Seven Daggers and Drawn Swords
At the height of his mad trek through New England in 1742, James Davenport decided to pay a visit to the Reverend Charles Chauncy. Sharing a nickname with the First Church building where he preached, “Old Brick” Chauncy was the leader of Boston’s Old Lights. As had become his method in recent months, Davenport thought he would use the visit as an excuse for one of his signature interrogations. After quizzing Reverend Chauncy on the state of his soul, Davenport would doubtless find it lacking and, barring a sudden confession, would then proceed to denounce him. On Boston Common or in a similar public venue, Davenport would muster every ounce of venom he could to publicly incriminate this foe of the revival and turn the people against him, perhaps even his own congregation.
Chauncy had not always been an enemy of the New Birth. In fact he had been intrigued by the revival at first, when it seemed to bring about a reawakening of faith among his parishioners and lead them toward more virtuous behavior. But as the movement progressed, he saw its perils: unsound forms of worship, itinerant ministers raising havoc, unchecked enthusiasm in the pews. And he realized one of the central figures behind these perils was Davenport. In his writings and sermons, Chauncy began to let his congregants and other Bostonians know his feelings—and soon enough, Davenport knew them too.
Chauncy wasn’t surprised by Davenport’s unannounced appearance at his door. He had been observing the man’s tactics for some time and had prepared his defense. Davenport had barely begun his questioning when Chauncy gave him a verbal lashing. He blasted him for abandoning his congregation in Southold, for leading church services that descended into madness, and for bringing chaos to places like Boston. He thought him to be either a scheming charlatan who deluded the masses, or an outright lunatic with no control over his actions. In the end Chauncy opted for the latter and hoped that “if God ever gives you a sound mind, you will cry to him from the deeps, for this strange conduct you have unhappily fallen into.”
He didn’t stop there. To his own First Church congregation, Chauncy delivered a sermon, Enthusiasm Described and Cautioned Against, that used his encounter with Davenport to illustrate everything he saw as dangerous about such extremists. Most of the charges had been heard from the pulpits of other Old Lights, but Chauncy argued his points cogently and convinced many New Englanders that the revivalists were not only errant in their conduct, but insane. As he said, the disease of enthusiasm led people to follow “the blind impetus of a wild fancy” causing tortured visions and emotional outbursts, among other unfortunate effects. With this sermon and later works on the same topic, Chauncy became the central nemesis of the revival in the colonies and, not surprisingly, his books were some of the first Davenport torched at his 1743 bonfire in New London.
Chauncy found himself invigorated by the contest against the New Lights, writing letters and pamphlets against them, excoriating them from the pulpit, and unlike many of his brethren, taking to the road to quench the revival fire where it had spread. Chauncy undertook an exhausting 300-mile circuit from New England to the Middle Colonies, taking extensive notes at the meetinghouses he visited, gathering information about enthusiastic wildness and using it as evidence of the revival’s excesses. His work led to a book, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England, that not only provided the traditionalists with the foremost defense of the old faith they could imagine, but helped hamper the revival’s progress and impugn the reputations of many of its champions.
George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent especially came under scrutiny. Chauncy accused them and other, more radical figures of sowing division in the churches, muddling God’s word in the pulpit, causing strife in parishes that were not their own, and whipping worshippers into a state of frenzy and terror. As he saw it, the whole New Light project had thrown churches into turmoil and caused good Christians to attack and abuse each other. And in true hypocritical fashion, after causing so much chaos and splitting decent Christians into factions, these cunning New Light schemers had the nerve to present themselves as pious and holy men!
On one occasion in his travels, Whitefield met Chauncy at random on a street in Boston. Whitefield knew Chauncy had tried to convince New England clerics to close their doors to him and to chastise him in print. But surprisingly, when they crossed paths, they offered a courteous bow to each other. Chauncy inquired as to his purpose in town; Whitefield said he had come in service of the Lord. “I am sorry to hear it,” Chauncy said. Whitefield replied, “So is the devil!”
In a recent work, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New-England, Jonathan Edwards had anticipated many of the Old Light arguments and admitted some aspects of revival—harsh judging of others’ souls, censorious and extreme behavior, and claims of divine revelation—were false and disorderly. But such outcomes did not negate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that had transformed souls and revived people’s faith. However, Old Brick Chauncy could not accept this defense, and in Seasonable Thoughts spent page after more than 400 pages eviscerating the revival and its “strange effects upon the body, such as swooning away and falling to the ground . . . bitter shriekings and screamings; convulsion-like tremblings and agitations, strugglings and tumblings, which, in some instances, have been attended with indecencies I shan’t mention.”
