2. A British Emissary

2. A British Emissary

Having placed Whitefield and Georgia in their eighteenth-century context of empire, we will focus in this chapter on the details of Whitefield’s early American itinerary in order to trace his development as an actor on the imperial stage. Savannah may not have been impressive in appearance, but it spurred Whitefield’s imagination in ways that would direct and sustain his work for the rest of his life. It was a place where the acquisition of new territory, the evangelization of both indigenous peoples and transplanted Britons, and the drive for religious renewal coalesced in dramatic fashion. In this context, Whitefield chose Georgia well aware of its defensive position against the Spanish Catholic threat emanating from Florida. If there were perils to working on the outskirts of empire, there were also strategic advantages. Furthermore, even as Whitefield’s itinerations disturbed the established order, they prompted social entrepreneurship by tapping into commercial trade networks, constructing educational institutions, and spreading the gospel of the new birth using innovative methods in communication.¹ With close attention to activities spanning his first two American trips, this chapter will reveal that whereas he had little patience for the plodding work of revitalizing old religion in New England, he quickly warmed to the prospect of establishing a new beachhead of British Protestantism in the growing edge of empire. Whitefield’s early fixation on Georgia helps explain the entanglements of Protestant religion and British culture.

But there is more. Inasmuch as Whitefield was an agent of Anglicization, it was not a straightforward, unidirectional process where he brought the light of British Protestantism to the empire’s outer borderlands.² To be sure, he functioned with a straightforward vision of missionary engagement as he visited remote lands to preach the Christian gospel. Without realizing it, however, he stepped into cross currents of cultural translation that flowed in multiple directions.³ A study of Whitefield in America shows what was possible for those pushing against the age’s inherited social boundaries at the very edge of what might be called Greater Britain; but it also reveals processes of change that the message and its messenger underwent—whether of culture or religion or politics—upon entering a new context. In the end this is a story about how Whitefield sought to renew religious life in America and experienced a transformation of his own.

Whitefield first came to America as a young and unseasoned British visitor, but what he experienced broadened his vision of a Protestant Atlantic world. We will see that he came to function not only as a Protestant missionary but also a British emissary in the course of his journeys throughout the American colonies, preaching evangelical religion while embodying the virtues of Britishness from the beginning of his ministry in America. The brevity of his first trip to the colonies can obscure the important role it played in shaping the rest of his transatlantic career. By giving due weight to his first American tour and paying attention to imperial dimensions throughout, we are able to expand our vision of Whitefield as more than just a famous revival preacher. Furthermore, we will examine how his return to London and subsequent planning for another trip to Savannah further contributed to his evolving strategy, even as his tours around the British countryside apparently delayed his return voyage. Far from distracting him from his American focus, however, the time in England solidified his intentions to labor on behalf of the entire British Empire, beginning with a foothold in the American South. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the significance of Whitefield’s burgeoning imperial perspective and the evangelical predilection for political activism from its earliest stages.

Before joining Whitefield on the shores of Georgia, it is worth noting that there is a personal side to this story that reflects a larger reality about transformations in mobility and identity in the Atlantic world. The details of his early life established a different trajectory than the lives of contemporaries like John Wesley or Jonathan Edwards. In order to harness Whitefield’s biography without surrendering to deterministic reductionism, this study will pay careful attention to the contingencies of the eighteenth century that also impinged on Whitefield’s career. Identifying the factors in his life that contributed to his affinity for Georgia helps us see Whitefield as a person deeply affected by, and engaged with, his world—and not merely a preacher dissociated from time and place, waxing eloquent about timeless truths. Whitefield’s socioeconomic provenance, his religious aspirations as well as insecurities, and his eventual impact on British Atlantic culture, all highlight the significant fact that he chose to start his American career in a remote plot of land outside Savannah, Georgia, in the spring of 1738.

Whitefield’s First American Trip, May–September 1738

In May 1738, the Whitaker cast anchor near Tybee Island off the coast of Georgia, and Whitefield set foot in America for the first time. As workmen unloaded his cargo, the sophisticated thinking of an entrepreneurial mind was already on display. His packing list included an assortment of medicine, stationery, household tools, and a variety of clothing items—enough merchandise to stock the general store in Savannah for several months and spawn a few specialty shops as well. To be sure, Whitefield first and foremost meant to bring a message of spiritual rebirth. In addition to his spiritual mission, however, Whitefield brought British goods and culture with him. A close examination of the commercial sensibilities he evinced during his first two American visits reveals the close connections that existed among religious awakening, commercial entrepreneurship, cultural diffusion, and military imperialism. To the extent that Whitefield combined these potent forces from the beginning of his career, he helped set in motion an intermixing of religious consumerism and imperialism that long influenced the character of American religion.

The cargo Whitefield brought with him provides a glimpse into the work he intended to accomplish in America. In contrast to Wesley who packed little besides books and treatises, Whitefield came to Georgia bearing gifts from the bounty of a rich imperial metropolis. Shoes, stockings, hats, flannel waistcoasts, and breeches lay in the belly of the Whitaker next to medicinal products such as rhubarb, senna, manna, Jesuit’s bark, pearl barley, and so on. Cheese, wine, raisins, cinnamon, sugar, oatmeal, oranges, sage were packed alongside stationery such as sealing-wax, lead-pencils, and ingredients to make ink. Luke Tyerman provides a detailed list of Whitefield’s cargo, concluding, “Wesley’s ritualism repelled the people; Whitefield’s donatives attracted them.”⁴ In addition to helping Whitefield gain trust and popularity, the goods he transported across the Atlantic reveal the mind of a consummate strategist at work.

Rather than a minor and incidental difference, their contrasting inventories reveal the chasm separating Wesley’s and Whitefield’s understanding of Christian ministry in a transatlantic context. Whitefield likely saw much of the empire through his experience of growing up in a Gloucester inn near the Severn River. From the traffic that passed through this family establishment, Whitefield gained a sense of the expansive world that existed outside his small corner in Gloucestershire. Aware that he lived and worked in an “empire of goods,” the young preacher began his ministry in America by tapping into this world and deploying worldly means to religious advantage.⁵ He believed in the power of commercial goods to attract the people of Georgia to the message he preached. Aware of destitute conditions in Georgia, he sought to inject the hope of imperial bounty into this colonial hinterland. Before Whitefield had established contractual agreements with Benjamin Franklin to publish and disseminate his writings (for which he is better known), in fact before he set sail for America from a busthng London port, he already had a commercial strategy sketched out in his mind.⁶

Political realities on the ground further primed the colonists to receive a missionary hailing from the metropole. Whitefield arrived in Georgia during a period of military ascendancy against the Spanish. General Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony and its most fervent protector, had made progress securing the southern areas of Georgia against Spanish aggression in Florida. In 1736, ignoring protestations from the Spanish, he established Fort St. George at the mouth of the St. Johns River. The following year, Oglethorpe traveled to England to secure Parliamentary appropriation toward the raising of a regiment and the appointment of his ally, Samuel Horsey, as governor of South Carolina. During the summer of 1738, Oglethorpe and his men were on Jekyll Island, laying the foundations for a defense against the Spanish in Florida.

On the ecclesiastical front, John Wesley and his meddlesome ministry were a distant memory and settlers in Georgia were ready to make peace with their new minister. Revealing some surprise at these favorable early circumstances, Whitefield wrote a friend on June 10, 1738: “America is not so horrid a place as it is represented to be.”⁷ Already thinking about educational initiatives, Whitefield made long-term plans for “setthng little schools in and about Savannah; that the rising generation may be bred up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”⁸ Whitefield harbored a grandiose vision from the start and “setthng little schools” manifested his desire to make an impact on the social well-being of the colony. Rather than bifurcate religious renewal and social improvement, he saw them as two sides of the same coin. Whitefield’s reports back home displayed a wide-ranging interest in diverse aspects of colonial life, including thorny economic issues. He complained in one letter about the prohibition on slavery, bemoaning that “to place people there on such a footing [without the advantage of enslaved labor], was little better than to tie their legs and bid them walk.”⁹ Despite challenges on the ground, however, Whitefield had “hopes, that, unpromising as the aspect might be, the colony might emerge in time out of its infant state.”¹⁰ It was not a far stretch for Whitefield, who had also risen from lowly ranks, to envision a future more hopeful for Georgia. “Their beginnings as yet are but small,” he acknowledged, “but I cannot help thinking there are foundations being laid for great temporal and spiritual blessings in Georgia, when the inhabitants are found worthy.”¹¹ Whitefield understood the present challenges of Georgia but also saw a promising future. In his Georgia philanthropy, he not only recognized a stepping stone to greater opportunities elsewhere; he identified Georgia itself as the future site of British greatness and bound up his own fate with the infant colony.

