1. A British Explorer

1. A British Explorer

George Whitefield came to Georgia as much a British visitor as a Protestant missionary. A complex mix of motivations attended Atlantic crossings in the eighteenth century and Whitefield, who arrived in May 1738, was subject to the same factors as anyone else. The prospect of a fresh beginning, the allure of untold riches, and the conceit of imperial destiny emboldened adventurous spirits to brave the sea voyage. In an era of widespread expansionist ambitions, the young Whitefield harbored more than evangelistic hopes when he traveled to America in 1738. If his childhood in a Gloucester inn—not far from the port city of Bristol—predisposed him to wanderlust, his Oxford education reinforced an Anglo-centric view of the world that stoked ambitions of carrying British Protestant civilization to remote parts of the world. Situating Whitefield’s decision to go to America in the middle of longstanding popular British fascination with the growing edges of empire reveals a key facet of his mission to Georgia. It is therefore important to place the fact of imperial ambitions alongside the Grand Itinerant’s revival aspirations in order to yield new insights into the development of evangelicalism. Indeed at the earliest stages of evangelical Protestantism, a vital connection existed between the cause of empire and religion. By uncovering the ways in which Whitefield appropriated cultural trends like Protestant polemics, commercial trade, maritime mobility, and the celebration of individual liberty, this chapter argues that the religious activism of early evangelicals was indebted to a matrix of British imperial factors.¹

Seen in this light, Whitefield was not only an evangelist of Protestant renewal but also a British explorer in America.² And in a sense this book is a study of the complicated process of forming British national identity in an age of imperial expansion, with a focus on the evangelical Protestant awakenings in North America as one peculiar expression of translating Britishness into a new context. Remembering Whitefield’s British identity and casting his life against the backdrop of a larger process of Anglicization help us to see the religious dimensions of imperial ideology and its corresponding impact on religious renewal. A corollary contention is that seeing Whitefield exclusively, or even primarily, as an evangelical religious leader is not enough. Building on important works that have established the signal importance of Whitefield as a revival figure, this study seeks to bring the religious historiography of Whitefield into conversation with broader themes in British Atlantic history.³

A period of religious pluralization and growing individualism, the first half of the eighteenth century was also a time of imperial state formation and rising nationalism.⁴ It was in such a milieu that Whitefield rallied a sprawhng, ambiguously defined empire and spurred the Anglicization of the American colonies by preaching a Protestant message that bore a distinct British stamp.⁵ His contributions to the cause of the British Empire is a dimension of Whitefield’s life and career that historians have overlooked in the rush to explain his revival triumphs. Yet it is difficult to understand the magnitude of that success apart from his contributions to a gathering Britishness—not in lieu of, but in addition to his unmatched gifts in preaching and publicizing. The project of Anglicization and the concomitant call to evangelization were enmeshed in the person and ministry of Whitefield.⁶ In recognition of Whitefield’s cultural significance, one historian called him a “fashionable import.”⁷ He was that and much more. A detailed account will show that he was a calculating exporter of British culture who served as a conduit for dynamic cultural exchange in both directions.

By taking the cultural context of Whitefield’s revival ministry seriously, this chapter sets the stage for understanding his extensive itinerant career as an illustrative study of the mid-eighteenth-century British Empire. With Georgia, the southern frontier of empire, as the focal point, it becomes easier to see how the interests of Protestant revivalism and British imperialism represented two sides of the same ideological coin. More specifically, they were the twin targets of Whitefield’s intensely focused evangelical ambition, such that his efforts to preach for religious revival were at the same time a project of British cultural exportation. The evidence will show that, alongside his role as a revival preacher who traveled the length of the empire for the sake of the gospel, Whitefield also acted as an agent of Britishness.

In order to frame the imperial context for the rest of the book, this chapter focuses on Georgia as (1) the southern frontier of empire and (2) the site of Whitefield’s southern strategy. Because of the seemingly counter-intuitive choice of Georgia as the base for his transatlantic ministry, the chapter opens with a background survey of the thirteenth colony in order to elucidate the significance of its location on the southernmost edge of empire. Delving into the early history of Georgia as the southern frontier of empire will set the stage for Whitefield’s lifelong work in linking the thirteenth colony to its imperial center. For this reason, the chapter follows up the history of Georgia with a biographical sketch of Whitefield that highlights his participation in the Atlantic world stage as a British subject. In particular, we will see how his background primed him for action on the front lines of empire in Georgia. Once we have established his early preference for the American South, we will be in a better position to identify the reciprocal influence of the era’s territorial expansion and religious innovations. A study of the imperial outhnes of the revivals illuminates the influence of broader processes in British state formation on the religious life of its subjects.

The chapter concludes with reflections on several theological accents brought into clearer focus by studying Whitefield and Georgia together: his post-Puritan and anti-Catholic orientation as well as his differences with John Wesley, who spent two difficult years in Georgia prior to Whitefield’s arrival. Whitefield’s revivalist emphasis represented a new way of being British and Protestant that broke with past models and differentiated itself from contemporary alternatives. Along the way, we will see how the spread of British colonialism went hand-in-hand with attempts to rearticulate the significance of old religion for a changing world.

The Southern Frontier in Georgia

When rising Protestant evangelical leaders like John and Charles Wesley, and then George Whitefield three years after them, headed to Georgia, they sailed knowingly into the eye of an imperial storm. For these ambitious individuals, it was not so much the frontier wilderness as the front lines of imperial expansion that captured their imagination. Indeed, the colony of Georgia from its earliest years represented a galvanizing cause for British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. South Carolina needed a buffer from Spanish Florida. Early explorations mistakenly identified silk and wine as lucrative commodities ideally suited to the Georgia climate with ready buyers in London markets. Philanthropists saw a veritable Garden of Eden in the Georgia environment, where the poor could have a new start. And, not least, fifty years after the establishment of the previous colony in Pennsylvania, the British public was itching for another colonial enterprise. In these ways, geo-political tensions, social and economic opportunities, philanthropic aspirations, and imperial expediency converged to offer an enticing opportunity for entrepreneurs of every stripe, including the religious. A survey of early Georgia history therefore sets the stage for explaining Whitefield’s attraction to the colonial South as part of his larger strategy.

The region of America that became the colony of Georgia in 1732 had been through a tumultuous history of imperial claims and native resistance ever since Ponce de Leon’s arrival from Spain in 1513. In the early eighteenth century, tensions mounted with the expansion of British settlements in Carolina and opposing Spanish fortifications in Florida. As a result, multiple skirmishes broke out over what came to be called “the debatable land” in between.⁸ 1715 was a cataclysmic year as South Carolina suffered over two hundred fatalities at the hands of the Yamasee Indians who were leagued with the French and Spanish.⁹ Two years later the Lord Proprietors of South Carolina were more than happy to approve Sir Robert Montgomery’s petition to establish a military colony in the land between South Carolina and Florida. Naming the region “Margravate of Azilia,” Sir Robert sought public support for his work in London by publishing a promotional booklet in 1717 entitled A Discourse Concerning the Design’d Establishment of a New Colony to the South of Carolina, in the Most Delightful Country of the Universe. He followed up that effort with A Description of the Golden Islands, which appeared in 1720.¹⁰ Despite lush descriptions and grandiose intentions, however, he was unable to secure the requisite number of settlers. His grant expired, the southern borders of South Carolina remained exposed, and opportunities for trade and commerce were left untapped. Not to be deterred by the failure of Azilia, Jean Pierre Purry, a Swiss merchant, in 1724 proposed a British settlement in the same region. Financial constraints also doomed Purry’s efforts. In the meantime, due in part to the burden of mounting military defenses in this contested region of the empire, the South Carolina proprietors relinquished their land to the English crown and it became a royal colony in 1729.

