Ten “Hunting in the American Woods”: Whitefield, Slavery, and Evangelical Radicalism
“HUNTING IN THE AMERICAN WOODS”: WHITEFIELD, SLAVERY, AND EVANGELICAL RADICALISM
George Whitefield wrote thousands of letters in his life, but because of careless handling over the centuries, many original manuscripts have been lost. John Gillies’s edition of his writings, published in the 1770s, included more than fourteen hundred letters. Even in Gillies’s edition, however, there is a major gap between July 1745 and August 1746. Only a few scattered, unpublished letters in archives were able to help fill in that blank year. But in the early 1950s came a remarkable discovery: a whole Whitefield letter book, from precisely those missing months, was found in the personal papers of a colonial pastor from Delaware. The volume came to the attention of a Presbyterian historian, who transcribed and published the letters.1
One of the most remarkable—and disheartening—letters in Whitefield’s corpus lies in that long-lost letter book. Whitefield traveled south in fall 1745 to check on the Bethesda orphanage. In December, he wrote to the Reverend William Hutson of the Stoney Creek Church in Lowcountry South Carolina, where the brothers Hugh and Jonathan Bryan served as deacons. Hutson had converted under Whitefield’s ministry, and with the encouragement of the Bryans and Whitefield, he made slaves part of the church community, including some slaves whom Hutson or the Bryans owned. Slave conversions, to Hutson, entailed spiritual freedom, but not liberation in this life.2
At some point in 1745, Hutson offered to give Whitefield a “Negroe.” This presented a unique temptation for Whitefield, who had earlier denounced southern slave masters’ treatment of their bound workers and who had called for the evangelization and education of slaves. But he had never questioned slavery as an institution. Indeed, he called for its introduction into Georgia, where trustees had initially banned it. Now Whitefield had to make a personal decision about owning slaves, and about the related question of breaking Georgia’s law against slavery. The legal question alone should have made the decision easy, but Whitefield thought that the ban on slavery was silly, and that it was only a matter of time before Georgia abandoned it. He also convinced himself that if he could just have a few slaves there, Bethesda would “more than maintain itself” financially.3
As for slavery itself, Whitefield was aware that some Quakers denounced it, but it was not until 1755 that the Society of Friends’ Philadelphia Meeting decisively resolved to ban slave merchants from membership. Until that year, most Quakers’ position on slavery was generally ameliorist; they wanted to make slavery more humane and Christian, not abolish it altogether. That was Whitefield’s stance, too. New England Quakers did not ban slave traders from their meetings until 1770, the year of Whitefield’s death. Few in the itinerant’s own circles objected to slavery per se—John Wesley’s Thoughts on Slavery, for example, did not appear until after Whitefield’s death. The celebrated slave trader turned abolitionist John Newton, the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” experienced conversion in 1748 and did not go public with his antislavery views until 1788.4
One exception to this silence on slavery among Whitefield’s colleagues was Johann Martin Boltzius, a German Lutheran pastor of Ebenezer, Georgia, who was ten years older than Whitefield and had moved to Georgia in the mid-1730s. About the same time that Whitefield considered accepting a slave from Hutson, Boltzius met with Whitefield and expressed dismay at the revivalist’s views on bound labor. Because Boltzius envisioned Georgia becoming a refuge for persecuted European Protestants, he thought that introducing slavery would depress the wages of white immigrants, making it difficult for them to live there. Whitefield told Boltzius that he thought the “Providence of God has appointed this colony rather for the work of black slaves than for Europeans, because of the hot climate, to which the Negroes are better used than white people.” Boltzius thought this was a stereotype, however, and reminded the itinerant that some parts of Europe were as hot as Georgia during the summer. He was also dubious of Whitefield’s claim that introducing slavery would allow for the evangelization of blacks; Boltzius thought slave masters were more likely to be worldly-minded and to “take advantage of the poor black slaves,” raising the “sins of the land to a great height.” The advent of slavery would be followed shortly by the appearance of mixed-race children in Savannah, he predicted, perhaps reflecting the tendency of some masters to prey sexually on their slaves. Ministers who were truly worried about evangelizing African workers, Boltzius said, should simply cross the Savannah River and preach to South Carolina’s burgeoning black population. Five years later (shortly before slavery’s legalization in Georgia), Boltzius was still pushing Whitefield to explain how the “conversion of these poor creatures” would be furthered by expanding the brutality of slavery. By that point, Boltzius stood nearly alone in defending the colony’s ban.5
