Six Animal Spirits
By 1742, Americans were bracing themselves against the rising tumult of a social and religious upheaval. Their anxieties had risen with the ministry of men like Gilbert Tennent and Andrew Croswell and worsened as economic desperation and poverty began to crack the veneer of polite society. Evangelical ministers and their lay exhorters freely invaded their enemies’ parishes, while their foes responded with ever-greater anger and derision from the pulpit and in print.
This marked a dramatic change in the religious landscape. Just a few years before, members of a community would grow up and be baptized in the church of their parents, a local pastor would guide them in their parish, and they and their neighbors would share the same faith and help each other during times of crisis. Now those social bonds had been destroyed, and Christian churches stood under siege from both New Birth insurgents and the vehement defenders of the old dogma. Ideas of redemption, the promise of salvation, and faith itself now came into question: What doctrines should believers accept? How should they pray and behave? How could they expiate their sins? Which side should they choose, and would they suffer in the afterlife if they picked the wrong one? No one knew the right answers because no one knew the mind of God. Even pretending to know how he felt was itself a kind of sin. This lack of answers provided fuel for more anxieties.
In Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin featured the drama throughout the pages of his Pennsylvania Gazette, as he continued to profit from the zeal of the warring sides. Two years before, he had written that “the alteration in the face of religion here is altogether surprising,” and that change had only become more severe in the time since.
The dividends from his bet on George Whitefield continued to multiply. His printing house now sold volumes on the life of Whitefield to explain and illuminate his ministry; sermons and journals to let devotees know how he preached and what he thought; descriptions of his orphan house and charity work to assure readers of his philanthropy; letters and pamphlets that belittled his old enemies and made controversial new ones; and a full range of paraphernalia like Whitefield portraits and mezzotints to go with a “great variety of Bibles, Testaments, Psalters, spelling books, primers, hornbooks, and other sorts of stationary [sic] ware.” Franklin even published attacks on Whitefield like The Querists, and Whitefield’s response to them. Indeed, whenever a dispute arose about the Grand Itinerant, Franklin made sure his readers knew about it, breaking the latest news on the conflict even though the preacher had sailed away more than a year before.
One third of everything he printed in the early 1740s concerned the evangelical revival. Along with the stories on Whitefield, Franklin highlighted the Presbyterian schism: the Old Side’s attacks on the New Side, the New Side’s defenses and its counterattacks, and vice versa, month after month. He printed a Querists III pamphlet attacking Gilbert Tennent and the Protestation that caused the expulsion of the New Side in the Synod. Then he printed Gilbert’s response to the Protestation and his sermons touching on the subject and asked him to comment on Querists III. Gilbert passed on the offer because the pamphlet was “stuffed with satire and burlesque.”
Franklin’s promotion of the New Birth gave him an unquestioned advantage over Andrew Bradford. In 1741 alone he published forty-six books and pamphlets on the revival, whereas Bradford only printed ten. As postmaster, Franklin had the opportunity to put his publications in the hands of more colonists, and to give his rival a long-awaited comeuppance—payback for earlier years when Bradford had been postmaster and refused to allow his mail carriers to deliver the Gazette.
Franklin was clever with his return gambit. Instead of refusing to distribute Bradford’s American Weekly Mercury, he offered to carry it for free, with the understanding that his rival would have to settle his account later with a deputy postmaster. This scenario promised to make Bradford dependent on Franklin for distribution, which he could revoke on a whim if necessary. This fed Bradford’s anger. Soon, a furious battle over the tactics and schemes of both men inked the pages of the Mercury and the Gazette, with each man (or his flacks) calling the other a schemer and a liar, and accusing him of transgressing the “rules of honor and the laws of humanity,” among other things. Ultimately, the dust-up did little to prevent Bradford’s decline. He had placed too little stock in covering the revival, and when he did, it was often from the point of view of the establishment.
Privately, Franklin’s views were darker, and colored with pessimism. While he had allowed the pages of the Gazette to be filled with news of the Calvinist crusaders who were transforming the soul of the colonies, the revival began to vex him. What he originally saw as a long-overdue resurgence of morality and ethics had turned into a strange battle over clerical hierarchy and purity, with the threat of turmoil always looming. The clerics in conflict had brazenly violated six of his thirteen key virtues—silence, order, justice, moderation, tranquility, humility—and their lack of restraint alienated him further.
In the 1742 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack, he published a jaunty rhyme that described well his views of the current state of religion and the world:
Among the divines there has been much debate,
Concerning the world in its ancient estate;
Some say ’twas once good, but now is grown bad,
Some say ’tis reformed of the faults it once had:
I say, ’tis the best world, this that we now live in,
Either to lend, or to spend, or to give in;
But to borrow, to beg, or to get a man’s own,
It is the worst world that ever was known.