Although these various efforts failed to produce their intended outcome, one byproduct of their persistence was the growing awareness among the British public of the pressing need for new settlements in the southern edge of British America. According to one historical account, James Oglethorpe’s 1733 arrival in Georgia “symbolized not only the beginning of a new colony but also the culmination of Carolina expansion ideas during the preceding quarter century.”¹¹ In the mind of the British public, this endeavor by Oglethorpe would have been viewed as only the latest extension of earlier attempts. Thus, more than the extracurricular interest of a few idealistic entrepreneurs, the Georgia project as a whole represented the signal cause of imperial development in the early eighteenth century. If colonies like Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania typified British focus in North America during the seventeenth century, the southern frontier rekindled the thrill of exploration and the promise of colonization in the British expansionist imagination of a new era. The numerous aborted efforts to establish a colony there revealed the difficulties of colonizing America but also the appeal of such an enterprise. The elusiveness of the goal served to reinforce public appetite for a successful venture, laying the groundwork for public opinion to rally around the next protagonist bold enough to undertake the formidable cause.

What followed has not always been clear. The long history of pre-Georgia is complicated by a divergence of historical interpretations and offers an apt reminder of the multiple dimensions of imperial developments. Clarifying the military and philanthropic dimensions of Georgia, and its strategic position for British interests, is important for understanding Whitefield’s early attraction to this region. Yet many historians of Georgia have insisted on a sharp dichotomy between military expansion and philanthropic compassion, leading to falsely monolithic impressions of the thirteenth British American colony. For instance, when Jefferson Randolph Anderson argued that “the chief and controlling object and purpose for the founding of the colony was a military one,” he also dismissed the role of social idealism at work in early Georgia. In his view, James Oglethorpe and the people he recruited knew well that “they were not entering into any unexplored Eden where . . . they might erect a Utopia away from strife and turmoil.”¹² This distinction allowed Anderson to present Georgia as a unique case study, indeed “the only military colony ever sent out from Great Britain.”¹³ In contrast, other historical treatments have tended to accentuate the charitable nature of Georgia’s founding. Ian Steele identified Georgia as a “major transatlantic charity and one that would attract John and Charles Wesley and then, in 1738, George Whitefield.”¹⁴ Such interpretive disagreements continue to obscure the alignment of religious and political factors at play in the early history of Georgia. Allowing for the simultaneity of these factors, on the other hand, we can better understand the ways in which evangelical leaders like the Wesleys and Whitefield engaged their cultural contexts with religious aspirations. Tracing these early developments shows how a distinctly British Protestant version of religious imperialism—at once militant and philanthropic—blurred traditional boundaries in a time of spiritual upheaval and renewal.

In fact, such conflation of religious and imperial aims was so pronounced that one historian spoke of “ecclesiastical imperialism” to describe the spirit of the age.¹⁵ Dr. Thomas Bray, an early supporter of the Georgia project, exemplified this spirit of ecclesiastical imperialism. Bray had long harbored interest in the cause of religion in America as the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK). An influential churchman, he had also served as commissary in Maryland where he mediated the authority of the Bishop of London. In 1723 Bray formed a group called the Associates of Bray to leverage his substantial fortune toward ongoing philanthropic work after his death. His interest in prison reform brought him into contact with James Oglethorpe, who, in 1729, after valorous service in the War of Spanish Succession, was serving as chairman of a parliamentary committee inquiring into the state of British gaols. This reform work united Oglethorpe and Bray in common cause that eventually led to substantial funding by the Bray Associates toward the founding of the Georgia colony.

James Oglethorpe was not only the first chairman of the Bray Associates but also a colonel who possessed political acuity alongside philanthropic sensitivity. It was fitting that he would lead a group of twenty-one men to petition King George II for a colony in the contested land between South Carolina and Florida. In presenting the case for Georgia, Oglethorpe referred to the Greek colonial tradition and highlighted the strategy of Greek city-states that planted colonies “on the frontiers of their new empire [and] gave a new strength to the whole.”¹⁶ One historian has noted Oglethorpe’s deft combination of “Machiavellianism with political economy” as well as his reliance on Francis Bacon’s “On Plantations,” which justified British settlements in Ireland.¹⁷ In other words, Oglethorpe was quite consciously drawing upon a long history of colonial and imperial ideology when he explicitly pitched Georgia as a logical and necessary step in building the British Empire. On June 9, 1732, the Georgia Trustees received their charter; soon thereafter, efforts to gather colonists for the southern frontier gained unprecedented momentum. It helped that nearly two-thirds of the Trustees were also members of Parliament. To a large extent, the success of this latest colonial iteration was owing to the many prominent persons involved who embraced the cause of empire.
What further distinguished Oglethorpe’s plans for Georgia from Sir Robert’s and Purry’s prior failed attempts was the articulation of religious and philanthropic concerns as justification for establishing a colony in the southern frontier. Indeed, publicity concerning a strong religious rationale helped ensure popular support for Georgia. In addition to the long-term benefits of securing the empire’s periphery, there would be immediate solutions to problems faced by a broad range of persons in London, from languishing debtors and released prisoners to aspiring entrepreneurs with little room to grow in England. In Georgia they might find greener and more open pastures.

Oglethorpe arrived in America with thirty-five families on January 13, 1733, to the welcome of elated colonists in Charleston. Immediately the military man went to work setting up a military colony. After establishing a settlement in a strategically defensible position at the mouth of the Savannah River, he sent later arrivals such as the Salzburgers from Germany and Highlanders from Scotland to outlying locations—Bethlehem and New Inverness, respectively—that might serve as garrisons.¹⁸ Not content with simply fortifying the colony, Oglethorpe began making plans for an offensive against Spanish Florida by establishing forts farther south on Frederica and St. Simons Island.

Back home in England, Oglethorpe and his associates were out of sight but not out of mind. This illustrative account appeared in the December 1, 1733, issue of Hooker’s Weekly Miscellany:

The Planting of Colonies is of such publick Utility, that we think we cannot do anything more acceptable, than to take Notice of all that occurs material on such Occasions. The new one in Georgia, carry’d on with so much Chearfulness and Ardour by the honourable Trustees appointed for that Purpose, claims our particular Attention.¹⁹

Describing the attitude of the colonists as marked by “chearfulness” evoked 2 Corinthians 9:7 and served to remind British subjects that the Georgia enterprise should be viewed as an act of pious sacrifice, an offering unto their God. Those familiar with the context of 2 Corinthians would have also heard the apostle Paul’s exhortation: the person who “soweth bountifully” may “abound to every good work” (2 Cor. 9:6, 8, KJV).

Ever mindful of the London audience and the need for ongoing public support, Oglethorpe returned to England in 1734, bringing with him the Yamacraw chief Tomochichi, his wife, and other friendly natives. Oglethorpe and the Indians who accompanied him became a national sensation, feted by the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury and receiving glowing praise in the press. When out of the public spothght, Oglethorpe was busy in the House of Commons and at the Old Palace Yard, where the Georgia Trustees conducted their business. The public tour of Tomochichi and his group had already made the case for the value of humanitarian and religious work in Georgia. By highlighting the French threat from the west, Oglethorpe secured a government grant of £25,800 for Georgia. When he returned to the colony in 1735, he had assembled a group of 257, notable among them a contingent of two hundred Salzburgers expelled from their homeland, the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg, by Catholic authorities. Fatefully for the story of George Whitefield, the party also included John and Charles Wesley as well as Benjamin Ingham, members of Oxford’s Holy Club.²⁰ This group of religious reformers had already become notorious for practicing a rigorous piety that would later evolve into the form of evangelical Protestantism that gained much popularity throughout the Atlantic world. Oglethorpe’s correspondence with the Wesleys’ parents, Samuel and Susanna, helped secure the brothers’ commitment to Georgia and evinced his desire for a strong religious life in the new colony.

Unsurprisingly, British activities in Georgia aroused the suspicion of Spanish diplomats in London, who raised a furor and demanded English conformity to the treaty of 1670 that limited English settlements from moving south of St. Helena Sound, South Carolina. On November 29, 1736, Oglethorpe sailed again for England in order to rally support for the Georgia cause, whereupon he made appearances before Parliament and the King. Parrying the diplomatic moves of Don Tomas Geraldino, Spain’s ambassador in London, and outmaneuvering the pacifistic prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, Oglethorpe made the case for Georgia’s defense as a matter of urgent security.²¹ At the beginning of 1737, he put forward a bold proposal in Parliament for financial investment to back the military mandate he still awaited, requesting £30,000 when he only hoped for £20,000. In August 1737, he was appointed as Brigadier General of His Majesty’s forces in South Carolina and Georgia with generous funding to back his mandate, giving him sweeping authority in a strategic corner of the British Empire.²² Over the course of the next year he worked to recruit additional men and gather munitions needed to mount a military offensive against fort St. Augustine in Florida. On the first of July 1738, Oglethorpe set sail to return to Georgia with a force seven hundred strong.

