Nine “Close Attacks, But Strong Consolations”: The Return to America
“CLOSE ATTACKS, BUT STRONG CONSOLATIONS”: THE RETURN TO AMERICA
On a summer evening in 1744, a weary Whitefield settled down for the night at an inn in Plymouth, in the far southwest of England. For the past two years, he had endured a number of “close attacks” but had enjoyed “strong consolations,” too. He longed to return to America, a place that always seemed like a fresh start to him.1
Whitefield booked passage on a ship departing from Plymouth, the place from which the Pilgrims had departed for the New World 124 years earlier. International affairs delayed him again: England and France had gone to war, making it difficult for ship captains to get permission to sail.
That evening, while he waited, the woman of the house tapped on his door: a well-dressed gentleman was waiting downstairs to see him. Whitefield figured that this was a “Nicodemite” (like the Pharisee Nicodemus, who had visited Jesus by night). He invited the visitor up to his room.2 All seemed well at first as the gentleman congratulated the itinerant on his triumphs. But then the stranger jumped up, started cursing at Whitefield, and began beating him about the head and shoulders with a gold-headed cane. The preacher immediately “underwent all the fears of a sudden violent death.”3 As he screamed for help, the woman of the house and her daughter ran up the stairs, burst into the room, and grabbed the assailant by the collar. Hitting Whitefield a few more times, the attacker got spooked and ran out the door. The woman shoved him down the stairs, but another assailant appeared. Meeting the innkeeper halfway up to the room, he grabbed her by the heel and cast her down to the first floor, nearly breaking her back. Neighbors had heard the commotion by now, and both attackers vanished into the night.4
Whitefield learned later that the miscreants had plotted the attack at a local tavern. He considered having the conspirators arrested and prosecuted, but instead just went about his normal preaching duties. The next time he spoke outdoors in Plymouth, two thousand more people than usual showed up, to “hear a man, that had like to have been murdered in his bed,” Whitefield wrote. God could use evil to further the gospel, he reminded himself.5
Thankfully, most attacks were just printed, not physical. Although he did not answer each critic—doing so would have taken too much time—he did respond in a couple of pamphlets before his return from Scotland in November 1742. First, since antagonists routinely hinted at malfeasance related to the Bethesda orphanage, he produced A Continuation of the Account of the Orphan-House, which updated progress there. He noted that the orphanage had experienced several awakenings “much resembling” the one at Cambuslang, and he reprinted letters from Jonathan Barber and James Habersham detailing the work. Whitefield appended a detailed record of donations and expenditures related to the orphanage, but acknowledged that no amount of information about finances would silence rumormongers.6
A postscript to the Bethesda account contained news that Spanish forces had invaded Georgia in an action related to the War of Jenkins’ Ear. When Georgia settlers learned that Spanish ships lay off the colony’s coast, Habersham hastily arranged for Bethesda’s evacuation, sending residents to Hugh Bryan’s plantation in South Carolina. On July 5, 1742, the Spanish governor of St. Augustine, Florida, brought five thousand troops ashore at St. Simons Island, down the coast from Savannah. General James Oglethorpe’s forces confronted the Spanish on July 7. When Oglethorpe learned that a Spanish detachment was proceeding up the island’s Frederica road, he mounted his horse and attacked: “I charged [the Spanish] at the head of our Indians, Highland men, and rangers and God was pleased to give us such success that we entirely routed the first party,” he wrote. The Spanish sent reinforcements, whom Oglethorpe’s troops fired upon from brushy cover in one of the island’s swamps.7
This British victory became known as the Battle of Bloody Marsh, which transpired in a marsh but was not extraordinarily bloody, with about fifty deaths, mostly on the Spanish side. Nevertheless, the demoralizing loss led the Spanish to abandon the island. It was the last major Spanish attempt to invade Georgia; Bethesda was preserved. The worried Whitefield wished he could have been there to comfort the orphans, and told Habersham that he “could willingly be found at the head of you kneeling and praying, though a Spaniard’s sword should be put to my throat.” When he learned of Oglethorpe’s victory, Whitefield said it was a miraculous deliverance on par with Israel’s great triumphs in the Old Testament.8
Critics were hardly deterred by Whitefield’s responses to their charges. The anonymous pamphlet by “A.M.” titled The State of Religion in New England, Since the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield’s Arrival There was published in Glasgow in August 1742 and may have been written by New England’s key antirevivalist pastor, Charles Chauncy. It called the New England revivals a “superstitious panic,” and Whitefield a “bold and importunate beggar” who “took all ways imaginable to persuade people to give him money.” Whitefield published Some Remarks on a Late Pamphlet to defend himself, Gilbert Tennent, and other participants in the “great and marvelous work in New England.” He especially recommended Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “The Distinguishing Marks,” which “answers all the objections that Mr. A.M. or others can make against it”; he added, “If any work has all marks of a divine signature, this undoubtedly has.”9