Franklin refused to fall into the trap of choosing a side in the conflict over faith. His own handcrafted religion had worked well for him—with his emphasis on Christian ethics stripped of the supernatural—and he resisted any efforts to change his mind. Although Whitefield continued to try to steer him toward orthodoxy in his letters from Britain, Franklin had little interest in returning to the fold. He recalled how, in his younger days in Boston, he had ceased going to services on Sunday, and became skeptical of organized religion, and instead embraced teachings that would later be labeled “Deist.” Regardless of what it was called, Franklin’s philosophy held good works, upright behavior, and ethical conduct to be paramount—and though it was not one of his official virtues, he would make public charity the guiding principle of his life.
It troubled him that few of these things seemed to matter in the warfare that had erupted between the sects. While divines argued who would run the churches and control their worshippers, public attention to virtue and morality had gone lacking. Franklin saw how Anglicans and Presbyterians and other hierarchical denominations “served principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another.” Indeed, the spiritual combatants undercut the very Christian ethics they claimed to uphold. And this made him cynical to claims of holiness by the reborn, especially if they behaved abominably in pursuit of salvation. As he wrote, “morality or virtue is the end, faith only a means to obtain that end; and if the end be obtained, it is no matter by what means.”
He knew he was an outher in America for this stance. He had seen it all too clearly in the mid-1730s, during a time when Jonathan Edwards’s Northampton revival was fully enflamed and the passion for piety burned hot. During this time, he came into conflict with the Synod over its accusations of heresy against the rationalist minister Samuel Hemphill, whose gospel of moral virtue influenced his own. He wrote that the pastor “delivered with a good voice, and apparently extempore, most excellent discourses. . . . I became one of his constant hearers, his sermons pleasing me, as they had little of the dogmatical kind, but inculcated strongly the practice of virtue, or what in the religious style are called good works.”
But such a seemingly innocent ideology brought condemnation, since it deviated from orthodoxy as the Synod saw it, which made Hemphill “unqualified for any future exercise of his ministry within our bounds.” The reverend also faced accusations of plagiarism for lifting words out of others’ sermons, and of heterodoxy for “teaching of a religion based on the law of nature”—minimizing the role of justification by faith and divine revelation.
Such charges prompted Franklin to battle the Synod in the press. Not only did he defend Hemphill with vigor, both by name and anonymously, he called out such ministers as Robert Cross of Jamaica, Long Island, for persecuting him. (Cross would later help expel the New Side from the Synod.) It galled Franklin to see how those censorious zealots had hounded the poor fellow, interrogated him, and accused him so unfairly. Such an exercise of power only validated his feelings about the cruelty and excesses of dogma, and the way good men with sensible beliefs could be torn down by imperious institutions. It prompted him to write, “a virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.”
He composed other tracts and did whatever he could to plead Hemphill’s case in the press and to redeem his name from the blackened words the old-guard ministers had applied to it. In the end, though, Franklin’s invective did little to help the minister’s case, and he may have even hampered it. When it was clear the Synod would excommunicate Hemphill, Franklin composed a scabrous bit of doggerel about the clerical “authors” who composed the reverend’s demise:
Asses are grave and dull Animals,
Our Authors are grave and dull Animals; therefore
Our Authors are grave, dull, or if you will, Rev. Asses.
Ironically, seven years later, Franklin profited by many of those same asses. After the failure of his Hemphill campaign, he had learned to keep his opinions about religious revivals to himself, and to distance his emotions from the charged feelings on both sides. He remained friends with many of the men who despised each other, and even became a trustee in charge of the New Building, since he belonged to no sect and was respected for his neutrality in overseeing the hall for itinerant preachers. Yet while he was nonsectarian, he was not indifferent to all religion. The sect in the Middle Colonies that most appealed to him was the Society of Friends.
Many of Franklin’s closest friends were Quakers, and he found much to admire in their frugality, tolerance, and practicality. While he was not a subscriber to their doctrine of the “inner light,” he did approve of their moderate behavior, sensible ethics, and attention to good works. And with many of the leading Quakers controlling politics and government in the colony, Franklin found it useful to be allied with them, at least for now. However, though the Quakers came closer than any other sect did to his own philosophy, he could not embrace them fully. For they believed in the God within, and Franklin believed in a god . . . very far away.
His ideology allowed little room for a personal savior delivering him peace and comfort. He could not find succor, as the revivalists did, with religion of the heart, the transformation that lifted the reborn Christian up to a place of redemption. He did not feel, as Whitefield did, that God took an interest in his salvation or any of his personal affairs. He could only see the deity as a great designer and overseer of the universe, and a master craftsman of moral values. He might reward virtue and punish sin in the afterlife, but he would never reveal the true workings of the cosmos. And beseeching him for salvation or waiting for him to bestow his grace seemed like a fool’s errand.