Even after some of the revivalists began to retreat with the demise of Davenport, Chauncy did not relent in his attack. To him, the revival was a scourge that had few positive effects on people’s faith, apart from those that God naturally bestowed. Its proponents were blackguards and mountebanks, and no good had come from undermining the power of the clergy. And while melodramatic orations like those of Davenport and Whitefield might be entertaining and fuel people’s emotions, they did not lead to salvation or redemption from sin. The only thing that could accomplish that was good old-fashioned faith channeled through human reason—“the plain truth is, an enlightened mind, and not raised affections, ought always to be the guide of those who call themselves men.”
Moreover, the lay congregants who dared to preach were no better than a rabble to Chauncy, who feared hordes of ignoramuses and fools polluting the meetinghouses and babbling incoherently about meeting Jesus and having divine revelations. Such enthusiasm threw the whole system of pastoral education, licensing, and ordination into question and forced the Old Light orators to compete with the more theatrical and thrilling Calvinist upstarts.
Furthermore, since the traditionalists represented many of the wealthier parishes in the colonies, they saw the evangelical churches as a magnet for “the lower sort” who had a mind to steal from their betters and tear down the traditional hierarchy and civil order. This could not be allowed to stand, and in his writings Chauncy painted the threat of mob rule with the darkest images he could. Because once the masses no longer respected their old ministers, customs, and loyalties, they might believe anything and accept any miscreant or tyrant to rule over them—and start burning books, or clothes, or even people.
He reserved a special animus for women. Proclaimed as truth-tellers and visionaries by many New Lights, women had, through the course of the revival, found their voice in the pews, and exhorted with vigor and passion in fields and meetinghouses to hundreds of souls. It was one of the most visible outcomes of the revival, and to opponents of the New Birth, it had to be stopped. Chauncy wrote, “It is a shame for WOMEN to speak in the church . . . ’Tis a plain case, these FEMALE EXHORTERS are condemned by the apostle [Paul].” Such an outrage as female ministers would lead to the perversion of the church and threaten the power of established ministers—all of them men like himself, in formal wigs and robes.
Sarah Wheaten knew most orthodox ministers felt the same way as Chauncy, and she knew better than to speak in church—and to suffer the consequences of it. She had been told at least once by her minister Nathaniel Clap that the proper role for ladies in the house of the Lord was silence and solicitude of the gospel. She followed the edict and did not raise her voice in her worship, even as the great revival swept through Rhode Island around her.
Though silent in her pew, Sarah did not otherwise keep quiet about her faith. With her friends she discussed God, prayed, and sang hymns to him, read the Bible and pondered and worried over what it took to be a good Christian. Since the arrival of Gilbert Tennent in Newport, she had given up her interest in popular music and dancing and avoided all gratuitous pleasures. She dressed modestly and cast aside the old Sarah who enjoyed fun and frivolity and instead embraced a life of piety that could prove what a good and faithful follower of Christ she was. She had found rebirth through him, so she figured she should let it show.
Proper and upright did not mean passive and docile, however. The new Sarah began to speak publicly about her thoughts on the divine creator and created a women’s gospel society in which she led Bible study and counseled those in need of spiritual guidance. With her “steady, prudent zeal and activity” she tried to inspire her group members with stories of the grace and beneficence of the Lord. For if she could find hope in God, anyone could.
Nothing came easy for Sarah. For many years, Sarah’s life seemed to resemble the story of Job. But while God ultimately rewarded that famous biblical figure, he rarely seemed to take pity on her or provide an earthly reward for her troubles. Yet she still persisted through the pain and grief.
When she was younger, she thought of suicide as a release from her star-crossed existence. She wrote regularly in her journal of her hatred of her sins and sometimes of herself. But by 1743, she had become reconciled to her struggles, and made it part of her philosophy. For it was strangely comforting to see God as the author of her misery: it made her a better Christian and in some way proved that the divine creator existed. As one writer summed up Sarah’s views, “If there was no divine providence in the world, but only fate or luck, then human life was sheer chaos, an abyss of meaninglessness that was even more frightening than hell. Either God controlled everything, including suffering, or there was no God.” Sarah knew there was a God, for he continually brought her new obstacles to face and new burdens to shoulder. Even when the Lord showed her mercy, he did so in a curious way: “It pleased him to remove a dear friend by death, with whom I was very intimate.” The loss of her friend allowed her to find work through the widower, which enabled her to subsist for a while longer. God offered his providence through her sorrow, and she thanked him for it.
