3. An American Icon

3. An American Icon

The second phase of Whitefield’s transatlantic work from 1741 to 1752 occurred during a time of ecclesial fracturing, national insecurity, and imperial war. This period of crisis on multiple fronts was also the moment of Whitefield’s greatest triumphs, with the fire of revival appearing to spread wherever he went and his fame achieving iconic status in America. His work of fundraising for Bethesda Orphanage took the celebrity preacher from the metropole to the far reaches of British territory, giving him a singularly broad view of that empire. He labored in established urban centers, from Boston to London to Edinburgh. But he also returned time and again to the periphery, from Savannah, Georgia, to other small towns in South Wales and Scotland. While Jonathan Edwards wrote treatises from his parish in Northampton, Massachusetts, to spread reports of New England revival across the Atlantic world, Whitefield crisscrossed that world spreading not only tantalizing news but also catalyzing experiences of religious awakening. With his on-the-ground reporting and rough-and-tumble style, he continually refined his skills as preacher as well as publicist, and he gained notoriety on both sides of the ocean. As a consequence, whether reviled or adored, he could not be ignored. Taking stock of his widespread influence, this chapter will trace the reciprocal influences of the geographical map and the religious message of Whitefield’s itinerancy during the height of his revival career.

Imperial expansion created ruptures across the British Atlantic that Whitefield’s evangelical message sought to repair under a common Protestant vision. With attention fixated on the floodtides of revival, it can be easily forgotten that the awakenings could ebb as abruptly as they flowed. The decline of revival over the course of the 1740s is significant, for as Whitefield grappled with the fleeting gains of the Awakening’s fervor, he also found new opportunities for deepening religious work against the backdrop of newly erupted imperial conflicts with Britain’s longstanding Catholic foes. His increasing international fame makes Whitefield, the American icon of the 1740s and early 1750s, an instructive weathervane of cultural change during this period of tumult and war.

Such a focus also has the advantage of locating the colonial Great Awakening in broader context. Previous attempts to place the awakenings in their social milieu identified religious backsliding, economic depression, and social frustration as key explanatory factors usually in only one or a few, mostly colonial, location(s).¹ While these studies have uncovered a colonial culture of restlessness as the essential soil for revival, they have downplayed the hopes for extensive cultural renewal undergirding religious revivals in this period. Whitefield’s transatlantic activities point to other factors at work. Rather than isolated religious outbursts, the evangelical awakenings had a striking imperial outhne. Through Whitefield, moreover, far-flung localized expressions of religious fervor combined to form an empire-wide, identity-shaping cultural phenomenon. If religious revivals during this time rose from the crucible of an expanding, sometimes faltering, empire, their corresponding impact on British imperial identity carried a distinct Protestant stamp. The evangelical message stressed personal human failings while also sanctioning military conquest and commercial expansion and prosperity. Missionary activity had long depended on new world exploration, exporting the home culture to colonial outposts. The significant change Whitefield inaugurated was the frequency with which he traveled back and forth between the imperial center and its margins. In so doing, he accelerated the pace of cultural exchange across the empire, with inward spiritual revival emerging as only the most visible outcome of his labors. Beyond trying to strengthen individual devotion, he called for a national reformation and sought to leverage his transatlantic revival coalition toward the goals of British as well as international Protestant interests.

In a setting of war and empire building, then, Whitefield expounded a doctrine of new birth that articulated possibilities for not only religious renewal but also a profound reformulation of social and cultural relationships. Indeed, commissaries in the colonies and bishops in Britain had more than doctrinal reasons to oppose Whitefield. Despite problems of his own making and crises generated by imperial expansion, Whitefield’s ecumenical Protestant spirit offered a consolidating, if controversial, vision for the increasingly disparate elements of British Atlantic identity, and it did so—most worryingly for his critics—without featuring the Anglican Church. Over the course of the 1740s, Whitefield grew in his ability to manage the controversies swirling around him. He amended impulsive public statements and patched up relations with high-profile figures not only for pious personal reasons but also for the sake of unity among Protestants.