The same Thomas Causton who had brought suit against Wesley for slandering his niece Sophia Hopkey welcomed Whitefield to Savannah with open arms a year later. The preacher who had just taken London by storm appeared sensible of the need for polite humility in Savannah, recording in his journal: “In the afternoon, Mr. Causton sent word, that he and the magistrates would wait upon me; but I chose rather to wait upon them” (177). It was clear from the beginning that Whitefield would prove to be a different kind of minister than Wesley. He quickly comported himself in his Georgia surroundings as a visitor in need of orientation. “I have endeavoured to let my gentleness be known amongst them, because they consist of different nations and opinions; and I have striven to draw them by the cords of love, because the obedience resulting from that principle I take to be most genuine and lasting” (183). Ever the shrewd tactician, he began his American career with a listening tour.

Only a week after his arrival Whitefield sought audience with Tomochichi, the King of Yamacraw and a friend of General Oglethorpe. This leader of the Creek Indians had himself traveled to England and met with King George II in 1734. Whitefield’s initiative toward this influential figure fit into a carefully crafted strategy. It was not all smooth sailing for Whitefield, however, as “there was nobody who could talk English, so I could only shake hands and leave him” (178). Whitefield returned four days later, only to find that Tomochichi had died. Rather than sympathy, as one might expect, Whitefield’s response came in the form of a harsh word: “But alas, how can a drunkard enter [heaven]!” (178). He may have been a foreigner in a new land, but he maintained the superiority of his British and Protestant judgments.

From the beginning of his time in Georgia, Whitefield looked for opportunities amid the dire, discouraging conditions. “Surely they speak not truth, who say that the Georgia people have been idle; for I never saw more laborious people than are in these villages” (177). It was during this time, in his search for encouraging “useful members of the Colony,” that he articulated an early vision for the Bethesda Orphanage: “Nothing can effect this [i.e., improvements that the colony needed] but an Orphan House, which might easily be erected at Savannah, would some of those who are rich in this world’s goods contribute towards it” (178). This early move was significant for Whitefield, as Georgia became not only his first missionary charge but also a foundation for future ministry. Similarly, when he appointed one of his traveling companions to be a teacher in the villages of Highgate and Hempstead, he expressed a desire that the French-speaking children there might “be naturalised to the colony till they can talk our language.” He also evinced a long-term vision when he wrote of his hope that “the present [French-speaking] generation will soon wear off.” With each subsequent generation, he was confident that “these children being well instructed in ours, will make them forget their own tongue.” He saw ahead to a time when “at length we shall all be of one speech” (180).

In Whitefield’s view, Georgia was a colony that would not only absorb and naturalize French children but also benefit from “the order and industry” of German-speaking Salzburgers who settled Ebenezer, twenty-five miles north of Savannah. The Salzburgers had migrated to Georgia in 1734, fleeing persecution by Catholic leaders in their homeland, present-day Bavaria. While they lived apart from the British colonists, they represented a vital piece of the diverse Protestant culture that comprised the thirteenth colony. For their industry and philanthropy, they became model citizens in Georgia’s early years.

In telling fashion, Whitefield the missionary was most impressed by their work on the land that yielded “the best crop of any in the colony” (181). With similar concerns in view, when Whitefield preached before Georgia officials only four days earlier, he had “endeavoured with all plainness and humility to show both them and the people what they ought to do to promote their temporal and eternal welfare” (181; emphasis added). Not only did he want the settlers in Georgia to experience religious renewal, he also sought ways in which the people of the colony could improve their lives in general. In this way he exhibited both a spiritual and social agenda. When he returned to Savannah on July 18, he once again voiced these far-reaching hopes for the colony. About the condition of several families, he wrote, “Their beginnings as yet are but small; but I cannot help thinking there are foundations being laid for great temporal and spiritual blessings in Georgia, when the inhabitants are found worthy” (182; emphasis added). This vision of a thriving British society in America included the ability of the empire to assimilate strangers. When he found children in a Savannah school who, “though foreigners, answered admirably well,” the experience “gave [him] great hopes that the other foreign children of the colony may also learn [the] English tongue” (187).

By the time his first American trip came to an end, Whitefield had succeeded in winning the hearts of Georgians, including members of the elite merchant class. Thomas Causton became an avid supporter of Whitefield, provided the boat for his journey out, and even went out personally to bid Whitefield farewell, likely conveying the community’s hope for his speedy return.

After traveling no farther north than South Carolina, Whitefield made Charleston the last stop on his first American tour. While still absorbing all that he had encountered over the previous three months, he met with Alexander Garden of Charleston, who as commissary in that city represented the Bishop of London in South Carolina. Garden and Whitefield would later become bitter enemies but in 1738 Garden encouraged Whitefield to establish a future foothold in Georgia—an action he surely came to regret. According to Whitefield, Garden “said something . . . about the colony of Georgia, that much encouraged him, as if he thought its flourishing was not very far off; and that Charleston was fifteen times larger now, than when he (Mr. Garden) first came there.”¹² The prospect of such exponential growth transfixed Whitefield. That Garden, who would become so hostile toward Whitefield during his second American visit, encouraged Whitefield at the end of his first visit provides evidence that Whitefield was in an exploratory frame of mind at this early stage, eager to listen and learn.

Georgia clearly captured the young missionary’s imagination. After returning to England, Whitefield found it hard to get the colony out of his mind. When a packet of letters from his associate, James Habersham, who looked after his affairs in Savannah, brought bleak news, Whitefield expressed genuine sorrow that “the colony seems to be at a low ebb. Poor Georgia!” As it happened, this news arrived when he was facing stiff opposition back in England, and his thoughts on Georgia could have applied to his own situation: “When thou art universally despised and quite despairest of human help, then will God manifest His mighty arm in thy salvation” (226). While he was itinerating in Ireland a few months later, Georgia was still on Whitefield’s mind. “America, infant Georgia, is an excellent soil for Christianity,” he wrote a friend in November 1738, three months after he had departed from his Georgia friends.¹³ No sooner did he land in England than he began making plans for his return trip to America.

It is important to keep in mind that Whitefield saw in the colonies not merely fertile soil for Christian ministry but a key outpost for British expansion. A few weeks after Whitefield left Georgia, Oglethorpe wrote on September 19, 1738, “The Inhabitants are extreamly cheerfull and now hope that they have seen the worst over and that being no longer troubled with alarms they may on with their Improvements.” Writing approximately a year before the resumption of military conflict with Spanish Florida, Oglethorpe was referring to the calm before the storm of the War of Jenkins’ Ear that broke in 1739. Despite the governor’s rosy report, military scuffles persisted and Oglethorpe continued to send his soldiers on reconnaissance missions as a way of posturing against the Spanish throughout the latter period of the 1730s. He nonetheless held out hope that peace could be achieved and that prosperity might take hold. Whitefield’s vision for his own American work took shape in the midst of these British military realities as he arrived in the face of specific and detailed Spanish threats from St. Augustine, Florida. Far from dissuading him, these circumstances appear to have galvanized Whitefield. During a time of rapid advances in travel and commerce, Whitefield became increasingly obsessed with the outermost margins of the empire—“in the very tail of the world,” to use his words.¹⁴ In this space, he apprehended numerous practical constraints but also boundless possibilities.¹⁵

The Development of an Imperial Strategy

With his first trip to America under his belt, Whitefield was in a position to devise an action plan for his work in the colonies. Toward that end, one of his goals as he returned to England was to be ordained a priest. But another goal was to see how much he could leverage his popularity in order to collect funds for the numerous causes he envisioned going forward in America. If his first American trip was a listening tour, the second would prove to be his dramatic debut. The return to England in December 1738, therefore, paved the way for Whitefield’s sensational revival tour in the fall of the following year. With feet planted firmly on both sides of the Atlantic, so to speak, his imperial program could finally commence. In that sense, his time back in England was a key season for the development of a transatlantic strategy.