Franklin found it difficult to accept that such a divine figure could ever be actively involved in his life. His doubts about the presence of God in human affairs had only grown since his younger days, as he questioned not only the truth of the stories of the Bible, but basic Christian theology. The Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the miracle stories—they all seemed so hard to accept. As Franklin aged, and the wars over belief enflamed around him, his doubts only strengthened.
Later in his life he wrote to Whitefield, dismissing the idea that God had much of any sway over human doings: “though the general government of the universe is well administered, our particular little affairs are perhaps below notice, and left to take the chance of human prudence or imprudence.” In a different letter, he saw religion mainly as a tool to control human wickedness, for a great “proportion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women . . . If men are so wicked as we now see them with religion, what would they be if without it?”
This level of doubt made Franklin an odd figure to be promoting a spiritual revival. While his newspaper was filled with stories of rebirth, his feelings about the church grew ever hollower, his cynicism ever deeper. He could only watch in silence as dissenting sects tore themselves apart, each faction accusing the other of reveling in sin and being in league with Satan. While their congregants hungered for assurance their souls would be delivered in the afterlife, many of their ministers preached terrors to them, mocked their ethics, and condemned them to hell, as if they held the keys to salvation instead of God. And all around them, even the secular news they read seemed to echo the bleak outlook of the direst Calvinists. Franklin printed the following stories during the era:
• In the winter the failure of the local currency exchange caused economic panic and led some merchants to refuse to accept orders until they could be paid in sterling. Bread riots broke out as Philadelphians couldn’t buy the staple, with a mob smashing shop windows and raising havoc throughout the city. Order was only restored when the authorities forced the mob to relent.
• In May a biblical-style plague of “black worms or caterpillars” emerged from the earth to consume corn crops and ruin farmers’ harvests, upon which their livelihoods depended. The fields soon became riddled with the insects, as “where no worms have been seen on one day, there have been millions the next.”
• During an October election, a crowd of up to eighty sailors attacked magistrates and constables and chased people out of the voting sites. Armed with clubs, they beat and killed several people in the frenzy, in which “the confusion and terror was inexpressible.” A group of angry townsfolk counterattacked and chased the sailors back to their ships, where they dragged them out one by one, throwing almost fifty of them into prison.
In this atmosphere, as division and hostility surged amid economic uncertainty and violence, one minister seemed to perfectly echo his times. The reputation of Jonathan Edwards reached its pinnacle.
Reverend Edwards was of two minds. He had become an ardent champion of the revival, but he also felt dismay at the economic and social conditions around him. The New Birth might prepare people’s hearts for Christ, but it had done very little to make them more charitable or aid the poor. Many of his congregants lived with penury and desperation, and he looked to assign blame for their miseries.
Long before other revivalists attacked the cruelties of market society, Edwards saw wickedness hiding under its pious veneer. He noted how rich men trampled on the dignity of those below them, and repeatedly denounced the practice of theft—not only simple larceny and fraud, but the abuse of creditors by wealthy debtors, and the exorbitant pricing of goods by greedy merchants. He knew that commoners lusted after money just like the rich, and the economy had become ever more injurious to the poor even as the elite prospered by it. With the Crown forcing the retirement of Massachusetts’s inflated currency in 1741, and no replacement for it in sight, Edwards saw the crisis throwing people into debt and creating “national calamities” that fed injustice and “threatens us with ruin.” He would later remark that “God oftentimes gives those men that he hates great outward prosperity.”
Looking across the Atlantic, Edwards saw another source of great sin: the mother country of Britain. Holding no affection for the colonial power, he saw little good coming from its shores. Its merchants and tradesmen stripped and exploited the riches of the New World to make worldly goods, then sold those goods back to Americans at high prices. Their ultimate goal: to make the unlucky colonists more like Britons: acquisitive, selfish, materialistic, and indifferent to God.
Britain’s most popular recent export continued to be George Whitefield. His sermons and musings sold in great quantities, but Edwards cast a wary eye on his rendition of the gospel. As he had already told his congregation, the power of itinerant preachers could be ephemeral or even damaging, with the threat that such men might present themselves as God and lead their followers toward damnation. However, it could not be denied that Whitefield had reignited the revival and gave it new life and color. Edwards felt some resentment at the effect he achieved: his theatrics, his impromptu passions, his lugubrious melodrama. And he resolved to do better.
Edwards had been invited to preach a sermon in Enfield, Connecticut, to a particularly hard-nosed congregation that rejected the New Birth. He prepared a text that he had already offered to his own parishioners in Northampton. But he continued to hone it, reasoning that he could incite a response more powerful than anything the theatrical preachers like Whitefield had achieved. He would show that clear logic, thoughtful argumentation, and cogent rhetoric could summon deep emotions and achieve lasting results, a far better outcome than merely entertaining a crowd with bombast and spectacle.