Boltzius’s pleas failed to convince the itinerant. In Whitefield’s note to Hutson, he mentioned the recent arrival of traveling slaves, including “Bob,” who worked as a teamster shutthng supplies from Charleston to Bethesda. Whitefield said that in spite of the prohibition on slavery in Georgia, no one noticed Bob or other slaves when they came to the orphanage. No one was interested in enforcing the preposterous law, Whitefield thought.6
“Therefore,” he told Hutson, “if you think proper as you once said to give me a Negroe, I will venture to keep him.” If some Georgia official did enforce the law and seize Whitefield’s slave, he would just buy him back and send him back across the Savannah River into South Carolina. “I leave it to you to do as you find in your heart,” he told the minister. But if he did send a slave, he told Hutson, he should make sure it was a “sober one.” Then, before sending the letter, Whitefield jotted a hasty postscript: “upon 2d thots. you may Deferr sendg ye Negroe till I talk further abot. it.” Whitefield still hesitated to break Georgia’s law, but by 1747 he had acquired a South Carolina plantation, becoming a slave owner.7
By the time of his return to America in 1744, time and circumstances were turning Whitefield into a moderate man. He was stung by charges of fanaticism and subversion, and was weary of feuding with would-be allies over theology. Respectable, aristocratic followers appeared everywhere he preached, and he did not wish to alienate them. Whitefield maintained his core message of the new birth and the evangelical gospel, as well as his Calvinist absolutes. But his days of theological brawhng, calling out unconverted ministers, fostering church splits, and reporting messages given him by the Holy Spirit were mostly in the past. Coming to terms with slave owning was also a part of his growing moderation. While he had never gone to the radical lengths of Hugh Bryan in prophesying the destruction of slavery, his 1740 address to slave masters certainly took an aggressive stance. Now slave owning and evangelism went together smoothly, at least in his mind.8
This journey to moderation was not unusual, and perhaps even expected, as Whitefield moved into his thirties, past the flush times of the early 1740s. Others experienced the same transition out of radicalism: James Davenport reclaimed some respect from moderate pastors after his book-and clothes-burning debacle, apologizing and swearing off his most controversial practices. When Whitefield arrived in Philadelphia, he found a subdued Gilbert Tennent, by then installed as the preacher at the New Building, which backers had initially erected for Whitefield’s preaching. Regretting the “excessive heat” of his earlier behavior, Tennent had engaged the Moravians in a bitter exchange over their radicalism in 1742. By the time he accepted the position in Philadelphia, he had left much of his radical style behind. The man whom critics formerly painted as a dangerous enthusiast now railed against the “Moravian tragedy,” which enticed naïve young converts with “enthusiasm, pride, error, and nonsense.” Tennent had begun to wear typical ministerial attire—a wig and robes—and to read sermons from manuscripts instead of preaching extemporaneously.9
Gentlemanly supporters in Philadelphia tried to convince Whitefield to stay there, offering him an £800 salary if he would preach in Philadelphia for six months out of the year. The rest of the time, they said, he was free to itinerate. Whitefield turned them down. Agreeing to this arrangement would have effectively meant permanent relocation to the colonies. As much as he loved America, he was not prepared to make this commitment.10
Whitefield made his way south through Maryland and Virginia in the fall of 1745. In Hanover County, Virginia, a converted bricklayer named Samuel Morris had just missed seeing Whitefield on his earlier visit, but Whitefield’s sermons had inspired him to lead his own local revival. Morris said that he had heard all the news about the “warm and alarming preacher” in the early 1740s, but not until 1743 did he receive direct exposure to the itinerant’s work. It came through the 1741 Glasgow sermons “taken from [Whitefield’s] mouth.” (Morris remembered the printer’s exact advertisement on the title page.) An immigrant from Scotland brought copies of these sermons with him, which Morris acquired. He liked them so much that he began preaching them himself. “I invited my neighbors to come and hear it,” he recalled, “and the plainness, popularity, and fervency of the discourses, being peculiarly fitted to affect our unimproved minds, and the Lord rendering the Word efficacious, many were convinced of their undone condition, and constrained to seek deliverance.” Many began to go to Morris’s home meetings rather than attending Anglican parish services.11