After a harrowing sea voyage and on the brink of disaster, with only “half a pint of water left,” Whitefield’s ship from America landed in Ireland on November 14, 1739 (201). There he witnessed poverty exceeding what he saw in the colonies, leading him to remark, “If my parishioners at Georgia complain to me of hardships, I must tell them how the Irish live” (204). Whitefield also wrote about Irish foibles such as their seeming inability to measure distance, apparently finding humor in what he saw as deficiencies: “Their innocent blunders often extort smiles from one” (204). Above all, he lamented the ignorance induced by Catholicism in those he called “the wild Irish” and had no trouble dispensing quick-fix solutions:

I can think of no likelier means to convert them from their erroneous principles, than to get the Bible translated into their own native language, to have it put in their houses, and charity schools erected for their children . . . which would insensibly weaken the Romish interest. (205, emphasis added)

This statement reveals several key insights about Whitefield’s understanding of his own work in Georgia. He believed that the work of a charity school went hand-in-hand with the essential Reformation task of translating the Bible into the vernacular. He saw both, furthermore, as being vital strategies in an anti-Catholic campaign. As he toiled for the Savannah charity school in close proximity to a Spanish, and therefore Catholic, Florida, it is likely that he saw parallels between the needs in Ireland and America. We might even venture to guess that Whitefield was thinking about his work in Georgia as he pleaded for laborers in Ireland, “Oh that some man, in whom is the Spirit of the Holy God, would undertake this!” (205). In fact, the comparison may have served to sharpen his sense of calling in America. For even as he lamented the lack of a dedicated Protestant minister in Ireland, he saw himself as that man for Georgia.

After several weeks of an Irish tour, which culminated in Dublin on November 30, 1738, Whitefield finally returned to England where he planned to receive his ordination and make further preparations for continuing his work in Georgia. According to one biographer, Whitefield had thought little of becoming a traveling preacher—“at the end of 1738, he had not the least idea of becoming an open-air and itinerant evangelist.”¹⁶ Instead, he was preoccupied with thoughts of returning to Georgia to work at the Savannah parish and to erect an orphanage on the outskirts of town. For that purpose, he met with the colony’s Board of Trustees on December 13, 1738, to receive the call to serve as parish priest for Savannah at an annual salary of £50. Yet the Trustees, perhaps sensing that a local parish ministry was not enough to fully engage Whitefield, also on December 27 sealed “his commission to collect money for erecting an Orphan house at Savannah”—a fateful decision they would come to regret. Within a few weeks of his return to England, Whitefield had secured far more than he could have dreamed: the pastoral charge needed for priest’s orders, a legitimating commission to travel at will in order to raise funds for the orphanage, five acres of land for personal use in Savannah, and as if all that were not enough he also found an apothecary to take back with him to Savannah “to serve the poor gratis.” The Earl of Egmont, president of the Trustees, reported in his journal that Whitefield “went away thoroughly satisfied.”¹⁷

This satisfaction, however, was short-lived. Whitefield’s conduct in the months following his return to London reveals much about the evolution of his long-term vision for Georgia and his own future, as the two became increasingly intertwined. He quickly reached for greater independence in his Georgia affairs and tensions began to surface before a fortnight had passed since the congenial meeting between Whitefield and the Trustees. The missionary preacher appears to have had second thoughts, leading the Trustees to express remorse of their own. After considering a letter “wherein he varied a little from his first proposals,” the Trustees deemed that “to put the entire direction and management of the Orphan house into his hands, without communicating to us his schemes, or giving us an Acct how the money collected by him is laid out, we thought to be not in our power.”¹⁸ In part, Whitefield’s reconsideration of his arrangement with the Trustees arose from his extraordinary fundraising success. By the second week of January 1739, he had returned from London with his ordination in one hand and £46 in the other. To put things in perspective, in a few short days he had raised a sum nearly equal to the entire annual salary promised him by the Trustees. It did not take long for him to realize that he could do much of his Georgia work without the help, and meddling influence, of the Trustees.¹⁹

By April 21, 1739, Whitefield had experienced even greater, and unexpectedly tantalizing, success in fundraising. The initial £46 reached “upwards of 500£ for the Orphan house”—an astonishing sum by any account. His relations with the Georgia Trustees were further strained as, emboldened, he demanded “a Grant of 500 acres where he should choose,” with the right of ownership going to his inheritors in perpetuity. What had seemed a generous gift of five acres, which the Trustees bestowed upon him only a few months prior, now appeared a mere pittance. Not one to mince words, he declared that, since he had raised this substantial amount of money, he should have the right to use it as he saw fit. He also declined to receive any salary from the Trustees, money he had been “thoroughly satisfied” to accept no less than four months ago.²⁰ A month later, as his fundraising climbed still higher, “upwards of 700£,” so did his boldness. He went as far as to relinquish the commission the Trustees had “granted him on the 27 December 1738 to collect money for the uses of the Colony,” claiming he “never made use thereof.”²¹ Aggrieved as they were at Whitefield’s audacious efforts to outmaneuver them, the Trustees were nonetheless beholden to Whitefield’s successes. They invited him to a Trustee meeting where they “delivered him his Commission to be our Parish Minister at Savannah.”²² Buoyed by his financial triumphs, Whitefield was having his cake and eating it, too. Yet even as he seemed to be overcoming his differences with the Trustees, he was also beset by a number of doctrinal and ecclesiastical controversies.

In fact, Whitefield’s actions in setthng his Georgia affairs can also shed light on the controversies he was creating by his increasingly bold theological positions. Just as fundraising breakthroughs stiffened his resolve in negotiations with the Trustees, so homiletical successes made him ever more daring in his theological innovations. A brief survey of Whitefield’s ecclesiastical controversies dating from his return to England in November 1738 lays the groundwork for explaining the connections between his imperial experiences in Georgia and the development of his reputation as the Grand Itinerant.

Whitefield’s preaching upon his return at the end of 1738 caused a sensation, and he immediately faced throngs of admirers as well as a steady stream of opposition, especially from church officials. Within two days of his arrival in London in December, five churches denied him access to their pulpits. In part, his association with the methodists as well as his fiery, combative style were to blame. Adding insult to injury, Whitefield played the trump card of raising funds to support orphans against those who accused him of violating parish boundaries, thereby painting his critics as heartless in their objections to the improvement of conditions for poor children. With churches closed to him—as a result of his own provocations—Whitefield turned to preaching outdoors. There he found spectacular success.

Perhaps just as alarming to his foes as his outdoor preaching, however, were the indoor services he held in unorthodox locations, from the parlor rooms of landed gentry to the barn gatherings of religious societies. One particular objection from a clergyman appealed to the authority of the Canons and the Act of Charles II, legislation designed to combat political rebellion. The complaint charged that Whitefield and his associates held public worship outside the space and schedule of the official church. Whitefield frequently expounded the Scriptures in a private home at nine or ten in the evening, ungodly hours when decent folks should have been home. It was also not uncommon for Whitefield to teach back-to-back lectures lasting three to four hours or to preach outside not only in country fields but at city gates and streets.²³ In this way, he appropriated public spaces for religious purposes and used his religious messages to air public complaints.

Even more disconcerting to establishment clerics than the outdoor locations, many revival-seeking individuals gathered for all-night love feasts—consisting of shared meals, prayers, songs, and testimonies—which critics derided as clandestine debaucheries posing as fervent prayer meetings. These anxious defenders of the establishment had a point. The revival gatherings served not only to encourage religious devotion but also to blur the lines governing social order. If not blatantly seditious, such meetings and the religious societies responsible for them were subversive movements that disturbed the peace of an already fragile social fabric. To the extent they brought together rich and poor, and other groups that rarely interacted on equal footing, they further exacerbated fears of the social elites who stood to gain most by preserving the status quo.

Yet opposition to Whitefield that focused on his methods was not the only source of criticism. Others responded to the ways in which the content of his message underwent change as he resumed his preaching in England. One example is Whitefield’s preaching on the new birth, which evolved over time, especially in the early years of his ministry. The methodism of the Oxford Holy Club has been described as “a harsh legalism without the new birth” (24). That judgment is correct for Whitefield in the mid 1730s. But between his graduation from Oxford and departure for his first American trip, Whitefield’s theology appears to have changed, as he developed a pronounced emphasis on the new birth. It is striking that every time he expounded the doctrine of the new birth in this early period, it was met with general acceptance and favor. In fact, he recounts no early public opposition whatsoever to this teaching in his Journals. Rather, his preaching—and presumably his doctrines—met with widespread approval. “Large offers were made” to Whitefield for setthng down in Bristol, west of London, and admirers asked why he was so intent on going to Georgia when he would be “well provided for at home” (92).