Some reports from New England did trouble the itinerant, especially news related to his friend James Davenport, the dynamic, controversial Long Island preacher. An increasingly moderate Benjamin Colman told Whitefield that Davenport and other radical preachers were “too much under the impressions of a heated imagination, and no doubt often preached under actual fevers.” Davenport declared enemy pastors unconverted, and led crowds singing through the streets of New England towns. Expelled from Connecticut for illegal preaching, Davenport went to Boston in the summer of 1742 and began praying publicly for the conversion not only of antirevivalists such as Charles Chauncy, but also of moderate evangelicals such as Colman himself. Authorities arrested Davenport and charged him with slander, but a Boston court declared Davenport mentally unfit for trial and released him. Whitefield wrote to Colman in November that although the “confusion” in New England concerned him, he was not sure that Davenport’s incautious words warranted arrest and imprisonment. As a rift began to open between America’s moderate and radical evangelicals, Whitefield tried to smooth over their differences.10
Whitefield’s friends and opponents continued reading about his ministry in Britain, too. One anonymous anti-Whitefield tract published in Boston, A Letter from a Gentleman in Scotland, mirrored The State of Religion in New-England by characterizing the Scottish revivals as gross enthusiasm. McCulloch and other ministers had stoked an emotional frenzy even before Whitefield’s second visit, the skeptical author noted, but the “screamings and hysterical affections which had been frequent there before, were now considerably increased by Mr. Whitefield’s manner of preaching to them . . . the more wild and raving they were, they had the greater effect upon the illiterate crowd.” Whitefield, the “giddy fanatical hero,” deemed it all an outpouring of the Spirit.11
An anti-Whitefield ditty published in England in 1742 captured central themes in opponents’ attacks, targeting his Calvinism, overwrought emotions, and humble background:
With face and fashion to be known,
With eyes all white and many a groan,
With arms outstretched and sniveling tone,
And handkerchief from nose new-blown,
And loving cant to Sister Joan.
’Tis a new teacher about the town . . .
With tap-house breeding and intrusion;
With Scripture saws for elocution;
With Calvin’s methods and conclusion,
To bring all things into confusion,
And far-fetched sighs for mere illusion.
’Tis a new teacher . . .12
Whitefield did not want to spend much energy batthng his adversaries. It was time to move on from Scotland, so he preached a farewell sermon in Glasgow on Psalm 105:45, “That they might observe his statutes and keep his laws.” (Whitefield would also preach on this text for his 1746 sermon “Britain’s Mercies, and Britain’s Duty,” concerning the suppression of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.) Calling it a sort of “national sermon,” Whitefield addressed the responsibilities required by the Scots’ religious heritage. He proclaimed: “Jesus Christ, has carried on Reformation farther in this land, than among any other people. And, I really believe, the Church of Scotland, is the best constituted church in the world.” Although the Scots had their share of struggles, both earthly and spiritual, the Lord had given them an “extraordinary out-pouring of the blessed Spirit.” Whitefield affirmed that he had “in no place, seen the Redeemer reign more in his power, than in this land.” Yet immorality still dominated many places in Scotland, not least Glasgow, where swearing and drunkenness, “whoring and debaucheries,” were rampant.13
Whitefield cautioned new converts to stay faithful to the Lord, even when enemies mocked their faith. According to his adversaries, Whitefield taught “only enthusiastical raptures” and was “always preaching up imputed righteousness, and . . . cry[ing] down good works,” but he knew that he could call on his “dear friends . . . to witness, this is a slander.” Many said that he came only for money, or that he was in league with the devil. Indeed, he wrote, “I think more calumny has been thrown on me in Scotland, than any other place where I have been.” They would all have to wait until Christ’s return to see who was right, he concluded.14
Whitefield returned to London in early November 1742. He discerned that God’s presence for revival—the “cloud,” he called it—was again moving across the Atlantic. But he found his way “blocked up from going abroad” for the time being. In London, Whitefield resumed preaching at the Tabernacle, where John Cennick and Howell Harris had been sermonizing in his absence. The Tabernacle had grown to 1,200 members, whom Harris helped organize into prayer and discipleship “bands” divided according to gender and marital status. (Elizabeth Whitefield, who returned from Scotland a few weeks before George, remained in contact with Harris, telling him that she was quite happy with Whitefield.)15
Whitefield had begun to attract as followers a number of British aristocrats, none more significant than Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, who would become Whitefield’s key patron. The countess, seven years older than Whitefield, had embraced Methodism in 1739. She and her husband regularly attended meetings at the Tabernacle, as did occasional guests such as the Duke of Cumberland, the youngest son of King George II. Having such supporters was socially and financially valuable to Whitefield, and may have steered him toward a more genteel, less controversial style.16
The itinerant began to recognize that he needed organizational structures to give stability to converts, lest they slip back into former patterns of sin and complacency. He told Harris that “there are so many living stones, it may be time to think of putting them together.” Never John Wesley’s equal in organizing, Whitefield told Wesley that he did not want to lead a denomination, nor did he want people “to be called after [his] name,” adding, “If Jesus lives, I care not if the name of G.W. die forever.” Yet they still needed to consolidate the revivals’ successes.17