Thanks to the industry of men like Bray and Oglethorpe, Georgia “assumed a paramount place in European diplomacy” and commanded the attention not only of diplomats but ordinary British subjects in the course of the 1730s.²³ In fact, the southern frontier of mainland North America was—due to imperial holdings in the West Indies—also the geographical center of British territories in that region.²⁴ The philanthropic vision for Georgia attracted “merchant and minister, visionary and imperialist, middle class and nobility” with the result that “the Trustees were flooded with contributions.”²⁵ The colonial enterprise became yet another site for releasing pent-up desires to improve British culture, and rising prosperity fueled optimism about the entire venture. According to historian Jack Greene, economic, social, cultural, and religious opportunities coalesced, so that “Georgia was to be not just a model colony but a model society for Britain.”²⁶ The Trustees aimed for nothing less than Utopia, an aspiration with practical outworkings on the ground that included limited land tenure and the prohibition of slavery. Through such spartan land and labor policies, the Trustees sought to create a new colony that valued hard work unencumbered by inherited status. In so doing, they issued “both a reaffirmation of old values and a repudiation of the baser tendencies then rampant in British life.”²⁷

In light of these factors, it is difficult to overestimate the enthusiasm of the British public’s response to the Georgia effort that resulted from a two-pronged appeal to imperial and philanthropic sentiments. The Trustees of Georgia fanned the flames of euphoria in the early 1730s by hiring publicists to write about their cause across the empire. Their pamphlets stirred such a fevered pitch of enthusiasm that a highly selective winnowing process turned many applicants away. One historian of Georgia has remarked, “All England was now aroused to the importance of Georgia, and the fervor spread to the British possessions throughout the world.”²⁸

Phillip Thicknesse, a young servant of the influential Savannah storekeeper, Thomas Causton, described his initial conception of the move to Georgia as “setting out to begin the forming of a new world.” Never mind that a world already existed, and that to so many this so-called “new” world was anything but new.²⁹ His striking language revealed the ambitious self-perception of British expansion as not merely discovering a new world but forging, even creating, a world of new possibilities. So taken was he with the prospect of a new beginning in Georgia that he could not imagine doing anything else with his life: “I felt a delight and a faith not to be removed, nor could at that time any offer, however advantageous in appearance, have diverted me from adding one to the number of the foolish Georgia emigrants.”³⁰ Adumbrations of future struggle aside, Thicknesse’s raw enthusiasm points to the ambitious vision that Georgia represented to many Britons. Fueling this excitement was a well-orchestrated scheme of promotional literature. “No other American colony, surely, had so good a press, or so musical a chorus,” according to Verner Crane.³¹ Religious motivations mingled symbiotically with political, social, and economic concerns, leading to “more than a hundred clergymen and churches set to raising money” for Georgia so that “almost a religious crusade developed.”³² As the money and applicants poured in, “the Trustees set up a sifting process more exacting and rigid than was ever used in securing settlers for any other American colony.”³³

In this context, the rhetoric of the Trustees struggled to keep pace with the enthusiasm their project received. They rose to the occasion with sometimes overwrought descriptions, such as when they claimed their territory lay in the same latitude as the Garden of Eden. They may have remembered a similar observation by Sir Robert that Georgia “lies in the same Latitude with Palestine Herself,” the promised land of the Old Testament. The alliance of political, social, and religious vision proved effective; while biblical references helped highlight matters of imperial expediency, there were also propitious religious opportunities on offer. If Georgia was necessary for defending the most hotly contested area of empire, with the French in New Orleans and the Spanish in St. Augustine, it also provided the ideal site for a holy experiment and a fresh outpouring of divine blessing.

As it turned out, the long prelude to the Georgia colony’s founding had tested but also intensified its idealistic vision, providing a platform on which someone like Whitefield could hope to build. In fact, if Georgia was, as Paul Langford wrote, “the brain-child of a group of philanthropic enthusiasts for colonization, who indulged in a potent mixture of patriotism and piety,” Whitefield was the ideal candidate to provide spiritual nurture for sustaining the long-term vision.³⁴ The settlers who came to Georgia ranged from the poor to the middle class who had fallen on hard times. They also came with soaring ambitions to construct “a future guidepost for colonial America.”³⁵ In these ways, Georgia provided an amenable setting for Whitefield’s emerging ministry—post-Puritan with sympathies for religious reform yet aggressively Protestant, and by extension anti-Catholic, with the kind of political and polemical features primed for imperial appropriation.

At the same time Oglethorpe was working the corridors of Whitehall, Whitefield was preparing to leave for his first tour of America with Georgia as his destination. It was notably a time when the colony’s focus was shifting from religious reform to military defense.³⁶ Since the contrast between such categories was rarely felt in stark terms on the ground, it may be more accurate to say that Whitefield’s work in Georgia began during a heightened mood of ecclesiastical imperialism. According to Langford, supporters of the British Empire “fearlessly replanted the education, supervision, and welfare of the lower class to fit it for such a society, [assuming] that British power would maintain [its] international competitiveness.”³⁷ This same group of optimists, among whom we can include Whitefield, also “made due allowance for the provision of godly discipline and pious benevolence in a commercial age.”³⁸ Where a commercial middle class thrived as never before, care for the poor was a way of simultaneously fulfilling religious duty and investing in the cause of a Protestant empire.

Remembering the monumental scale of the greatest philanthropic experiment of the age can deepen our understanding of the catalyzing forces behind early missionary efforts in Georgia.³⁹ Rather than a form of pietistic flight from the world, it is conceivable that missionaries who traveled to the Georgia wilderness saw themselves engaged in a task of profound cultural engagement. They were throwing themselves headlong into trailblazing philanthropic work that would benefit the whole empire. To live in Georgia was not to sequester oneself in a remote part of the world; it was a means of relocating to what one person called “a sort of cross-roads of the world.”⁴⁰ With a population that soon consisted of “Piedmontese, Swiss, Salzburgers, Moravians, Germans, Jews, Scotch Highlanders, Welsh, and English,” the young colony “had as cosmopolitan a population as could be found in America.”⁴¹ Of all places in a rapidly growing empire, Georgia would have appeared to the Wesley brothers and George Whitefield a site well-suited to experimental religion precisely because the project involved building a new society with the enthusiastic backing of London in a key strategic location.

Due to the extended history and widespread publicity surrounding the Georgia project, when missionaries like the Wesley brothers and Benjamin Ingham embarked for the American South in 1736—and George Whitefield in 1738—there was an undeniable imperial dimension to their undertaking. They could hardly have missed the steady stream of pamphlets and newspaper stories extolling the virtues of the Georgia enterprise. They may even have known neighbors and friends who enlisted to become Georgia colonists. The heightened public awareness of this fledgling colony provided sufficient recompense and redeeming vision for these young men to leave the imperial center, giving them some hope of joining a noble and worthwhile cause. For Whitefield, focusing on Georgia paved the way toward active engagement in the empire’s growing edge, where instability brought perils but fluidity also created opportunities. Georgia, in other words, represented the freest place in the empire for the work Whitefield intended to do.

The Southern Strategy of Whitefield

If it is true that motivations shaped by empire as well as religion led Whitefield to Georgia, a brief biographical survey leading up to his first American voyage will present a fuller picture. Understanding his early years can help explain his fixation on Georgia and the development of his imperial strategy as a religious itinerant. Without dismissing his spiritual convictions, we will see that attention to cultural developments contributed to the direction of his revival labors. A comparison of George Whitefield’s and John Wesley’s experiences in Georgia will round off this exercise. In a dramatically different storyline, Wesley left the colony so disillusioned with possibilities in America that he exhibited little interest thereafter in matters outside the British Isles. Wesley’s short but tempestuous tenure in the thirteenth colony provides a helpful foil for underscoring Whitefield’s imperial interests.