The year before, shopkeeper Henry Osborn had proposed to her. He promised relief from her financial woes and a measure of loyalty and affection. But she wasn’t convinced the pairing was a good idea. He was nearly thirty years older than her, he had three almost-grown children who were only a decade younger than she was, and she questioned whether she loved him. She took comfort that he seemed like a decent Christian, but she still struggled over whether to say yes. Henry brought many potential pitfalls and few benefits other than companionship and perhaps economic security. Somehow, though, she felt God encouraging the union, and since she always trusted in his will, she took Henry’s hand in marriage and became Sarah Osborn.
Months later, the newly married couple were bankrupt. Henry’s money had disappeared in a failed shipbuilding investment, his savings vanished for unknown reasons, hers were seized by creditors, and he sold all the goods in his shop at cut-rate prices. Unable to pay their debts, the couple sunk into the mire of poverty—with four children in need of care. Worse, Henry was suddenly struck with physical infirmities and could not hold a job, so Sarah was once again forced to work as a schoolteacher to survive and to pay the family’s mounting bills, which sometimes seemed like an impossible task.
Once again cursed by fate, Sarah wondered how she could endure this as a proper Christian. She tried to understand God’s motive behind this latest grim turn of events, and the sins for which she was being punished. She blamed it on her pride.
She lived in a world where fine linens, expensive clothing, and rich imported goods from Europe had tempted the souls of many New Englanders. While she did not covet such things, God must have thought she could not be trusted with even the hope of material comfort, much less good health and happiness, so he never let her have it. As she wrote, “I have often thought God has so ordered it throughout my days hitherto, that I should be in an afflicted, low condition, as to worldly circumstances, and inclined the hearts of others to relieve me in all my distress.” God had meant for her to be poor and for others to take pity on her, and she had to deal with it.
Despite all the misery God heaped upon her, she refused to take pity on herself, and redoubled her commitment to being a good Christian and proclaiming her faith publicly. By the end of the year she finished her memoir, having endured a lifetime’s worth of suffering despite only being thirty years old, and now wished for others to understand her struggle and what it meant. Just as “I have always reaped much benefit myself, by reading the lives and experiences of others,” so too would Newport and the world beyond come to know what it meant to be Sarah Osborn, and how she had profited in the eyes of God by the hardships he inflicted on her.
Women who were not Sarah Osborn struggled in colonial America and faced countless obstacles, too. They could not study for the ministry, they could not go to college or vote for the assembly, and they could not own property independently of their husbands. They had fewer rights than their eldest sons to their estate, and they received a fraction of the inheritance of their male siblings. Viewed by some quarters of society as “a more advanced child,” an adult woman had less power and fewer rights in the eighteenth century than she had in the previous one. As Sarah discovered, one of the few outlets a woman had was religion.
For most of the century, women dramatically outnumbered men in the pews. In one church in New London, Connecticut, where James Davenport had an influence, there were nearly three times as many women as men. Some parishes showed greater parity at the height of the revival, but for the most part the majority of congregants were women and nearly all the ministers were men. The few exceptions were in Quaker meetinghouses, where during quiet prayer a woman might be inspired to speak out and channel a divine message, but in other sects, women were told to keep silent and not interfere with the workings of the Holy Spirit.
Jonathan Edwards and other Congregationalist ministers saw some women, including his wife, as exemplary in their faith, but many other preachers did not, and blamed them for the world’s assorted ills. One English pamphlet condemned “lewd women that are no whores, and yet are ten times worse” because their devilish spirit derived from the very first sinner, Eve. And in a society where original sin had wide-ranging power over the minds of men, such a charge was a grave one—“as the world grew in years, so women grew in wickedness, each age being worse than the preceding.” Some churches had such a baleful view of women that they didn’t even allow them to read their stories of conversion aloud. For Sarah, the task was done by Reverend Clap.
Now that the revival had come, however, many women broke the silence. In New Light meetinghouses and outdoors in the fields, they raised their voices to praise the Lord. They shouted from the galleries, gave their testimony in the pews, and summoned the Holy Spirit in the streets. Daniel Rogers, acolyte of Whitefield, recognized the power of the revival for women as early as 1741, when during a spiritual meeting he saw how “the Spirit of God came down in an astonishing manner—two or three screamed out—it spread like fire.” Rogers came away so impressed by women’s testimony that he vigorously defended their exhorting and preaching the gospel, often in the face of hostile rebukes from other ministers.