He knew his listeners in Enfield, and indeed throughout New England, needed such a lesson in the consequences of sin—they reveled in it, and took pride in their selfishness. So he aimed to convince them of the error of their ways by employing a rhythmic structure that repeated and reinforced his points, almost akin to literature. He would draw on scholarly research that showed how Newtonian physical gravity could reflect God’s own emphasis on moral gravity and how John Locke’s ideas about the importance of the senses could release inner feelings. He knew that a direct appeal to the heart was the strongest way for sinners to understand their dependence on Christ. He would later write that there could never be “any lively and vigorous exercise of the will or inclination of the soul, without some effect upon the body, in some alteration of the motion of its fluids, and especially of the animal spirits.” And for him, the best way to activate such emotions was to preach terrors.
On July 8, 1741, Edwards came to the Enfield pulpit with a calm demeanor, a measured tone of voice, and a quiet intensity to lecture on Deuteronomy 32:35, “Their foot shall slide in due time”—by which he meant slide into hell.
He informed the congregation that most of them were damned. Not only were they damned, but God had made sure their roastings would commence soon: “the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow.” Just as the truth of it was unavoidable—God was furious at them for sinning—the physics of it were unquestionable: “Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell.” All God had to do was release his grip, and the sinners in the church would soon be burning. Even if they felt they were safe on earth, luxuriating in their pleasures, God could at his whim plunge them into the pit without warning.
Edwards told them they could die at any moment, and if sinning would face damnation. God’s arrow of wrath was ready to strike at the heart, and only his “mere pleasure . . . keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.” Moreover, he held the sinner in his hands like one might hold a spider—dangling by a thin thread over the chasm of hell, ready to be consumed by the flames for eternity.
The “greatest earthly potentates” would of course be condemned to the furnace with Satan, no matter their power on earth, but so too would the smallest children, who in their callow sins would “bear the dreadful wrath of that God that is now angry with you every day, and every night[.] Will you be content to be the children of the devil . . . ?” Ultimately, the only choice people had was to convert; to renounce their sins and repent before God; and pray that he might bestow his grace upon them and prevent them from suffering annihilation. And Edwards left the Enfielders with this thought: “The wrath of the almighty GOD is now undoubtedly hanging over [a] great part of this congregation: Let everyone fly out of Sodom: Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.”
The congregants did not literally run for their lives, but they did fill the church with weeping and moaning, crying out “What must I do to be saved?” among other pleas. Word soon got out that the reverend had preached a particularly stirring and gut-wrenching homily, and within months people began seeking out the sermon to read for themselves. Edwards oversaw the publication of the work, titled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, within months after he delivered it, and it spread his message throughout the colonies. It also considerably advanced his name, as America’s leading theologian and an evangelist without equal. With a soft voice and controlled rhetoric, he had outdone Whitefield for dramatic effect and provided more fuel for the revival to burn hotter.
A few months later, in September, Edwards had another opportunity to give a key sermon at Yale College when he gave the commencement address. In recent months the college had become a battleground between New and Old Light students over questions of piety, sin, and redemption. A Yale alumnus himself, Edwards prepared an oration addressing the tensions in the revival movement. He imagined himself as the bridge between those who distrusted the “awakening” and those who had experienced it. It would be a sober and thoughtful analysis, and a follow-up to the ideas in his Sinners sermon. But before he could get to New Haven to deliver it, James Davenport got there first.
From the time of his tour with George Whitefield, Davenport’s methods had only become more extreme and eccentric. Routinely denied admittance into established churches, he railed at any minister who denied him entrance and said that his parishioners were better off consuming rat poison than listening to his sermons. He shouted and stamped his feet in furious tantrums, “roaring that thousands of persons roasting in the devil’s kitchen” were there because the teachings of the targeted minister “had seduced them into hell.”
In recent days he had resorted to holding church services that were unlike any New England had ever seen. After informing his parishioners of their many sins, he cast some of the worst offenders outside the church, only to run after them shouting “Come to Christ! Come to Christ!” He then rushed back inside to sing and preach in an outpouring of wild emotion, and his congregants followed his lead—“some praying, some exhorting and terrifying. Some singing, some screaming, some crying, some laughing and some scolding, [which] made the most amazing confusion that was ever heard.” Newspapers like the Boston Weekly Post-Boy reacted in horror to the spectacle, but Davenport continued to gain followers with each new radical gesture.
Even before Davenport traveled to New Haven for commencement week, the locals had been warned of his excesses, but they welcomed him anyway, respecting his long family legacy. His ancestor John Davenport was the town’s cofounder and its first pastor, and James himself had graduated from Yale at the top of his class and been one of its youngest attendees ever. And so, with deference, the minister of First Church, Joseph Noyes, allowed him access to his pulpit, and gave him all the professional courtesies to which he was entitled. Such sentiments, however, did not tame Davenport’s wild nature.