While there is no specific mention of Whitefield preaching on the new birth during his first tour of America, there is a noticeable shift in his message upon returning to Britain. Whitefield first took up the theme of the new birth in a sermon on December 24, 1738, as he arrived back in England. This occasion is also the first record in his Journals of public opposition to preaching on the new birth (218). From this point on, controversy began to swirl wherever Whitefield dared to mention it. And dare he did, as Whitefield repeatedly insisted on the importance of preaching aimed at the regeneration of his hearers. The louder the opposition and criticism he faced, the more vehement he became in his exposition of this doctrine.

Though it calls for speculation, making sense of the growing resistance in England to Whitefield’s new birth preaching can lead to an appreciation of how his imperial travels shaped his theological formulations. Specifically, it is reasonable to conclude that Whitefield’s travels to the outer margins of empire helped him see British society unencumbered by the metropole’s hierarchical ordering of society. The frontier was a place of fresh beginnings, liminal identity, and therefore ripe with opportunities for recasting inherited values. In such an open environment, Whitefield’s theology of the new birth became a socially leveling doctrine. This wider dimension of imperial culture presents the most plausible explanation for why Whitefield’s preaching of the new birth received little attention, let alone opposition, prior to his first American trip. His exposure to the far outpost of empire almost certainly radicalized his theology so that his preaching began to draw criticism unseen before his trip to America.

Substantive doctrinal reasons can certainly explain the fresh criticism he received; but the accents that made him theologically suspect also resulted from his growing perspective on the imperial landscape. That is to say, the timing behind his intensified message of the new birth and his initial tour of the empire was not coincidental but connected. Whitefield believed his time in the colonies provided clarity of soteriological vision. Regarding the “old doctrine about Justification by Faith only,” he wrote on December 10, 1738 (shortly after his return from America), that he could “come unprejudiced, and can the more easily see who is right” (218, emphasis added). His use of the comparative construction assumes movement from a prior position to a newer understanding.

Whitefield continued preaching the new birth despite inciting more and more opposition. On the evening of February 9, 1739, when “near twenty friends came to visit” in order to dispute with him about regeneration, he was dismissive of their efforts. “They took care to show as much as possible, viz., that they had read the Fathers (I suppose the English translations)”—Whitefield was intent on highlighting his superior education and command of the original languages—“but at the same time, denied experience in religion” (235). In this way, he heaped scorn on their inferior intellect as well as lack of religious affections.

Historians have been quick to focus on the closure of prominent pulpits, which forced Whitefield to find his field preaching voice, leading to unexpected and phenomenal results. The conventional view goes on to conclude that his breakthroughs in outdoor preaching led his opponents to even more clamorous denunciation of his evangelistic style. Scholars have thus linked his most serious opposition to disputes over matters of style rather than substance. As a result, Whitefield’s theological innovations are treated as secondary, or inconsequential, details. One historian has gone as far as to say that “after Whitefield became a confirmed Calvinist during his second American preaching tour in 1740, his theology was fixed.”²⁴ But there is another way to see the matter. For it fits extant evidence to conclude that Whitefield’s particular theological emphasis in talking about such doctrines as regeneration and the new birth—as well as his innovative way of promoting them—explained both his infamy and popularity. The former led to increasing marginalization while the latter resulted in ever-growing crowds. While evidence of these theological innovations was present before Whitefield visited America, they became more pronounced with his visits to the empire’s peripheries.

The development of a theological emphasis that appeared after his American voyage shows how the empire shaped Whitefield’s religious outlook. We can detect this development in the change that marked reactions to his preaching after his return to England in December 1738. Why did people respond in a more critical manner during this time? The most plausible explanation is that Whitefield’s theology of the new birth had itself undergone a change that threatened the prevailing ecclesiastical system. In other words, his preaching of the new birth grew openly hostile toward the social order. Whereas Whitefield had earlier emphasized the positive aspects of the new birth, upon his return to England in December 1738 he began to stress the negative implications of a message that prized personal volition above communal tradition.

At the risk of putting it too simply, theological formulation consists of doctrine and praxis, an exposition as well as application of religious beliefs. Before his trip to America, Whitefield mainly preached the doctrine of the new birth; after his trip, he began also to apply the doctrine he preached, working out its personal as well as social implications. More often than not, this extrapolation of the new birth amounted to a severe criticism of those who had not undergone the experience of saving faith. Especially when such charges involved his eccleisastical peers, the result was fierce pushback, including though not limited to the denial of pulpits. Fired by righteous indignation, Whitefield led the chorus of evangelicals that “sapp[ed] the theological outworks of the social order.” In fact, many feared that his message encouraged “the poor and ignorant not merely to disregard their duty and the example of their betters but to social insubordination and perhaps even worse.”²⁵ What is apparent from the foregoing examination is that Whitefield’s travels around the empire abetted the development of his doctrine in a way that appeared seditious to the social and ecclesiastical establishment.

The progression outhned above takes seriously historical change over time while arguing also for the importance of theology in interpreting social and cultural phenomena. Taking note of Whitefield’s theological development, especially his intensifying conviction regarding the doctrinal basis for the new birth, illuminates a relationship between imperial travels and theological positions. Regeneration, he insisted, came neither by way of inherited status nor one’s own good works but through the mediated righteousness of a savior—“And who dare assert that we are not justified in the sight of God merely by an act of faith in Jesus Christ, without any regard to works past, present, or to come?” (218). In contrast to the Puritans who had elucidated a complex ordo salutis (literally “order of salvation,” which depicted a morphology of conversion with details of the long and arduous pathway to salvation), Whitefield collapsed the process into one punctiliar moment where the person’s decision for Christ held ultimate significance for that person’s eternal destiny.²⁶

It was a message likely to appeal to people without social preferments, such as the settlers in Georgia and miners in Kingswood, of whom Whitefield wrote: “My bowels have long since yearned toward the poor colliers, who are very numerous, and as sheep having no shepherd” (241). In much the same way that his anti-Catholic reflections in Ireland shed light on Whitefield’s vision behind his Georgia orphanage, his heightened stress on an egalitarian new birth that he preached to a variety of audiences—whether impoverished colliers, religious societies that blurred social hierarchy, or London’s upper class—revealed Whitefield’s faith in the liminal and limitless possibilities of an expanding Protestant empire.

Whitefield’s message held attraction for the poor, but he was also intent on proclaiming it to the rich. As he went out of his way to prick their consciences, they could not help noticing the subversive undertones of his preaching. Though he had many aristocratic admirers, some of them also fretted from time to time over his indiscretions regarding proper social boundaries. To take one example, the Duchess of Buckingham wrote a letter to the Countess of Huntingdon expressing unease about methodist doctrines, especially as Whitefield preached them.²⁷ In her view, they were “most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks, and do away with all distinctions.”²⁸ She even seemed to implicate the Countess for her lack of good judgment: “I cannot but wonder that your Ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.”²⁹ The duchess was a shrewd and careful listener who understood the far-reaching disruptive implications of Whitefield’s doctrine of the new birth for the existing social order. On the other side, Whitefield—who had been to the far edges of empire—appreciated, even aspired toward, a more malleable social hierarchy. For in addition to envisioning the assimilation of young French children in Georgia noted earlier, he apprehended there fertile ground for rearranging social norms. In this emerging view of the empire, the doctrine of the new birth empowered British colonists abroad to renegotiate the terms of their status in an expanding, and therefore shifting, social landscape.

