a sense of their own power. For they now enjoyed greater participation in church policy, more authority in judging the spiritual state of their ministers, and more excitement in the mass assemblies and dramatic sermons that Whitefield and the Tennents had pioneered.
The revivalists also surged into regions where no ministers had been ordained or where there were vacant pulpits, and they began to preach there to people who desperately wanted it. They occupied the New Building in Philadelphia, which had been erected so Whitefield could orate to thousands indoors, and turned it into the greatest advertisement for the New Birth in the Middle Colonies. Flocks of young men brought energy and zeal and ferocity to their roles as revival pastors, ardent in their defense of Calvinism and uncompromising in their contempt for their rivals.
They engaged in pamphlet wars in the press and dueling missives in newspapers with their foes, praising the beauty of being reborn in Christ and dismissing the wicked old “Pharisees” who opposed them. They spread their passion into new provinces and pushed the boundaries of Presbyterianism into regions where it had never gone. And they constantly made sure that, throughout the Middle Colonies at least, no one could remain neutral in this battle over faith and devotion. You were either on the side of the angels or the devils, and every good Christian had to choose.
Some observers decried the new, often menacing, state of affairs, riven with “turbulence, shattered and divided congregations, and a rash of slanderous reports against Old Side clergymen.” They remembered how the church had been, at one time, a force for unity. Just twenty years earlier few of these divisions were apparent; the church had developed into one of the major intellectual and spiritual forces of British North America. But now, even before it could reach fruition, it had been undermined—the saboteurs either upholding or defying tradition, depending on one’s perspective. And with this tumult rising in what had been one of the most traditional and hierarchical of all faiths, it could only be a portent of things to come for others.
By 1742, repeated attempts to heal the breach in the church failed, and with the division now looking permanent, the warring sides became more vehement in their denunciations of each other. The Old Side issued dictums on proper behavior and dogma, leveling threats at those who might stray from the doctrine. By contrast, New Side revivalists found their power in mass appeal, an ecumenical approach that allowed them to spread their gospel to whomever might embrace it, regardless of race, sex, occupation, or station in life.
The traditionalists now saw an even greater danger from their foes—not only in the church, but in society at large. They condemned the “wild rabble” who congregated for the revivals, and lampooned their writhing, screaming, blubbering, convulsing masses as subjects for both low comedy and high tragedy. In their view, Satan laughed with delight at such frenzies, which could only encourage blasphemy and depravity. And almost as bad, such “social leveling” threatened to collapse the hierarchy upon which colonial society was built, where the best men in business, law, state, and religion held sway over the rest of the populace, and everyone accepted this as part of God’s natural plan.
But who were the best men now that so many in this new church were women, or Indians from the frontier, or black slaves held in bondage, or indentured white servants, or humble children or hungry laborers or paupers or vagabonds? They all testified to the spirit of the Lord at revival meetings and became the lifeblood of this new Presbyterian church. Such forces only strengthened when itinerant preachers brought their message to areas where it had never been and converted fresh waves of men and women who had been ignored by established churches, and caught these “multitudes in the gospel net” of the New Birth.
So a frightening specter faced the ministers of the Old Side. Their enemies had driven masses of parishioners toward the revival, giving them the power of judgment over their spiritual mentors and upending the rule of church law. The revivalists filled their converts with “contempt of their betters” and pitted “husbands against wives, children against parents, servants against masters.” A sense of dread took hold, as the old powers grew despondent over the new divisions and the rise of common people who had no business determining the proper course of worship. One minister lamented this “exceeding difficult gloomy time” and mocked how “Every low-bred, illiterate person can resolve cases of conscience, and settle the most difficult points of divinity better than the most learned divines.”
With the rising, muscular power of the New Side, Gilbert Tennent reached the moment when victory over his nemeses now seemed palpable. It should have given him cause for satisfaction, or at least tempted him with the sin of pride. But instead he felt fear creeping into his heart—not because of his opponents in the church, but because of his friends.
The revival movement he had started began to slip out of his control. He realized it immediately and questioned his own judgment, when not every minister allied with him proved to be reliable—or even stable—in his conduct. Alexander Craighead, perennial source of trouble, caused even more of it by demanding that the New Side adopt the Solemn League and Covenant, a bid to increase the sectarian power of Presbyterianism at the expense of other faiths. Gilbert worried that would repel potential allies and mix clerical and civic authority to a dangerous degree. Craighead didn’t appreciate his argument, withdrew his church from the reformed presbyteries, and formed an “independent Covenanters movement,” creating a schism within a schism. He also spread bile about Gilbert and his allies and proclaimed himself as the true leader of the new Presbyterian church.