Whitefield’s Early Life

George Whitefield was born on December 16, 1714, at the Bell Inn in Gloucester to Richard Whitefield and his wife Mary. His father died when he was two years old, and the subsequent marriage of his mother to Capel Longden opened an unhappy chapter marked by financial hardship for the family. At age fourteen Whitefield interrupted his studies at St. Mary de Crypt School to help with maintenance of the inn, where “I put on my blue apron and my snuffers, washed mops, cleaned rooms, and, in one word, became professed and common drawer for nigh a year and a half.”⁴² Located in southwest England, Gloucester abutted the Severn, the longest river in England, only thirty miles northeast upstream from the port city of Bristol. In this busthng city, the inn was a place where travelers shared gossip and news from across the empire. Whitefield’s mother learned from one such guest about opportunities for poor students to attend Oxford as a servitor. Thanks to this opportunity, Whitefield became a student at Pembroke College, Oxford, in the fall of 1732, where he financed his education by doing menial chores for his peers. It was not all work and drudgery, however, as he met a lifelong friend in Charles Wesley. Largely owing to this friendship, he joined the Holy Club, a group of students famous in the history of Methodism—and often derided—for the “methods” they employed to express their piety. So fervently did Whitefield embrace their regimen of self-denial and rigorous devotion that he nearly died during the Lenten season of 1735.⁴³ After a year recovering in Gloucester, he returned to Oxford in the spring of 1736 to complete his education. For his association with these so-called methodists, Whitefield learned the pain of social ostracism as well as habits of endurance. “Some have thrown dirt at me; others, by degrees, took away their pay from me,” Whitefield wrote in his journal, all the while becoming “inured . . . to contempt.”⁴⁴ Though he had no way of knowing, he could have been describing his preaching ministry a few years later.

During those heady days at Oxford, Whitefield’s theological influences were wide-ranging. He mentioned in his journals a diverse set of authors from Thomas à Kempis to Juan de Castaniza to Bishop Hall. The books that most influenced him, however, were those given by his close friend Charles Wesley, which included works by the German pietist August Hermann Francke and an anonymous work revered among Oxford methodists, The Country Parson’s Advice to His Parishioners.⁴⁵ Puritan authors like Richard Baxter and William Burkitt and the Presbyterian Matthew Henry also made a lasting impression. Not content to regurgitate these authors, moreover, Whitefield would build on their theology to develop his own pathbreaking emphasis on spiritual rebirth. One of the most hard-hitting books for the young Whitefield, upon which he improvised to build his own distinct ministry approach, was Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man. It was a Puritan classic that pointed out the worthlessness of outward religious deeds in the absence of inward transformation. The innovation of locating soteriology in the realm of the personal, as Scougal did, emboldened Whitefield to favor individual agency over institutional authority. For Whitefield, this theological emphasis manifested in an irresistible urge to invite individual conversion to as many as would hear him on the matter. If the Holy Club was “an iron-clad regime . . . of human effort, that provided no assurance and left the all-important salvation of the soul but a distant uncertainty,” Whitefield found his way to a grassroots spirituality that was more accessible to all.⁴⁶ The far-reaching aspirational quality of his ministry derived fuel from the Puritan vision of divine sovereignty but also, over time, cultural validation and empowerment on the broad canvas of a growing empire.

After graduating from Oxford in May 1736, Whitefield received his ordination as a deacon in the Church of England and began preaching to great acclaim in Bristol, London, and surrounding regions. Displaying a daring nimbleness in both doctrine and delivery, Whitefield captivated audiences with the combination of his youthful flair and oratorical force, so that “hearers seemed startled” everywhere he preached.⁴⁷ Still, he was at an early stage in his theological development and himself admitted in 1737 that, regarding the doctrine of new birth and justification by faith, “I was not so clear in it as afterwards.”⁴⁸ As a result, he chastised parishioners and preachers alike, lamenting “the shell and shadow of religion” that they allowed to pass for Christian devotion. In his first published sermon, The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth in Christ Jesus, in Order to Salvation (1737), he absolutized the requirement of an experiential new birth, narrowing the circle of true Christianity even as he broadened authentic Christian membership beyond the walls of the national church. A careful student of tradition, he nonetheless displayed a readiness to eschew any inherited constraints that did not comply with his own reading of Scripture.

Whitefield, Georgia, and Empire

Thus far we have focused on the pre-history of Georgia and the early life of George Whitefield. As it happens, the course of Whitefield’s life before he left for America reveals how much he was being prepared for ministry on the frontiers of empire. In order to illuminate this point, we are now ready to take note of the significant convergence points between Whitefield as British subject and Georgia as a strategic imperial outpost.

The story of Whitefield in America begins with a geographical puzzle. For despite his ambitious agenda aimed at cultural engagement, the itinerant strangely positioned himself on the margins of empire. Although we will cover this material more fully in the next chapter, a brief snapshot of his early American travels serves to provide some framing questions. From the moment he set foot on American soil, Whitefield conspicuously avoided New England while carefully cultivating ties in the southern colonies. What drew him to the American South and why did he at first show so little interest in the North? Over the course of his first two American trips between May 1738 and January 1741, he devoted almost twenty months to his work in the colonies. Given New England’s vaunted importance to religious life in America, it is astonishing that Whitefield spent barely over a month there during this period. Even that short visit did not occur until mid-September 1740 and amounted to merely one-twentieth of his time in the colonies during his first two trips. There can be little doubt that much happened during his famous September journey to key sites of revival such as Boston and Jonathan Edwards’s Northampton. Indeed, his New England preaching tour has become the stuff of legend and detailed historical accounts of his fiery evangelism in New England are legion.⁴⁹ If it is legitimate to acknowledge the significance of his brief ministry in the North, however, it is even more important to grasp his affinity for the South, to which he committed well over two-thirds of his early work in the colonies. What compelled Whitefield to pour so much of his time into Georgia? The answer lies in his awareness of imperial politics and his evolving vision of what it might mean to become a cultural force in the crowded social and political landscape of empire. The fledgling colony offered the ambitious young cleric a broad field of religious, cultural, and political experimentation. Uncovering the central place of Georgia in Whitefield’s early American labors helps to reveal the imperial shape of the Great Awakening.

Before he became the catalyst of evangelical awakenings across the British Empire and chief architect of a transatlantic Protestant network, Whitefield dug his roots into southern soil in the American hinterlands, on the far fringe of empire. Neither a place of escape nor a destination of random chance, Georgia represented a strategic location where he was free to nurture a form of religion that was experimental and entrepreneurial. For such an effort, imperial expansion afforded the critical venue. If we recognize that Whitefield was not merely a product of his times but also a perceptive interpreter and aspiring shaper of the world around him, we can detect the same fault lines dividing his world into distinct regions that he apprehended. By focusing on Whitefield’s wide-ranging and versatile career we can map out an imperial topography, hierarchically arranged from center to periphery. In this scheme, London takes its expected place in the center, New England occupies the middle ground, and Georgia—along with Scotland and Ireland, which Whitefield also frequently visited—represents the outer periphery.⁵⁰ Such a mental geography can help us appreciate the ease with which an itinerant like Whitefield wove in and out and across the empire’s internal boundaries and also why he chose to do so. Although many aspects of Whitefield’s success lay beyond his control, little was accidental about his selection of Georgia, in addition to London, as the base of his Atlantic operations.

As we will see, Georgia became only more important to Whitefield with the passing of time. In his early career, efforts to raise support for Bethesda Orphanage, which lay a few miles outside Savannah, provided the justification he needed for riding roughshod over parish boundaries and sparking religious awakenings and social disturbances—from Charleston and Boston to Edinburgh and Dublin. After the revivals quieted, he poured energy in his later years into establishing a college in Georgia. Though it is difficult to speculate about hopes and dreams that never materialized, it is worth noting that had Whitefield succeeded in establishing Bethesda College, it would today find its place as a peer of America’s oldest universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. In fact, Bethesda would have wrested from William and Mary the distinction of being the southernmost college in colonial America. That Whitefield attempted such a feat at all shows how important it was that a little-noticed southern orientation undergirded the well-known career of this celebrity preacher.

