Five “A Tour Round America”: The American South and the Bethesda Orphanage
“A TOUR ROUND AMERICA”: THE AMERICAN SOUTH AND THE BETHESDA ORPHANAGE
Benjamin Franklin, who recognized a good business prospect when he saw one, had never seen a better prospect than George Whitefield. The twenty-four-year-old preacher came to Philadelphia on November 2, 1739. Primed by news reports of his triumphs in England, the city received him eagerly. Although Philadelphia was the colonies’ second-largest town, at about 13,000 residents, it remained something of a fledgling colonial outpost. The Scots traveler Alexander Hamilton (not to be confused with the future American patriot leader of the same name) said in 1744 that Philadelphia reminded him a great deal of “country market towns in England.” The streets were unpaved and “full of rubbish and mire.” He considered it “a degree politer than New York though in its fabrick not so urban.” Philadelphia was busthng and growing, yet still marginal within the British Empire. Philadelphians, including Franklin, had never encountered anyone who caused a stir as Whitefield did.1
By the late spring of 1739, American newspapers, including Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, were buzzing with reports of England’s star pastor. Skeptical by nature, Franklin puzzled at the reported throngs of tens of thousands. Could that many really hear him preach? Franklin thought one could answer most questions experimentally, as he would do by flying his electrical kite into a storm cloud thirteen years later. So when Whitefield came to town, Franklin set up an experiment during one of the itinerant’s assemblies: “I had the curiosity to learn how far he could be heard, by retiring backwards down the street towards the [Delaware] River, and I found his voice distinct till I came near Front Street . . . Imagining then a semicircle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were filled with auditors, to each of whom I allowed two square feet; I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand.” To Franklin, this settled the question. The calculation “reconciled” him to the accounts of the mammoth crowds.2
Although Franklin never experienced the new birth of conversion, and later described himself as a Deist, he was convinced that Whitefield’s ministry was legitimate. His preaching was incomparable, thought the printer, more like an “excellent piece of music” than the tedious recitations given by others. Publishing Whitefield’s works became a bonanza for Franklin’s print shop. Sometime before Whitefield’s departure, the two men met at Whitefield’s rented house on Second Street and struck a deal. Franklin announced shortly afterward, “The Rev. Mr. Whitefield having given me copies of his journals and sermons, with leave to print the same; I propose to publish them with all expedition, if I find sufficient encouragement.” Thus began a business arrangement—and friendship—that lasted thirty-one years.3
At considerable financial risk, Franklin began releasing a flood of titles by or about Whitefield. Most took a favorable view of the preacher, although a few were critical. Between 1740 and 1742, Franklin printed forty-three books and pamphlets dealing with Whitefield and the evangelical movement. (In 1742 there was an uptick in titles specifically related to the Moravians and Count Zinzendorf.) Franklin produced editions of books recommended by Whitefield, too, including Ralph Erskine’s Gospel Sonnets and Joseph Alleine’s Alarm to Unconverted Sinners. Franklin’s Philadelphia competitors William and Andrew Bradford published a number of Whitefield-related titles, as well. The Whitefield sensation helped the Bradfords and Franklin become the colonies’ first omnibus printers, publishing and selling a range of genres. But only Franklin, the great entrepreneur, made this business profitable. He found that religion—and Whitefield specifically—often sold better than any other topic.4
As in Britain, media coverage buoyed Whitefield’s American tour. By summer, reports appeared of Whitefield’s massive meetings at Moorfields and Kennington. There was often a delay of about two months between reports in London and their reprinting in the colonies, but by the end of July, Americans had begun to read of Whitefield’s imminent return to the colonies. (The Boston Evening-Post skeptically noted that Whitefield planned to bring some of his “methodically mad” supporters with him to work at the Georgia orphanage.) Reprinting commentary from London’s Daily Post, the New-York Weekly Journal scoffed at the “giddy brain'd workfolks” who neglected their jobs in order to scurry after the preacher.5
As these reports were paving the way for his arrival, Whitefield enjoyed the respite of his Atlantic crossing. He told correspondents that the temptations of his “popular life” made him think of abandoning preaching, but he considered such thoughts to be whispers from the devil. It is unlikely that Whitefield ever seriously considered retiring to a more private life (such as becoming the resident director of the Georgia orphanage). But he recognized the “innumerable snares” that came with his celebrity status: pride, covetousness, and worldly pleasures.6
This ocean crossing was not nearly the ordeal that his previous voyage back from Georgia had been. He relished the company of his Methodist fellow travelers, whom he began to call his “family.” Among the most important shipmates was his publicist William Seward, who would manage the coverage of Whitefield’s American tour. Whitefield shared many hours of prayer and devotion with his companions, but also took time for private prayer, in which “the freeness and riches of God’s everlasting love” so overwhelmed him that it occasionally rendered him speechless. He wrote a great deal, including the autobiographical Short Account of God’s Dealings with George Whitefield from his Infancy to His Ordination, our most complete account of his early life and conversion.7
Whitefield continued to cultivate his Calvinist convictions; or, as Wesley later put it, he continued “warping towards Calvinism.” (Whitefield, for his part, also worried about those “warping toward Arminianism.”) The itinerant told Wesley that he had actually “never read any thing that Calvin wrote” and that he took his doctrine from the Bible alone, as God taught it to him. But of course, the Bible was not the only book Whitefield read. He was perusing books such as the Dissenting minister Jonathan Warne’s Arminianism, the Back-Door to Popery (1738). Warne, quoting liberally from the Anglican Calvinist apologist John Edwards, argued that if the Anglican clergy were faithful to their own church’s doctrines, they would embrace Calvinism. Whitefield affirmed Warne’s convictions and thought they should “be written in letters of gold.” He increasingly understood the value of publicly defending the Calvinist doctrines of grace, telling his Welsh friend Howell Harris that since they last met, “God has been pleased to enlighten me more in that comfortable doctrine of election . . . At my return, I hope to be more explicit than I have been.” At some point he would need to confront John Wesley’s Arminianism in print. Growing contemptuous of Wesley’s notion of free will, Whitefield wrote, “Man is nothing: he hath a free will to go to hell, but none to go to heaven, till God worketh in him.”8