The assemblies grew so large that Morris built a meetinghouse “merely for reading,” he wrote. His recitations of Whitefield’s sermons generated dramatic effects, with so many “crying out and weeping bitterly” that some regarded Morris’s followers as “strange and ridiculous.” Again, Whitefield’s sermons could create a stir on their own. Even though Whitefield had been physically absent from Virginia for six years, his publications did a great deal of revival work in the interim, by Morris’s initiative. Gilbert Tennent and other visiting Presbyterian pastors from the Middle Colonies began working with Morris’s congregation. Strangely, by the time that Whitefield came to Hanover County in October 1745, his arrival did not seem to make an enormous difference to Morris. (Whitefield apparently declined an invitation to speak at Morris’s meetinghouse.) The visit did give Morris’s followers “farther encouragement” and helped them to recruit more Anglicans, who were more receptive to Whitefield than they were to the traveling Presbyterians.12
One Virginia correspondent noted that gentlemen and planters particularly responded to Whitefield’s sermons. Any perceived threat that he posed to the institution of slavery had faded. One master came with a black indentured servant (workers who effectively served as slaves, but only for a contracted number of years). Curiously, this African laborer was a “Papist,” a point the correspondent made sure to emphasize. A surprising number of slaves in America, especially ones from the Kingdom of Kongo (in modern Angola), had a Catholic background deriving from earlier Portuguese influence. The prospect of a Catholic African convert was worth mentioning. This man had three years left in his term of indenture, but his pious master apparently could not get him to church until Whitefield’s arrival. Now the servant was so animated that “his master was in hopes he might be made use of if converted, to the conversion of other Negroes.”13
Whitefield and his “dear yoke-fellow,” Elizabeth, arrived in Charleston on November 8, 1745. The commissary, Alexander Garden, awaited him with a formal suspension from the Anglican ministry, but as before, Whitefield simply ignored Garden’s sanctions. He repeatedly told correspondents that he pitied and prayed for “unhappy Mr. Garden.”14
For half a year Whitefield shuttled between Charleston and Bethesda, trying to put the orphanage on a stronger footing. Though Bethesda always struggled to maintain sufficient funds and supplies, it struck visitors as an idyllic refuge cut out of the piney woods. One friendly visitor in 1748 wrote that the three-story main house, completed in 1742, “stands on a rising ground, having a descent on all sides—On the north and south, are yards about 120 feet long, planted with orange trees.” The property had a lovely garden and orchard, and two enclosures for livestock; “on the east, is a water passage to carry you, to any part of Georgia [or] Carolina.” Even a skeptical visitor in 1743 called the garden “one of the best I ever saw in America,” and was impressed by the “genteel and friendly” welcome offered by Jonathan Barber and other Bethesda residents. Although this traveler initially suspected that Bethesda was a haven for Whitefieldian fanatics, the visit disabused him of those concerns. In short order he “became a convert to the design.”15
When Whitefield had departed in 1741, about a hundred people lived at Bethesda; now it was down to twenty-six. The remaining children’s rigorous schedule of devotion and education had them studying evangelical standards such as Matthew Henry and Isaac Watts’s edition of the Westminster Shorter Catechism as well as learning “Latin, arithmetick, writing, and reading.” All lessons were accompanied by prayer. Whitefield said that the children benefited from their relative isolation: they did not have to contend with the temptations of cities, and Bethesda was more wholesome than southern plantations, “where children must necessarily be brought up with Negroes.” Even though Whitefield urged the introduction of slavery in Georgia, he assumed that slaves, most of them uneducated non-Christians, were morally suspect.16
Soon after arriving at Bethesda, Whitefield began asking the South Carolina plantation master Jonathan Bryan for supplies. “I am obliged in conscience to keep [Bethesda] up,” he wrote, and “I believe it may now be done with a little charge.” He requested a hodgepodge of items for the farm and children: sheep, “pease,” butter, a chaise and harness, salt, pork, corn, rice, shoemaker’s thread, and flax. He wanted to do all he could for the project and to expand the residents beyond twenty-six people. “We have a house that will hold 100, and hearts that will hold 10,000,” he told Bryan.17