In light of the observations above, Savannah and its outlying areas represented not only a particular site for spiritual and philanthropic work but also a key location for impacting the empire in its entirety. Whitefield lived during a time of maritime trade that extended across the globe and—by virtue of the pluralistic diversity that ensued—highlighted the need for a more coherent British identity. In this liminal context, the outward expansion and the inward consolidation of British state formation can be seen as complementary and mutually reinforcing processes. In fact, British culture had been shaped by adventures abroad that stretched both east and west. Tea, to highlight one example of a key cultural artifact, was not an English creation but an import from China, adapted and refined to British tastes.⁵¹ Curiosity about and appropriation of the foreign became a marker of British culture precisely because Britishness was in flux and therefore negotiable.⁵²

At the very moment when this international consciousness had reached its apogee, therefore, Whitefield provided a connective sinew between the old world and new. As British fashion flourished in America, the traveling preacher reminded his hearers through the Protestant message that another, more accessible, pathway existed for participating in Britishness. To the metropolitans in London, he provided a bond of unity that went deeper than the sugar and tobacco they enjoyed in their coffee houses and taverns, reminding them that they were part of something larger.⁵³ In this context of the exchange of British goods, Whitefield proved a theological innovator and religious entrepreneur through his preaching of the new birth, which moved beyond the prevailing national covenantalism of his day in order to call individuals to their own particular experience of salvation.⁵⁴

To put it another way, Whitefield focused on the empire’s periphery because he discerned there the most fertile ground for the development of a religious vitality that was truly Protestant, maritime, commercial, and free. These four terms, well known in recent British and Atlantic histories as comprehensive descriptors of imperial ideology, can also provide useful categories for understanding Whitefield’s transatlantic ministry.⁵⁵

First, he was a lifelong Anglican with extensive pan-Protestant connections, courting allies across the theological spectrum, from German Moravians and Pennsylvania Quakers to Scottish presbyters and English bishops. The only thing that matched his passion for Protestant unity was his virulent anti-Catholicism.

Second, as a tireless itinerant who took advantage of British maritime advances, Whitefield spent a great deal of time at sea aboard ships and also took a keen interest in military developments all over the empire.⁵⁶

Third, he was an active participant in the commercial revolution, at times a prescient innovator who had an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time, along with the entrepreneurial astuteness to use those opportunities to his distinct advantage. His friendship with local merchants like Benjamin Franklin enabled him to gain a foothold in Philadelphia, making it possible to flank his southern strategy with reinforcements in the middle colonies.

Finally, in his multiple clashes with ecclesiastical and political authorities, Whitefield exhibited a marked preference for individual liberty over inherited traditions. For to be free was a necessary precondition of the new birth he so passionately preached. Insofar as these four characteristics revealed a view of the world grounded in an imperial outlook, Whitefield was not only a product of that empire but also one of its most outspoken heralds.

Locating his early labors in the American South not only presented imperial opportunities for Whitefield but also ecclesiastical advantages. In many ways, Whitefield’s theological home should have been New England. Indebted to the orthodox theology and pietist spirituality of the Puritans, Whitefield saw his religious project as the renewal of vital Puritanism. Finding distance from Anglican establishment in England and Puritan entrenchment in the colonial North, however, proved an even more pressing strategic consideration. As a place devoid of traditional strictures, Georgia appealed to Whitefield’s creative and anti-deferential mindset. There he could allow his post-Puritan proclivities to roam unfettered as he sought to build on the foundation of New England orthodoxy while incorporating new measures made available by the latest advances in commerce and communication. This sense of standing on the precipice of a new moment might explain why despite his dissenting sympathies, which would have found a more congenial environment among theological peers in New England, Whitefield bypassed the north and headed south. Aware that New England’s Puritan errand into the wilderness was in shambles, he appears to have been intent on initiating an altogether new errand.

Placing Whitefield in the southern context in these ways serves to highlight both the religious and imperial dimensions of his American work. Such geographical attention foregrounds the variety of roles he embraced as a revival preacher and imperial tactician. Historical studies that focus narrowly on Whitefield the preacher have overlooked the significance of his activities as a British subject, cultural architect, and institution builder. Whitefield exhibited both liberal and conservative tendencies, inventive in his proclivity for micromanaging the individual’s conversion experience while retaining traditional Puritan connections in his insistence on the sovereignty of a predestinating God. With a transatlantic itinerary betraying ambitions as grand as the breadth of the British Empire, he invested much of his time clearing forests and building an orphanage in the Georgia frontier. More than the idiosyncrasies of an above-average intellect inflamed by religious passions, Whitefield’s reasons for pouring so much energy into Georgia flowed from careful, indeed imperial, calculations.

Furthermore, Whitefield’s willingness to break with his mentor, John Wesley, provides additional evidence of the new direction he had in mind as he visited Georgia. Before controversy famously erupted between Wesley and Whitefield over free will and predestination, Whitefield began to carve out a markedly different path from Wesley. Evidence from his early days in America further reveals the broader imperial and transatlantic scope of his ambition that led to divergent paths between the two leading evangelicals of their day.

Though the decline of the Puritan movement did not happen overnight, “the defeat of Puritanism and the disarray of Calvinism” is a well-known feature of the long seventeenth century. “What concerned American Protestants, a century after the first planting of Massachusetts Bay, was the sterility—not of colonial soil—but of its spiritual life.”⁵⁷ By the 1730s, New England’s guiding vision of covenant, the confidence of being a chosen people, and the hope of creating a new, godlier society had floundered. The compromise, or innovation, of the halfway covenant in the latter part of the seventeenth century proved inadequate to right the ship in the second generation of the Puritan enterprise in America.⁵⁸ Episodic and isolated renewals at the turn of the century were insufficient to the task of restoring a full-orbed Puritan vision. The Protestant project was both in a state of disrepair and poised for dramatic innovation when Whitefield entered the American scene in 1738. The decline of Puritan vitality in New England, the destabilizing plurality and proliferation of religious sects in the middle colonies, and the uncertainties of established Anglicanism in the Chesapeake reflected the difficulties facing a contested British culture transplanted to North American soil.⁵⁹

Nevertheless, where many saw dire challenges, Whitefield sensed emerging opportunities. As far as he was concerned, the time was ripe and the stage ready for significant change. For Whitefield the circumstances called for a geographical shift as much as theological and spiritual renewal.⁶⁰ So it was that a hundred years after the great migration of Anglican Dissenters to New England, he sparked a new movement of religious innovation across the Atlantic into America by starting in the South. He began, however, with inchoate notions and half-baked inklings. Halting steps as a visitor in a foreign land helped Whitefield form his impressions and, only later, cast a vision.

While he admired his Puritan forebears and sought to restore their vision of vital religion, Whitefield steered clear of New England, the then crumbling center of Puritanism. New England was too territorial, and too ecclesiastically crowded, to allow sufficient breathing room for someone like Whitefield with his creative ambitions. His decision not to go first to New England, however, took place against the backdrop of a tumultuous landscape.

It was during this same period, throughout the vast expanse of the Atlantic world, that numerous subjects of the king sought to retain a sense of connectedness to their British culture even as they scattered across the burgeoning empire. Thus, many historians have tried to make sense of the eighteenth century as a period of both sprawhng empire and coalescing British identity.⁶¹ It was during the early eighteenth century that families like that of John Black experienced new levels of mobility and scattered across the Atlantic world, marked by “the peculiarity and particularity of a family that rarely met in the same place.”⁶² In their case, economic opportunities resulted in a family dispersed throughout England, Scotland, Ireland, Portugal, France, and even the Caribbean. Members of the Black family “clearly identified themselves as British” but also longed for markers that reinforced their identity as Britons.⁶³

Subjects of the king derived a sense of national identity, a distinct Britishness, not from their ties to physical territory but from a constellation of political, commercial, and religious associations. This self-conceptualization was in a state of flux due to imperial expansion and in need of clearer articulation. It was during this time that Commodore George Anson made his famed voyage around the world, even if it was “in origin an old-fashioned buccaneering expedition,” expressing well the spirit of adventure felt by many Britons. Anson represented some of the wanderlust and bold exploration that characterized the era in which Whitefield made his own Atlantic crossings—thirteen over the course of his lifetime.⁶⁴ In Georgia, Whitefield, as one among a throng of imperial explorers, found freedom from the fetters of tradition and sought fallow soil for his own groundbreaking work.