Because of his familiarity with polemics for and against Calvinism, Whitefield knew that it was under assault in the eighteenth century as part of the intellectual revolution that historians often call the Enlightenment. (I prefer terms such as “liberal” or “humanitarian” thought to describe these new developments, rather than the catchall term “Enlightenment.” The concept of the Enlightenment, as many have noted, oversimplifies European intellectual trends of the time. Some Enlightenment figures were friendly toward traditional faith, some not.) Pressure against Calvinist doctrine came from Arminians such as Wesley, who considered predestination irrational and unreasonable. Other critiques came from humanitarian voices who emphasized God’s benevolence rather than his sovereignty. Historians have also noted a growing sentiment against “cruelty” in eighteenth-century thought, a development that would ultimately help birth the antislavery movement. To humanitarian critics such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, notions such as eternal torment in hell, original sin, and predestination cast God as a merciless tyrant. To Shaftesbury, the Calvinist belief in a wrathful God spoke only to Calvinists’ own disturbed, fearful psychology. He proposed that God was better understood as compassionate, loving, and “truly and perfectly good.”9
In printed treatises and private reflections, Calvinist evangelicals such as Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, along with less famous believers such as Sarah Osborn, of Newport, Rhode Island, defended Reformed doctrines in response to such humanitarian challenges. During the course of her life, Osborn suffered the early deaths of her husband and her son, as well as besetting illnesses, yet she remained convinced of God’s providential sovereignty over each of these scourging experiences. She reminded herself that the Lord disciplined those he loved. The overcoming of doubts about election, predestination, and the overarching authority of God featured prominently in many evangelicals’ spiritual autobiographies.10
Whitefield may have adopted modern marketing and communication methods, then, but his message was traditional and Calvinist. Instead of softening his view on the depravity of man in response to humanitarian critics, he emphasized original sin even more. Whitefield spoke regularly of how people in their lost state became “sunk into the nature of the beast and the devil.” His hearers repeatedly noted this phrase in reminiscences about his preaching. One of them, Margaret Austin, found herself agreeing with the itinerant, writing that she really was “half a beast and half a devil.” Another Methodist convert, Martha Claggett, recalled that she was in a state of spiritual despair: “I knew not what to do, having none to guide me till God sent Mr. Whitefield amongst us. He told me of Original Sin and man’s fallen estate. This by sorrowful experience I had proved to be true.” As Claggett recounted it, Whitefield’s description of the dire weight of sin began her journey to spiritual relief because it resonated so accurately with her experiences.11
Befitting his far-flung travels and correspondence, Whitefield’s Reformed influences ranged widely. He sought out a wider Anglo-American Calvinist network in travel, correspondence, and reading. In a letter to Ralph Erskine, Whitefield noted that he “exceedingly” liked the Scottish Presbyterian minister Thomas Boston, especially Boston’s massive tome Human Nature in Its Four-Fold State (1720). The book had been “of much service” to his soul, Whitefield said. Boston’s Four-Fold State portrayed sinful men and women as totally corrupt, with a “load of wrath” hanging over them. Boston insisted that the sinner also suffered from an “utter inability to recover himself.” Salvation was entirely a work of God’s grace. Through volumes such as these, Whitefield told Erskine, the Holy Spirit had convinced him of “our eternal election by the Father through the Son, of our free justification through faith in his blood,” and other Calvinist precepts.12
Whitefield’s advice to followers sounded increasingly Calvinist, too. If they had truly been saved, God would never turn away from them, he assured correspondents. Nor would God turn away from Whitefield himself, despite his own struggles with sin. “I fear not falling finally,” he wrote to a friend during the Atlantic crossing, “for God I believe chose me in Christ before ever the earth and the world were made, as a vessel of his saving mercy.” Whitefield still wrestled with his unnamed sin, which he called a “thorn in the flesh,” echoing the Apostle Paul. These struggles did not represent anything more than obstacles on his path to final redemption, he assured himself, a state he was sure to reach because of God’s grace and power.13
Whitefield disembarked at Lewes (Lewis Town), Delaware, where the Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean, on October 30. It had been a year and two months since he left Savannah, but it seemed much longer than that. Thanking God for another safe passage, he reflected: “As here’s the same sun, so here’s the same God in America as in England. I bless God all places are equal to me.”14
All places were equally valuable, for all places had lost souls. But on this second visit he also began to understand how especially congenial America was. Everywhere he turned, he found allies. (In time, of course, he would also make his share of American enemies.) The revival in England was largely an Anglican-Methodist affair among English people. In America, Whitefield encountered friends of revival in many denominations: Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, Moravian, German Pietist, and occasionally Anglican, too. He also saw opportunities to bring the gospel to Africans in America (and, more distantly in Whitefield’s experience, Native Americans). America remained a smaller venue, but one with major gospel potential and an enticing future.