It should not be forgotten that even as ecclesiastical, doctrinal, and personal storms raged around Whitefield, war broke out on the frontiers of the empire and rebellion drew near to the heart of the nation. Imperial battles seemed to follow Whitefield everywhere he went during the 1740s. The War of Jenkins’ Ear against Spain in the American South, an expedition against French Louisbourg in Canada, the Jacobite invasion and the Battle of Culloden in Scotland all occurred in or near places where Whitefield also itinerated, and in some cases they prompted his direct engagement. Because of his extensive travels, he had a proximate view of numerous imperial conflicts, leading to a wide-angle perspective that was unusual in his time for British subjects.² Though reluctant at first, Whitefield increasingly expressed support for Britain’s military efforts, from helping raise troops to preaching victory sermons calculated to fan the flames of British exceptionalism. Another comparison at this point underscores Whitefield’s effort: while his fellow evangelical John Wesley lamented the deleterious effects of war on religious revivals, Whitefield sought to leverage the conflict-driven stirrings of British nationalism toward a culture of revivalism.³

For these reasons the leavening effect of imperial and military developments on Whitefield’s religious message needs fresh inquiry. Consideration of Whitefield’s evangelistic themes in primarily religious terms has not merely sidelined the significance of that message; turning a blind eye to the broader context of his activities has obscured our view of the Atlantic world he traversed with an intensity and impact few contemporaries could match. In what ways did his preaching conform to a celebration of British geopolitical ambitions? But just as importantly, what kind of impact did his revivalistic preaching have on inspiring new notions of what it meant to be a Briton in the mid-eighteenth century? Clarity on these matters will come from close attention to Whitefield’s travels throughout the empire.

The chapter begins with a study of the imperial shape of Whitefield’s new birth preaching, shifts focus to the precipitous retreat of revivals, and concludes by considering the impact of imperial wars on the inchoate culture of revivalism and evangelical identity. From the first revival sparks to its fading embers, war in the imperial outposts was the one consistent reality. At the same time that Whitefield was attempting to impose religious meaning on a sprawhng empire, his travels through an Atlantic world in upheaval forced him to rethink and recalibrate the message he proclaimed. Neither scattered personal renewal nor isolated local revivals proved satisfactory for a sustained, long-term vision in light of his broad view of the empire. Where revival-centric treatments of the famous itinerant’s life and ministry have reified a young and impetuous Whitefield for posterity, the odyssey of his decade-long transformation that this chapter traces reveals a more complex life attuned to the longings of an imperial age. When the hopes of new birth revivals dissipated after the initial outburst of revival enthusiasm, preachers like Whitefield improvised by creating a more explicit link between British Protestant identity, the growth of empire, and ongoing spiritual vitality. In that process, they both acknowledged the limitations of their religious agenda and redoubled their efforts toward a deeper alignment of religion and empire.

The Imperial Shape of Whitefield’s New Birth Preaching

The evangelical religious awakenings that dotted the British Empire beginning in the late 1730s outhned not only a revival of Protestant religion but the contours of an imperial movement. During the height of revival, believers as well as unbelievers across the empire began attending religious services in unorthodox venues with unusual results. Some remained skeptical and mocked the enthusiasts. But many more were deeply touched by the preaching of these impassioned itinerants. Local revivals reverberated across the empire, stirring new awakenings in faraway locations. The most famous of the revivals’ many traveling preachers was George Whitefield, whose destinations ranged from metropolitan centers to remote corners of British territories. Being subjects of empire was privilege enough in many minds; the Grand Itinerant came along, however, and invited Britons to lay claim to their citizenship in a heavenly kingdom as well. For colonists in the hinterlands of Georgia, Presbyterians in Scotland, ordinary denizens of an ever-expanding London, and for many more in between, this invitation proved alluring, even irresistible.

Whitefield’s exposition of the doctrine of regeneration was an essential element in the message he carried throughout the empire. Significantly, this religious proclamation relied heavily on imperial opportunities newly emerging in the 1730s and 1740s. Far from a timeless and universal message, Whitefield’s new birth preaching reveals the imperial shape of this controversial religious doctrine in a changing world.