The radical women of the New Birth did not stop there. Some found so much power in their conversions in Christ, they no longer feared reprisal from the clergymen who demanded their silence. They broke from their old churches and led splinter congregations. And when those congregations evolved into Separatist churches, they took major roles in their operation, and used their power as laypeople to hire ministers of the New Birth. As one writer put it, “evangelical religion offered women a faith that explicitly embraced feminine qualities. From its emotional rhetoric to its ecstatic conversions,” this new spirituality gave women the opportunity to find strength in the house of God that they had not known before.
The men in wigs and robes condemned them for it. Charles Chauncy and the Old Lights inveighed against female enthusiasts who should have known their place, while other ministers worried women would fall prey to lusty itinerants who would use them for their own pleasures, or that they would usurp men’s role in the church and the family. Such critics warned that if this happened, women would subject their husbands to unjust authority, and they would lose their status and be reduced to an effeminate role—as women became “queens for life.” Even Jonathan Edwards, otherwise sympathetic to the revival, worried that “women and children might feel themselves inclined to break forth and scream aloud to great congregations, warning and exhorting the whole multitude, and to go forth and halloo and scream in the streets, or to leave the families they belong to, and go from house to house earnestly exhorting others.”
While Sarah Osborn had no interest in hallooing and screaming, she did become increasingly vocal in her faith. Through her women’s group, she drew listeners and followers for her thoughts on the gospel. She offered strength and even a hint of martyrdom to give them comfort through their trials and provided counsel to those who stood wracked by fear and guilt that they were on their way to hell. Offering herself as an example, she explained how salvation could be attained through suffering, and how God’s grace could arrive in unexpected ways.
This prompted a reaction from her neighbors. They questioned her surety that she had been picked by the Lord for redemption and dismissed her thoughts on religion as those of an ignorant pauper. Ultimately, they wanted her to cease her improvised ministry and to keep quiet as she had once done. But she refused, for she saw her struggles as proof of God’s power, and wrote, “Should I altogether hold my peace? . . . It appeared to me such a monstrous piece of ingratitude that it seemed as if the very stones might cry out against me.”
She acquired a reputation in Newport as an arrogant evangelical, someone so convinced of her righteousness that she impinged on the judgment of God. One minister even preached against her and other revivalists in church—one of the first times she was considered important enough to be the object of public derision, instead of pity. But she would not relent in her mission to tout the gospel as she knew it. She had suffered too much, and endured too many miseries, to turn back from her true calling and lose favor in the eyes of her creator. As she wrote defiantly in defense of her actions, “God must cease to be God if he damned me.”
Sarah’s religious study group attracted women drawn by her self-assurance, and who were in need of comfort from their fears and anxieties. One such example was Sarah’s friend Susanna Anthony, who, though a dozen years younger than Sarah and still a teenager, would remain her closest confidante over the decades. “Susa,” as Sarah called her, had suffered the loss of her sister and other traumas, and felt her torments multiplying and enveloping her.
Susa’s troubles began in earnest with the arrival in Newport of George Whitefield in 1740. Shortly after she saw the Itinerant in action, she experienced a great spiritual uplift, only to come crashing back down when Satan began to trouble her. The infernal beast taught her to despise herself and all she was, and she became consumed with paralyzing terror and self-hatred. She wrote, “I believe a bloody inhuman butcher would have been more welcome to my tortured breast than a reprieve to a tortured criminal. For Satan began to persuade me that I was a devil incarnate.” The wicked one convinced her she was a mere plaything in God’s hands, her soul broken at his whim, and an example to others of his taste for revenge upon sinners.
These torments went on for months, as Susa saw herself as “one of the worst of monsters; and often wished that I might be annihilated” for her baleful thoughts and actions. When Gilbert Tennent arrived the following year, he made things worse. Now the visions of hell, and Gilbert’s vivid preaching of terrors, became more palpable and irresistible to Susa’s young heart. She contemplated suicide to avoid the suffering she had been forced to endure; she begged Christ for mercy, and sometimes received it, only to be thrown into distress again with new and more fearsome attacks of the beast. The agony often became too much, and “through the violence of my distress, I wrung my hands, twisted every joint, and strained every nerve; biting my flesh; gnashing my teeth; throwing myself on the floor.” God eventually rescued her from such horrors, but Satan remained ever present and ready to strike.
Sarah Osborn had endured more hardship than Susa, but she took pity on her friend’s ravaged heart and did what she could to relieve her suffering. Others in Sarah’s study group also struggled between light and darkness and wondered if the Lord would ever offer them mercy from their troubles. Sarah could not answer such questions. She could only tell them of the grace of God and the promise of salvation, and the possibility their sins would be expiated by Christ’s loving sacrifice. She would become their teacher, their counselor, their confessor. Indeed, while Sarah may not have worn a pulpit gown or have earned a divinity degree, she did more to help her friends find God than any of their own ministers ever had.