Harris warned him that the revival in Wales was in danger of sliding into chaos and infighting. Not that organization was entirely lacking, as Harris and other key leaders had established monthly meetings to help regulate the evangelical “societies” there in 1740. Whitefield had especially encouraged converts to form these home-based cohorts—little churches of “living stones”—in a 1740 publication, A Letter to the Religious Societies, which was soon translated into Welsh. Nevertheless, Whitefield wrote to the “brethren in Wales” at the end of 1741, warning them that the sheep (converts) there had no shepherd, and that they were “everywhere bleating for food.” He recommended that they set up a Methodist organization “without a formal separation from the Established Church.” A year later, Whitefield convened meetings in Wales with Harris, Cennick, Daniel Rowland, and other key ministers. They finalized Welsh preaching districts and formed a union of Welsh and English revival leaders known as the Calvinistic Methodist Association. Whitefield was appointed moderator of it.18
Whitefield was satisfied that Wales had become more organized. He and Howell Harris preached at a series of meetings through southern Wales that spring, Harris speaking in Welsh, Whitefield in English. After making a four-hundred-mile westward circuit through Wales and Gloucestershire, the itinerant returned to London in May. In tiny towns throughout Wales he saw huge audiences: in the hamlet of Jefferson, he spoke to “several thousand souls, very like the Kingswood colliers,” and at Llaffivran, he had “as it were a Moorfields congregation.” Whitefield was still amazed at these scenes; he felt as if he were in “a new, but very unthought of pleasant world.”19
In the spring of 1743, Elizabeth and George learned that they were going to have a baby. As the time for the child’s arrival drew near, Whitefield continued preaching but took only short trips away from her. One fall evening, he learned that God had blessed them with a son. He hurried off to London to be with Elizabeth and the child. Thousands came to the Tabernacle for the baby’s baptism. There Whitefield gave the boy “up to that God, who gave him to me.” They named the boy John, after John the Baptist. Assuring correspondents that he would quickly return to preaching after baptizing the child, Whitefield asked for prayer that God would teach him “how to order the child aright.”20
Even before his birth, Whitefield had become convinced that the child would be a boy, who would in turn become a great preacher. He publicly claimed the promise of the angel Gabriel to John’s father and mother (also named Elizabeth) in Luke 1: “Thy wife Elizabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John. And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth. For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord.” Elizabeth believed that the boy had already begun to display signs of true piety, even at his baptismal service, since he frequently clasped “his little hands,” suggesting that he had a “sweet thought or something from the Lord.”21
Because of ongoing financial struggles (which belied accusations that Whitefield unduly profited from his ministry), Whitefield decided to relocate the family to Elizabeth’s home in Abergavenny. It was just too expensive to continue renting in London. In January, she and the baby set out for Wales, stopping over in Gloucester to stay at the Bell Inn. He told a friend that Elizabeth and the “little one are brave and well.” “But why talk I of wife and little one?” he asked. “Let all be absorbed in the thoughts of the love, suffering, free and full salvation of the infinitely great and glorious Emmanuel.”22
While in Gloucester, the baby became severely ill, suffering at least one seizure. Whitefield’s brother Richard, still the proprietor of the inn, summoned a doctor. In the cruel conventions of early-modern medicine, the doctor ordered that the baby be blistered. Physicians in Britain and America often used blistering, as well as other means of purging, to try to bring the body’s fluids into balance. One of Whitefield’s panicked friends in Gloucester, John Grace, wrote to Howell Harris and confessed that he did not know how to contact the itinerant to advise him of his son’s dire condition.23
By the time Whitefield received word of his son’s plight, it was too late. John passed away in late January, dying where Whitefield was born. Whitefield returned to Gloucester and learned the awful news. He wrote, “I was called to sacrifice my Isaac; I mean to bury my only child and son.” His ambitions for his son had given the devil an opening to deceive him with “wrong impressions,” he concluded. He had misapplied scripture to the child’s destiny. Now all his “ill-grounded expectations” were destroyed by the child’s sudden death.24
John was buried at Gloucester’s St. Mary de Crypt, where Whitefield had been baptized, taken first communion, and first preached. At the funeral, George and Elizabeth knelt, prayed, and wept. Elizabeth told Howell Harris that John was now “as a little cherub made white in the blood of his and our dear Lord.” George said less about John’s fate, but noted that he took comfort in the story of the resurrection of a dead boy by Elisha’s prayers in 2 Kings 4. George told Benjamin Colman that although God had called them to give up the “lovely boy,” they were “enabled to make him a free-will offering.” Whitefield returned to preaching as soon as he could. Indeed, he had already started preaching again before the funeral, and after burying John, he returned to London. Elizabeth went on to Abergavenny. Quoting the Bible commentator Matthew Henry, the itinerant told himself that “weeping must not hinder sowing.”25