At a level of sheer practicality, Whitefield’s transatlantic influence would not have been possible without the growth of empire in the early eighteenth century and its sprawhng trade and transportation routes. While British officials talked about a “blue water” policy that utilized an ascendant navy as well as troops on the ground, Whitefield traveled over land and sea, making thirteen Atlantic crossings and fourteen trips to Scotland, preaching hundreds of sermons, and reaching tens of thousands of people nearly every month with his message of the new birth.⁴

A detailed itinerary of a shorter period can demonstrate Whitefield’s broader imperial ambitions even at this early stage of his career. After spending all of 1740 traveling up and down the eastern seaboard and fanning the flames of the Great Awakening in America, Whitefield returned to England in March 1741. After a six-week stopover in London, Whitefield hit the road again, preaching throughout the Bristol region in May. He returned to London, but he did not stay put for long. The next month he was on the road again, roaming east and north, from Essex to Cambridge to Suffolk then back to London.⁵ At the end of July, he set his sights farther still and arrived in Edinburgh. For the next four months he would itinerate around Scotland, building bridges for a burgeoning transatlantic evangelical network. So impressed was Whitefield with the fertile soil for gospel labors he found in Scotland that he made sure to return the following year for another extended tour.

In England, Whitefield had been dogged by Arminian critics—foremost among them John Wesley, who thought his view of God’s power unnecessarily denigrated humanity’s free will. In Scotland, his broad agenda led him on an inevitable collision course with his Calvinist brethren in the Associate Presbytery, a schismatic group that was sharply critical of the Church of Scotland. In truth, he shared much with Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, brothers and leaders of the sectarian Presbyterians, who had been conducting an epistolary courtship with Whitefield for several years. On his first trip to Scotland, however, Whitefield was eager to reach as wide an audience as possible, as per his custom. Not one to back down from a fight, he told the Erskine brothers that he would have no qualms about preaching in a Catholic cathedral or a Muslim mosque should the opportunity be afforded him. In response the spurned Presbyterians unleashed a torrent of public criticism against Whitefield, condemning not only his theology but also his politics. “The Declaration of the true Presbyterians within the Kingdom of Scotland, concerning Mr. George Whitefield” condemned him as “a base English impostor” whose mistaken ways would “lead the covenanted kingdom of Scotland back to Egypt and Babylon.”⁶ Full of anti-papal rhetoric, the writer of the pamphlet sought to fan the flames of an English-Scottish animosity. But Whitefield’s evangelical vision had no room for anything that undermined the transnational empire created by the Scottish-English Union of 1707.

Ironically, this rupture over strict Presbyterianism came at the very same time as Whitefield’s battles over predestination with John Wesley, his one-time mentor and friend. In this way, Whitefield courted trouble for being too Calvinistic with Wesley and invited biting criticism from the Erskines for not being Calvinistic enough. More to the point, Whitefield’s trouble in both instances came from his abiding worry that theological disputes would stand in the way of a broadly evangelical Christian union. He had pleaded with Wesley to gloss over minor theological disagreements even as he resisted the pleas of his Scottish brethren in the Associate Presbytery to stand firm on minutiae of theological distinctives. What appears on the surface as theological laxity or inconsistency turns out to reveal a coherent imperial strategy.

When Whitefield returned to England in November 1741, in addition to getting married (which he went about in characteristic perfunctory fashion), he continued to work at building a Calvinistic Society.⁷ In part he was casting about for ways to counter the assaults of Wesley and his Arminian allies. He was also looking to consolidate the revival gains he had catalyzed in diverse areas on both sides of the Atlantic. Whitefield was in Scotland again between June and October of 1742, in time to participate in the great revivals at Cambuslang and Kilsyth. Whitefield the Anglican fostered close partnerships with several Presbyterian colleagues in Scotland, including William McCulloch at Cambuslang and James Robe at Kilsyth. Though these ministers were themselves active evangelists, they both saw Whitefield as God’s specially chosen instrument to spark revival. Ever mindful of the broader landscape of his spiritual work, Whitefield found time when he was not preaching in Scotland to write a financial report for his orphan house work in Georgia and a pamphlet defending the New England revival.⁸ After he returned to England in November 1742, it would be another two years before he returned to America. Hardly one to sit still, Whitefield spent most of these two years on the road, building his society of Calvinistic methodists and developing key relationships with ministers like Howel Harris in Wales.