In more radical sects, some women went even further. Not only did they exhort and preach to worshippers, they revealed fantastic visions and prophecies. They described vivid scenes of Satan and Christ, images of warring demons and angels, messages from God and missives from the underworld. As a wave of mystical faith swept over the land, newspapers described how such women lapsed into trances and spoke directly to God. They transported into the ethereal world and saw beauty and wonder beyond comprehension. They witnessed heavenly “Glyphs” and other phantoms before their eyes. They saw their names inscribed in the Book of Life among the names of the saints. And they warded off the temptations of the Evil One. Such visions became so common that some worshippers assumed a person had to enter a trance and see the workings of heaven before he or she could be fully converted to Christ.
Pastor Nicholas Gilman in Durham, New Hampshire, found so much power in the visions of his female parishioners that he reported them in detail during his sermons, and saw one woman, Mary Reed, as a veritable conduit to God. She became the church oracle, describing radiant images of heaven and the power of the Holy Ghost—sometimes for weeks on end. She wrestled with Satan and sung with angels and inspired her neighbors to follow her example. Soon others saw doves and angels and heavenly lights, too, and heard celestial voices and issued messages to Gilman sent from the spirit world, with themselves as the Lord’s messengers. Indeed, some radical sects honored women as great mystics, and “rejoiced in women leaders who claimed to be incarnations of God.”
Not surprisingly, the spectacle of homegrown prophets touting their visions and claiming to be messiahs terrified the Old Lights and the moderate revivalists. In Seasonable Thoughts, Charles Chauncy thundered against all such enthusiasts, especially women, whose “agitations and terrors” derived from “the weakness of their nerves, and from hence their greater liableness to be surprised and overcome with fear.” He railed against them as an affront to decency and order, and demanded they desist from their actions.
He compared such women to the notorious figure of Anne Hutchinson, who a century before had led worship services at her house and encouraged her followers to turn away from orthodoxy and toward what the Puritan authorities called sedition and blasphemy. She even talked to God and heard the voices of the biblical prophets. For these and other transgressions, the Bay Colony excommunicated and exiled her to Rhode Island, where she later perished in an attack of Siwanoy warriors, who scalped her and left her for dead.
Chauncy had more examples at hand. He accused women exhorters and oracles of being little different from the French Prophets of thirty years before in England—just as Alexander Garden had when attacking George Whitefield. These radicals claimed to have special knowledge of Christ’s return, and they asserted their power to raise people from the dead. They would writhe about, fall over, “foam at the mouth, roar, and swell in their bellies, and that some of them affirm themselves to be equal with God.” Chauncy railed against such horrors in detail, filling page after page with examples of self-proclaimed prophets running amok as they channeled the Holy Spirit, including sacrificing animals, dancing naked, mouthing blasphemies, and otherwise behaving like lunatics.
As with so much of his work against the revival, Chauncy’s writings bred anxiety in his readers and forced the revivalists to respond. Jonathan Edwards, for one, had long worried about the “spirit of delusion” that led the “wildest enthusiasts” to become “the objects of ridicule of all the rest of mankind.” He and other traditional men of the cloth wished to see the women prophets and exhorters reined in, to prevent another demagogue from rising from their ranks as Davenport had, and to return to their old place of being quiet and submissive in church.
However, what men like Reverend Edwards didn’t understand was that many evangelical women had not only seized the New Birth for themselves, they had thrown it back in the face of their former ministers. They openly questioned them, they split from them, they formed their own churches in spite of them—and they were no longer afraid of them. They would partake in beautiful visions of heaven and describe them with all the passion they could muster, and no old-fashioned preacher could stop them.
Enthusiasm had set thousands of Christian souls alight. It offered the same radiant power that had marked religious uprisings since the time of Martin Luther, but this time it had come to the American colonists and melted their hearts. One English Puritan had described it well, long before the revival, “Let your auditors be awed with your flaming zeal, as if they heard a voice from the burning mountain, or the dark cloud bursting with flashes of fire.” For when preachers put the Holy Spirit in the hearts of sinners, “their words must be daggers and drawn swords.”
Charles Chauncy remained undeterred by the passions of his foes. He saw that the rise of enthusiasm allowed a motley collection of clairvoyants, soothsayers, and fortune-tellers to upend society from its lowest ranks. This group of miscreants even included the enslaved—“yea, Negroes, have taken upon them to do the business of preachers.” The rise of such exhorters was particularly loathsome to him, and the result was “certainly a very bad one, and portends evil to these churches” where the New Birth held sway.