Critics routinely indicted him for neglecting the orphanage, even suggesting financial malfeasance. The Boston Evening-Post, for example, printed a letter in 1743 that painted a much different picture of Bethesda than the rosy ones depicted by friends. A visitor claimed that the main house was dilapidated, the doors stood open at all hours, and cows ranged about the lower rooms, which the writer “perceived by the dung on the floors.” He saw no evidence that any orphans actually lived at the place. People in the area told him that Whitefield was as bad as “a murderer, for enticing poor orphans to that place to starve.”18
This sort of criticism pressured Whitefield to publish an independent audit of the orphanage’s accounts, which he did in a letter to Ben Franklin printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette in May 1746. The auditors declared that it did not appear to them that Whitefield had “converted any part” of the donations to the orphanage to his private gain, and that the funds disbursed for Bethesda amounted to more than £5,500.19
One marvels at all Whitefield had to manage in his travels, from the supplies at Bethesda to the spiritual affairs of the London Tabernacle. Inevitably, slippages happened in his absence. In late 1744, he became concerned about reports of Moravian inroads among his English followers, inroads that would ultimately claim the allegiance of his key subordinates John Cennick and John Syms. For years, Whitefield had struggled to balance evangelical unity with his reservations about the Moravians’ doctrines, especially their teaching on perfectionism. Even before he left England, he knew that Syms, his secretary, was thinking of joining the Moravians, and Howell Harris informed him in January 1745 that Syms had done so. A frustrated Whitefield wrote to Syms, noting that he had written him several times but had heard nothing back. He chalked up the silence to difficulty of mail delivery, given the ongoing war between France and England, and the associated Jacobite uprising in Scotland. Whitefield continued to use stock Moravian phrases in this letter and others, telling Syms that Jesus’s “wounds and precious blood [are] a sure asylum and place of refuge in every time of trouble.”20
By March 1746, Whitefield had also learned of Cennick’s defection. Cennick specifically cited Whitefield’s absence as a reason for the move, saying that the itinerant had “only gone to America because he foresaw that the whole affair would collapse,” presumably meaning Whitefield’s Calvinistic Methodist Association. Whitefield wrote a tense letter to Syms, saying that the divisions at the Tabernacle did not surprise him: “The fire lay under the embers and near ready to break out before I left England.” He warned that Cennick and the other Moravian converts (he did not directly name Syms, but the implication was unmistakable) were verging toward “antinomianism.” He figured that some of them would soon become “Ranters,” an elusive species of radical heretic from the era of the English Civil War. These were ironic charges for Whitefield to make, since opponents had often associated Whitefield with antinomianism, and Alexander Garden had specifically drawn parallels between Whitefield and the “Ranters, Quakers, and French Prophets.” But the epithets remained on Whitefield’s mind: as he told John Wesley that antinomianism had become worse in New England than in Old England, and that many there had “turned almost complete Ranters.”21
Whitefield, the paradigmatic “New Light,” told Cennick to be wary of new light. He believed his former collaborator had an authentic, saving union with Christ, but he was concerned that Cennick would accept radical beliefs and lead the Calvinistic Methodists astray. “You and some others have imbibed antinomianism and under the notion of Christian liberty and new light—are really though unwittingly holding out a false light and bringing some into licentiousness of living . . . This has been always Satan’s way after a great awakening—It is but the old story over again,” Whitefield reckoned.22
Whitefield left open the possibility of godly new light if it brought “new love and lays the soul lower at the foot of Jesus.” If it made people bitter and contentious, however, such inspiration did not come from God. In the end, Whitefield could yet not denounce Cennick or the Moravians, because of his latitudinarian principles. “I am a staunch Calvinist,” the itinerant said, but “I cannot help loving [the Moravians] because I believe they love Jesus in sincerity.” Many of Whitefield’s English supporters followed Cennick and Syms into the Moravian fold, and ultimately, Whitefield estimated that he lost about 400 Tabernacle members in the schism. He called it the “Revolution at the Tabernacle.”23