Whitefield did not say much about his feelings regarding John’s death, but we can reasonably assume that the experience tested his faith in God’s sovereign, benevolent rule over his life. He had scripture passages ready at hand to help him understand the staggering loss: Job lost his family to the “great wind” at the outset of that classic book of divine tribulation. God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac (which Whitefield cited explicitly), and God the Father had given up his only begotten son, Jesus. Whitefield must have wondered, too, what the experience revealed about God’s guidance through the Spirit—Whitefield was sure that the boy would have grown up to become a powerful preacher, but he now regarded that certainty as devilish deception. He had no inkling that the Lord would take the boy away, and before he knew it, the boy was gone. Well might the itinerant and Elizabeth have returned repeatedly to Job’s confession: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Nothing soothed Whitefield more than preaching, even in the midst of such tragedy or when enduring ongoing harassment from local antagonists. Whitefield was hardly alone among evangelicals in receiving such treatment, which the Wesleys, Howell Harris, and other evangelicals also encountered. Outdoor preaching made the itinerants particularly attractive targets. The Welsh Anglican preacher Daniel Rowland reported that while preaching near the seaside in Cardiganshire, a “company of ruffians” armed with guns and clubs accosted him, beating him mercilessly and wounding him in the head. John Wesley likewise wrote that in Wednesbury, near Birmingham, mobs dragged him through the town, some shouting, “Knock his brains out, down with him, kill him at once!” Thankfully, most hooligans intended only to frighten or make fun of the preachers. Few suffered serious harm or met with William Seward’s fate.26
The common experience of harassment helped broker a truce between Whitefield and John Wesley. The thaw had begun in late 1742, when Whitefield received a “kind letter” from Wesley, and Whitefield replied, asking that they “bear with, and forbear one another in love.” Some months after Wesley’s dangerous encounter at Wednesbury, Whitefield went to the town as well, noting that “much mobbing had been there against Mr. Wesley’s friends.” A smaller crowd accosted Whitefield. “Several clods were thrown,” he wrote, “one of them fell on my head, and another struck my fingers, while I was in prayer.” When he returned to London (shortly after his son’s funeral), Whitefield held a fast and took an offering at the Tabernacle for the Methodists in the Birmingham area. Rather than renewing their former alliance, however, Wesley and Whitefield decided (as Whitefield put it) that they would “go on best when [they] only preach the simple gospel, and do not interfere with each other’s plan.” Their public feuding subsided, but their correspondence also became less frequent.27
Whitefield renewed his clash with Anglican authorities—or rather, they renewed it with him—with the anonymous publication of Observations upon the Conduct and Behaviour of a Certain Sect, Usually Distinguished by the Name of Methodists. This pamphlet, widely attributed to Whitefield’s old nemesis Edmund Gibson, the bishop of London, accused Whitefield and the Wesleys of subverting church and state and indulging in wild enthusiasm. Citing Whitefield’s journals, Gibson asked “whether a due and regular attendance on the public offices of religion” was not better evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit than the “sudden agonies, roarings and screamings, tremblings, droppings-down, ravings and madnesses” into which the Methodists had fallen?28
Anglican critics also implied that the Methodists were potential rebels against the king. Their meetings attracted tens of thousands of people, who were “subject to no control or examination.” This represented a ready-made opportunity for “seditious persons to raise disturbances.” These were serious charges, given that England had just entered the War of the Austrian Succession (the part of it fought in America was known as King George’s War) against France, Prussia, Spain, and other European powers. Just before the bishop’s publication, France had attempted a seaborne invasion, launched from Dunkirk, but terrible storms had stopped the attack. The French had hoped to depose George II and install the Catholic “Old Pretender,” the son of James II (who had been removed in the Glorious Revolution) as the new British monarch. Confirming British Protestants’ sense that a larger Catholic conspiracy was at work, the Old Pretender had been living comfortably in Rome on an annuity supplied by the pope. A March 1744 edition of the London Gazette advertised the publication of the bishop’s anti-Methodist tract; that issue also bristled with Britons’ proclamations to the king regarding the horror of “an invasion to extirpate our religion, laws and liberties, to set the pretender upon your Majesty’s throne, and ourselves to be made tributaries and slaves to France.”29
Whitefield published a reply to Gibson with a pointed quote from Psalm 35:11 on the title page: “False witnesses did rise up; they laid to my charge things that I knew not.” The bishop should have titled the pamphlet “Misrepresentations of the Conduct and Principles, of Many Orthodox, Well-Meaning Ministers and Members of the Church of England, and Loyal Subjects to His Majesty King George,” the itinerant chided. He was a “zealous friend” to the king and routinely prayed for and preached on obedience to him. In light of the crisis with France, Whitefield assured readers that he would continue warning audiences “against the dreadful effects of Popish principles, and exhort them to exert their utmost endeavours to keep out a Popish Pretender from ever sitting upon the English throne.” This rejoinder went through three editions in London (as did Gibson’s pamphlet), as well as one in Boston.30