Whitefield made his way up the Delaware River to Philadelphia. As was his habit, he met with Anglican leaders as well as Quakers, Presbyterians, and Baptists, attempting to ascertain potential friends and enemies. He found few supporters among the Anglican clergy. He needed to convince Anglican laypeople that “the generality of their teachers do not preach or live up to the truth as it is in Jesus,” he wrote. Nevertheless, he assisted in services at Philadelphia’s Anglican Christ Church before embarking on outdoor preaching. There was never any question that he would hold open-air meetings. Five days after his arrival, he spoke from the Philadelphia courthouse stairs to a crowd he estimated at six thousand. Reports said they “stood in awful silence” as they listened.15
Americans were more accepting of his outdoor preaching than the English, he concluded. In England, “the generality of people think a sermon cannot be preached well [outside a church]; here they do not like it so well if delivered within the church walls.” Whether Americans (or Philadelphians) really were so different from English audiences is difficult to say; Whitefield had attracted legions to his open-air preaching in London and Bristol. But perhaps American audiences were more used to unconventional religious practices. Quakers founded Pennsylvania, of course, and they were among the most controversial of all Dissenters. Pennsylvania also had no official church. But he would receive an even more enthusiastic response in the New England colonies, where the Puritans had established the Congregational Church by law.16
While Whitefield maintained friendly contacts only with certain Dissenters in England and Scotland, in America he discovered that non-Anglicans were his most enthusiastic supporters. Among the first such supporters he met were members of the Tennent family. He enjoyed a visit from William Tennent, Sr., whom Whitefield called “an old grey-headed disciple and soldier of Jesus Christ.” Tennent and his family were among hundreds of thousands of Scots-Irish immigrants to America in the eighteenth century, many of whom carried with them a cultivated tradition of Presbyterian piety. Although Tennent had received ordination as an Anglican, he felt more at home among Presbyterians. When his family arrived in Pennsylvania in 1718, he affiliated with the city’s Presbyterian synod. In 1726 the family found a home in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, where Tennent opened the so-called Log College seminary, a Presbyterian training school that was a precursor to the College of New Jersey at Princeton. Whitefield noted with delight that he and Tennent had common friends in the Erskine brothers of Scotland.17
Whitefield was even more impressed by Tennent’s son Gilbert. Gilbert was eleven years older than Whitefield. For a time, Tennent became something of a replacement for John Wesley as the mentor for whom Whitefield longed. Tennent served as the pastor of a Presbyterian church in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where Whitefield first encountered him. Although the Philadelphia Synod was divided over issues related to revivalism, it had allowed Tennent and several other evangelical pastors to form the revivalist New Brunswick presbytery in 1738. (In Presbyterian polity, a presbytery is a body of ministers and elders that governs the churches of a district; a synod is a larger governing body composed of presbyteries.) To Whitefield, Tennent and his circle of ministers were “the burning and shining lights of this part of America.”18
Whitefield traveled with Tennent to Elizabeth Town, New Jersey, where they took a ferry to New York City, the colonies’ third-largest city, with about 11,000 residents. It was a lovely place. One visitor remarked in 1748 that it was “extremely pleasant to walk the town, for it seemed like a garden.” One could easily stroll from the wharfs and tightly bunched wooden buildings on the southern tip of Manhattan into the countryside that lay close by. The Anglicans’ Trinity Church was one of the finest buildings on the continent. But the city also had a grittier side. It was a “slave city,” as the historian Jill Lepore put it. One in five New Yorkers was enslaved.19
In the city, Whitefield listened as Tennent preached at Ebenezer Pemberton’s Wall Street Presbyterian Church. He was impressed. Never before had he “heard such a searching sermon,” Whitefield wrote. Tennent helped Whitefield see that they had to preach the gospel in its stark, offensive fullness. All people—including pastors—had to experience conversion. In salvation, religiosity did not matter. A preacher must have experienced the conviction of sin and the redeeming power of grace in his own heart, or else his preaching would inevitably be cold, moralistic, and misleading. Whitefield was invigorated. Tennent was a true collaborator, willing to press the issue of conversion, without any of Wesley’s theological problems. Tennent was a “son of thunder,” Whitefield reckoned. He did not “fear the faces of men.”20
Whitefield soon met with, and offended, the minister of Trinity Church, the Anglican commissary William Vesey. (Commissaries were officials whom the bishop of London appointed to oversee affairs in the American colonies, where there was no resident bishop.) Forty years older than Whitefield, Vesey came into the meeting primed for a fight. He denied Whitefield the Trinity Church pulpit before Whitefield could request it. He charged Whitefield with breaking his ministerial oath and the church’s canon by preaching without a license. Whitefield countered that he knew Vesey frequented taverns, and reminded him that the canon also forbade clergy from going to such places. “This, though spoken in the spirit of meekness,” Whitefield drily noted, “stirred up his corruptions more and more.”21
Once again, Whitefield would have to find somewhere else to preach other than an Anglican pulpit. He was, of course, prepared for Vesey’s hostile reaction. That afternoon he began field preaching, attracting an audience of a couple of thousand people. In the evening, he preached to a packed house at Ebenezer Pemberton’s church.22
One of the most detailed accounts of Whitefield’s preaching, perhaps written by Pemberton himself, emerged from that day’s appearances. The correspondent was friendly toward Whitefield’s revival preaching, but was initially concerned that the itinerant might indulge in enthusiastic extremes. Observing Whitefield’s outdoor meeting, the writer noted that Christians of all denominations, as well as a small number of Jews, gathered to hear him. Many attended out of genuine spiritual interest. Others, members of what the writer called the “Devil’s Chapel,” had other motivations. The godly pressed around the preacher; the skeptics hung around the periphery and spent most of their time in “giggling, scoffing, talking & laughing.” Nevertheless, by the end of the sermon, Whitefield’s powerful rhetoric had captured the attention of most, and a “solemn awe” fell over the crowd.23
After seeing his dazzling performance at the Wall Street church, the writer was convinced: “Every scruple vanished. I never saw nor heard the like, and I said within myself, ‘Surely God is with this man of a truth.’” Of Whitefield himself, he wrote:
He is a man of a middle stature, of a slender body, of a fair complexion, and of a comely appearance . . . He has a most ready memory, and I think, speaks entirely without notes. He has a clear and musical voice, and a wonderful command of it. He uses much gesture, but with great propriety; every accent of his voice, every motion of his body, speaks, and both are natural and unaffected. If his delivery is the product of art, ‘tis certainly the perfection of it, for it is entirely concealed.
The correspondent regarded the evangelist’s theology as solidly Calvinist. Although Whitefield did not make eschatology, or the study of the last days, a central point of his preaching, he did regard the current time to be the “midnight state of the church.” A “Glorious Day,” however, was approaching, when legions would come to new faith in Christ. Perhaps that day was dawning. Like many of his Reformed and evangelical colleagues, Whitefield prayed for the ultimate conversion of the Jews to Christianity. Perhaps this is why the correspondent noted that Jews were present at Whitefield’s meeting.24
Catching his American stride in New York, the itinerant said that he had felt no “greater freedom in preaching” since he arrived. But Anglican opponents were mustering their forces. Soon, one of the first American anti-Whitefield publications appeared. The fusillade came from the pen of Jonathan Arnold, a missionary with the Anglicans’ Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Arnold confronted Whitefield in New York, charging him with teaching false doctrine and offering to debate him publicly. Whitefield declined, saying that he did not debate unregenerate men. The irate Arnold went to the newspapers, proclaiming that Anglicans should treat Whitefield “as he deserves, i.e. with neglect and contempt, as being the most irregular man in doctrine and manners,” calling him also “remarkable for ignorance and confidence.” One of Whitefield’s defenders returned fire in a front-page letter in the American Weekly Mercury, saying that Arnold’s lies proceeded “from the Father of Lies, the Devil.”25
Nothing that Whitefield or Tennent did made opponents angrier than calling them unconverted. Both pastors would level general charges about the “dangers of an unconverted ministry,” as Tennent’s incendiary 1740 sermon would put it. Whitefield had also begun openly telling people like Jonathan Arnold that they were unregenerate. In one of the letters he wrote on board the Elizabeth, for example, Whitefield informed a British pastor that he did not think “that a thorough work of conversion was ever wrought upon your soul.”26
This was a delicate issue, one that Whitefield did not handle delicately. Obviously, he and the new evangelicals believed that conversion was essential to salvation. Evidence such as opposition to revival, lax theology, or compromised morals could indicate that a person, even a minister, had not experienced the new birth. But, as he would later admit, Whitefield was incautious about turning disagreements over theology and tactics into a (literally) damning charge that a person was unregenerate. Long-serving ministers, in particular, did not wish to be indicted as hell-bound by a twenty-four-year-old.