While he was still in Georgia, on June 10, 1738, Whitefield articulated his plans for the colony in this way: “What I have most at heart, is the building of an orphan-house, which I trust will be effected at my return to England. In the mean while, I am setthng little schools in and about Savannah; that the rising generation may be bred up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”³⁰ Whitefield understood his primary purpose in Georgia as the establishment of schools rather than churches, something that had not occurred at all to the Wesleys during their Georgia experience prior to Whitefield’s arrival. In this surprising difference, we get a glimpse into the long view with which he approached his Georgia ministry. “The seed of the glorious gospel has taken root in the American ground, and, I hope, will grow up into a great tree,” Whitefield wrote a friend from Ireland in November 1738. He had completed his first trip to America, and to be sure, it was far from his last. With “infant Georgia,” which he called “an excellent soil for Christianity,” constantly on his mind, he proceeded to lay the foundation for a lifetime of work.³¹

As the lessons of his first American trip sank in and opposition in England grew apace, Whitefield’s theological innovations and his imperial strategy continued to develop and, more significantly, converge. Whitefield’s fundraising prowess and his field preaching success were linked to two distinct, even disparate, aspects of his career. Yet, it is possible to imagine that the large sums of money he raised and the enormous crowds he attracted to his preaching events helped bolster his hopes for a transatlantic career. If he could continue to draw large crowds, he could continue to fund his colonial plans. To view this development from a different angle, his travels in America and his triumphs in England served to enlarge his imperial vision. In this vein, his metropolitan ministry enabled his frontier work in Georgia. Had Whitefield settled in Bristol, as so many friends and admirers pleaded, he would likely have had a very different life trajectory. More than idle conjecturing, this line of thinking highlights the fact that his travels abroad, and, in particular, his exposure to the fringe of empire in Georgia, opened up new vocational and theological possibilities for Whitefield.

An incident illustrating Whitefield’s growing boldness is his public disagreement with Bishop Martin Benson of Gloucester, who had ordained him as deacon in 1736 and as priest in 1738. By the summer of 1739, the relationship had deteriorated into an epistolary shouting match, which Whitefield gladly made public. Reacting to the bishop’s disapproval of his non-parochial ministry, Whitefield made the issue not about himself but about the missteps of other pastors. “But, if the commission we then receive obliges us to preach nowhere but in that parish which is committed to our care,” he protested, “then all persons act contrary to their commission when they preach occasionally in any strange place.” Whitefield showed open disdain because Bishop Benson’s criticism threatened to shrink the imperial stage to which he was growing accustomed. So roused was he to defend his activity that he went on the offensive against the bishop himself: “and, consequently, your lordship equally offends when you preach out of your own diocese.”³² For his critics he reserved the harshest judgment, accusing them of “falling from their Articles, and not preaching the truth as it is in Jesus, that has excited the present zeal of those, whom they, in derision, call the Methodist preachers.”³³ This abrupt turn away from the bishop who had encouraged his ministry and ordained him to the priesthood signifies a dramatic shift in Whitefield’s mentality for ministry. At this early stage, invigorated by his preaching and fundraising successes, Whitefield threw caution to the wind. He drew a clear line in the sand and indicated in no uncertain terms to his bishop that nothing would stand in the way of his itinerating across the empire, parish boundaries and priestly decorum notwithstanding.

The itinerant’s pioneering work in the empire’s outer edges legitimized his invasion of the empire’s religious, social, and political centers. Without his plans in the American South, Whitefield would have had feeble justification for gallivanting around the West Country in England. Not only the pounds he collected for his orphan relief work but also the haughty disdain he incurred for daring to preach the new birth out of doors gave Whitefield both the vision for imperial strategy and the basic building blocks of a transatlantic stage. Whitefield’s travel itinerary can appear frenetic to a casual observer, but it is possible to discern rhyme and reason to his frequent travels to and from the empire’s center and periphery. Whitefield stayed longer in England, by a few months, than he had originally intended. But it was not because he was losing focus. To the contrary, he was finding a much deeper and broader foundation for his American southern strategy than he had anticipated, in London and its surrounding boroughs of all places. The longer he toured around England and the more he preached to adoring and thronging crowds, the more he wanted to return to America. For his work in England was truly only half the work he envisioned for his life.

Whitefield’s Second American Trip

The tenor of Whitefield’s second visit to America stands in stark contrast to his first. During the earlier journey, Whitefield went about his business as if he was on a listening tour, meeting with a variety of colonial officials, touring the territory around Savannah, and making plans for an orphanage and a parish ministry. At the conclusion of this information-gathering exercise, Whitefield praised Commissary Alexander Garden in Charleston as “a good soldier of Jesus Christ, [who] received me in a most Christian manner.”³⁴ A little over a year later, much had changed. On March 14, 1740, Whitefield could be found in the home of his former admirer, trading loud aspersions with Garden. The encounter ended badly with Garden throwing Whitefield out. A month later, on Sunday, April 20, Whitefield cautioned a Philadelphia audience of “about fifteen thousand people” against the “false doctrines and many fundamental errors contained in the Commissary’s discourse.”³⁵

In order to understand this dramatic change in Whitefield’s relationship with Commissary Garden, we must work out what changed for Whitefield and why ecclesiastical leaders like Garden, once enthusiastic supporters, began to vigorously oppose his work. But to grasp Whitefield’s commitment to the far reaches of the British Empire, we also need a clear understanding of Georgia’s situation in the period between Whitefield’s departure after his first visit in August 1738 and when he left America the second time in January 1741. The southern frontier of Georgia went through a severe testing with the eruption of the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739. A conflict over English efforts to force their way into trade with Spanish colonies, this war had deleterious effects on the relationship between South Carolina and Georgia. We will briefly treat two specific matters that impinge on our understanding of Whitefield’s American activities: the challenge of transatlantic communication and the rise of competition between South Carolina and Georgia.

War in the southern frontier highlighted the difficulty of maintaining clear lines of communication across an extensive empire separated by a vast ocean. The timing of Britain’s declaration of war on Spain in 1739 provides an apt illustration of this problem. Based on faulty intelligence from Rhode Island on September 8, Oglethorpe commenced steps toward a formal declaration on October 3, sixteen days before the king’s officials did in London on October 19.³⁶ In this case, the Georgians were saved from the major embarrassment of a colony declaring a war by itself without the mother country. But the mistake also illustrates the hazards of slow communication in the colonial world. Communication is always fraught with potential for misunderstanding, but this danger was exacerbated in the age of transatlantic letter writing. Amid this complex dynamic of correspondence across the Atlantic, Whitefield’s contentious style was especially susceptible to snowballing disputes. If the preacher stirred controversy with the people he came into contact with in London, those not present had to reach their own conclusions using the secondhand accounts of biased reporters. When the issues involved theological nuance and ecclesiastical politics, the stakes were even higher.

Another development in the American South during the interval between Whitefield’s first two American visits was the growing acrimony between South Carolina and Georgia as they found themselves in an uneasy alliance against the Spanish. One manifestation of this problem arose in the summer of 1740, when Oglethorpe led an offensive against St. Augustine in Florida to disastrous effect. Due to a variety of factors that ranged from logistical errors to unfavorable weather conditions, Oglethorpe experienced a humiliating setback. The fallout of this moment hurt not only his reputation but also the tenuous relationship between the two southern colonies as each assigned blame to the other. Oglethorpe sought to deflect or share some of the embarrassment. South Carolina’s legislature conducted a year-long investigation and produced a report that was as prolix as it was critical of their Georgian compatriots. The strain rising from military frustrations spilled over into other arenas of colonial life, including the relationships of religious leaders.

With this background in place concerning Georgia, we are better positioned to understand what changed for Whitefield and why leading establishment clerics now came out so strongly against him. To put it simply, more than doctrinal conflicts were at stake; Whitefield provoked opposition because he aspired to change the imperial landscape in America. Central to this insight is the fact that Whitefield never lost interest in Georgia, even as he moved on to the more populous, better established northern colonies. Precisely because of his ongoing aspirations for Georgia he rankled many other colonial leaders as he made his second tour through the Atlantic seaboard. But before we come to that conflict, we must trace the course of Whitefield’s preparations for his second American trip.

In the summer of 1739, as he looked forward to returning to America, Whitefield had a specific destination in mind: “I am convinced that God calls me now to Georgia, and so are our friends.”³⁷ On board the Elizabeth, which was bound for Pennsylvania, he wrote to a friend in America: “My stay will be as short as possible at Philadelphia. I must not delay coming to my dear, though poor charge.”³⁸ After disembarking in Lewes, Delaware, on October 30, he went to Philadelphia and spent several weeks in the middle colonies.³⁹ But all the while his heart was fixed on Georgia. Despite ardent invitations from some of New England’s most prominent ministers, that region would have to wait another ten months to host this young preaching sensation; he had other, more pressing matters to attend to in Savannah. For reasons that deserve closer scrutiny, Whitefield spent the early part of his second journey to America exploring and studying the South. His first trip to America had lasted three months in the summer of 1738, with the majority of that time spent in Georgia.⁴⁰ The singular preoccupation of his second trip was again Georgia. Though his time in the colonies lasted from August 1739 through January 1741, and though he reached as far north as New York in the spring of 1740, Whitefield did not set his course toward New England until September 1740. Disappointing many in the North, he chose to pass another summer in the Georgia heat.