The polyglot nature of colonial societies outside New England also appealed to Whitefield, whose own articulation of the Christian message veered from conventional practice and sought to transcend provincial borders. In the view of disgruntled and restless young evangelicals, orthodoxy of the past generation had surrendered too much to Socinianism, Arianism, and deism. Publications like Matthew Tindal’s deistic Christianity as old as the Creation (1730) and Thomas Woolston’s positivistic Six Discourses on Miracles (1727–1730) assailed such dearly held doctrines as the pre-existence of Christ, original sin, and the historicity of miracles in the Bible. In response to this steady stream of what they deemed dangerous heterodoxy, the Protestant evangelical revivals of the early eighteenth century represented “a revolt of the young against the irresponsibility of their elders.”⁶⁵ It was a perilous undertaking, as Jonathan Edwards would discover a decade after the great revival of 1740 when he attempted to reverse some of the innovations made by his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts. When Edwards moved to require full profession of converting faith prior to receiving admittance to the Lord’s Table, he found himself embroiled in a conflict that resulted in dismissal from a parish he had served for more than twenty years.⁶⁶ Edwards’s difficult experience suggests why Whitefield sought a base of operations far from the entrenched authority of those very elders whom he wanted to challenge.

As much as evangelicalism during this period represented a desire to return to the familiar tenets of traditional faith, the outlook of young evangelicals like Whitefield also sought creative adaptation to the present. On the one hand, Whitefieldian revivalists longed for a renewal of historic orthodoxy. Yet, they displayed theological nimbleness that increasingly privileged the experience and judgment of individuals in a context of market expansion and devolving social hierarchies. That is to say, although evangelicals saw themselves in competition with a range of Enlightenment principles throughout the eighteenth century, they also found themselves caught up in the shifting cultural waters, sharing a common iconoclastic spirit, or “the rejection of scholasticism, or inherited wisdom, as the basis of knowledge.”⁶⁷ Impatient with the constraints of traditionalism, Whitefield sought to find room for an improvisational spirituality. In this respect, he typified the early modern impulse to embrace a commonsense pathway to truth. It is hard to deny that Whitefield for all his claims to orthodox faith was a pioneer of experimental religion. Beyond the dangers of free-ranging itinerancy disrupting parish boundaries and the established social order, there were more substantive, if subtler, changes afoot—such as the segregation of “the experience of conversion from the life of faith.”⁶⁸ Whitefield was a catalyst of change during an era undergoing myriad transformations.

Seeing Whitefield as a transitional figure in this way helps us perceive the changes he inaugurated. “The twenty-five-year-old Whitefield, cocksure and anything but knowledgeable, set the actual terms of the debate over the New England way,” wrote Stephen Foster at the end of his book examining the long seventeenth century of Puritan influence. This backhanded compliment, echoing the prevailing view of Whitefield as a lightweight thinker with oversized zeal, nevertheless recognized that Whitefield, for all his early foibles, initiated and frequently exacerbated longstanding debates with deep historical roots.⁶⁹ Foster pointed out the ways in which Whitefield “finally unleashed the sectarian impulses” long brewing “within the Puritan movement in America.”⁷⁰ In so doing, Whitefield unwittingly abetted the process that “fatally rupture[d] the Puritan movement,” which was already a “long time dying.”⁷¹ Using Whitefield to provide a dramatic bookend to his work on English Puritanism in New England, Foster’s influential work offered penetrating insights into sharp discontinuities between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He neglected, however, to provide for Whitefield the long view that he has so helpfully developed (and defended) for English Puritanism in New England culture.

One unfortunate consequence of Foster’s otherwise helpful analysis was that he ripped Whitefield out of his southern context. This is a mistake that many other historians have made in their treatment of Whitefield. Yet any understanding of the meaning of his life and career for the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century must bear in mind where and how the Grand Itinerant started his ministry in America.⁷² It was not a matter of mere circumstance that he began his American labors in Georgia, a place to which he would return time and again until the end of his life. He dwelled on Georgia in his letters, in his preaching, and in his ceaseless fundraising for Bethesda Orphanage. He came back often to Georgia to refresh his spirit and refocus his mind, Bethesda being one of the few places where he could find rest and repose. Toward the end of his life, Whitefield, erstwhile critic of “the establishment,” would spend a great amount of time and energy trying to build a college, an eminently establishment-like institution, in Georgia. In this way, his work in the thirteenth colony—and not New England—can serve as the key to Whitefield’s transatlantic career, unlocking hidden trajectories strewn across his peripatetic life.

By the early eighteenth century, idealistic visions of creating an improved, more virtuous British society in New England had given way to sober assessments of religious decline and economic recession. Hope drifted south as urban centers like Philadelphia and New York grew in the middle colonies, tobacco production flourished in the Chesapeake, and rice and cotton reaped large profits in South Carolina. Fresh efforts concentrating on Georgia during this time merely continued the trend of new ventures pushing against existing boundaries. In other words, there were good reasons for Whitefield to set his sights on the American South.

Wesley in America

As yet another way to think about the evangelical spirit and empire, it may be helpful to leave Whitefield for a moment and take a slight chronological detour to consider a close contemporary. A snapshot of John Wesley’s turbulent tenure in Georgia can help us appreciate Whitefield’s contrasting, and enduring, success there. Wesley arrived in Georgia in February 1736, two years before Whitefield, and promptly made himself a thorn in the sides of many colonists through his sanctimonious dealings. In one notorious incident, the souring of his relationship with Sophia Hopkey resulted in dramatic repercussions. When William Williamson proposed to her, Wesley became a wreck, going to her uncle “with grief and tears,” pleading for intervention because he “himself desired to marry her.”⁷³ Unable to stop the marriage, Wesley held a grudge against the couple. He withheld communion from her and exacerbated matters by publishing false accusations against her husband “of something notorious which in due time he would make appear.”⁷⁴ Thomas Causton, an influential merchant and Sophia’s uncle, came to their aid by bringing a libel suit against Wesley. A grand jury inquiry ensued, leading to Wesley’s ignominious flight from the colony by cover of night.

It is telling that the grand jury formed on the occasion of that suit could hardly focus on the matter of the scandal, discussing at length instead the dire straits of the colony and seizing on the opportunity to publicly air their grievances. In a document signed by thirty-seven of Savannah’s leading citizens, the grand jury took this opportunity to register complaints with the colony’s Board of Trustees, tacking on mention of the Wesley-Hopkey affair only in the last page, as if an afterthought. Beginning with the fact that “the want of Publick Roads in this Town and County is a great discouragement,” they listed many other problems.⁷⁵ It may seem strange that a court session called to discuss ecclesiastical and social conflict over regulation of holy communion should devote most of its time addressing Savannah’s “utmost need of a Good Wharfe and a proper Crane” in order to accommodate the “Landing of Goods.” The signatories would have protested that their very livelihood was at stake, with religious matters and social offenses, under such severe conditions, of only secondary importance.

There are many good explanations for John Wesley’s failed tenure as a missionary in America during 1736–1738.⁷⁶ Only some of them, however, had to do with the man himself. Wesley was still a novice pastor who had yet to experience the new birth that he would soon exhort upon the masses. Nevertheless, if there were personal deficiencies, there were also external obstacles. Whereas New England represented the established religious center of British America with a storied, if also contested, hundred-year record, a new colony like Georgia seemed to offer fresh, new opportunities. Yet Georgia, established only in 1732 and settled with the outcasts of English society, proved to be inhospitable soil for Wesley’s style of religion. With his Oxford Holy Club days just behind him, Wesley had come to Georgia looking to scale new spiritual heights. As it turned out, he found valleys and plains instead—including failures as a minister and numerous disputes with Georgia’s colonists that led to the scandalous lawsuit and his abrupt flight from the colony. Before his heart could be “strangely” and famously warmed at Aldersgate back in England in May 1738, he had to undergo heartache in the Georgia wilderness. Though Georgia appealed to Wesley as a site for missionary work, the land proved intractable and the people inured to his ministerial labors.