Whitefield realized his potential for cockiness. After leaving New York City, he wrote a sheepish letter to Ebenezer Pemberton, suggesting that he might not have shown the humility to Pemberton “due from a babe to a father in Christ.” (Pemberton was only nine years older than Whitefield, but had served at the Wall Street Presbyterian Church since 1727.) Whitefield frankly admitted that it was difficult to “not be puffed up” by the kind of success he had enjoyed. Pemberton was apparently not offended, however, since he wrote a positive letter to Whitefield, commending him for being used by God to start “a good work in this secure and sinful place.”27
Whitefield did not clash with every older minister, of course. His rivalries did not run along simple generational lines, as could be seen in his quick appreciation for William Tennent. He soon met a longtime friend of the Tennents, Theodorus Frelinghuysen. Frelinghuysen, a Dutch Reformed pastor twenty-two years older than Whitefield, had immigrated to New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1720. Frelinghuysen represented a trend among the German-Dutch churches of northwestern Germany (he had previously served a church near Emden) toward blending Reformed theology and revival. Frelinghuysen was known to make sharp distinctions between the converted and the unregenerate when addressing congregations. Gilbert Tennent, then a fresh Yale College graduate, began preaching in New Brunswick several years after Frelinghuysen, and Tennent learned a great deal about preaching heart religion from the Dutch Reformed minister. They held joint services together, with sermons delivered in both Dutch and English.28
Whitefield called Frelinghuysen a “worthy old soldier of Jesus Christ.” He credited the Dutch minister with precipitating revivals in the 1720s that helped prepare New Jersey for Whitefield’s arrival in 1739. To get a picture of early American evangelicalism’s diverse, transatlantic qualities, especially in the Middle Colonies, one need look no further than the alliance of Frelinghuysen (Dutch), Tennent (Scots-Irish), and Whitefield (English). All three were immigrant (or itinerant) preachers laboring far away from the lands of their birth, all of different denominations, and all three proclaiming the need for personal transformation by the grace of God.29
After five days in New York, Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent preached their way through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, visiting key pastors such as Frelinghuysen along the way. They stopped at Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, to see William Tennent and his wife. Enjoying sweet fellowship, they stayed up late discussing coordinated tactics for “promoting our dear Lord’s Kingdom.” Whitefield admired Tennent’s Log College, which he described as a “log-house, about twenty feet long, and near as many broad.” It reminded him of the “schools of the old prophets” referred to in 2 Kings 2. Such schools were critical for training up a new generation of pastors and evangelists who were converted and faithful to the true gospel.30
The small towns between New York and Philadelphia did not muster the phenomenal crowds of Whitefield’s urban meetings. Nevertheless, he marveled at how people streamed from the woods to hear him preach. At Maidenhead, New Jersey, Whitefield mounted the back of a wagon to address fifteen hundred people. At Abingdon, Pennsylvania, he spoke out of a meetinghouse porch window to about two thousand. And at Neshaminy, where he addressed about three thousand in the churchyard, Whitefield also estimated that about one thousand horses were there. (He complimented the Neshaminy audience for tying the horses up at the hedges rather than sitting on them during the meeting.) He found it surprising that so many people “so scattered abroad” could be “gathered at so short a warning.”31
Outside Philadelphia, Whitefield visited Germantown, a common destination for German immigrants to the colony. By the middle of the century, Pennsylvania’s Germans probably numbered about one hundred thousand, or between a third and a half of the colony’s population. Many of these came from Reformed and Pietist backgrounds. Whitefield met an eager response at Germantown, even though he did not speak German. Preaching from a balcony, he addressed six thousand people for two hours, and saw a powerful “demonstration of the Spirit.” Many in the crowd wept bitterly. Again, the immigrant throng illustrated the transatlantic quality of the revivals. Whitefield marveled at the “different nations and professions” represented. He estimated that Germantown had perhaps fifteen different Christian denominations, all of them (no doubt overstating their relative harmony) agreeing “to hold Jesus Christ as their head, and to worship him in spirit and truth” (John 4:23–24).32
At the end of November, Whitefield said good-bye to his friends in Philadelphia, setting out to travel by horse to Georgia. As he proceeded through Delaware and Maryland, he continued to see large crowds primed to see him by news and word-of-mouth reports. (Whitefield reflected that even negative news reports helped him by exciting “people’s curiosity.”) Coming to Annapolis, he called it a “little town, but the metropolis of Maryland.” Annapolis was a village seaport with perhaps seventy-five households and about eight hundred residents. It was the colony’s primary slave market, with about a third of its people enslaved. Maryland began as a refuge for Roman Catholics, but by the 1740s it had become a more typical British colony dominated by Protestants.33 Annapolis was also ethnically diverse, even among its Europeans. A historian of the town imagines its eighteenth-century waterfront sounding of “saw and hammer and caulking mallet, the slap of rigging and creak of wooden hulls, the voices of men in accents Irish, English, and Scots, Prussian and African.” Smells of fish, hemp, sea breezes, spices, coffee, rum, and rotting trash filled the itinerant’s nose.34
Whitefield received a cheerful welcome from Maryland’s governor, Samuel Ogle. Launching a blistering attack on the town’s propertied class, Whitefield warned them about the “folly and sinfulness of those amusements, whereby the polite part of the world are so fatally diverted.” He may well have criticized Annapolitans’ passion for horse racing, which by the 1740s had become a major spectacle, thanks in part to Governor Ogle, who even introduced thoroughbred horses to the town in 1747. Nevertheless, Ogle remained a supporter of Whitefield’s ministry during his repeated visits to Annapolis.35