Shortly after his arrival in the colonies, Whitefield wrote Howel Harris on November 10, 1739, from Philadelphia with spectacular details concerning his hopes for the southern colony: “I have had great intimations from above concerning Georgia. Who knows but we may have a college of pious youths at Savannah?”⁴¹ He then went on to compare his plans for an orphan house in Georgia to the work of pietists in Germany: “Professor Franck’s undertaking in Germany has been much pressed upon my heart. I really believe that my present undertaking will succeed.”⁴² It is surprising to see that at this early juncture in his American career, the work of revival seemed secondary to the more urgent work of establishing a sturdy institutional foundation in Georgia. Less than a month after his arrival in the middle colonies, Whitefield could think of little else besides his developing work in the South. New England seems hardly to have crossed his mind, except as a matter to put off. He wrote Boston’s Benjamin Colman on November 16, 1739, informing him that he hoped “in about seven months . . . to see New England in my return to Europe.”⁴³ On the same day, he wrote Jonathan Edwards, acknowledging the “great things” of God in Edwards’s Northampton and his desire “to come and see them in a few months.”⁴⁴ As it turned out, Colman and Edwards would have to wait nearly a year. Faced with the choice of revival work in the North or relief work in the South, Whitefield chose the latter. He knew how to juggle these various locations in his mind without losing sight of the need of the moment. Foremost were the opportunities awaiting in Georgia.

Such singleminded focus on Georgia appears even more remarkable when we understand the wide range of Whitefield’s epistolary network. November 10, 1739, was a busy day for this missionary priest who had just arrived in Philadelphia, the colonies’ second largest city. He mailed fifty-nine letters on that day—twenty to ministers (some of them “unconverted,” many fellow revivalists), fourteen to women, several to groups and societies, one addressed to a house servant, and even one letter to a woman whose name he had forgotten.⁴⁵ We could attribute this prolific epistolary activity to a variety of factors, but high on any such list must be the strategic, forward-thinking, entrepreneurial mind of Whitefield. Having received letters from Benjamin Colman (Boston) and Jonathan Edwards (Northampton), who were themselves involved in broadcasting news of New England revivals to the broader British Atlantic world, Whitefield was determined to make his own contribution as a herald of evangelical renewal.⁴⁶ His fixation on Georgia, when viewed against this larger backdrop of a conscious transatlantic strategy of imperial and spiritual expansion, reveals the reasoning behind Whitefield’s tactical preference for the empire’s periphery. He was not heading to Georgia to withdraw but rather to establish a base upon which to launch forward movement.

Whitefield’s delayed visit to New England, alongside his growing enthusiasm for Georgia as well as his active correspondence with ministers in other outlying regions of the empire such as Wales (Howel Harris) and Scotland (Ralph Erskine), reveals a wide-ranging imperial blueprint. In fact, his tactical focus on the empire’s margins can be understood only in the context of an overarching strategy. Whitefield himself was not so shortsighted as to view Savannah and Boston as binary choices; plying his trade in the South was not about meekly embracing contentment with one’s lot, however small, in life. Instead, he had a much larger vision that went beyond the constituent pieces. If Savannah was too small a playing field, so were Boston and London. As we will come to see with greater clarity throughout this study, Whitefield’s vision was transatlantic and international. He labored for a worldwide Protestant movement, and if riding the coattails of British imperialism helped him along in that trailblazing work, he was eager to take the journey where it took him for the moment.

So it was that before he returned to Savannah on his second American sojourn, Whitefield had already made up his mind to resign the parish there. He focused instead on the work of establishing an orphanage and intended to range from that center as far and wide as possible. He longed for flexibility as well as a broader reach: “The Orphan House I can take care of, supposing I should be kept at a distance; besides, when I have resigned the parish, I shall be more at liberty to take a tour around America, if God should ever call me to such a work.”⁴⁷ Despite pious talk of waiting on God’s will, reading between the lines makes it clear that Whitefield had made up his mind to broaden his field of ministry in America. He was also thinking carefully about how to prepare a geographical base from which to carry out that work. The cause of orphan relief gave him the justification he needed to go anywhere in the empire where he could hope to raise funds. Far from consigning him to obscurity in the periphery, his work in Georgia made it necessary for him to frequent the cosmopolitan centers of empire as much as he possibly could.

As he traveled about, Whitefield met Swedish, Dutch, and German Protestants from such diverse theological streams as Quaker, Moravian, and Presbyterian traditions. He met the Dutch Reformed revivalist Theodore Frelinghuysen in the Raritan Valley of New Jersey, and in nearby New Brunswick he found a kindred spirit in the Irish-born Presbyterian revivalist Gilbert Tennent. He witnessed firsthand the fruits of  William Tennent’s Log College, an independent Presbyterian seminary at Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, established in 1726, which educated many revival preachers and later contributed to the founding of the College of New Jersey at Princeton. As a reminder that the work of revival was far from an isolated event, he received reports of persecution from dissenting Protestants fleeing various parts of Europe. Many of these exiles became deeply involved in the colonial revivals. He found a like-minded spirit with these various Protestant groups and worked to discover common cause amid their great diversity. “I think there are no less than fifteen denominations of Christians in German Town, Pennsylvania, and yet all agree in one thing, that is, to hold Jesus Christ as their Head, and to worship Him in spirit and in truth,” he remarked, clearly impressed but also bewildered by the varieties of Protestantism he encountered.⁴⁸

Meeting so many religious refugees probably reminded Whitefield of the larger battles surrounding embattled European Protestants, so that foreign Catholic threats abroad and Jacobite rebellions closer to home loomed large.⁴⁹ By going so far to the edge of empire, Whitefield was able to see the world beyond it. Rather than shrink back in fear, he displayed eagerness to impose some semblance of order on that world. Indeed, he was convinced that he had the right theological formula for the occasion. The evangelical new birth of individual persons was not something that had to be vetted through high church structures or subject to the scrutiny of some Protestant form of the Roman Curia. As he was now preaching the doctrine, it leveled the playing field and opened up immediate access to a new Christian identity without the need of a formal procedure for christening.

In this expansive inter-denominational setting, Whitefield’s response to the diversity of empire paralleled his turn to new birth preaching as a way to reverse England’s spiritual decline. His ecumenism arose not from theological simplicity, as many have assumed, but rather from an ambitious imperial vision that recognized the need of a Protestant coalition arrayed against hostile Catholic forces, whether French or Spanish. His search for a common denominator was, far from a dilution of theological complexities, a way to achieve a coalition force in the face of a cacophonous plurality of Protestant perspectives. For Whitefield, the Protestant interest was the imperial agenda, and vice versa. Georgia was a place where he could both confront Spanish Catholicism and transcend New England Puritanism, thus heralding a new, eighteenth-century British imperial world that was vitally Protestant precisely because it was anti-Catholic and post-Puritan.

For this reason, despite manifold signs in November 1739 of a harvest to be gathered in major colonial cities to the north, Whitefield did not want to be detained long. As he made plans to leave Philadelphia and travel south toward Georgia, he had little patience for the crowds clamoring about him. “It grieves me to send them away with such short answers; but necessity compels me,” Whitefield wrote in his journal, with a hint of annoyance at the people lining up to talk with him (393). The necessity in this case arose from the haste with which he wished to commence his journey south. Even the crowd of ten thousand that came together for a farewell sermon on November 28 did nothing to slow his rush to depart for Georgia. Along the way he turned down numerous “fresh and pressing invitations” to preach, and only after he reached South Carolina did he take time to relax and reflect (397). Upon his return south, Whitefield went as far as to muse in his journal about the possibility that God had a geographical preference: “I could not but think, that God intended, in His own time, to work a good work in these southern parts of America. At present they seem more dead to God, but far less prejudiced than in the northern parts” (408, emphasis added). There was some sense of strategic logic underneath Whitefield’s affection for the South. He compared, even calculated, his chances of success in that region over against the North. And he put a divine stamp of approval on his own personal partiality for the “southern parts of America.”