However moderate Whitefield was becoming, he would not cut off allies for theological radicalism or for former excesses and errors. For example, Whitefield reached out to Hugh Bryan and James Davenport, the two people who had brought the most notoriety to America’s evangelical movement in the early 1740s. Kindly writing to Bryan, he indicted himself for making mistakes in the name of the Lord. “If blunders, frequent blunders ought to make a person silent, I am sure I ought to be dumb and open my mouth no more,” he told the planter. He exhorted Bryan to receive Christ’s forgiveness and to resume his ministry. Davenport had publicly recanted his errors two years earlier and had begun preaching in Hopewell, New Jersey. Davenport wrote to Whitefield in 1745, praying that “the Lord give you to take warning by my sad blunder and misconduct specified in my public retractions.” In a congenial missive back to Davenport, Whitefield only hinted at the former radical’s indiscretions, saying that he wished for the time when “corruption, infirmity, and error will be at an end.”24
Aside from the Moravian defections, Whitefield was also troubled by reports of Britain’s Jacobite rebellion. In July 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, commonly known as “Bonnie Prince Charlie” or the “Young Pretender,” had invaded Scotland in hopes of reestablishing the Catholic rule of the House of Stuart. (His grandfather, James II, had been removed in the Glorious Revolution fifty-six years earlier. Jacobites supported a restoration of Stuart rule.) Charles Edward recruited a formidable army of Highland Scots, and by mid-September, Edinburgh had fallen to Jacobite forces. George II was not even in the country when the uprising began, and his best troops were occupied in fighting the French on the Continent. Charles Edward’s army entered northern England, and for a moment it seemed as if he might march on London itself. Whitefield saw Jacobitism as part of a broader transatlantic Catholic threat, remembering Georgia’s narrow escape from the Spanish, and the remarkable conquest of Louisbourg. (He viewed these victories, along with the Glorious Revolution and other signal events in British Protestant history, as providential deliverances and “national mercies.”) He wrote in November 1745 that the “threatened storm” was “breaking upon Scotland and England,” adding, “I suppose ere long will reach us in America.” Employing Moravian language, he prayed that his friends in Britain would “fly for shelter to a dear redeemer’s wounds.”25
The decisive battle of the Jacobite rebellion came at Culloden Moor in northern Scotland in April 1746, ending with a devastating defeat of Charles Edward’s forces. Americans began receiving reports of the “bloody battle” at Culloden within three months. Whitefield, realizing the galvanizing potential of episodes such as Louisbourg and Culloden, delivered a well-publicized sermon, “Britain’s Mercies, and Britain’s Duty” in August 1746 at the New Building in Philadelphia. (He had left Charleston in May.) The sermon was “occasioned by the suppression of the late unnatural rebellion.” Jacobitism had few supporters in America, especially in settled areas of the colonies. Just like anti-Catholicism, anti-Jacobitism helped soothe differences over Whitefield’s previous excesses. A sermon like “Britain’s Mercies” could also blunt charges that Whitefield and the Methodists had subversive designs themselves. An admiring report on the sermon said that Whitefield had never “met with a more universal applause; having demonstrated himself to be as sound and zealous a Protestant, as truly a loyal subject, as now he is a grand and masterly orator.”26
In his sermon, the itinerant praised the “dread and rightful Sovereign King George the Second” for protecting Protestants’ civil and religious liberties. The “horrid plot first hatched in hell” to remove George II and replace him with the Catholic Pretender would have surely ended those blessings. He speculated that in the Pretender’s wake, “whole swarms of monks, Dominicans and friars, like so many locusts, [would] have overspread and plagued the nation.” Oxford and Cambridge would have fallen to Catholics, and Anglican pulpits would have been “filled with those old antichristian doctrines, free will, meriting by works, transubstantiation, purgatory, works of supererogation [the doctrine that justified indulgences], passive obedience, non-resistance, and all the other abominations of the Whore of Babylon.” (Including free will in that list was a swipe at the Wesleyan Methodists.) He also warned that the Jacobites would take away people’s Bibles and deprive them of liberty of conscience.27
Along with his promotion of the Louisbourg expedition, “Britain’s Mercies” reflected a growing political and imperial focus for the itinerant. Of course, he ended the sermon with an exhortation to repentance in light of continuing threats from the French, but the primary message was one of thankfulness to God for his providential interventions in British Protestant history, and of Whitefield’s confidence in the ultimate destruction of Europe’s Catholic powers. Whitefield had the sermon published in Philadelphia, Boston, and London editions, and it became part of his sermon anthologies published in the 1750s and 1760s.