Whitefield had been absent from America for three and a half years when his ship finally slipped out to sea in August 1744. The Wilmington joined a convoy of 150 British military and merchant ships, whose massed presence made the passage more secure during a troubled time. Elizabeth came with him, and the passage was tense and exhausting for them both. On one occasion, the sight of unidentified ships sent the crew into frenzied battle preparations. Elizabeth began making gunpowder cartridges. George admitted that he wanted only to “go into the holes of the ship, hearing that was the chaplain’s usual place.” A devout sailor pleaded with him, however, to come on deck and address the men before the fight. Whitefield complied, and for the first time in his life he “beat up to arms by a warm exhortation.” Once the ships came into range, however, the crew realized that they were flying the Union Jack. They were safe.31
When Whitefield landed at York, Maine, he became so ill that he felt he was at the “mouth of the heavenly harbor.” His “nervous cholic,” as he described it, threw him into convulsions. After convalescing for three weeks at the home of a key supporter, Colonel William Pepperrell, the itinerant attempted a ferry ride across the Piscataqua River to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Doing this was a mistake, and he relapsed. But his followers had already announced his intent to preach, so the gaunt twenty-nine-year-old proceeded with his sermon, which he thought he might simply deliver and die. That evening, friends laid him on a pallet near a fire to keep the fall chill at bay. (Elizabeth said that he had become “as cold as a clod.”) Alarmed by his ghostly appearance, they whispered among themselves, “He is gone.” But Whitefield reported that an African American woman sat beside him and said, “in broken language, ‘Master, you just go to Heaven’s gate. But Jesus Christ said, get you down, get you down, you must not come here yet; but go first, and call some more poor negroes.’” Indeed, he regained his health, and figured it was not yet his time.32
Great revival had shaken many parts of the colonies, especially New England, since Whitefield’s last visit. He had heard so many reports of wondrous awakenings in America, he wrote, that “one would have imagined the millennium was coming indeed.” Beginning in 1742, however, the Great Awakening spawned fierce debates not only between evangelicals and nonevangelicals, but also between friends of the revivals. In particular, the radical exploits of revivalists such as James Davenport and Whitefield’s South Carolina convert Hugh Bryan brought an avalanche of criticism against radical evangelicals.33
The culmination of Davenport’s radical career had come in March 1743 when, defying orders, he returned to preach in New London, Connecticut. Davenport was suffering from a “lame leg” that required his followers to carry him about in a chair. He later blamed this infirmity, caused by a “cancry humour,” for producing a feverish daze that explained his behavior in New London. The Lord revealed to Davenport that his followers should burn the books of questionable authors, including some, such as Benjamin Colman, who had supported Whitefield. Davenport also called on them to torch the “idols of their gay clothes,” including “scarlet cloaks, velvet hoods, fine laces, and everything that had two colors.” Davenport himself cast a pair of “plush breeches” into the pile, but a brave young woman, thinking this was all too much, pulled his pants out and threw them in Davenport’s face. Her bold gesture sobered the crowd; they realized that their zeal had become mindless frenzy. Davenport lost many of his followers and began making amends among pastors whom he had offended.34
Likewise, in the months following his conversion, Hugh Bryan came to believe that God was raising him up as a liberator of South Carolina’s slaves. He sent a book of prophecies to the South Carolina legislature in Charleston, including the prediction that Charleston would be “destroyed by fire and sword, to be executed by Negroes before the first day of next month.” Lawmakers promptly called for Bryan’s arrest. But before they caught him, Bryan had already failed a test of his prophetic calling. A report printed in Boston said that he had taken up a rod and, Moses-like, attempted to part the waters of a Lowcountry river. He tumbled into the river with the staff in hand, “smiting, splashing and spluttering the water about with it,” and nearly drowned.35
Moderate evangelicals remained thankful for the abundant conversions, but worried about spectacular embarrassments like the Davenport and Bryan affairs, and about more common excesses. These included the advent of “exhorters,” whom critics described as “children, boys and girls, sometimes women; but most commonly raw, illiterate weak and conceited young men, or lads . . . [who] take upon them what they imagine is the business of preaching.” Many worried about subversive effects on the slave population, too. Would the revivals’ enthusiastic extremes give blacks notions of equality and liberty? One Anglican minister contended that Whitefield’s Three Letters (1740) and its criticism of slaveholders “gave great countenance” to the supposed slave conspiracy in New York City in 1741, which led to the execution and deportation of hundreds of the city’s slaves. Antirevivalists such as Boston’s Charles Chauncy pointed to the evangelicals’ extremes and said that they represented the essence of the revivals, which he regarded as ungodly chaos.36
In Whitefield’s absence, many colonists had begun blaming him for the revivalists’ radicalism. A report of Hugh Bryan’s failed river parting, for instance, concluded that this episode represented “the workings of Whitefieldism in its native tendency.” A survey of periodicals during his time away shows that ninety-three letters about him appeared in colonial newspapers. More than half were negative, twice the negative coverage that he received during his first American preaching tour. Whitefield had become used to charges of enthusiasm, but he found these attacks especially galling: how could he be guilty for American evangelicals’ extremes when he was not even in the colonies in 1742 and 1743? He readily admitted that some of the radical preachers had gone too far: “Wild-fire will necessarily blend itself with the pure fire that comes from God’s altar.” In the ecstatic furor of the awakenings, some had mistaken their own imagination for God’s revelation. But Whitefield would not accept responsibility for the imprudent behavior of Bryan, Davenport, and others. He unfairly received all the blame, he wrote, “as being the primum mobile.”37