Not everyone in Annapolis shared Ogle’s view. One of Whitefield’s detractors was Stephen Bordley, a well-connected lawyer, legislator, and Anglican vestryman. In the wake of Whitefield’s Annapolis visit, Bordley wrote a hostile yet evocative letter about his preaching. The “celebrated Whitefield,” Bordley conceded, had a wondrous “delivery” and appearance: “His voice is strong and clear, but not musical, and he has a little of the west country twang” (the accent typical of those from the west of England). He admired Whitefield’s “fine set of teeth,” which he considered a “great ornament” for any public speaker. His natural good looks were sullied by the “prodigious squint with his left eye,” however. Whitefield’s voice was unforgettable. Bordley thought the man had mastered “the art of pronunciation.”36 Rhetorical talents aside, Bordley found Whitefield’s doctrine appalling. Touching on common criticisms, Bordley concluded that the “doctrine of the [Holy] Spirit and his railing at and accusing the clergy in the manner before mentioned, are the great hinges” of his sermons. This sensational preacher was really just a “ranting enthusiast.” Nevertheless, Whitefield had entranced some foolish followers in Annapolis, sending them on a “wild goose chase in quest of that degree of the Spirit which perhaps they will never find.” In summary, Bordley determined that the English star had the “the best delivery with the worst divinity that I ever met with.”37
Whitefield’s party crossed the Potomac River from Maryland into Virginia about thirty miles south of today’s downtown Washington, D.C. They marveled at the lonely, leafy stretches between Annapolis and Williamsburg. James Blair, the Anglican commissary, spoke for many when he wrote in The Present State of Virginia, and the College (1727) that Virginia was both “one of the best [and] one of the worst of all the English plantations in America.” Blessed with incredible natural resources and a burgeoning but dispersed population, the colony had struggled to establish a key port to compete with Boston or Philadelphia. Travelers had to depend on the hospitality of scattered strangers to give them food and lodging. Occasionally, Whitefield’s group happened upon a roadside “ordinary,” or tavern, where they could spend the night or take a meal.38
Women often operated, or even owned, Virginia’s ordinaries. At one of these taverns, Whitefield appreciatively noted that the “woman of the house” kept quiet some other patrons who had become “disordered in liquor.” He and his companions slept peacefully in a bed that the host made for them in the kitchen.39 Whitefield engaged this charming hostess in spiritual discussion, but to his disappointment found that she did not accept his view of the new birth. She thought that term referred to the believer’s transformation in heaven. He insisted that she needed to turn to God for forgiveness and conversion; she assured him that God was quite merciful. Maybe he did not need to worry so much about judgment and hell, she mused. “The devil loves to represent God as all mercy, or all justice,” Whitefield glumly wrote. Thousands responded eagerly to Whitefield’s message, but others, from Anglican critics to this unnamed tavern keeper, countered him with their own reading of scripture.40
A couple weeks after leaving Annapolis, Whitefield reached Williamsburg, “the metropolis of Virginia.” (He arrived, without comment, on his twenty-fifth birthday.) Williamsburg, which had served as Virginia’s capital since 1699, was about the same size as Annapolis. About half its residents were enslaved or free blacks. The Virginia Gazette kept close tabs on Whitefield’s progress in America, printing fourteen news items about him before his arrival in that colony. When he came to Williamsburg, the paper reminded readers that the “celebrated preacher” had already dazzled tens of thousands in New York and Philadelphia. The Gazette was no doubt pleased that a luminary of such magnitude had come to Williamsburg.41
Commissary James Blair happily welcomed Whitefield, in contrast to the reception offered by other Anglican officials. Blair was the key leader in Virginia’s Anglican Church. The octogenarian Scotsman had come as an Anglican missionary to Virginia in 1684, and five years later became the first Anglican commissary in the colonies. In 1693 he secured a charter for the College of William and Mary, a school founded so that the Anglican Church would have a proper “seminary of ministers of the gospel, and . . . that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the western Indians to the glory of Almighty God.” He singlehandedly kept the college afloat through a series of early crises, from devastating fires to repeated feuds with Virginia governors.42
Whitefield hailed Blair— “by far the most worthy clergyman I have yet conversed with in all America.” He also commended the work of the college and prayed that “learning Christ” would be the students’ chief goal. While he was on the subject, Whitefield took a swipe at Oxford and Cambridge, asserting that most English schools and universities had become “mere seminaries of paganism.” Since their curriculums were focused heavily on the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity, students’ heads became “stuffed with heathen mythology” at the expense of the knowledge of Christ. (Whitefield himself knew the classics well, and often referred to them in his sermons and letters, so he was not opposed to classical education per se.)43
In spite of Blair’s encouragement, Whitefield did not linger in Williamsburg. His Sunday-morning sermon at Bruton Parish Church went off without much notice. As he prepared to leave, he assessed the Anglicans of the Chesapeake region as “more dead to God” than those in the northern colonies, but “far less prejudiced.” In the Chesapeake, “Satan seems to lead people at his will,” he reported to Gilbert Tennent. The distance between the region’s plantations made it more difficult for him to assemble large meetings. Moreover, the “commonality is made up of Negroes and convicts,” including slaves and indentured servants, whose masters did not want them to attend religious meetings.44
The entourage moved into eastern North Carolina, the most desolate stretch of his overland journey. They arrived at Edenton, North Carolina, the colonial capital, on December 20, 1739. Whitefield called it “a little place, but beautifully situated by the water-side.” From Edenton, he took a ferry across the wide Albemarle Sound. He estimated the journey across at twelve miles; it took them seven hours to reach the southern side. They proceeded to Bath, North Carolina, the colony’s oldest town, incorporated in 1705.45
Whitefield would visit Bath four times in his career, earning a dubious place in local folklore. On one occasion, he reportedly became so frustrated with local opposition that while leaving, he shook the dust from his feet and placed a curse on the town, forever keeping it from major commercial development. (Among the reasons to doubt this story is that if Whitefield cursed every town where he encountered opposition, countless places would have endured Bath’s fate.)46
From Bath they again took a ferry, crossing the Pamlico River. Traveling across North Carolina was arduous: abysmal roads, “wet and swampy” soil, and few people. The climate struck Whitefield as unusually warm—almost tropical—and flocks of strange birds flew squawking overhead. At night the travelers heard the howhng of what they assumed were wolves.47
Whitefield celebrated Christmas in New Bern, North Carolina. Anglicans had established New Bern’s parish only in 1715, and the church still met at the courthouse. Whitefield received communion there, but sadly noted that parishioners and the parson worshipped in an “indifferent manner.” When he preached in the afternoon, however, he witnessed one of the most dramatic manifestations of the “Divine Presence” since his arrival. The people gave him rapt attention, and many wept. He considered the experience an “earnest of future and more plentiful effusions of God’s Spirit in these parts.”48