The itinerant still needed to reconcile with Gilbert Tennent, who had warred with the Moravians and had exchanged pointed letters with Whitefield in 1742 over the issue. Whitefield had accused Tennent of being overzealous for doctrinal precision, and Tennent responded angrily: “Your high opinion of the Moravians and attempts to join with them shocks me exceedingly and opens a scene of terror and distress. Oh my dear brother! I believe in my soul you never did anything in all your life of such dreadful tendency to the church of God as your favouring that sect of enthusiastical heretics.” Managing such delicate matters via transatlantic mail (Whitefield was just preparing to visit Cambuslang as Tennent sent his letter) was less than ideal.28
Given the defections to the Moravians in London, Whitefield was eager to side with Tennent against them. Soon after returning to Philadelphia, Whitefield happily reported, “Jealousies and suspicions begin to vanish quite away and Mr. Tennent and we are very friendly.” Elizabeth similarly wrote to Benjamin Colman: “Dear Mr. Tennent is getting alive again, and expresses great love to my dear Master, and says he loves him better than ever.” No danger of a split with Tennent remained, and Whitefield and Ben Franklin arranged to have Tennent write the introduction for a new volume of Whitefield’s sermons. (The first of the five sermons was Whitefield’s standard “Thy Maker is Thy Husband.”)29
Tennent’s new moderation came out in this introduction, in which he endorsed Whitefield precisely because of his prudence. The itinerant’s sermons, Tennent wrote, brimmed with “words of truth and soberness,” adding “The style is easy and natural . . . grave and masculine.” It was important to mention masculinity, which to Tennent implied rationality and emotional control. The sermons indicated a “sober, humble, well-informed mind, and a warm heart.” No enthusiasm here, said Tennent, just trustworthy, grounded piety.30
Moreover, Tennent commended Whitefield’s theology as reliable and as in agreement with the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles and the Westminster Confession of Faith. He particularly praised Whitefield for speaking out against the “error of the Antinomians” (Moravians), namely, that “persons are actually justified before faith,” which was the “first rise of all their abominations.” This notion that the justification of believers happened at the cross, not at the moment of faith, was an extreme step beyond Luther and Calvin’s teaching on salvation and justification as accomplished entirely by God. The Moravians de-emphasized the Ten Commandments and Mosaic law for Christians, which led critics to charge them with being antinomian (literally, “against the law”).31
In addition, Tennent praised Whitefield’s turn against “impulses,” which Tennent defined as following “our own fancy, as a rule of conduct, without the written word, while the sober use of reason is rejected.” Adversaries had routinely accused Whitefield of promoting spiritual impulses, especially in less prudent passages in his journals. But now, faced with the radical evangelical threat in America, Whitefield expressly opposed reliance upon such impressions. Tennent blamed the itinerant’s earlier indiscretions on his “young years, strong passions, education in Arminian principles, and the continued hurry of his labors in preaching.”32
Having reconciled with Tennent, Whitefield turned his thoughts to his estrangement from the Wesley brothers. He wrote them in September 1747 in anticipation of his eventual return to England, telling John that his heart longed “for an outward, as well as an inward union” with him and his followers. But doctrine was too important to Whitefield to overlook the disagreements that remained between them, especially on sinless perfection and the availability of Christ’s atonement to all sinners. The itinerant had heard that the Wesleys were moderating their stance on perfectionism. “Time and experience I believe will convince you,” Whitefield wrote, “that attaining such a state in this life, is not a doctrine of the everlasting gospel.” On a universal offer of redemption, Whitefield was more pragmatic. He and Wesley already agreed that preachers should offer the gospel to “all poor sinners that will come and taste the water of life.” Whether all were spiritually capable of responding to that offer was not immediately relevant. Whitefield advised preachers to give “a general offer and invitation; convinced of this, that every man’s damnation is of himself, and every man’s salvation all of God.” A final resolution of these issues was difficult to achieve while an ocean separated him and Wesley. In any case, he told the Methodist leader that their ongoing disagreements need not prevent them from unity on their foundational conviction that Jesus was “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).33
In the midst of this fence-mending, Whitefield kept preaching. He told Wesley that he was happily “hunting in the American woods after poor sinners.” During the summer of 1746, he preached for weeks in Maryland, which had only seen modest revival in the early 1740s. The itinerant repeatedly noted that he preached at crowded meetings, and concluded that there was a “prospect of a great and glorious awakening” there. Maryland did experience substantial revival in the mid to late 1740s. America’s Great Awakening saw its peak in the early 1740s, but its effects continued for decades. The southern colonies witnessed their strongest revivals later than the northern ones. Cognizant that the South had not yet experienced the kind of awakening seen in the North, Whitefield strategically preached through each of the southern colonies from 1745 to 1747, praying that God would cause “these southern wildernesses to blossom like a rose.”34