As soon as he arrived, he singled out Reverend Noyes as “dead of heart, a blind leader of the blind” and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and blasted college officials for their impiety and wickedness—to the delight of the New Light students who despised the old-guard minister and many of their teachers. Davenport thundered his contempt for the sinners at Yale and predicted their demise in Satan’s lair. He encouraged his followers to erupt in praise of God before leading them into the streets singing and praying at top volume, well into the night.
Inspired by Davenport’s example, the New Light students accused their tutors and leaders of being unredeemed and deaf to the word of God and demanded to be led by men of the New Birth. They openly revolted against the traditions and formalities of the institution, and put the authorities on notice that the school must cater to their needs and desires, instead of vice versa. With the tension at a high pitch on the day of commencement, the college trustees rushed through a rule that no student could say “the rector, either of the trustees or tutors are hypocrites, carnal or unconverted men” upon penalty of public confession and expulsion. This was the charged atmosphere that awaited Jonathan Edwards when he came to town.
When Edwards later published the text of his sermon, The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, it ran to more than 100 pages, and the reverend may have spoken for more than three hours. To the Old Light and moderate ministers who were appalled at the antics of Davenport and his kind, Edwards admitted that the frenzy that had erupted in recent months was alarming. He called the outbreaks of untamed emotion strange and unusual and saw how they could invite harsh judgment. He said “tears, trembling, groans, loud outcries, agonies of body, or the failing of bodily strength” were disturbing and not a reflection of whether a revival was the true work of God. His words placated the establishment ministers and college leaders and persuaded them that Edwards was on their side.
But then the reverend turned the argument. He said that in biblical times many “extraordinary effects on persons’ bodies” occurred in the midst of spiritual conversions. While visions and prophecies, lay exhortations, and extreme emotions could indicate questionable behavior, all such things also followed a real revival. And he offered an interesting duality: “Grace dwells with so much corruption, and the new man and the old man subsist together in the same person; and the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the Devil remain for a while together in the same heart.”
Even the wildest sort of enthusiasm had long been found in times of devotion to God, such as during the reign of Oliver Cromwell in England when “vital religion” held sway, and “in the beginning of New England, in her purest days, when vital piety flourished.” Any frightening behavior, therefore, might be part of the Lord’s design, and should not be shunned. For the true signs of righteousness would eventually outshine those of wickedness, and the heavenly plan would be made clear.
Thus Jonathan Edwards admitted the faults of the revival, but endorsed it anyway. For it was an extraordinary event “from the Spirit of God.” Moreover, the results of the latest revival were more striking than what occurred six years before at Northampton, with its suicides and declension, miseries and backsliding. This new, more devout rebirth had forced people to admit their sins and expose their souls to the power of God’s grace in a great beautiful swell of redemption and transformation.
Upon reading Distinguishing Marks, the New Light evangelists treated it as a personal endorsement of their work, and the sermon further elevated Edwards as the central figure of the revival. He was now known throughout the colonies, and across the Atlantic to London and Edinburgh, by virtue of his brilliant arguments and rhetoric, and his intellectual power; and he would continue to support this great work of God and ensure there would be many more converts to come.
Yet even as he accomplished so much, one thing Jonathan Edwards could not do was stop the chaos engulfing Yale College.
James Davenport’s antics and Edwards’s sermons empowered the radical students to action. They became ever more boisterous in their piety and issued more brazen insults against the school’s tutors and leaders. The bar for moral purity rose, with radicals demanding higher standards of devotion and louder calls for conversion no matter the cost. Tension rose between those who had been saved and those they saw as unconverted, and thus damned. One of Edwards’s own followers, David Brainerd, claimed a particular teacher had no more grace than a chair, and he was expelled. Another student said the preaching in New Haven was as chilly as the winter air, and he was fined. In this atmosphere, the authorities found it impossible to contain the disruptions from student protests, itinerant ministers and lay exhorters. Strident dissent and open disrespect of authority became common, and the tutors and their pupils became wary or even fearful of each other. Students began deserting Yale in greater numbers, and in April 1742 the rector, Thomas Clap, shut down the college altogether. It wouldn’t reopen for another two months.
During Yale’s closure, Davenport and his old college friend Timothy Allen began assembling plans for an institution to channel the zeal of converted students. They called it the Shepherd’s Tent, and Allen set up classes on the second story of a convert’s house while Davenport traveled throughout New England raising money for the school during his preaching tours, in the manner of Whitefield. Picking up anything from a few pounds to several pairs of socks, Davenport brought his donations back to New London and funneled them into his “Nursery of True Converts.”
His school was nothing like Harvard or Yale. Admittance did not depend on one’s station in society, family connections, or even sex or age. All the applicants had to do was to pass a rigorous screening process to weed out the unconverted and make sure they possessed a minimum level of holiness. The school had no divinity curriculum, no library, and no formal pedagogy, but what it lacked in structure it more than made up for in enthusiasm. Young male and female revivalists prayed together, exalted God and explored the nature of rebirth, and became part of Davenport’s growing army of exhorters who brought the force of the gospel wherever he led them.