Yet only the radical evangelicals seemed genuinely pleased by his return to New England. Daniel Rogers, the Harvard tutor who had experienced the new birth under Whitefield in 1740, was among a group of ministers who welcomed the ailing Whitefield in York, finding the itinerant “in bed very ill of a nervous cholic.”38 These friends and Davenport allies only confirmed critics’ suspicion that Whitefield had not really turned over a new leaf. The itinerant had promoted “the same disorders in Scotland, and elsewhere, since he went from America,” wrote one antagonist in the Boston Evening-Post, and now the church-rending radicals had served as his welcoming party in York. Some of his defenders, the writer noted, suggested that Whitefield would tone down his divisive rhetoric, but could he really “pull down a building which is the work of his own hands?”39
There was a real possibility that moderate evangelical leaders might turn against Whitefield if he could not convince them that he had repudiated his previous indiscretions. In late November 1744, Whitefield had recovered sufficiently to go to Boston, where he held a critical meeting with four leading pastors, including Benjamin Colman of the Brattle Street Church. Before sitting down to dinner, they had a frank exchange about some of his earlier mistakes and some enthusiastic passages from his journals. They expressed concern that while New England had seen a massive revival, a “chill” had come over the religious climate in the past couple years because of the “imprudence” of Davenport and other radicals. Some radicals had separated from existing congregations and illegally formed their own.40
Colman and his moderate colleagues pressed Whitefield: did he approve of these separations? Many radicals had cited Whitefield as having tacitly endorsed them when he denounced unconverted ministers and when he declared that the “generality of preachers preached an unknown Christ.” The itinerant said that if anything he wrote or said had encouraged church divisions, he regretted it. In any case, he had come back to New England to “preach the gospel of peace . . . and promote charity and love among all.” His divisive days were in the past. They could trust him to disrupt the churches no more. The Boston ministers clearly had come with an intention of asking for—and receiving—such assurances, and having done so, they “dined very comfortably” together. Colman invited Whitefield to speak the next day at his meetinghouse. Soon the irenic Colman had Whitefield assist him in serving at a communion service, as well.41
Whitefield had to secure the support of these moderate pastors in order to maintain access to New England’s prominent congregations. The fact that they stood behind him, however, hardly ended the controversy. More than a half dozen pastoral associations publicly registered concerns about Whitefield and the effects of his ministry. Harvard and Yale, stung by his earlier comments about them, also weighed in against Whitefield. Harvard’s faculty painted him as a troublemaking outsider whose preaching tended toward the “entire destruction of the order of these churches of Christ, which our fathers have taken such care and pains to settle.” They highlighted his itinerancy and enthusiastic tendencies as particularly dangerous, chiding his devotees for following a man who “conducts himself according to his dreams, or some ridiculous and unaccountable impulses” of his mind. He implied, the professors lamented, that he had “as familiar a converse and communion with God as any of the prophets and apostles, and such as . . . all acknowledge to have been under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost.” They warned against accepting any such claims of special access to God in the centuries since the passing of the apostles and the closing of the biblical canon.42
Yale’s rector, Thomas Clap, went further, accusing Whitefield of planning to replace many of New England’s ministers with his allies. This was a ridiculous charge—Whitefield retorted that “such a thought never entered [his] heart.” But Clap claimed to have gotten the information from none other than Jonathan Edwards. Clap and Edwards had a history of conflict dating to 1741, when Edwards challenged Yale officials for failing to support the revivals in his commencement address “The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God.” Clap said that Edwards had confided in him in 1743 that Whitefield “designed to turn the generality of ministers in the country out of their places, and bring over ministers from England, Scotland and Ireland” to replace them. Edwards was incensed and “exceedingly astonished” by Clap’s account, explaining that all he had said was that Whitefield expressed interest in bringing promising candidates from Britain to study at the Tennents’ Log College. Edwards asked Clap “publicly to correct your mistake in this.” Clap refused. Edwards and Clap engaged in a heated exchange of pamphlets that endured through the first half of 1745.43
Although Edwards admitted that he had had some earlier disagreements with Whitefield—especially over Whitefield’s judging ministers as unconverted—he thought those conflicts were not exceptionally problematic. He attributed the mistakes to Whitefield’s youth. Edwards considered the attacks on the itinerant, especially Clap’s, to be mean-spirited and baseless. He lamented that Whitefield would be “pursued with so much violence, and appearance of inveterate opposition, and indefatigable endeavours to blacken him to the utmost; and with such artifices, as it would be mean to use, with respect to the basest miscreant.” Clap, of course, had engaged in the worst of such “artifices.”44