Writing to his mother, Whitefield said that he loved “to range in the American woods.” (Phrases about hunting and the “American woods” appear regularly in his correspondence in these years.) He was beginning to think he might never go back to England, since well-connected people repeatedly asked him to settle in Philadelphia and Annapolis. Jesus kept him from “catching at the golden bait,” however. He knew, as one English correspondent put it, that his followers there were “crying mightily” for his return. Elizabeth too was eager to go back. He and Elizabeth had continued to experience personal grief: he told his mother that she had recently miscarried (she would go on to endure several others, into her midforties). Nevertheless, Whitefield reported that he and his “dear yoke-fellow” were “happy in Jesus, and happy in one another.” In the winter of 1746–47, George and Elizabeth split time between Charleston and Bethesda.35
Debt on the orphanage’s construction and operating costs continued to trouble Whitefield, in spite of continuing contributions from British and American benefactors. Even Benjamin Franklin donated £75 in 1746. Whitefield personally thanked Franklin for the gift. Franklin apparently hoped to publish a list of donors (including himself) to help generate more funds for Bethesda, but Whitefield balked at that plan. He thought publishing the appeal would bring in more funds than he actually needed and might betray a lack of faith.36
In spite of these reservations, Whitefield widely publicized his 1747 acquisition of a South Carolina plantation—and slaves—as a breakthrough for the orphanage. “God has put it into the hearts of my South Carolina friends,” he wrote, “to contribute liberally towards purchasing a plantation and slaves in this province; which I purpose to devote to the support of Bethesda.” They called the place Providence. The 640-acre property, which had belonged to the Bryans and stood between their plantations, came with a house, outbuildings, and a barn; 60 acres were cleared for planting corn and rice. The Bryans also gave Whitefield “one negroe,” and he planned to purchase more. Correspondents reported that “Mr. Whitefield has more friends in Charlestown among gentlemen, especially of distinction and substance, than ever heretofore,” and that benefactors had raised upward of £300 for Bethesda.37
We might well echo the sentiments of Whitefield’s nineteenth-century biographer Luke Tyerman, who saw the “odious act” of purchasing slaves as “one of the blots on [Whitefield’s] distinguished life.” But, blinded as he was by the prejudices of his time, and by the quest for financial stability, the itinerant did not see slave ownership the way we do. Instead, he viewed his plantation as another means of advancing the gospel among orphans, and among the slaves themselves. Soon he noted excitedly that “several negroes” at Providence had come under conviction of sin and were likely to experience conversion.38
The Whitefields spent summers in the northern colonies, and Elizabeth informed Howell Harris in May 1747 that they had returned to Philadelphia from Charleston after a four-hundred-mile journey during which George had preached about thirty times. The breakneck pace of travel caught up with him again, however, and he had a “great fever.” The ravaging illness remained with him for weeks, and Whitefield wrote that his “whole frame of nature seems to be shocked” with convulsions and continuous fever. He also mentioned having the “gravel,” or kidney stones (an ailment for which John Wesley once recommended taking wild parsley seeds). The itinerant agreed to take some breaks from preaching so that no one would charge him with “murdering” himself. Not surprisingly, Whitefield discovered that for him, it was “hard work to be silent.” But the prospect of death—which meant being with his Lord—seemed pleasant. His body was “weak and crazy,” he said, but “after a short fermentation in the grave, it will be fashioned like unto Christ’s glorious body.” He frankly hoped to die in the pulpit.39
William Shippen, a pioneering doctor in Philadelphia and friend of the itinerant, was not so enamored of the prospect of Whitefield’s death, and even pleaded with one of Whitefield’s associates to get their “dear friend” to slow down. When Whitefield did preach, Shippen requested that he “take pains to regulate his voice and so not strain himself, so much as he is wont to do.” Shippen also prescribed him (unmentioned) medications and recommended that he ride out in the country on fair-weather days.40
Whitefield kept traveling and preaching, however, and in the summer of 1747 he took a northern tour through New York City and Boston, going as far north as York, Maine. Everywhere he reported crowds as large as ever, but the sensation of the early 1740s was largely gone. One Philadelphia diarist surmised that “the people’s curiosity about him now seems so well satisfied that there is very little talk of him.” His travels prompted little mention in the newspapers. That year, for the first time since 1738, there were almost no Whitefield-related publications in America, except for a solitary reprint of an antirevivalist sermon. His efforts to cast himself as an irenic moderate may have worked too well: news thrives on controversy, not the absence of it.41
In spite of letters clamoring for him to return to England, Whitefield decided to visit Bermuda. This British colony, more than six hundred miles off the North Carolina coast, was founded by the Virginia Company in 1609, only two years after Jamestown. It had become a vital port for trade between Europe and the Caribbean. Whitefield’s Charleston ally Josiah Smith grew up in Bermuda and had served for a time as pastor of the island’s Independent (Dissenting) congregation. Friends may have encouraged the visit to Bermuda, hoping to improve Whitefield’s health, and he always found the prospect of preaching in new places enticing.