If not for the growth of empire, Whitefield’s ambitions would have appeared ludicrous. Because of Britain’s expansive territory in the mid-eighteenth century, however, Whitefield could reasonably aspire toward a kingdom of Protestant ascendancy that stretched across the Atlantic world. Thanks to growing transatlantic ties, Whitefield stoked the flames of revival in Cambuslang and Kilsyth while writing letters of intervention to the Trustees of Georgia in London. He maintained active engagement throughout Britain’s most peripheral regions. In August 1742, the preacher was in the midst of his second visit to Scotland during a remarkable period of revival. At the same time in Georgia, trouble was brewing. The headmaster and chaplain of the orphan house in Savannah had landed themselves in prison for antagonistic behavior against the parish minister. Revealing familiarity with internal colonial politics from faraway Scotland, he not only expressed the hope that Savannah officials would “let the Orphan House managers alone” but also expressed the wish that eventually “we might have our own magistrates, as the people of Ebenezer have.” As if that were not enough, he requested additional land for himself as well as the right to offer land to prospective settlers. “Many have applied to me respecting their setthng in Georgia,” reported Whitefield without the least hint that such requests were out of the ordinary. In fact, he lamented the fact that he “could give them no encouragement.” Motivated for the sake of the colony’s well-being, Whitefield postured for greater power in no uncertain terms: “I wish I may be enabled to give them a great deal in the future.”⁹

As a young and only recently ordained missionary, he was able to risk such overreach because of the precarious nature of the fledgling Georgia enterprise and because of his unusual success in raising money for the orphan house in Savannah. Vocal critics in Scotland found irksome the idea of Whitefield taking money from their poor to help the hard-pressed in Savannah. Such protests failed to register in Whitefield’s mind because, in his view of the empire, Scotland and Georgia were one and the same to him as outlying provinces of a far-flung British world.

At a time when most clergy were content with a local parish assignment, Whitefield engineered a sprawhng trans-denominational and transatlantic ministry. For this reason some scholars have called Whitefield the first international celebrity. Situating his ministry in the unusually broad geographical context of empire reveals the far-reaching agenda that lay beneath his proclamation of the new birth.¹⁰ This observation comports well with the general recognition of the early eighteenth century as a time of ebullience about empire. One historian has made the case that “even the most humble citizens were drawn into the imperial effort, however distant or immediate that effort may have seemed.”¹¹ In a society where “a mercantilist, libertarian view of empire” was widespread, the revival preacher plied his trade with uncommon commercial savvy as he appropriated openness to individual economic activity by pleading for personal religious responses.¹²

Circulation of his writings was a key part of Whitefield’s imperial strategy. His early exposure to writing for publication only served to whet his appetite for broadening his impact through the use of printed material. During a sickness-induced break from university in 1736, he wrote in his journal about the thrill of being published. “God gave me favour in the printer’s sight,” Whitefield gushed, “and, at my request, he put a little of [my piece] in the News for six weeks successively.”¹³ Despite his strong accent on providence, the words “at my request” revealed his eagerness, perhaps agitation, for publicity. This early taste of publication stayed with Whitefield. In addition to his Journals, Whitefield regularly published sermons, pamphlets, and letters in order to spread his fame and attract large crowds to his preaching events. His 1740 “Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina, concerning their Negroes” is remarkable not only for its content but also for its intended audience—nearly one-third of the American colonies! In part, his confidence came from the high sales of his writings. Benjamin Franklin “told me he has taken above two hundred subscriptions for printing my Sermons and Journals. Another printer told me he might have sold a thousand Sermons, if he had them; I therefore gave two extempore discourses to be published.”¹⁴ With such fervent interest and the power of the press at his disposal, it was not a stretch for the preacher to imagine a broad influence that spanned the colonies.

Whitefield made strategic links with partners who could extend his reach as far as possible. William Seward, who functioned as Whitefield’s public relations manager, testified to the strategic thinking that went into Whitefield’s movement across the Atlantic world. Seward kept himself busy at Whitefield’s side, writing letters in one day “to Savannah, Charles Town, and Frederica, Virginia, Cape Fear, New Brunswick, and New York.”¹⁵ On the same day, he also “wrote paragraphs for the News, where our Brother was to preach and had preached.”¹⁶ In this way, Whitefield and his associates carefully cultivated the public persona responsible for catalyzing revivals across the British Empire.