Critics decried New Light schools like Davenport’s as “castles or colleges in the air” and tried to shut them down. The Connecticut authorities fined and punished the tutors of the Shepherd’s Tent and even its president Timothy Allen, sending him to jail for several months. They weren’t just worried over the enthusiasm bred there. The Shepherd’s Tent represented a real threat to the legitimacy of classical education and the social hierarchy. Davenport already encouraged black and white, men and women, poor and rich, Indian and colonist, to pray together in his tumultuous open-air assemblies, and the Shepherd’s Tent threatened to make him even more dangerous. But despite all the authorities did, they couldn’t shut the school down. By the fall of 1742, it had moved on to Rhode Island and attracted ever more attention in the press and on the revival circuit.
During the time of his greatest activity, when James Davenport’s trailblazing ministry was known throughout New England, Jonathan Edwards rarely mentioned him by name in his sermons. Edwards did critique him privately in his letters but took care not to denigrate such radicals in public because he didn’t want to hamper the spread of the revival or get in a petty war of words with such men. But not all his fellow revivalists felt the same way. Gilbert Tennent, for one, had finally had enough.
Gilbert had grown familiar with being a source of controversy, but at least he had been the driving force behind it. With Davenport he could only watch helplessly as the Long Island minister committed acts that brought all the New Light revivalists into disrepute. Critics cast Whitefield, Tennent, and Davenport as part of one great hydra of chaos, threatening to collapse America into a maelstrom of screaming in the pews and singing in the streets.
Knowing how he had influenced the radicals, Gilbert wrote to his ally Jonathan Dickinson and admitted his failings. He owned up to his role in the breach with the Synod, writing that “I cannot justify the excessive heat of temper which has sometime appeared in my conduct.” He confessed to “much spiritual desertion and distresses of various kinds” that forced his own self-examination, and he regretted his tendency toward division that had encouraged radical behavior. “Alas for it! My soul is sick for these things.” And he added a postscript about his old friend turned bugbear James Davenport, whom he had once allowed to preach in his New Brunswick Presbytery and who now brought so much cacophony to the house of God.
He hammered Davenport’s “damnable errors and confusions”—the way he claimed to be infallible in his knowledge of people’s souls and how he called out unconverted ministers by name. He despised the way he encouraged lay exhorters “to bring the ministry into contempt, to cherish enthusiasm, and bring all into confusion,” and how his acolytes warbled in the streets so offensively. In fact, “my soul is grieved for such enthusiastical fooleries. They portend much mischief to the poor church of God.”
Reverend Dickinson knew Gilbert’s private thoughts carried great critical weight. So instead of keeping the letter to himself, he sent it to Thomas Clap, rector of Yale turned critic of the revival, who in turn sent it on to the press.
The result was months of embarrassment. Old Light critics delighted in Gilbert’s admission of the faults of the revival. They compared his criticisms to their own, and even held him up as an example of the purest sort of hypocrite. For how could he deride Davenport for attacking unconverted ministers when he had pioneered the practice himself? How could he champion order and unity when he had helped bring down one of the major churches in the colonies? Wasn’t Davenport simply a more deranged version of Gilbert himself, and if so, why shouldn’t he go ahead and admit guilt for everything he had done?
The letter offered Gilbert’s critics the ammunition they had long awaited. They created a caricature of him as a merciless sadist, who laughed uproariously at his congregants’ distress and promoted schism with his ugly rhetoric. One anonymous New Englander published a pamphlet titled The Examiner; or Gilbert Against Tennent, in which he arranged statements in columns marked “Gilbert” and “Tennent,” and showed how almost all of his key arguments contradicted each other and made no sense. As one critic wrote, “Tennent has been severely censured in Boston where someone took all the arrows which he had sharpened for us and shot them at him.”
Gilbert responded with The Examiner, Examined; or Gilbert Tennent, Harmonious, trying to reconcile his various positions on the revival, but the damage had been done. Added to this was his ongoing feud with the Moravian sect, whose leader Count Nicholas Zinzendorf had proven to be a formidable foe. Gilbert had already rebuked him and his group for antinomianism—claiming God’s grace allowed them to disregard moral laws—and accused him of corrupting believers with lies and sowing discord. Worse, he said the Moravians had nothing to do with the real Christian revival, and instead preached “nonsense and contradiction” to the “ignorant and credulous” with ideas founded on “detestable mysteries” and “detestable doctrine.”