Slavery was present everywhere in America, and not only in the South. In the Middle Colonies, Pennsylvania had dramatically increased its import of African slaves since the turn of the eighteenth century, and 10 percent of Philadelphia’s population was black and unfree—and 40 percent of the dock workers were either slaves or indentured servants. While most Quaker merchants had turned against slavery by this time and proclaimed the practice to be immoral, businessmen of other sects defended and expanded their trade in human chattel. In New York, the enslaved made up one out of every five residents of the city, and half of all families may have owned at least one forced laborer. Boston, too, profited from the trade after the turn of the century, quadrupling the number of its citizens stripped of legal rights, justice, and freedom.
Most ministers defended slavery and excused it with elaborate references to the Bible and gospel verses cherry-picked to assuage their consciences that God approved of it. Jonathan Edwards owned slaves and tried to justify the practice, George Whitefield argued for leniency in the treatment of slaves but not for their freedom, and a full range of clerics from Charles Chauncy to Gilbert Tennent either openly supported slavery or gave it their tacit approval. The notable exceptions included the New Light radicals.
Roving preachers like Daniel Rogers, Andrew Croswell, James Davenport, and many others encouraged free and unfree colonists to give voice to the Holy Spirit in their meetings, and they found countless bondsmen willing to do so. They encouraged their exhortations and led services where people spoke with passion and energy, regardless of their color, sex, or age. Unlike Edwards and Tennent, these New Lights did not shrink from the implications of their preaching upon those held in bondage, and Croswell condemned slavery with the same towering rhetoric he used against unconverted ministers.
Through the teaching of the radicals, as well as their own interest and determination, many slaves learned to read—often to peruse the Bible for themselves and to find out that the Good Book included verses condemning slavery instead of upholding it. From their readings they learned to preach and to use lessons from scripture, and from preaching they came to influence others, until the entire project of black education and exhortation acquired momentum and threatened the power of the slave holders. New England ministers worried that “slaves in a state of grace thought themselves above the laws of their masters” as they “exhort[ed] their betters even in pulpit before large assemblies.”
The threat of the enslaved becoming enlightened increased the number of white foes of the revival. At first the slave holders had been the most opposed to the edification of black men and women, but by 1743 the fear and anxiety spread to others who didn’t own slaves. Old Lights and colonial authorities warned of the dangers of bondsmen freely choosing to follow the Holy Spirit wherever it led them, since “poor Negroes have not been vindicated into the glorious liberty of the children of God unless their manners have been altered by becoming better servants, more faithful, diligent, honest and obedient to their own masters.”
In this view, the soul of a slave could only be uplifted if he became a better slave. And yet many slaves had come to learn that their salvation did not depend on their own dutiful imprisonment. It came through the grace that God delivered, through the visions and words they spoke in inspiration, and through the divine power that led them to speak and testify. But the more the passions of the revival increased, the more the opposers railed against it. They reminded their readers that slave liberty could lead to slave rebellion, recalling the spring and summer of 1741, when the so-called Negro Conspiracy erupted.
Though two years had passed, few in the northern colonies could forget the conspiracy. What it was exactly, they did not fully recall or understand, other than it had something to do with black people. The stories were too lurid and conflicting to form a coherent narrative. Nonetheless, royal officials and other authorities were only too happy to remind colonists of the event, and what they saw as the danger of giving the enslaved even the faintest hope of freedom.
The alleged conspiracy began when a series of robberies and fires in New York City put residents on edge. No immediate cause could be determined, and an official investigation uncovered stories of slaves being served rum in taverns, whites and blacks fraternizing in those establishments, and prostitutes plying their trade there. None of this was particularly new or surprising, but in the climate of anxiety that gripped the city at the height of the revival, it explained a great deal. Many assumed the arson and larcenies were surely the result of whoring and drinking among slaves, with a few white tavern owners and criminals also having a hand in it. And so, with only the thinnest of evidence, a few forced confessions and contradictory witness statements convinced many white New Yorkers that enslaved black men and women had not only tried to burn the town, they had plotted the robbery and murder of its white inhabitants.
Ninety blacks and a dozen whites came under suspicion, and in the dubious trial that followed, thirty-four people were sentenced to death by hanging and burning, almost all of them black. Two supposed leaders of the plot died on medieval-style gibbets, as a public warning to any current slaves and future conspirators of the consequences of rebellion in New York or any other colony in America.