Yet even as Whitefield made this personal commitment to expand the empire, he still had much to learn about imperial realities. One important aspect of Whitefield’s education about the fringes of empire resulted from his increasing experience with slavery. As he traveled south on his return to Georgia during December 1739 through the early part of January 1740, his personal encounters pushed him in two different directions. On the one hand, as an aspiring institution-builder eager to follow the lead of Francke, first-hand observation of African Americans led him to envisage a school for “negro children” that might achieve some of the same goals he entertained for Bethesda Orphanage in Georgia. Yet on the other hand, as his company moved toward Savannah, it also ran across what Whitefield described as a “nest of . . . negroes” that troubled him greatly when he “inferred that these . . . might be some of those who lately had made an insurrection in the province” (420). Whitefield was observing the reverberations of the Stono Rebellion, which began in South Carolina on September 9, 1739. Though the rebellion lasted only a few days, slave uprisings destabilized the region for several years afterwards.

There were imperial dimensions to the Stono Rebellion, where one direct cause was the promise of Spanish officials to grant freedom to any slaves who came to St. Augustine in Florida. According to a contemporary account, attributed to Oglethorpe by some and written in October 1739, “There was a Proclamation published at Augustine, in which the King of Spain (then at Peace with Great Britain) promised Protection and Freedom to all Negroes [sic] Slaves that would resort thither.”⁵⁰ America was teaching Whitefield about both the possibilities and dangers of a far-flung empire. The African population served as a reminder of potential harvests but also serious pitfalls for the Protestant cause. The course he eventually set for himself as an itinerant evangelist would be his way of taking advantage of the possibilities and working to defuse the dangers. In chapter 4 we will see how Whitefield’s accommodation to slavery represented his conformity to imperial economics. For now it is sufficient to note that Whitefield’s American trips exposed him to imperial realities not present back home in London or Bristol.

His rapid march south by land, which he preferred over the quicker route by water, afforded other lessons as well. He recorded his dislike of tobacco culture, for it kept people apart on large tracts of land. Neighbors living in this dispersed manner would be less easy to “be gathered together without much previous notice” and therefore put a damper on his well-oiled field preaching machine (400). Further extending his criticisms of life in the Chesapeake, he remarked that people in Maryland received too much tobacco from the government, thus weakening their moral constitution. On the other hand, he admired the Scotch-Irish for the fact that they “raise no tobacco, but things that are useful for common life” (425–26). Observations like these—gleaned from travel throughout the colonies—led him to encourage Georgians’ investment in cotton, which fatefully contributed to his eventual embrace of slave labor. He bought three hundred pounds at once when he arrived there and promised to “take all the cotton, hemp, and flax that shall be produced the following year through the whole province” (434). The eloquent preacher justified this expense as part of a comprehensive strategy of gospel proclamation, but there were clear traces of social, economic, and political motivations as well.

Back in Georgia at the beginning of 1740, Whitefield went immediately to work, breaking ground and personally laying the first brick for his orphan house. Because he understood the value of a broad base of support, he visited Oglethorpe in Frederica, where the general was busy extending the fight against the Spanish into Florida, marching on forts St. Augustine, St. Marks, and St. Francis. Whitefield’s proximity here to imperial warfare is again worth noting, as well as Oglethorpe’s coolness toward Whitefield and his plans for Georgia. Shortly after Whitefield’s visit, the general expressed some of his concerns to the colony’s Trustees. He especially took exception to what he characterized as Whitefield’s coercive separation of a family, taking two teenagers to his orphan house away from an older brother clearly able to provide for his younger siblings. Oglethorpe criticized the language whereby orphans were “granted” to Whitefield and argued the point with Whitefield’s associate, William Seward, saying, “It is most certain that Orphans are human creatures & neither Cattel nor any other kind of Chattels, therefore cannot be granted, but the Trust have granted the care of the helpless Orphans to Mr. Whitefield & have given him 500 Acres of Land and a power of collecting Charities as a consideration for maintaining all the Orphans who are in necessity in this Province.”⁵¹ That Oglethorpe detected hints of instrumental, cavalier, and even economically shaped motivation in Whitefield is telling. The preacher’s response to the matter was terse, apparently not even taking time to respond directly to Oglethorpe and simply informing John Mellidge, the older brother, that “his brother and sister were at their proper home already, and he knew no other home they had to go to.”⁵² It was an example of the kind of imperious style that rankled so many opponents.

It was also during this same period after his return to Savannah that Whitefield’s confrontation with Alexander Garden in Charleston took place. The commissary had heard of Whitefield’s impertinence toward ecclesiastical superiors in England. One famous incident was Whitefield’s public letter of rebuttal to Bishop Benson of Gloucester, who only a few months before the incident had ordained him. He concluded his letter to the bishop with a categorical dismissal of any and all proscriptions on his preaching activity: “But, my lord, if you and the rest of the bishops cast us out, our great and common Master will take us up.”⁵³ As Whitefield intensified his attack on the Anglican clergy he declared to be unconverted, the force of criticisms arrayed against his itinerating activities saw a corresponding increase. Commissary Garden in South Carolina, who had once welcomed Whitefield’s activities in Georgia, wrote public letters decrying Whitefield’s seditious message in the spring of 1740. Whitefield quickly dispatched a petulant dismissal, observing, “Both by your conversation, sermon and letter, I perceive that you are angry over-much.” When Garden continued his attacks, Whitefield simply exhorted Garden, “be pleased to read [my sermon] again.”⁵⁴ If that should not suffice, he invited a public debate to settle the matter: “be pleased to let the Publick know it from the Press. And then let the World judge.”⁵⁵ After a series of letters throughout March and April in 1740, the debate ended without a clear winner, and with losses inflicted upon the reputation of both religious leaders.⁵⁶

In the meantime, Whitefield’s relationship with the Trustees of Georgia also continued to sour. More often than not, they considered his communications with them “impudent.”⁵⁷ On April 16, 1740, while Whitefield took leave of his Georgia charge for a nine-week preaching and fundraising tour of the middle colonies, the Trustees in London called an emergency meeting to discuss how they might handle their mutinous rector. Clearly exasperated, they resented Whitefield’s threats to make public his charges against the Trustees, including an account of what he called their “irreligion.” One Trustee gave voice to a long list of grievances that went back to the spring of the previous year:

Dr Burton said it appear’d to him, that [Whitefield] was resolvd to be totally independent of every body: that he had refused a salary from the Trustees because he would be obliged to attend the duty of a Parish Minister longer than he cared for; and he never should think him honest since the time he accepted a Comission to collect money for the Religious Uses of the Colony, and after he had collected some, surrender’d that commission on pretence it was of no use to him, whereby he made himself not accountable to the Trustees for the money he collected, and refused to put the money into the Trustees hands, in order to dispose of it as he pleas’d himself.⁵⁸

This frank denunciation of Whitefield provides a lengthy assessment by someone who enjoyed sustained, if adversarial, contact with the famous preacher. He suspected Whitefield of harboring ulterior motives and intending to use Georgia to further personal schemes that reached far beyond Georgia. Though Whitefield may have insisted on a more generous characterization of his actions, he would not have denied larger designs with empire-wide implications.

Perhaps because Whitefield thought himself engaged in genuine Christian charity, he remained blind to how a consumerism that bespoke the economic needs of the empire inflected his rhetoric. To take another example, when he returned to Philadelphia in the spring of 1740, he boasted of a conversation with an African American woman who promised her children to his school:

One, who was free, said she would give me her two children, whenever I settle my school. I believe masters and mistresses will shortly see that Christianity will not make their negroes worse slaves. I intended, had time permitted, to have settled a Society for negro men and negro women; but that must be deferred till it shall please God to bring me to Philadelphia again. (462)

Here we can see the ease with which Whitefield mingled rationalizations of slavery with subtle paternalism, viewing children as trading pieces for his gospel work. In these ways, as he laid the groundwork for broad American engagement, the preacher found himself entangled in the commercial machinations of empire that stretched far beyond evangelistic labors.