More headaches arrived in the form of Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf, who led the Moravian denomination and, like Craighead, encouraged New Side parishioners to leave their pastors and worship under him as their bishop. More bizarrely, he claimed sin could be expiated by “the body’s fermentation in the grave,” and that Jesus paid ransom to the devil in a sort of cosmic blackmail, and he flirted with antinomianism—the idea that true faith allowed God’s elect to behave however they liked on earth. Outraged at such heresy, Gilbert lambasted him and his beliefs in print, but Zinzendorf paid him little heed. He preached to growing crowds in Philadelphia and even maintained a strong ally in George Whitefield. To Gilbert’s dismay, the Itinerant wrote to him, “Jesus Christ fights for the Moravian brethren,” and refused to denounce the German evangelist no matter what sort of heresy he proclaimed.
There were worse problems to come. One of the revivalists’ greatest allies, John Cross—whose congregation in Basking Ridge had been the scene of a frenetic all-night revival with Whitefield and other preachers—now stood accused of terrible and infamous acts. He was said to have seduced a young virgin who was a parishioner in his church, informing her she had to become a “notorious sinner” before she could be redeemed. “Whereupon the holy man, in the fear of the Lord, deflowered her, and for some time repeated the practice, until he had, by pregnancy, put her in the way to receive the Lord Jesus Christ.” Cross fled before the case could be heard in court and became a fugitive from justice. It was a shocking embarrassment for the New Side, whose leaders could only condemn Cross now that the wayward preacher had vanished.
From New York and Connecticut, Gilbert also heard disturbing reports of James Davenport’s latest actions: That his denunciation of unconverted ministers by name had become especially vehement. That his preaching had reached new levels of intensity, and potentially madness. And that he commanded a legion of unhinged followers who disrupted public order and made a clamor in the streets. Thus a man who had once been a bosom friend to the New Side, marked by a sense of holiness, now seemed to be blossoming into a demagogue.
Gilbert read these reports with concern, which the Old Side seized upon as evidence of the degeneracy of those they had expelled from the Synod. He duly defended his movement from their accusations. Such men as Craighead and Cross and Davenport were surely to be expected in a growing, passionate Christian revival, as outhers if nothing else. As long as the authority of converted ministers remained sacrosanct, and as long as those ministers trained in a proper school like the Log College or perhaps Yale, the cohesion and serenity of the church would persist.
Then Gilbert discovered that he himself had unleashed the greatest turmoil of all.
Gilbert’s effect on New England had not ceased when he returned to the Middle Colonies. If anything, his fiery preaching and powerful orations had only strengthened his audience’s commitment to the New Birth and gave rise to the New Lights who favored it. But the memory of his ministry had also emboldened men and women to challenge clerical authorities, rules, and customs in ways he could not have expected, and certainly didn’t approve of.
Inspired by the gospel of Gilbert Tennent, a rash of lay exhorters—common people driven by the Holy Spirit—crossed the countryside as itinerants, proclaiming the power of the new gospel and declaring themselves to be its finest examples. They burst into church services without permission and challenged anyone to stop them. In some meetinghouses they popped up and occupied the deacon’s seat, while in others they stood among the congregation, blasting their scorn at anyone they felt deserved it. Their behavior could get outrageous: “Frequently these ‘guests’ interrupted the proceedings to preach terrifying sermons, which set the listeners into ‘hideous shrieks and outcries,’ to shout charges of unconversion against the local pastor, and to urge the congregation to separate from him.” They demanded men of the cloth become outwardly charismatic, passionate, and spellbinding—and if they did not, they denounced them as Pharisees.
This perverted Gilbert’s message and made a mockery of his sermons! He could not understand why any sane Christian would take his principled stand against an unconverted ministry and transform it into such despicable behavior. It was freelance theology, mayhem in the meetinghouses, and he could not allow it. These lay exhorters had no proper training, no good cause, no reason whatsoever to interrupt the ordered praise of God. Although some of the reports he read had been overblown by his enemies, he had no choice but to write an impassioned critique assuming many of them to be true.