George Whitefield also came under suspicion in the conspiracy, even though he had already sailed back to Britain. Although witnesses did not connect him to a direct role in the controversy, they charged that his ministrations to slaves, his encouragement of their conversions, and his attacks upon the slave holders had contributed to a climate of insurrection. If he didn’t light the flames himself, he was at least responsible for gathering the tinder, and for providing the spark. Of course, the Grand Itinerant had no interest whatsoever in leading slave rebellions and, if anything, was even more frightened of black people than other revivalists. Yet in the Middle Colonies the charge of sedition adhered to his name and those of the other ministers of the New Birth.
Two years later, suspicions of the revivalists continued to mount as many began to minister to Indians on the frontier. Missionaries had long attempted to convert the indigenous peoples of the colonies, but the spiritual awakening made the push to proselytize more urgent, with more preachers wandering into the hinterlands to spread the gospel to those unfamiliar with it. Radicals especially found success with proclaiming the power of the Christian God to tribes in the Middle Colonies and New England. Whitefield and Davenport had drawn many Indians to the New Birth, as did other preachers who followed in their wake, bringing their message to the Mohegan, Pequot, Montaukett, Shinnecock, and Narragansett peoples. In 1742 conversions spiked, as the radicals’ freewheeling services attracted many who had avoided the staid ceremonies of conventional churches. Daniel Rogers wrote of how he ministered to penitents regardless of their race and encouraged anyone from black slaves to poor women to Indians to become “itinerants, exhorters, prophets, and visionaries, embracing their own radical awakening.”
Standing at the vanguard of this movement was Andrew Croswell, who ministered to Indians as he did to others overlooked by conventional churches, and spurred his congregants to learn to read and study the Bible for themselves. As with his gospel to freedmen and slaves, he personally converted fifty Pequots and encouraged them to testify to their new faith. When the Indian converts decided to create a Christian school and hire a schoolmaster, they wrote a petition to the Connecticut General Assembly asking for financial support. Croswell delivered their petition to the Assembly himself.
Along with his other activities, the Groton minister continued to hold ecstatic, chaotic worship services unlike any known in the colonies. In his meetinghouse, parishioners were not divided by rank or race or class—they all gave praise to God in a great helter-skelter assembly where they “sang, prayed, hugged, and fainted” without regard to the rest of society or what anyone else thought of them. He shouted with delirious joy and “encouraged blacks and Indians along with women and children to exhort, pray, and testify publicly to God’s free grace.” He charged through the pews with fearsome energy to inspire passion in the worship of the Lord. He gave up his pulpit so anyone feeling the Holy Spirit could express it. He spoke in the rough, everyday language of his congregants. And he sometimes even preached without a shirt or clerical vestments—almost naked, his critics said.
The moderate revivalists and opponents of the New Birth still singled him out as an example of everything wrong with the radicals. Yale rector Thomas Clap linked Croswell to the raving excesses of James Davenport and cast him as partially responsible for Davenport’s running amok in New London. Croswell in turn denounced Davenport for his behavior, but would not apologize for his own background role at New London or his encouragement of Davenport to go to Boston in 1741. In fact, Croswell refused to criticize his own actions or take back any of the scabrous things he had said about ministers who opposed him. He would never apologize for those things, because condemnations had become his stock in trade.
Croswell collected the grievances so many had about colonial life and incorporated them into his theology. He cursed the moderates who promoted proper behavior and fashionable ethics: “Curse be that charity, for it is fierce, and that moderation, for it is cruel.” He envisioned nothing less than a second Reformation in the New World, casting himself as Martin Luther and his enemies as the Pope’s legions, and announced that there could be no compromise in the titanic struggle.
He especially blasted Jonathan Edwards, who had tempered some of the most extreme aspects of the revival by calling them into question. Croswell thought this to be middling and absurd. He called Edwards a coward and defended the intense passions the revival had unleashed, writing of the moderates, “God’s order differs vastly from their nice and delicate apprehensions of it.” For the Lord often brought turmoil when he offered redemption to sinners, and he cared little for decorum when he melted their hearts in Christ. According to the gospel of Andrew Croswell, the Holy Spirit drove colonists toward God with a violent, irresistible force, and converts should never apologize for channeling his divine ferocity.
As the revival burned on, Croswell’s rhetoric grew more vehement. He published tracts throughout the Middle Colonies and New England in which he eviscerated his enemies for their spurious beliefs and equivocations. In one lengthy reply to a book written by moderate Presbyterian Jonathan Dickinson, he claimed the author was leading his readers into hell with “Christ-despising and soul-murdering doctrines,” and he called those who hadn’t been converted Pharisees and “rotten-hearted hypocrites,” among other choice words.