Whitefield quietly passed his thirtieth birthday by preaching in and around Boston. He saw large crowds and continuing signs of awakening, although it would have been difficult for the fervor to match that from his initial appearance in New England. Many who came admired him, but they had seen him speak before. At the end of December he preached in Bridgewater, south of Boston, at the church of John Porter, one of the Massachusetts pastors who had experienced the new birth under Whitefield’s preaching four years earlier. Echoing Romans 5:5, he told Whitefield that he had never experienced true spiritual peace until he “felt the love of God shed abroad abundantly in his heart by the Holy Ghost.” Whitefield preached and assisted with communion at Porter’s church, and reckoned that Jesus “filled his people as with new wine” during the service. Some people cried out, but Whitefield did not try to restrain them, since “it did not give offense” and since he thought “country people could not so well restrain themselves as those of a more polite education in the town.” The penitents were not drowning out Whitefield’s sermon, anyway.45
Although Whitefield still permitted outcries such as these, he had moved into a moderate phase, emphasizing unity and sobriety rather than division and zeal. He did not back off his Calvinist theology, yet he now preached “little terror,” he wrote. The avalanche of criticism he had received in England, Scotland, and America had stung him, especially when it came from influential allies such as Colman and Edwards. Whitefield sought to soothe grievances and build bridges with the alienated.46
Whitefield increasingly found that imperial politics and military affairs presented him with opportunities to build those bridges. He never stopped preaching the new birth, of course, but war and politics became more salient. These themes could help him win over critics and supply fresh material for his sermons. The year 1745 offered two ripe occasions for such material. One, as we shall see, was a Jacobite rebellion in Britain. The other was an American colonial expedition against Cape Breton Island. In both instances, Whitefield emphasized his role as a supporter of the Protestant British monarchy and as an inveterate foe of Catholic France. These were positions with which most Britons, including the colonists, would heartily agree (at least for the next couple of decades).
The French presence to the north of New England, especially at the Louisbourg fortress on Cape Breton Island, had become increasingly irritating to Massachusetts leaders. Louisbourg was the hub of a lucrative fishing trade, and the French had launched a raid from the fort on a British outpost at Canso, Nova Scotia, in 1744. The outbreak of King George’s War in 1744 prompted the governor of Massachusetts to commission an expedition against the fortress. He raised several thousand men from the northern colonies and put the expedition under the command of Whitefield’s friend William Pepperrell. Pepperrell asked for Whitefield’s advice before he accepted the task, and Whitefield also supplied Pepperrell’s forces with a motto, Nil desperandum Christo duce (No need to fear with Christ as our leader). Massachusetts held a public fast for the expedition, and Whitefield prayed for God to grant that Louisbourg would become a “garrison for Protestants.” Another New Englander prayed bluntly in verse, “Destroy proud Antichrist, O Lord, / And quite consume the Whore.”47
Pepperrell’s forces proceeded up the Nova Scotia coast, landing on Cape Breton in early May and laying siege to the fortress. The New England troops dragged cannon over spring snow to bombard the French. The French soldiers were badly undermanned, and the British colonial forces captured a French supply ship that would have replenished their flour and meat rations. Instead, those supplies bolstered Pepperrell’s men. The end came in mid-June, just before the New Englanders launched a direct assault on the fortress: a flag of truce appeared, and the French gave up Louisbourg.48
Whitefield and many other pastors, including his inveterate opponent Charles Chauncy, preached thanksgiving sermons on the happy news. The itinerant spoke from Psalm 41:11, “By this I know that thou favourest me, since thou hast not permitted mine enemies to triumph over me.” Jonathan Edwards, whose congregation had supplied about twenty men for the expedition, wrote that Pepperrell’s forces enjoyed one favor from God after another, making the victory “a dispensation of providence, the most remarkable in its kind, that has been in many ages.” He concluded, “We live in an age, wherein divine wonders are to be expected.”49
Louisbourg could not heal all disagreements, of course, and Whitefield found that he could not always successfully navigate the misunderstandings regarding the revivals. While he insisted that he opposed church separations, for instance, he not only still associated with Separate leaders, but also sometimes preached in their breakaway churches. This practice led to a major showdown in Exeter, New Hampshire, with Pastor John Odlin. Odlin, who had served as the pastor of the Exeter church since 1706, was one of northern New England’s most formidable antirevivalists, tangling repeatedly with Whitefield’s convert Daniel Rogers, who itinerated in the area. The appointment of Odlin’s son Woodbridge—who was also hostile to the revivalists—as the church’s assistant pastor precipitated a split within the church, and the Separates erected a new building for their meetings.50