The public relations machine had its intended effect. “He has put a new Face upon Religion, my Letters inform me, in some populous Cities and Parts of our neighbouring Continent,” declared the Charleston pastor, Josiah Smith, on March 26, 1740, alluding to an inter-colonial communication network focused on Whitefield. He strikingly attributed Whitefield with making sermons a “vendible Commodity.”¹⁷ That Smith, who was from Charleston, made these claims in a sermon he published in Boston was no less extraordinary. As leading Boston clergymen Benjamin Colman and William Cooper wrote in the preface, such words about a fellow preacher in the course of a sermon were “very unusual, or, perhaps, altogether new,” and yet they were warranted in the extraordinary season Whitefield had initiated.¹⁸

With his fame growing, the itinerant’s feel for imperial connections extended beyond the spiritual to the material. Not only did Whitefield bring English goods to win the good will of the colonists in Georgia on his first American trip, but on his second trip he brought similar products to sell in Philadelphia. Beginning in November 1739, Whitefield posted regular notices in The Pennsylvania Gazette, advertising items ranging from candlesticks to pistol powder to sewing silk.¹⁹ No doubt leaning on help from his publisher friend Benjamin Franklin, Whitefield also bolstered his influence by notices such as this one, which appeared in the aforementioned issue of the Gazette:

Last Week the Rev. Mr Whitefield landed from London at Lewes-Town in Sussex County, where he preached; and arrived in this City on Friday Night; on Sunday, and every Day since he has preach’d in the Church: And on Monday he designs (God willing) to set out for New-York, and return hither the Week after, and then proceed by Land thro’ Maryland, Virginia and Carolina to Georgia.

Through the report of inter-colonial travels like this one, readers in Philadelphia could imagine a colonial society knit together by Whitefield’s itinerant ministry. That such a report was followed in the next paragraph of the Gazette by news of military unrest indicates a high level of interest in news about the empire at large:

We hear from Charles-town in South Carolina, that a Body of Angola Negroes rose upon the Country lately, plunder’d a Store at Stono of a Quantity of Arms and Ammunition, and murder’d 21 white People, Men, Women and Children before they were suppress’d: That 47 of the Rebels were executed, some gibbeted and the Heads of others fix’d on Poles in different Parts, for a Terror to the rest.

The editorial choice to juxtapose Whitefield’s colonial itinerancy with slave insurrection in South Carolina gives us a picture of how the revival preaching of Whitefield fit into the colonial landscape. They belonged together under the broad yet specific category of imperial developments.

Itinerating an Empire at War

The expansion of Britain’s imperial effort resulted in nearly ceaseless military confrontations with competing nations. Sir John Seeley remarked that war was the “characteristic feature” of this period.²⁰ Paul Langford called the eighteenth century the “age of war.”²¹ H. V. Boven observed that “from 1739 the frequency of war was such that periods of peace could almost be regarded as exceptions to the wartime norm.”²²

However, studies of the Great Awakening have paid scant attention to the relationship between spiritual revival and religious, as well as imperial, warfare. If we grant that more than youthful idealism lay behind Whitefield’s early interest in Georgia and acknowledge the possibility that he deployed a deliberate southern imperial strategy, then fresh lines of inquiry emerge. Despite the natural pull of New England for someone like Whitefield and the earnest invitations from Massachusetts ministers like Benjamin Colman and Jonathan Edwards as early as November 1739, Whitefield tarried. As we have already seen, rather than head north, he spent the first fifteen months of his first two American trips mostly traveling around the southern part of America. He did finally arrive in Boston in the fall of 1740 for a much celebrated visit. Before he ventured to the logical colonial venue for his ministry, however, he spent a great deal of time lingering in the South and setting up a colonial base of operations in Georgia. In these actions there are strong hints of self-consciousness about empire driving his travel plans. Far from oblivious to the Spanish threat, Whitefield well understood the strategic position of the southern frontier, implying that since “Georgia is a Frontier Colony, and stands as a Barrier to all the other English Provinces,” his work on the Georgia orphanage played a key strategic role in the cause of empire.²³