Croswell cast himself as the most savage warrior of the New Lights. He wrote that the power and success of Christianity often depended on “contention, persecution, and bloodshed. . . . and if it should please God still to pour out his spirit in a more glorious manner upon the Earth, there is reason to fear there would be scenes in blood in every country and colony; and many would be forced to die for the testimony of Jesus.”
Whereas Jonathan Edwards had imagined terror in the afterlife as God judging and punishing sinners, now Croswell applied the same doctrine on earth, with himself as the judge. He wrote, “my soul has heard the alarm of war; and the question is, Who will arise on the Lord’s side? Who? Who will come to the help of the Lord against the mighty?” It was a call to religious conflict, a crusade for holy war, and he knew such language would inspire fear in his enemies as much as it inspired faith in his followers. He felt he had no choice but to use such rhetoric to crush the philosophy of his enemies, for “if they will keep hugging this monster, while I am killing it; what can I do? For I breathe out nothing but slaughter against it: As far as GOD enables me, I will be the death of it. Killed it must be, because it kills the souls of men.”
Such ideas made Croswell a bane to the governors and magistrates of the colonies, who not only assumed he had been part of the turmoil at New London, they feared he had other plans to upend more than a century of religious tradition and disrupt the social order. He did nothing to disabuse them of this notion, and even compared the current rulers of British North America to the sinful authorities who persecuted Christ, for their behavior resembled that of a witch possessed by demons. “The truth is, every persecutor is a madman.”
He did not stand alone in attacking the colonial magistrates. Political dissent crept into the ministry of other New Lights as well. In one New Haven congregation, the parishioners separated from their minister and compared him to Pontius Pilate and Herod. The women of the church led the charge toward schism, seeing not only their reverend but the town councilors as a failure in God’s eyes. They believed the Lord had given them license to denounce anyone who stood in the way of the Holy Spirit, regardless of whether his power derived from civil or canon law. The driving faith of such radicals allowed them to violate whatever rules they saw as sinful. For even Jesus broke the law when he overturned the money-changers’ tables—proving that disobedience could be holy and just, and rebellion divinely inspired.
The bedlam of radical Christianity that Andrew Croswell championed had been four years in the making. Ever since George Whitefield had shaken the foundation of American institutions in 1740 with his attacks on the clergy and the established hierarchy, the revival had inspired waves of men and women to question everything they knew about God. From this arose a deeply personal understanding of how the Holy Spirit worked in their hearts, and a proud and rabid individuality that would continue to grow in American life. The radical ministers harnessed the fervent beliefs of their congregants and pushed them to defy the current religious hierarchy that was unresponsive to their needs. They disputed old traditions and values and left behind them a trail of divided congregations and disputed pulpits, and angry traditionalists whose power had been seized without warning.
Charles Chauncy, the revival’s greatest critic, wrote that the legacy of recent events meant “the body of the ministers were never treated with more insult and contempt than by multitudes, and of those too, who once esteemed them the glory of New England.” When people stopped deferring to established authority, any kind of anarchy was possible, including revolution. Only by smothering the fires of revival could the elite ministers once again regain control of their flocks and protect society from disintegration and madness. As Chauncy wrote, “The country was never in a more critical state, and how things will finally turn out, God only knows.”
Pastors like Whitefield, Tennent, and Edwards may have lit the flames, but Croswell and the radicals now fed the blaze without restraint. And as it burned, it forged something new out of the ashes of the old order—the hazy outhnes of an American populism. The Calvinists of the New World, with their unforgiving theology, had led a revolt of the spirit that undermined British customs and set faith in the individual above respect for civility and authority. As historian Alan Heimert saw it, Calvinism offered “a radical, even democratic, social and political ideology, and evangelical religion embodied, and inspired, a thrust toward American nationalism.”
None of this radical change came without consequence, and the America at the peak of the revival little resembled the America of just four years before. Such a fundamental transformation affected everyone, and all the old relationships came into question. “Wives rebuked husbands for their lack of piety; children evangelized their parents; clergymen undermined one another by quarreling openly in public and in the press; laymen became exhorters; and even women refused to keep silence in the churches any longer.”
The world had turned upside down and gave everyone a sense of vertigo. Yet regaining the balance and harmony of the former world would not be possible. Too much had changed and too many had been transformed. No one could return to the complacent peace of early America where Puritan divines and Anglican authorities held unquestioned power. British North America had become broken, its old ways shattered and replaced by strange forms that few could have imagined or expected. A new, feral, violent America was growing up from the ruins of English gentility and propriety, and “a psychological earthquake had reshaped the human landscape.”