In short, Wesley faced roadblocks and frustrations in Georgia because he failed to adjust expectations based on his location on the imperial map. He operated in the outer margins of empire as if he were still in the center; he related to the colonists in Georgia as if they were Londoners ensconced in the very heart of the empire. To Georgia, Wesley brought crates full of pamphlets, expecting the colonists to spend time reading and studying along with him. He gave lectures, chock full of the erudite learning he gained at Oxford, but they fell on deaf ears in a colony where people scraped by, unsure of provisions for the next day.

In contrast, Whitefield had a high degree of geographical awareness and sensitivity to imperial context. More specifically, he knew he was coming to an outpost of empire that was nevertheless deeply connected to, and with lingering fascination for, the center of that very empire. As the narration in our next chapter shows, Whitefield would approach Georgia in a sharply different manner than Wesley. He came to the colonies bearing the commercial goods of empire, convinced that the conduction of British culture was an essential part of the service he might render unto this distant settlement. From the beginning, moreover, he approached Savannah as a base for his American itinerancy. Whereas Wesley presumed life in Savannah should be like life in London and expressed disdain when his misplaced hopes were disappointed, Whitefield knew the two were nothing alike. He also held fast to the conviction, however, that with patience, effort, and the largesse of fellow imperial subjects back home, he could turn even this colonial hinterland into another British metropolis. With Calvin’s Geneva, Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Francke’s Halle as inspiring precedents, it was not unreasonable for Whitefield to believe that he could recast Savannah for the sake of a higher cause. As we have seen, Whitefield fit into Georgia as a hand in a glove, even as he set his sights on more ambitious imperial ventures.

Conclusion

When we observe how Whitefield began his work in America with the attitude of an imperial emissary as well as evangelical missionary, we can better appreciate the transformations that took place to turn him subsequently into an American icon and by the end of his years an advocate for American life and liberty. As a British visitor to America, Whitefield arrived with all the preconceptions of a highly educated Englishman but also the malleability of a foreigner in unfamiliar territory. Whitefield in 1738 was young, brash, and prone to many errors. Historians have made ample note of his record on these counts.⁷⁷ But he was also an attentive pupil—of British history, of Puritan divines, of the Wesleys (including some of their mistakes), and of colonial life in general. In other words, he read his Georgia context carefully. He paid attention to its nuances and textures. He listened to the people there and quickly won a following where John Wesley had left a mess. These were not the exploits of a mere self-centered prodigy, but a forward-looking strategist.

In a distant colonial outpost—snubbed by northern elites, overlooked by cosmopolitan Britons, and abandoned by the Wesley brothers—Whitefield found the cause of a lifetime. From the beginning, Whitefield saw Georgia as fertile soil into which he could transplant British religion and culture. By the end of his life, the place would work a profoundly formative effect on him. Neglecting the southern orientation of Whitefield’s work in America, therefore, obscures pivotal narrative themes not only in Whitefield’s life but in British Atlantic society and culture. For all these reasons, a careful reexamination of his early career in Georgia is necessary for understanding the imperial Whitefield.

1. For key features of the invention of Britishness in the eighteenth century, see Colley, Britons. One effort to problematize Colley’s argument and to grapple with the complex contours of the process she describes—for instance the contradictions between empire and liberty—can be found in Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. This process of translating Britishness into a new context we see in Whitefield and the evangelical revivals is related to, though also distinct from, the process described in Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). As provinces of a burgeoning empire, Ireland and the American colonies possessed similar traits, such as a cycle of resistance, accommodation, and integration (uneven at each stage and not necessarily in any uniform order), in which both indigenous peoples and transplanted British subjects participated.

2. There are many works that support the former claim and few that support the latter. Attestations to the central, catalytic role of Whitefield in the evangelical revivals include works like: Stout, The Divine Dramatist; Kidd, The Great Awakening. For studies in a similar vein with emphasis on Whitefield’s commercial strategies, see Frank Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For studies that examine the combined force of his religious and political rhetoric, see Jerome Dean Mahaffey, Preaching Politics: The Religious Rhetoric of George Whitefield and the Founding of a New Nation (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007); Jerome Dean Mahaffey, The Accidental Revolutionary: George Whitefield and the Creation of America (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011). For an interpretation of Whitefield’s preaching as social protest, see Nash, The Urban Crucible.

3. Hence, works in British imperial history and the New British history contribute significantly to this study. See especially Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire; Colley, Britons; J. G. A. Pocock, “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” The Journal of Modern History 47, no. 4 (1975): 601–21.

4. Pocock describes a “shift toward privatization” as occurring during the transition from an agrarian to a commercial culture in which money displaced relationships as the currency of social order: J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 436. This transition also accompanied a turn toward greater choice and specialization, of the kind that Whitefield so well espoused in his call to personal new birth. A helpful global history that describes well the imperial world into which Whitefield was born can be found in Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Games’s book argues for a broad shift in British activities abroad from commerce to colonization, though she may offer too strict a dichotomy between the two. Whitefield and the evangelical revivals serve to complicate the picture that emerged after the period of Games’s book by their exploits across an Atlantic world that was more connected and entangled than merely conquered or settled. To put it another way, both commerce and settlement—in particular the centrifugal force of global expansion and the centripetal pressure of Anglicizing consolidation—were part of the eighteenth century. Linda Colley has likewise argued, “Britishness was constructed and contested after 1707 in response to overseas developments.” Colley, Britons, xv.

5. For a precise description of the nuanced differences between “English” (Anglicization) and “British” (Britishness), see Chaplin, “The British Atlantic,” esp. 226–27. For the purposes of my analysis here, I treat the two terms as synonymous since Whitefield generally equated them in his own usage.

6. For the argument that “British expansion embodied features tied to its Protestant character,” see Carla Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 14.

7. Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 92.

8. Herbert Eugene Bolton and Mary Ross, The Debatable Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1925); John Tate Lanning, The Diplomatic History of Georgia: A Study of the Epoch of Jenkins’ Ear (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1936); A. A. Ettinger, James Edward Oglethorpe, Imperial Idealist (Hamden: Archon Books, 1968).

9. Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. Mancall, At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

10. Kenneth Coleman, “The Founding of Georgia,” in Forty Years of Diversity: Essays on Colonial Georgia, ed. Harvey Jackson and Phinzy Spalding (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 5.

11. Kenneth Coleman pointed out the significance of the frequency of efforts to establish a colony south of Carolina as revealing an empire-wide focus on the southern frontier. He lamented that “no one has heretofore shown in detail that most of the ideas put forth by Oglethorpe and his fellow Georgia Trustees had been suggested several times before the founding of the colony and were current in the colonial circles of London after 1720.” Kenneth Coleman, “The Southern Frontier: Georgia’s Founding and the Expansion of South Carolina,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1972): 163–74.

12. J. R. Anderson, “The Genesis of Georgia: An Historical Sketch,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1929): 231.

13. Anderson, “The Genesis of Georgia,” 232.

14. Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 263.

15. Verner Crane has noted: “To the ‘imperialism’ of the Carolinians and the Board of Trade . . . there were added the strong currents of English social reform and of that ‘ecclesiastical imperialism’ of which Dr. Thomas Bray had been for many years the indefatigable leader.” Verner Winslow Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 303.

16. Excerpt from Oglethorpe’s Account for the Designs of the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia quoted in Robert Goon, “The Classical Tradition in Colonial Georgia,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 86, no. 1 (2002): 4.

17. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, 168.

18. Anderson, “The Genesis of Georgia,” 264–66.

19. Cited in Ettinger, James Edward Oglethorpe, 141.

20. The expulsion of thirty thousand Protestant Salzburgers transfixed an international audience much affected by their plight. W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 24, 104.