To the moderate revivalists of New England, whose commitment to the revival now seemed to waver, Gilbert wrote that his mission had been worthy, and he had never intended to cause anarchy in the churches. He said that proper revivals were necessary, but “for ignorant young converts to take upon them authoritatively to instruct and exhort publicly tends to introduce the greatest errors and the grossest anarchy and confusion.” He also implored good Christians to “rise up and crush the enthusiastic creature in the egg.”
He placated most of these ministers with his words, but his real targets weren’t listening. They were too busy roaming across the countryside, spreading what they thought was his gospel, whether he wanted them to or not. They were common men and women, redeemed and transformed, lucid and visionary, fierce and burning. And among them was Andrew Croswell.
Only thirty-two years old, Croswell’s origins were humble, and there was nothing unusual about his background that suggested he might become a radical evangelizer. As an aspirant to the clergy, he adhered to all the tenets of Congregationalism that were standard to eastern Connecticut. He had managed to gain entrance to Harvard to study divinity, yet unlike most of his peers there, he struggled to pay for it. He graduated while still in his teens and received a degree that would prepare him to become a minister, after which he was ordained in a parish in Groton, and became its pastor after the previous one decamped for the Anglican Church. (Croswell later denounced him as unconverted.)
His first acquaintance with the New Birth came in the mid-1730s, when Jonathan Edwards’s great wave of Christian revival washed over Connecticut and swept him up in it. He admitted and renounced his sins, gave his heart to Christ, and promised to be faithful in his mission and recommit to spreading the gospel. Though his new faith was ardent, his Calvinist views were still relatively moderate and his profile obscure, at least until George Whitefield came to America.
The Itinerant brought great excitement to the world of Andrew Croswell, who not only enjoyed the great drama of his preaching, he came to appreciate how many adversaries there were in his own church. He experimented with denouncing them, in the way of his hero, and courted controversy with leading clerics for his remarks. He managed to offend academics at Harvard and Yale by amplifying Whitefield’s attacks on them, calling out their presidents and instructors as champions of heresy and “enemies to the work of God.” He encouraged students to ignore their teachers, demanded parents pull their children out of school and instruct them privately, and told anyone who cared to listen that an education aboard a British warship was better than that of a New England college. More than anything, though, Croswell really made his name when he read about Alexander Garden’s attack on Whitefield and responded by calling him a vile “meritmonger.”
His defense of the Itinerant gained him favor among the evangelists of the New Birth. It also lured the hair-trigger commissary into a war of words in print, as Garden vented his spleen against Croswell almost as much as he had against Whitefield. He compared him to a “zealous lady” overcome with the Holy Spirit moving within her, and chastised him for being foolish and delusional. He maligned the evangelical movement as “a harvest indeed for Romish missionaries!” and charged him with being in league with the pope—an absurd accusation trotted out with no evidence.
Having such a foe as Garden became a victory of sorts for Croswell. It enlarged his profile and emboldened him to denounce the corruption of the state church of Britain, which he increasingly saw as a nemesis to all Americans. He then extended his criticism to anyone who questioned the legitimacy of the New Lights, charging those critics with favoring good works over true faith and making an unholy alliance with the Church of England and, indeed, the Church of Rome.
Then James Davenport came to town.
Croswell was stunned to witness the fire of Davenport’s ministry. Over a little more than a week, the brash evangelizer converted thirty-eight people in great displays of ecstasy. He writhed and convulsed in the pulpit—he shouted bold words to his congregants—he made them erupt in full. They felt the Holy Ghost coursing through them, breaking them down, rebuilding their souls, and lifting them up to sit beside the Lord in electric phantasmic visions. Croswell stood among them, impressed by the sway Davenport had over his listeners, for not only did they explode with joy in the meetinghouse, they carried their enthusiasm into the streets, where they sang hosannas to God and let everyone know they had been touched by the miracle of God’s grace. Croswell wrote, “my former objections against singing were presently sung away.”
Gilbert Tennent, of course, did not approve of such behavior, but radicals like Davenport increasingly cared little for what the Presbyterian minister thought. Such men took his attacks on unconverted ministers and magnified them, calling out the wicked souls in high pulpits and denouncing them by name in front of their own parishioners. After observing Davenport in action, Croswell came to embrace this idea, too. He took to the road as an itinerant to condemn unconverted pastors and lead their followers to the New Birth.