Up to this point, Whitefield had said little about slaves or slavery in his writings. He grew up in an area connected to the transatlantic slave trade: in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, Bristol was Europe’s largest outfitter of slave ships, and its merchants had deep ties to Caribbean sugar plantations. But Whitefield had minimal personal experience with chattel slavery. As he moved farther south, however, the realities of America’s bound-labor system confronted him. At an ordinary south of New Bern, Whitefield visited with a slave family “belonging to the house.” He prayed with two of their children and thought they spoke well. This chance personal encounter seems to have catalyzed Whitefield’s thinking: what group was a more fitting subject for Methodist charitable ministry than slaves? He was convinced, unlike many southern slave masters, that white Christians could and should educate Africans in the ways of the Lord. Contemplating the creation of a “school of young negroes,” he soon wrote to a London correspondent that America’s slaves were much on his “heart.”49
Slavery, both on plantations and in towns, was a seminal fact in American society, especially in the slave colonies of the South. From the Chesapeake southward, the culture was interlaced with slavery. In 1750, the Chesapeake colonies (Virginia and Maryland) had about 150,000 slaves, which represented about 40 percent of the population. South Carolina had a black majority by perhaps a two to one ratio, and the total slave population of the Lower South was about 60,000. But even in the North, whites owned about 33,000 slaves at midcentury. While slavery was not as central to northern colonial development as to southern, it could cause great anxiety among whites there. Around the same time as his colonial tour, a panic erupted in New York City over a reputed slave plot to burn the town. The frenzy resulted in the hanging of seventeen accused slave conspirators. New York authorities burned another thirteen slaves to death at the stake.50
South Carolina had also just endured the greatest slave rebellion in colonial American history. In September 1739, perhaps as many as one hundred slaves along the Stono River near Charleston stole firearms, killed twenty whites, and marched toward Spanish Florida, beating drums and chanting, “Liberty!” A white militia attacked the rebel slaves, soundly defeated them, and denied them quarter, executing most of them on the field of battle. The whites decapitated many of the rebels and placed their heads on pikes along the roads as a warning to other slaves.51
On New Year’s Day 1740, Whitefield’s party entered South Carolina, a colony reeling both from the Stono Rebellion and from the ongoing threat posed by the Spanish in the War of Jenkins’ Ear. It was not long before he and his friends experienced the anxiety felt by whites there. On the night of January 2, the party lost its way in a moonless countryside. They could not find the plantation home where they had planned to stay. As they nervously wandered down the road, they saw a light in the distance, which upon investigation turned out to be a “hut full of negroes.” Whitefield’s friends asked them for directions, and the African Americans seemed to feign ignorance. The group suspected that these blacks might have participated in the recent rebellion (a suspicion that was probably wrong).52 In any case, Whitefield’s entourage hurried down the trail. Not long afterward, they saw a bonfire near the road and guessed that it had been lit by another “nest of such negroes.” Their fears rising, they left the trail to avoid notice. Some thought they could see blacks “dancing round the fire.” The panicked group was relieved when the clouds cleared and they could see again in the moonlight. Half expecting to encounter more runaway slaves, they finally found the house they were looking for. They breathlessly told the plantation owner about the blacks they had seen. He assured them that the slaves were no rebels, and nothing to worry about. Nevertheless, the party was relieved when they got to Charleston.53
Charleston (still spelled “Charles Town” in those days) was the most significant southern port in colonial America, and at about 6,500 residents it was one of the five most populous American towns. “A neat pretty place,” as one observer called it, the town stood at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers (named for Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, Carolina’s founder and the grandfather of the humanitarian philosopher). The town faced out on Charleston harbor, beyond which lay the wide Atlantic. Charlestonians traded in rice, indigo (used for dyeing clothes), and enslaved human beings. Cotton was not much of a factor yet; the short-staple cotton that thrived in the South was easy to grow, but its sticky seeds made it difficult to process. (The invention of the cotton gin, which solved this problem, was still a half century away.) The majority of the Lower South’s rice shipped from Charleston, and about 40 percent of slaves imported to the South between 1730 and 1780 disembarked there. The colony’s governor once remarked that the Cooper River was like a “floating market,” bringing crops from the Carolina interior and carrying back goods wanted on plantations. Many of those goods, of course, came from British companies.54
Whitefield attended the Anglican service at St. Philip’s Church that Sunday morning, January 6. The church, completed in 1723 after twelve years of construction, illustrated the cosmopolitan sensibilities of elite Charlestonians. The massive brick building featured three porticoes with Tuscan columns, and an octagonal tower and dome over the church. City boosters compared the church to the great religious edifices of London.55
That afternoon, Whitefield preached at the Reverend Josiah Smith’s Independent church. As in Annapolis and Williamsburg, he found the congregation too “polite” for his taste. He wondered how they could remain spiritually passive in light of “divine judgments lately sent abroad amongst them,” including the Stono Rebellion and the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Epidemics of yellow fever and smallpox had recently ravaged Charleston, too. During a yellow fever plague of the summer of 1739, pastors conducted multiple funerals every day. Doctors knew only to treat feverish patients with alcohol, plying them “burnt wine, hot punch, and strong juleps,” which did little but ease the pain.56 The next day, Whitefield preached to an overflow audience at the Huguenot (French Protestant) church. A number of French Protestants had fled their homeland in 1685 after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and Louis XIV’s brutal campaign to suppress the Protestant movement. Huguenots had a greater social and economic impact in South Carolina than in any other American colony. Whitefield’s visit to the French church offers another reminder of the international character of early American religion and society.57