This did not go over well with the New Lights, who had many friends among the Moravians. They painted Gilbert as a humorless, rigid, and prideful pedant who routinely spoke out of both sides of his mouth and became incensed when questioned about it. The anti-Moravian screed also put Gilbert in trouble with Whitefield, who from Britain had learned of his attacks and wrote him a disapproving note. Did he have to be so harsh and sectarian? And was it proper for him to judge the sect so harshly, when they were all God’s children who strove to be “nearest the mind of Jesus Christ”? Gilbert wrote back denying he was a bigot, reminded Whitefield of the importance of doctrine, and snapped—“Your high opinion of the Moravians and attempts to join with them shocks me exceedingly and opens a scene of terror and distress.” He implored Whitefield to renounce the sect of “enthusiastical heretics,” as he had. Yet the Itinerant would not listen to Gilbert’s counsel, and the latter could only feel more adrift and isolated from his old ally.
By this point it was clear that 1742 had become Gilbert’s year of misery. His coreligionists had split from him, his fellow revivalists had questioned his ideology, and even his enemies had twisted his words and forced him into a desperate defense. But amid all this, the challenges became greater, as Gilbert’s reputation, and that of all the revivalists, suffered once again from the continuing debacle that was the ministry of James Davenport.
THE FINAL NARRATIVE OF JAMES DAVENPORT
By the spring of 1742 Reverend Davenport had been traveling through the Middle Colonies and New England for two years igniting spiritual fires in meetinghouses, fields, barns, and anywhere else the spirit led him to preach. His association with George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent had given him initial credibility, but since then he had established his own brand of radical experimental piety, with the people of New London, Connecticut, as his current test subjects. No longer pleased to be the target of his abuse, the colony’s Old Light pastors joined together to pressure the Connecticut Assembly to pass the first in a series of laws to cripple the ministry of men like him and his army of followers.
In May a new law outlawed itinerant preaching in the colony. No longer could traveling ministers expect to give sermons outside their parishes without permission from the governing pastor; no longer could lay exhorters and random strangers offer their testimony in the pulpit without the same permission; and no longer could one congregation allow its minister to preach in other jurisdictions without consequences. If found guilty of breaking the law, transgressors were subject to fines, arrest, and exile.
More laws were to come. Soon, the authorities forbade New Light separatist congregations from legal protection as religious dissenters. New seminaries like the Shepherd’s Tent required legislative approval. Tests of religious orthodoxy became mandatory at Yale College, and ministers lacking a college degree were barred from teaching. And ministers of schismatic churches were forbidden to give communion or baptism to their congregants.
Critics reacted with outrage, charging that the lawmakers had tried to outlaw religious expression to protect a sinful and oppressive establishment. The revivalists in New England shuddered to imagine the next steps the authorities would take to shut down their movement. But despite the new challenges, James Davenport remained undaunted.
Just days after the passage of the anti-itinerant law, he boldly broke it in Stratford, Connecticut. The press followed his actions closely, and reported he preached angrily against unconverted ministers; pronounced damnation against his various enemies, “with hell-flames flashing in their faces”; imitated the agony and suffering of Christ; and created “shocking scenes of horror and confusion, under the name and pretext of religious devotion, as language can’t describe.”
The authorities drew up a legal complaint, which charged him with behaving in a “strange and unaccountable manner” to “affright and terrify the people, and put them into utmost confusion, contention, hate, and anger among themselves.” A great public trial followed, in which Davenport and his allies stood accused of inciting public outrage and breaking the laws and disturbing the peace of the colony. After the first day’s hearing, the reverend and his associates left the meetinghouse where the court heard their case, and he began shouting at the assembled crowd. Davenport blasted out invective about how the authorities had persecuted him and threatened his ministry. The sheriff grabbed his sleeve to take him away, after which Davenport fell to the ground invoking the protection of God: “Strike them, Lord! Strike them!” He was seconded by his allies, who promised the vengeance of God against their enemies. The crowd surged and attempted to release him from his bonds, but failed. That night, the masses mounted enough of a threat to try to free Davenport and ransack the town that forty militiamen had to be called out to restore order.
Yet despite the confusion Davenport had brought to Stratford, the court wanted to be rid of him more than punish him. In its decision, it concluded that the minister was “disturbed in the rational faculties of his mind, and therefore to be pitied and compassionated,” instead of imprisoned. So it deported him from the colony and sent him back to his parish in Southold, Long Island.
Davenport was not finished with his mission, though. He next planned to visit Boston to attempt to ignite fervor in New England, a region that had proved so hospitable to men like Whitefield and Tennent. Fearing his plans, an association of ministers decided to bar him from their pulpits and requested that he refrain from any disruptive, impolite, or judgmental behavior. These pleas, of course, only encouraged him to stir up more trouble. As one of his associates said, “where any congregation is in peace, the devil is their ruler.”