Whitefield visited Exeter in March 1745, intending to preach not just to the Separate congregation (he said), but to “all in general”—at the Separate meetinghouse. Unsurprisingly, John Odlin was not convinced by this distinction. He denied Whitefield access to his pulpit and said that Whitefield was endorsing Separatism by appearing at the breakaway church. In a testy meeting, the Odlins proclaimed that Whitefield’s itinerant ministry was illegitimate and forbidden by scripture. Whitefield countered that “the people had a right to private judgment and that [Odlin] could not, upon Protestant principles, deny the liberty of hearing for themselves.” More antirevivalist pastors joined the debate, which became loud and heated. It ended with Whitefield saying that he had heard enough and hastily leaving “to prosecute his pernicious principle,” as a hostile newspaper account put it. He trudged through fresh snow to the Separate meetinghouse, where he preached twice to packed audiences. There he “spoke of the things which make for peace,” he noted. Daniel Rogers, traveling with Whitefield, jotted in his diary that Whitefield preached on 1 Peter 2:7, “To you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed.” Rogers said that he could feel God’s power moving in the meeting.51
In August 1745, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette reported on Whitefield’s travels, noting that the itinerant preached “for the Rev. Mr. Edwards of Northampton twice” on a mid-July Sunday. He delivered one of his Northampton sermons on the powerful text he had used at Cambuslang, Isaiah 54:5, “thy maker is thy husband.” On the following Thursday, Massachusetts held a day of thanksgiving for the victory at Louisbourg, and Whitefield preached again at Northampton “at the request of the Rev. Mr. Edwards.”52
This visit soothed misunderstandings between Edwards and Whitefield. Edwards’s clash with Thomas Clap had aligned Edwards more closely than ever with the itinerant. The Northampton minister wrote to a Scottish correspondent: “Whitefield was reproached in the most scurrilous and scandalous manner . . . I question whether history affords any instance paralleled with this, as so much pains taken in writing to blacken a man’s character, and render him odious.” None of the attacks addressed any new problems; they all focused on his “old faults, without anything new worth speaking of,” Edwards concluded.53
Edwards was pleased to host George and Elizabeth for almost a week in Northampton. Whitefield “behaved himself so, that he endeared himself much to me,” Edwards told Scottish contacts. “He appeared in a more desirable temper of mind and more solid and judicious in his thoughts, and prudence in his conduct, than when he was here before.” Following his visit to Northampton, Whitefield proceeded to eastern Connecticut, which had become a center of evangelical radicalism. Edwards happily noted that Whitefield spoke clearly against the extremes of the “wild and extravagant people there, and has there done a great deal of good.” He had “reclaimed” a number of Connecticut’s awakened from the dangers of enthusiastic frenzy. Whitefield also held a “great Indian meeting” with Mohegans, Pequots, and Niantics near Norwich, following up on their interest in Christianity, which had been stirred by the preaching of James Davenport and others. From eastern Connecticut he crossed over to Long Island, making his way to New York City and then to Philadelphia.54
A New London diarist, Joshua Hempstead, stopped stacking summer hay to hear Whitefield preach as he passed through eastern Connecticut. On the Sabbath, Hempstead listened to the itinerant as he spoke under an oak tree from a field pulpit carried by horse from town to town. Hempstead observed that “a great assembly perhaps twice so many as could possibly sit in the meetinghouse” was there. “An excellent preacher,” Hempstead concluded.55
Whitefield was in New England for nine months, and despite the enormous controversy his visit precipitated, he had substantially repaired his reputation, at least among key leaders such as Benjamin Colman and Jonathan Edwards. He had more invitations to preach than he could honor. But comparisons with the spectacular results of his inaugural visit were inevitable. Edwards bluntly observed that the itinerant’s “preaching in New England was attended with no such remarkable effects, in awakenings and reviving religion as before.” Yes, he saw large, attentive crowds everywhere he went, but not many conversions. “The country in general remains in a great degree of stupidity, as to any work of conviction on the hearts of sinners,” Edwards lamented. “I know of no such work going on anywhere in this land.”56
As a Calvinist, Whitefield knew that whatever his mastery of preaching and print, he could not control the timing of revival. In spite of this conviction, he must have felt the sting of assessments such as Edwards’s. The “remarkable effects” of his preaching in London in the spring of 1739, in New England in the fall of 1740, or in Scotland in the summer of 1742 would never return. Critics began painting him as a celebrity past his prime. The anonymous author of “Mr. Whitefield’s Soliloquy” took on the voice of the itinerant, lamenting his downfall:
It must be so—unhappy man!
I'm sunk, I'm lost, do what I can.
Like Jonah’s gourd, rais'd in a night,
I wither by noon-day light.
I build upon unconstant sand.
My fabric can no longer stand:
What shall I do? Where shall I go?
What course to take I do not know;
Shall I, whose tow'ring height surpassed
The mountain’s top, for some years past,
And his my head among the clouds,
Stand level with the vulgar crowds?
. . . What would I give, could I redeem
The happy days that I have seen!57
Of course, Whitefield never articulated such sentiments himself, but he faced a critical transition, one familiar in the twenty-first century. A young man or woman becomes an international media sensation and then spends the rest of his or her career coping with the memory of that season of celebrity. Some fall into obscurity or a spiral of self-destruction. Some accept a new, quieter reality and use their celebrity status for constructive purposes. In general, the latter path was the one that a less fractious, more moderate Whitefield took for his remaining twenty-five years. But moderation, too, can have its price.