“Oh for a blessing upon the islands! Oh for a large draught of fishes!” the itinerant wrote to Howell Harris, who was no doubt frustrated by another delay in Whitefield’s return. Harris had many questions he needed Whitefield to answer about the Tabernacle and the Calvinistic Methodist Association. Moreover, Harris was facing increasing criticism about what his Welsh colleague Daniel Rowland and others saw as his Moravian leanings. (Harris preached incessantly on the wounds of Christ in these months, saying that he had seen “deeper into the mystery of Christ’s blood.” At one meeting, he proclaimed that he would go as far as he could to “declare this fountain,” and kept shouting “Blood, Blood, Blood, Blood!”)42
Elizabeth was quietly frustrated with George, too; she stayed behind in Charleston, having already told him how much she wanted to go back to England. He preferred to leave her in America, however, in order to supervise Providence and Bethesda. “Should I bring her to England,” he mused to Harris, “my two families must be left without a head. Should I go without [her], and unknown to her, I fear the trial will be too hard for her. But if the Lord calls, I can put both her and myself into his all-bountiful hands. Oh pray for me, my dear, dear man, that I may not err on the right hand, or on the left.”43
Whitefield was struck by the lovely vistas when his ship sailed into the harbor of St. George’s, Bermuda’s oldest town. The beautiful “scene was quite new, and different from any [he] had ever beheld before.” As usual, Whitefield received a mixed welcome from the Anglican clergy: one minister happily allowed him to preach in his parish churches, but two others kept their distance. A Presbyterian minister eagerly hosted him at his meetinghouse, where he preached on eight consecutive Sundays. In all, he found less opposition in Bermuda than in any “fresh place” he had ever gone. The island’s air did boost his flagging health.44
Bermuda combined features normally associated with colonial northern seaports and Caribbean islands, being heavily focused on seaborne trade, but also had more slaves (by percentage) than towns such as New York or Boston. In the early 1720s, Bermuda’s population stood at about 8,300 people, with whites outnumbering blacks 58–42 percent. As on the mainland, Whitefield arranged to address Bermuda’s slaves directly. He held a May 1 field meeting “intended for the negroes,” with perhaps a sixth of the colony’s entire population in attendance. During the sermon, he asked whether they wanted to go to heaven, and one slave loudly replied, “Yes, sir.” Whitefield said that this innocuous outburst “caused a little smiling,” presumably among the whites. “But in general everything was carried on with great decency,” the itinerant concluded.45
The large meeting put Whitefield in a reflective mood. He believed that God had helped him strike the right balance to reach the slaves, and “yet not to give them the least umbrage to slight, or behave imperiously to their masters.” The circumstance called for perfect balance: “If ever a minister in preaching, needs the wisdom of the serpent to be joined with the harmlessness of a dove, it must be when discoursing to negroes.” Whitefield heard that some of the Bermudan slaves did not think much of his preaching, though, because he “told them of their cursing, swearing, thieving and lying,” and because he said “their hearts were as black as their faces.” Some complained because they had expected he would say a word against the masters too, but Whitefield thought he should not do that in front of the slaves. A couple of the Afro-Bermudans walked out in the middle of his sermon. Others responded more warmly, showing signs of authentic conversion.46
Elizabeth waited for him on the mainland, but a ship was leaving Bermuda for England, so he decided to sail home without her. This was an extraordinarily callous thing to do, and suggests that—in spite of the suffering they had endured already in their marriage—the itinerant still saw Elizabeth as a ministerial assistant or employee as much as a wife. Perhaps he viewed his choice as a way to confirm that he would prioritize the work of the Kingdom over his family when circumstances warranted it.
Whitefield expected to come back to America in 1749, which is one of the ways he justified leaving Elizabeth (his “dear yoke-fellow”) behind, even though they had agreed that he would go back to Charleston to retrieve her before departing for England. “O that I knew how it was with her,” he wrote to one of her American friends as he sailed from Bermuda. “But I see that God will make those he loves, to live by faith and not by sense. Glorious privileges, though difficult to flesh and blood! As you are so dear a friend, I know you will do your utmost to comfort her.” Not long after she realized that he had crossed the ocean without her, she advised him that she was returning to England. He did not seem too disappointed, conceding (as she passed the late summer in South Carolina) that the “climate will not agree with her.” Soon he was telling friends that he would “persuade her” to settle in London. After some delays, she arrived in England in June 1749, bringing to an end any thoughts that she would remain as superintendent of his southern properties.47
By his return to England, Whitefield had become a slave owner and had successfully reconciled with moderate American allies. He had secured moderates’ support without exactly denouncing most of the radical evangelicals. Of course, England had its own challenges, including the Moravian defections. And as always, there was his relationship with the Wesleys.