He soon became one of Davenport’s firmest allies, working with him on plans to convert many more people in New England and even directing him to savage the enemies of God in Boston—“the great city Nineveh.” He encouraged his followers to interrogate unredeemed ministers in their own churches and worked at “breeding up exhorters” to carry out the Lord’s work. This made him notorious among settled parishes, where a visit from Croswell was seen as anything but a blessing and might be an invitation to anarchy. He set the template for such behavior at Plymouth.
He was only supposed to give a sacramental sermon for communion, but instead he decided to jar the parishioners with attacks on their character. In an especially incendiary sermon, he said, “I doubt not, but if you were to die tonight, three-quarters of you would be damned to Hell.” He told them that he had once been unregenerate, that most of his followers were unregenerate, and—now shouting—that the church’s leaders were unregenerate! He said, “a man may live in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless, and yet go to Hell at last.” Then he pointed his finger at the church elders and community leaders seated across from him, and eviscerated them as “old, grey-headed sinners.”
The congregation reacted with surprise and confusion. As one observer saw, “the fervors and frenzies of this teacher had answerable effects on the audience; where you might observe a general foaming or fainting, laughing or crying.” Some in the crowd stood up to preach themselves hoarse, testifying to the glories of Christ. Parents bellowed from the pulpit, as their children preached from stools. When the spiritual exultation could no longer be contained in the room, the congregants burst out into the street, singing and laughing and shouting, “everyone delivering the yell he was particularly inspired with, joined with all the mad gestures and actions that frantics show, the Reverend Mr. Croswell leading the van.”
The next day, none of Croswell’s furious energy had left him. He spoke to assembled crowds in the street that “God hates every one of you, as he does the devils and damned spirits in Hell, and to one degree worse, inasmuch as they have never sinned against redeeming love and grace as you have.” The crowds couldn’t get enough of it.
Some of them followed Croswell to Charlestown, Massachusetts, his birthplace, where they saw an even more frenzied performance, as the evangelist spoke for consecutive nights, his passion never seeming to flag. This time he not only tore into unconverted ministers, he condemned the abusive treatment of prisoners and the horrors of slavery—a denunciation that few established ministers were willing to risk. The rotten edifice of the church and the corrupt society around it should be razed, Croswell demanded, and restitution made with the Lord for such sinful depravity.
In one church, he darted from pew to pew, scampering up to the high galleries, proclaiming the coming kingdom of God, then tearing out of the building and leading his audience into the streets with ecstatic singing and cries of salvation. On some occasions, Croswell repeated his performance with the added touch of stripping off his shirt, to preach salvation in his trousers.
This obviously went well beyond anything Whitefield or Gilbert Tennent had ever imagined. The church authorities didn’t know what to do with Croswell. Some moderate revivalists claimed this behavior would lead to infamy, with such frightening zeal and uproar fit only for the devil. Another critic mockingly praised him for imbibing the Holy Spirit “by the quart or tankard” with a voice like a trumpet or conch shell; now he had become “a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls, when you wailed and howled, and were stripped, though not quite naked.” Outraged by such activity, the Old Lights called men like Croswell “wandering stars” and “red-hot comets” who spread chaos wherever they went.
Yet the critics also feared something else that went along with Croswell. Amid his masses of lay exhorters were black parishioners standing and shouting amid their white counterparts. There were women—some of them poor and destitute—exalting the glory of the Lord just as the men in wigs and robes did. And there were children, too, some barely old enough to raise their voice, but trying valiantly anyway, telling everyone who could hear them how God had reached down and brought beauty and power to their little lives.
Such social and racial mixing was anathema to the traditionalists, who mocked the evangelists for provoking it. Yet even their lampoons could not account for the rampant social leveling that had broken out with such powerful effect. The masses in all their ragged and untamed emotion, in all their heady spirits and unlearned ways, had become the firmest allies of the New Lights. With their visions and prophecies, their outbursts and exhortations, they were changing the face of the revival, seizing it from the men of the cloth without mercy or permission.
George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, and most of the original preachers of the New Birth did not see it coming. But Andrew Croswell did, and by the time March 1742 was finished, he and James Davenport had transformed the redemption movement into a social uprising. By their radical force, the power of the Holy Spirit overwhelmed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who experienced it. It charged them with energy, melted their hearts, and turned them into bold new enthusiastic Christians. And for a brief time, it even became too much for Croswell, who spent the end of winter in bed after preaching himself sick. For the moment, the glorious revolution of the spirit would have to go on without him.