In midsummer Davenport burst into town with a vengeance, preaching to the masses on Boston Common and calling out a dozen preachers for being ungodly and unconverted. He declared these “miserable and wretched men” would soon be going to hell, and “were murdering souls by thousands and by millions” with their horrific carnal beliefs. He preached in fields and led mobs through the streets and incited his followers into what town leaders thought would surely be anarchy. One reporter saw a monstrous scene in which Davenport led his legions through the streets, “hands extended, his head thrown back, and his eyes staring up to heaven” with his followers more resembling “a company of Bacchanalians after a mad frolic than sober Christians who had been worshipping God.” Another saw Davenport’s spiritual army as “so red hot, that I verily believe they would make nothing to kill opposers.”
The authorities reacted with alarm to these events, fearing not only for the protection of established religion, but also the stability of society. One minister in Salem wrote, “it is impossible to relate the convulsions into which the whole country is thrown by a set of enthusiasts that strole about haranguing the admiring vulgar in extempore nonsense, nor is it confined to these only, for men, women, children, servants and Negroes are now become (as they phrase it) exhorters.”
Many ordinary workers and commoners now rose up in support of Davenport, among them common artisans and the downtrodden, to threaten the rule of law and the sanctity of private property. Many of the elite worried that once fully unleashed, the revivalists would make “strong attempts to destroy all property, to make all things common, wives as well as goods.” Other saw disturbing parallels between the religious enthusiasts and revolutionaries like Oliver Cromwell, who had incited a civil war in England in the previous century and whose followers demanded the “leveling” of social classes. These assorted worries soon coalesced into legal action: Davenport was once again arrested and tried, declared insane, and removed from the colony.
When he returned to Southold in October, he did not receive a hero’s welcome. Instead, his congregation censured him for spending so much time outside his parish ministering to outsiders. Within months after the judgment, Davenport took his followers to their refuge in New London, Connecticut—despite the colony’s powerful anti-itinerancy law and despite the controversy that followed him wherever he went. By this time, Davenport suffered from inflammatory ulcers and bodily weakness that required him to employ an “armor-bearer” to help him walk. He ascribed his lame leg to the work of Satan and had fever dreams of being God’s favorite and privy to his cosmic plans. He preached of the millennium and offered the promise that everyone would soon be engulfed in a fiery final judgment, because God had offered him “some extraordinary discovery and assurance of the very near approach of the end of the world . . . in a very short time all these things will be involved in devouring flames.”
On March 2, 1743, he began organizing a church of New London separatists. God now gave him instructions in his dreams, and one such mission was to purge his followers of their wicked possessions—from wigs and cloaks to rings, jewels, and necklaces—and put them to flame. Four days later, another burning commenced, this time with a pile of books Davenport judged to be the works of the devil. Among them were classics by Puritan divines like Increase Mather and modern works by moderate revivalists like Benjamin Colman. The justification for the fires came from Acts 19:19—“Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men”—and met with the excitement of the crowd, who shouted and sang “Hallelujah!” and “Glory to God!” and imagined their authors being tortured in hell.
Davenport again fueled the flames the next day, now demanding that his followers’ own clothing be incinerated. Women hurled their “scarlet cloaks, velvet hoods, fine laces, and every thing that had two colors” while men torched their wigs and velvet collars, among other posh attire. Davenport crowned the ceremony by offering his own contribution—his breeches, which he whipped off and threw into the bonfire with aplomb. This action stripped his legs bare along with his power over the crowd.
One angry woman suddenly announced, “the calf you have made is too big” and took the smoldering breeches from the pyre and flung them at the minister’s face. Another man agreed the bonfire was a golden calf that symbolized Davenport’s pride and idolatry. Others claimed he had the devil inside himself and demanded he recant his actions. Shocked by their accusations, Davenport had no choice but to admit his error, claiming he was “under the influence of an evil spirit, and that God had left him.”
This led to the demise of his worldly power. Appalled by the spectacle, most of his acolytes deserted him, as did his allies in the ministry. Press reports detailed the bonfires of books and clothing he had arranged, and pronounced him insane beyond redemption. His congregation had already dismissed him, and now even the radical New Lights kept him away—knowing that his name had become infamous to some, absurd to others. Ardent revivalists like Andrew Croswell denounced Davenport, seeing that his ministry meant to “drive learning out of the world, and to sow it thick with the dreadful errors” of heresy. Within weeks of the bonfire, the Shepherd’s Tent closed and the spiritual army he had assembled seemed to vanish altogether.
What did not vanish were the consequences of Davenport’s ministry. For the March 6 bonfire sputtered the momentum of the revivalists and threatened to undermine the redemptive force of the New Birth. In many ways the figure of James Davenport was the greatest gift the Old Lights and the other traditionalists could have received, for their accusations of lunacy, fraud, blasphemy, and terror against their foes now seemed borne out and proven beyond question. Davenport was the embodiment of everything unholy they saw in the revivalists, and now every one of them would have to account for it.