Whitefield’s party had not yet reached its final destination, Georgia. Traveling overland in the South Carolina Lowcountry was prohibitively difficult, so Whitefield and his friends set out from Charleston by canoe. Five “civil, diligent, and laborious” slaves rowed them to Beaufort, around Hilton Head Island, and then finally to Savannah. Whitefield was delighted. He had now not only traversed the great Atlantic, but had trekked across the colonies from New York to Georgia. Few had made this trip.58
The end of the journey put him in a reflective mood, and he wrote a short essay reviewing the religious state of the colonies (leaving out New England, for the time being). He loved Pennsylvania the most. “The garden of America,” as he called it, had seen the most powerful work of God, with the possible exception of “Northampton in New England,” in Jonathan Edwards’s church. He clearly meant to include New Jersey, as well, for he specifically mentioned the ministerial labors of Gilbert Tennent. Pennsylvania would be the ideal spot for his proposed “school for negroes.” He especially commended Pennsylvania’s practice of religious liberty, where even Dissenters could “worship God their own way.” This allowed for the true friends of the gospel, regardless of denomination, to flourish in peace. Many of those friends were indeed Dissenters. Unfortunately, he thought the Church of England was at a “low ebb” in Pennsylvania.59
The South, to Whitefield, was more problematic. Religion among Maryland Anglicans was at a lower ebb even than that in Pennsylvania. Virginia offered more hope, but he reiterated that the high prevalence of slaves and indentured servants, combined with the scattered nature of the settlements, made consistent religious practice difficult for many. North Carolina was the least hopeful; in that sparsely settled colony, “there’s scarce so much as the form of religion.” In South Carolina, he saw more formal religious commitment, but “no stirring among the dry bones” (Ezekiel 37) yet. But he would come back to Charleston in due course.60
One of his first tasks upon reaching Savannah was to buy land for the orphanage. This was a significant moment in Whitefield’s institutional legacy. James Habersham, who stayed behind when Whitefield left Savannah fifteen months earlier, had picked out a tract of five hundred acres of sandy soil ten miles south of Savannah. Whitefield called the place “Bethesda,” a Hebrew name mentioned in the Gospel of John, meaning “House of Mercy.” The orphanage site was remote from the tiny town, selected intentionally so that the children would be free from “bad examples” and could work the farm he intended to establish there.61
Students would attend school for five hours a day; most would spend the remainder of their time “picking and carding cotton.” (The cotton operation would bear little fruit because it was so inefficient, and under the British Navigation Acts, colonists were not supposed to be producing finished cotton anyway.) Whitefield immediately began gathering orphans to live in temporary housing until workers could build the orphan house. The place would become an enduring Savannah landmark; Bethesda Academy continues to operate on the site today, not far from Whitefield Avenue. The brick Whitefield Chapel, built in 1925, is now one of the most distinctive buildings on the property.62
Throwing himself fully into the project, Whitefield went to Frederica to “fetch the orphans” he could find there. He also wanted to visit General Oglethorpe, who was in Frederica planning an invasion of Spanish Florida (an action related to the War of Jenkins’ Ear). Whitefield soon exasperated Georgia officials by taking some orphans without the trustees’ express permission, including some children who seemed to be living in fairly stable environments with older siblings.63
A power struggle was emerging between Whitefield and certain trustees. They thought he worked for them, but Whitefield assumed that because he had raised so much money for the orphanage, he could run it as he saw fit. Some trustees were wary because Whitefield intended to take the children and “breed them up Methodist.” (Whitefield certainly planned to “breed up for the ministry” any talented Bethesda boys who had experienced true conversion, as he wrote to a New England supporter.) The trustee Lord Egmont noted in his journal that even though he considered Whitefield an enthusiast, he was “willing to excuse the fool” for the time being. If the trustees angrily confronted the itinerant, Egmont feared that Whitefield might throw a fit and abandon the project altogether. Whitefield was also frustrated that the trustees had not yet arranged for a church to be built in Savannah. They talked as if religion was a major priority, but they did not act like it. By January 1740, Whitefield had begun threatening the trustees, via their accountant, Harman Verelst, that if Georgia authorities did not move quickly, he would “inform pious people in a public manner how little good has been done with their charitable contributions.” The trustees told him he was “rash and uninformed” to “menace” them that way. By the time he left Georgia, three months later, Whitefield was so dismayed by the governance and moral state of the colony that he hinted he might shift his charitable focus to Pennsylvania.64
He had already decided he would not remain as Savannah’s parish priest. Planning to stay in Georgia only long enough to set up the orphanage, he decided he could better provide for it financially from a distance. Fund-raising appeals would stay as regular features of his preaching. “When I have resigned the parish, I shall be at more liberty to take a tour round America,” he noted.65
Whitefield returned to Charleston in March 1740. The Anglican commissary, Alexander Garden, had been out of town during Whitefield’s visit in January. Garden was there this time and ready to put Whitefield in his place. Garden, thirty years older than Whitefield, had labored in South Carolina since 1720, becoming commissary in 1728. He and the itinerant met in Garden’s parlor, and Garden charged Whitefield with enthusiasm and rash denunciations of the Anglican clergy. The commissary particularly resented a public letter that Whitefield had written to the bishop of Gloucester (published in Whitefield’s journal), in which Whitefield averred that Henry Stebbing, a chaplain to King George II and a critic of the Methodists, knew “no more of the true nature of regeneration, than Nicodemus did when he came to Jesus by night” in the Gospel of John.66
When Whitefield refused to apologize, Garden declared that if he spoke at any church in the province, he would suspend him. Whitefield replied, “I shall regard that as much as I would a Pope’s bull.” Why did Garden worry so much about Whitefield’s preaching, the itinerant asked, when Garden himself would not “exclaim” against the balls and dances so popular in Charleston? (Charleston was rapidly developing a reputation for lavish and lewd entertainments; as mentioned earlier, George Farquhar’s bawdy The Recruiting Officer had been the Dock Street Theater’s first play when it opened in 1736.) Garden indignantly replied that he saw no harm in those pastimes. If that was Garden’s position, Whitefield retorted, then it was his duty to “exclaim” against Garden. The enraged commissary had heard enough. He told Whitefield and his friends, “Get you out of my house.”67