21. Ettinger, James Edward Oglethorpe, 184–206; Lanning, The Diplomatic History of Georgia, 85–123.

22. Thomas Spalding, Life of Oglethorpe, in Collections of the Georgia Historical Society (Savannah, 1840), 1:260.

23. Lanning, The Diplomatic History of Georgia, 1.

24. British maps of the New World from the early eighteenth century typically placed the region around Georgia at the cartographical center by necessity, due to New England to the north and the West Indies to the south.

25. Kenneth Coleman, A History of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 17.

26. Jack P. Greene, “Travails of an Infant Colony,” in Jackson and Spalding, Forty Years of Diversity, 284.

27. Greene, “Travails of an Infant Colony,” 284.

28. E. Merton Coulter, Georgia: A Short History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 20.

29. As one historian has argued, when Europeans came to America, “they meant to create a new world, not leave intact the one they found there.” Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 9.

30. Edward J. Cashin, Setting Out to Begin a New World: Colonial Georgia; A Documentary History (Savannah: Library of Georgia, 1995), 71.

31. Ettinger, James Edward Oglethorpe, 122.

32. Coulter, Georgia, 20.

33. Coulter, Georgia, 23.

34. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 172.

35. Coleman, “The Southern Frontier,” 24.

36. Historian Amos Ettinger divided Oglethorpe’s colonial career into three phases: a period of administration and social amelioration (1733–1736), support of religious life in the colony (1736–1738), and imperial defense (1738–late 1740s). Ettinger, James Edward Oglethorpe, 129–254. Two striking observations might be gleaned here. First, Oglethorpe’s American career embodied distinctly social, religious, and imperial factors. Second, Whitefield’s American career began in the period of transition between the second and third phases (namely religious and imperial) of Oglethorpe’s work in Georgia.

37. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 4.

38. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 4.

39. Coulter, Georgia, 20.

40. Coulter, Georgia, 32.

41. Coulter, Georgia, 32.

42. George Whitefield, Journals (Meadow View: Quinta Press, 2000), 44. Quoting from Whitefield’s journals involves complex interpretive issues because of their numerous editions and also because he made significant changes in a revised 1756 edition, which has become the most common version though it represents a sanitized version of his earlier, bolder self-presentation. In my citations, I rely on the edition from Quinta Press, which sought to trace the textual changes Whitefield introduced in 1756 by including both deletions and emendations. For a careful description of the publication history of Whitefield’s journals, see David Ceri Jones, “‘So Much Idolized by Some, and Railed At by Others’: Towards Understanding George Whitefield,” Wesley and Methodist Studies 5 (2013): 7–10.

43. Some of his intensity may have been a consequence of needing to compensate for a sense of social inferiority. Describing Whitefield’s initial sense of intimidation from the Wesleys and the Methodists, one biographer wrote: “For more than a year he intensely desired to be acquainted with them, but a sense of his pecuniary inferiority to them prevented his advances.” Joseph Belcher, George Whitefield: A Biography; With Special Reference to His Labors in America (New York: American Tract Society, 1857), 30.

44. Whitefield, Journals, 45.

45. Whitefield, Journals, 51. Authors mentioned in Whitefield’s Journals include: Thomas à Kempis (45, 47, 61), Castaniza’s Combat (61), Bishop Hall’s Contemplations (63), Burkitt’s and Henry’s Expositions (68), Alleine’s Alarm, Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, Janeway’s Life (69), and William Law’s The Absolute Unlawfulness of the Stage Entertainment (69). The use of the lower case “methodists” helps distinguish from the “Methodist” denomination that later emerged from one stream of the foregoing movement.

46. Arnold A. Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the 18th Century Revival (Carlisle: Banner of Truth, 1970), 1:72.

47. Whitefield, Journals, 92.

48. Whitefield, Journals, 92.

49. See Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 111–24; Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 13–15. Thomas Kidd provides a detailed account of Whitefield’s initial trip to the southern and middle colonies in chapter 4 before providing a treatment of Whitefield’s visit to New England in chapter 7, but he does not seem to detect a southern strategy or orientation in Whitefield; see Kidd, The Great Awakening, 40–44, 83–93.

50. My contention throughout this study is that Whitefield sensed what Bailyn and Clive have argued, namely that the cultural provinces of England provided the most fecund setting for cultural innovation. Clive and Bailyn, “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America.”

51. Troy Bickham, “Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Past and Present 198, no. 1 (2008): esp. 94.

52. David Hackett Fischer’s presentation of folkways as persistent yet never static is helpful here. David H. Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7–8.

53. Julie Flavell’s study captures the two-way exchange between London and America in this way: “If the vision and enterprise of London was transforming America, that wild hinterland was also changing London.” She also describes how American exports like sugar, tobacco, and rice not only influenced the economic equation but also the cultural flavor of London. Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 169–70.

54. While it is generally true, as Pestana has argued, that Whitefield’s emphasis on the new birth and dramatic conversion experience was consonant with “the standard sermonic theme of Reformed Christians,” the intensity of his insistence on personal repentance was based on the Puritan innovation of “visible sainthood,” which marked a departure from the reformers in favoring conversion over covenant. See Pestana, Protestant Empire, 193; Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963). The interpretive payoff amid a complicated theological debate is that Whitefield was a disruptive theological innovator.

55. For a careful distillation of these descriptors, see Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire.

56. Stephen R. Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and Atlantic Crossings to the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); George Whitefield, A Short Address to Persons of All Denominations, Occasioned By the Alarm of an Intended Invasion (London, 1756).

57. See Alan Heimert and Perry Miller, The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), xvii; Foster, The Long Argument, 290.

58. Morgan, Visible Saints. See also Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity,” 24.

59. For a summary of Puritan declension in New England, see Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). For a sobering critique of how ideals of toleration gave way to fear and atrocities in Pennsylvania, see Peter Rhoads Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). For division and volatility in Virginia, see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). A challenge to Isaac’s argument can be found in Lauren F. Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

60. In his treatment of the transition from Puritan to evangelical Christianity, Mark Noll links the final displacement of Puritan piety to the ecclesiology of Jonathan Edwards, which in his estimation shifted “emphasis on covenant away from the complex nexus of person, church, and society to a simpler bond between the converted individual and the church.” Noll, America’s God, 45. My study presents two observations based on this argument, having to do with Whitefield’s personal contribution as well as his place in the broader movement. First, no one embodied this theological shift more than George Whitefield through his preaching for individual conversion. Second, the disintegration of the Puritan canopy was a long time coming, culminating with Edwards’s dismissal in 1750, as Noll argues, but beginning already in the late 1730s with Whitefield’s revival preaching tours around the empire.

61. David Armitage, “Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (1999); Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in Marshall, The Oxord History of the British Empire, vol.2; Livesey, Civil Society and Empire; Kathleen Wilson, A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

62. Livesey, Civil Society and Empire, 133.

63. Livesey, Civil Society and Empire, 135.

64. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 174.

65. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 238. See also ch. 3 in Noll, America’s God.

66. George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 341–56.

67. Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials, 6.

68. Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials, 6. Landsman does not make the link to Whitefield, but this was clearly, at least in part, a Whitefieldian contribution.

69. Foster, The Long Argument, 295.

70. Foster, The Long Argument, 303.

71. Foster, The Long Argument, 290.

72. Kidd, The Great Awakening, 43–44, 50–54.

73. Allen Daniel Candler, The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia (Atlanta: Franklin Printing and Publishing Company, 1904–1906), 5:61.

74. Candler, Colonial Records, 5:61.

75. Savannah Grand Jury, MS 690, Georgia Historical Society.

76. “I came to convert the Indians, but, oh, who will convert me?” Wesley wrote in his journal. His famous conversion at Aldersgate would take place upon his return to England, on May 24, 1738. This spiritual lament glossed over drastic failures in his ministerial labors and numerous incidents highlighting Wesley’s incompatibility with Georgia colonists.

77. Perhaps most memorably, Bruce Hindmarsh has written: “Placing some 600 pages of autobiographical prose on public record while still in one’s twenties leaves plenty of time to repent one’s mistakes. And Whitefield did come to regret much of what he had written.” Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 108.

↑ Back to top