After returning to Philadelphia in the spring of 1740, Whitefield might have been expected by his growing colonial audience to continue traveling north. Rather than head to New England, however, and likely to the exasperation of expectant friends like Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Colman, and many others, Whitefield went back to Georgia and spent the summer there. It was not until September 19, 1740, nearly a year after his second arrival in North America, that he reached Boston, for his first New England visit to the largest colonial city. By the time of this visit, much belated in the minds of prominent ministers who had been sending him heartfelt invitations for years, he had spent a total of fifteen months traveling around other American colonies. Whitefield was happy to linger in the South. It was at the very edge of empire that he felt most at home and detected the greatest potential for growth. Just as surprising, he spent only a month in New England, before heading south again. To be sure, that month was one of the most notable periods in colonial religious history, with memorable sermons before huge crowds everywhere Whitefield went. But studies of this New England sojourn are numerous. What has not been studied is where this momentous northern triumph fit into his overall southern strategy.

Conclusion

Most studies of Whitefield in America begin the substantive part of their analysis in 1740 with the Grand Itinerant preaching to swooning thousands in New England. By more closely examining the earlier portions of Whitefield’s American work, it becomes clear that Whitefield had an overarching American strategy based on a peculiarly British imperial, consumerist perspective, the outhnes of which were present from the earliest days of his American tenure. Central to this argument is the southern orientation of that starting point, indicating Whitefield’s desire to be at the growing edge of imperial expansion. When Whitefield first began surveying the territory outside Savannah in the summer of 1738, he did so with the perspective of a British subject, a Protestant minister, and an ambitious entrepreneur. Whitefield the visitor bore in his heart the tradition of English dissenting religion and on his back the cold, hard realities of religious indifference among the orthodox and proliferating disunity among sectarians. As unsettled as Georgia was at the time of Whitefield’s visit, it was already a key factor in both colonial and imperial history. It is of consequence that the fires of renewal he helped spread up and down the Atlantic seaboard had their first flames in the South. To learn the full significance of his American southern strategy, we must next turn to examine how it is that Whitefield went from being a British emissary to an American icon.

1. See Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity”; Edward J. Cashin, Beloved Bethesda: A History of George Whitefield’s Home for Boys, 1740–2000 (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2001); Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History 34, no. 4 (1977): 519–41.

2. For Whitefield, “Anglicization” meant a presentation of British cultural, religious, political, and social standards as the normative rule for the enlightened, or godly, life.

3. See “The Translation Principle in Christian History,” in Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996), 26–42.

4. Luke Tyerman, The Life of the Rev. George Whitefield, B.A., of Pembroke College, Oxford, 2 vols. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1876), 1:108.

5. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

6. Frank Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits and Piety: The Friendship of Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield,” The William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 3 (1993): 529–54; Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity.”

7. Whitefield to Mr. H., June 10, 1738, in George Whitefield, The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield M.A., 7 vols., ed. John Gillies (London, 1771–72), 1:44. Hereafter Works.

8. Whitefield to Mr. H., June 10, 1738, in Works, 1:44.

9. John Gillies, Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend George Whitefield, Faithfully Selected From His Original Papers, Journals, and Letters (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1772), 31.

10. No date given, but likely in June 1738; Gillies, Memoirs, 32.

11. July 18, 1738, entry in Whitefield, Journals, 182. For the rest of this section, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.

12. Gillies, Memoirs, 33.

13. Whitefield to Mr. —, November 16, 1738, in Works, 1:45.

14. Gillies, Memoirs, 45.

15. In an otherwise helpful overview of the religious landscape of the American colonies in the eighteenth century, Boyd Stanley Schlenther does not even bother to mention Georgia. Schlenther does mention later in his chapter the significance of British welcome of religious refugees, such as Salzburgers in Georgia. Schlenther, “Religious Faith and Commercial Empire,” in Marshall, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 2:128–29, 145.

16. Tyerman, Life, 1:323.

17. Candler, Colonial Records, 5:86.

18. Candler, Colonial Records, 5:90.

19. Candler, Colonial Records, 5:95.

20. Candler, Colonial Records, 5:162.

21. Candler, Colonial Records, 5:173.

22. Candler, Colonial Records, 5:174.

23. “Expounded from five till near nine, to throned Societies. . . . About six in the evening I expounded to a Society without Lawford’s Gate, and afterwards to another in Baldwin Street: both were exceedingly crowded and attentive.” Whitefield, Journals, 241, 246.

24. Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity,” 202.

25. Mark Smith, “The Hanoverian Parish: Towards a New Agenda,” Past & Present 216, no. 1 (2012): 102.

26. According to Stephen Marini, “Whitefield shortened the morphology of conversion, swept away the casuistry of covenantalism, and focused the issue of salvation on the moment of conversion itself.” Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England, 13.

27. The date of the letter is not indicated, but it was sometime before March 13, 1742, when she died.

28. Tyerman, Life, 1:160–61; emphasis added.

29. Aaron Crossley Seymour and Jacob Kirkman Foster, The Life and Times of Selina: Countess of Huntingdon (London: W. E. Painter, 1839), 27.

30. Whitefield to Mr. H., June 10, 1738, in Works, 1:44.

31. Whitefield to Mr. —, November 16, 1738, in Works, 1:45.

32. Whitefield to the Bishop of Gloucester, July 9, 1739, Tyerman, Life, 1:261.

33. Whitefield to the Bishop of Gloucester, July 9, 1739, Tyerman, Life, 1:261.

34. Whitefield, Journals, 188.

35. Whitefield, Journals, 449.

36. This event is narrated in Kenneth Coleman, Colonial Georgia: A History (New York: Scribner, 1976), 63–65.

37. Whitefield to —, August 3, 1739, in Works, 1:59.

38. Whitefield to Mr. —, August 14, 1739, in Works, 1:62.

39. Tyerman, Life, 1:319.

40. For one assessment that Georgia “was far too small a stage” for Whitefield, see Kidd, The Great Awakening, 44. Kidd bases his argument on the observation that “after three months in Georgia, he returned to England.” Analysis of Whitefield’s first trip to America, however, can cut in either of two directions: he spent only three months in Georgia, or he spent the three months of that trip primarily in Georgia. So great was his focus on the South at this early point that Whitefield evinced surprisingly little interest in seeing other parts of the New World. This point becomes even more pronounced when we realize how much of his second journey also focused on the South.

41. Whitefield to Howel Harris, November 10, 1739, in Works, 1:84.

42. Whitefield to Howel Harris, in Works, 1:100.

43. Whitefield to Benjamin Colman, November 16, 1739, in Works, 1:121.

44. Whitefield to Jonathan Edwards, November 16, 1739, in Works, 1:121.

45. Whitefield, Works, 1:63–120.

46. For the importance of such epistolary networks, see O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints.”

47. Whitefield to Mr. Wm. D—, November 10, 1739, in Works, 1:109.

48. Whitefield, Journals, 392.

49. See Colley, Britons, 23–25. For the larger background of religious movements and migrations in Europe contributing to American revivalism, see W. Reginald Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

50. “Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina,” in Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt, ed. Mark Michael Smith (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 13. According to Peter Wood, the account was written by Oglethorpe; the point is disputed by others. “Anatomy of a Revolt,” in Smith, Stono, 59.

51. James Oglethorpe Papers, MS 595, Georgia Historical Society. Also in Candler, Colonial Records, 1:330–32.

52. William Stephens and Allen D. Candler, A Journal of the Proceedings in Georgia, Beginning October 20, 1737. By William Stephens, Esq; to Which is Added, a State of That Province, as Attested Upon Oath in the Court of Savannah, November 10, 1740 (Atlanta: Franklin Printing and Publishing Company, 1906), 541.

53. Whitefield to the Bishop of Gloucester, July 9, 1739, Tyerman, Life, 1:262.

54. Thomas Evans, Alexander Garden, and George Whitefield, The Querists, the Rev. Mr. Whitefield’s Answer, the Rev. Mr. Garden’s Letters (New York: J. P. Zenger, 1740), 75. The offending sermon is the final entry in George Whitefield, Sermons on Various Subjects (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1740).

55. Evans, Garden, and Whitefield, The Querists, 75.

56. A response from Whitefield and six letters from Alexander Garden are printed in Evans, Garden, and Whitefield, The Querists.

57. Candler, Colonial Records, 3:291.

58. Candler, Colonial Records, 3:332–35.

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