Whitefield spent most of the rest of his Charleston visit communing with Dissenters. Two days after the altercation with Garden, he dutifully attended St. Philip’s Church and heard Garden, as Whitefield put it, represent him as a “Pharisee.” He spoke at Josiah Smith’s meetinghouse the next evening and collected a remarkable £70 for Bethesda, the largest onetime gift he had yet received. Such continuing successes convinced him that a rift with Anglican authorities was unavoidable, and part of God’s plan.68
Back in Savannah, Whitefield laid the first brick of Bethesda’s great house and then made arrangements for returning to Philadelphia. It would have been easy for Whitefield to forget his concerns and friends back in Britain, which must have seemed far away as he stood on the cleared acreage at Bethesda. But two people back home especially stayed on the twenty-five-year-old’s mind. One was John Wesley. Whitefield got a letter from Wesley when he returned from Charleston. Wesley had continued to push Whitefield to accept Wesley’s views on perfectionism and to reject Calvinism. Pleading with Wesley to stop bringing up these topics, he said that they both had strong opinions and were unlikely ever to agree. Whitefield was “ten thousand times more convinced” of the doctrines of election and the final perseverance of believers than he was the last time they had talked. He still maintained that he did not want to go public with his objections to Wesley’s theology. That determination would not last out the year, however.69
The other person on Whitefield’s mind was Elizabeth Delamotte. Thoughts of this relationship were perplexing to the itinerant, who sought to mortify desires he considered frivolous or worldly, including romantic desires. But receiving a letter from Delamotte when he arrived in Savannah after his trans-colonial trek brought back the feelings that had stirred him while visiting with her as he waited out the embargo in England. In early February 1741, he wrote to her, sending mixed messages clothed in spiritual garb. The letter opened with standard Methodist spiritual advice. He confessed that he feared having his heart drawn away from Christ by “earthly objects.” What room, he asked, “can there be for God, when a rival hath taken possession of the heart?” Asking about her family, he abruptly closed, saying, “My heart is now full. Writing quickens me. I could almost drop a tear, and wish myself, for a moment or two, in England. But hush, nature.” He signed the letter “your sincere friend and servant in Christ.”70
This episode has become fodder for speculation about Whitefield’s psychological turmoil regarding women generally, and Delamotte in particular. We need not go as far as the historian Harry Stout, who says that Whitefield was “obsessed with Delamotte and hating himself for the ‘vile’ passions” he felt for her. Even the pastor-historian Arnold Dallimore, however, depicted the itinerant as enduring “bitter” struggles in these months as he wrestled with his feelings about Elizabeth and confronted fears of what acting on those feelings might do to his ministry. It is tempting to read his agonized deliberations over Delamotte into the “unspeakable trouble and agony of soul” he experienced on March 30.71
In April, Whitefield took the ten-day sea journey back to Philadelphia. While on board, he anxiously prayed and decided to resolve his struggles over Delamotte by sending her a marriage proposal. And what a proposal! He composed two letters, one to Elizabeth’s parents and one to her. The opening line of the letter to the Delamottes told them how one Methodist woman he brought from England had already died, and another was gravely ill. Then he told them that he needed a godly woman to take care of his affairs in Georgia; moreover, he had become convinced that the Lord wanted him to get married. Is “Miss Elizabeth . . . a proper person to engage in such an undertaking?” he asked. If so, could he have their permission to propose to her? Refusing the request was fine, he said, since he was “free from that foolish passion, which the world calls love.” If they declined, he would know that Elizabeth was not the one for him.72
He also sent the Delamottes a letter for Elizabeth; they were to deliver it only if they approved of his proposal. Was she willing to submit to the demands of being his wife, he asked? Could she manage the growing “family” at Bethesda? Would she willingly part with the itinerant, “even for a long season, when his Lord and master shall call him forth to preach the gospel, and command him to leave you behind?” His conscience was clean, for he desired to take her, “my sister[,] to wife, not for lust, but uprightly.” Not offering any “passionate expressions” such as those used by “carnal courtiers,” he would promise only to help her grow closer to the Lord if they married. He just loved her “for God.”73
The nineteenth-century biographer Luke Tyerman put it well when he wrote that Whitefield “was one of the oddest wooers that ever wooed.” Dallimore said that had he tried, Whitefield could not have written letters more likely to precipitate negative responses. Indeed, Elizabeth did not accept his proposal. In July, Whitefield received a letter from her that suggested to Whitefield that she was spiritually “in a seeking state only,” and perhaps not even converted. Such an intermediate condition would “not do,” he told William Seward: “I would have one that is full of faith and the Holy Ghost.” He wept over receiving the news, but Jesus assured Whitefield that he would not let him “fall by the hands of a woman.”74
The reference to Delamotte’s seeking state may have reflected the fact that, in Whitefield’s absence, the Delamottes had split with John Wesley and become Moravians. But Delamotte had another suitor, as well, a Moravian man whom she married less than a year after receiving Whitefield’s proposal. The parents too seem to have sent a negative reply to the itinerant, but Elizabeth (whose letter we do not have) may have equivocated. As late as November 1740, Whitefield wrote, “Mr. and Mrs. Delamotte refuse to give their daughter, but yet I believe [Elizabeth] may be my wife.” It was not to be.75
Upon his return to the Middle Colonies, he preached at Wilmington, Delaware, a river port of six hundred residents about thirty miles from Philadelphia. Whitefield estimated that three thousand people attended, and “God was pleased to be amongst us,” he wrote, “as in the holy place of Sinai.” He was glad to be back. As was typical at the end of his journeys, he paused to reflect. “The world is now up in arms,” he said, aware of the progress of the war with Spain, in which his friend James Oglethorpe was on the front lines. “Blessed Jesus,” he prayed, “whilst the kings of the earth are striving to extend their dominions, do thou secretly carry on thy Kingdom in believers’ hearts, till the earth be filled with the knowledge of thee, our Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). And indeed, a new flood was on the rise. Soon he began preparing to visit New England.76