An example of Whitefield’s involvement on the forefront of this colonial frontier was his experience during the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1748), which smoldered dangerously close to his orphanage initiative in Georgia. With bluster that bordered on recklessness, Whitefield sounded as if he welcomed Spanish invasion of Georgia. While on a preaching tour through Scotland, he wrote: “The place where [the Spaniards] landed, is about one hundred miles to the southward of the Orphan-house: and, supposing it should be taken, I do not repent the erecting of it, because the advantages that have flowed already from it, as appears from my accounts, have abundantly answered the pains and expense it has cost.” Even if the orphanage were lost at this point, Whitefield declared he was satisfied with its impact. He sounded oddly oblivious to the human costs, appearing to prioritize the successes of fundraising activities on its behalf. For the battle-hardened revivalist, the threat of Spanish soldiers on orphanage grounds paled in comparison to the benefits he had already extracted from his Georgia enterprise. His confidence also derived from a belief that Georgia was absolutely essential for the British imperial cause, so much so that “it is reasonable to believe that [all the other English provinces] will unite in its defence and protection.”²⁴

When he wrote these words from Scotland, Whitefield was unaware that already two months prior, the residents of his Georgia orphanage—whom he frequently referred to as his “family”—had fled before the invading Spaniards who came down “like a flood.” Fearing the worst, James Habersham, Whitefield’s on-site deputy, rushed to evacuate children and personnel from the orphanage and stayed behind to salvage what supplies he might. Whitefield’s orphans-turned-refugees took shelter at John Bryan’s plantation in South Carolina, arriving at midnight on July 10 and remaining six weeks.²⁵ So dire did the situation become at one point that Habersham wrote desperately to Whitefield, “I know not whether I shall be ever able to write to you again.”²⁶ A little over a month later, a weary Habersham complained that God was “chastising us with whips” and “scouring us with scorpions.” He pined for Whitefield’s return—“Indeed I hope you are now in your passage to us. We cannot but expect you”—even as he held the orphanage together in Whitefield’s absence.²⁷ Far from setting sail for America, however, Whitefield had his hands full in Britain. While Habersham was contending with whips and scorpions in Georgia, Whitefield was putting out wild fires in Wales and Scotland. In May of the following year, Whitefield was still in England, with no definitive forecast for returning to America. Likely to Habersham’s growing exasperation, Whitefield described his plans for more “gospel-ramblings”: “After I have fought the Lord’s battles in Moorfields, these holidays, I think to take a tour into Cornwall and Wales, and, perhaps, to Ireland.”²⁸

To judge by only his travel itineraries and his deliberate choice of locations close to the centers of imperial conflict, Whitefield’s goal was nothing short of a total makeover of religious life across the British Empire. Yet much more than simple travel was involved, including his relationship with religious as well as political leaders. Whitefield was an ordained Anglican priest who made alliances across the Protestant and British world, exhibiting a catholic spirit unusual for his time. Unlike Wesley, who was “almost exclusively the poor man’s preacher,” Whitefield also welcomed every opportunity to consort with the rich and influential.²⁹ Back in England, he fostered friendship with the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon, who were “constant in their attendance upon his ministry.”³⁰ This relationship would provide numerous benefits for the remainder of his life. The countess, Selina Hastings (1707–1791), used her aristocratic privilege to support the evangelical cause. She earned the title of a “Mother in Israel” among evangelical preachers who jockeyed for position to earn her patronage.³¹ Whitefield used his connection with the countess to good effect, becoming her chaplain and turning to her for support during moments of intense opposition. In addition, many dukes, duchesses, and “even royalty itself, in the persons of William Augustus . . . and his brother Frederick, Prince of Wales, helped to swell some of Whitefield’s congregations.”³² Importantly for our purposes, Whitefield evinced by his relationship with aristocrats that his ministry was aimed at more than converting the masses. He was tirelessly casting about for a wider circle of influence.

Further displaying his ambitions, in Scotland Whitefield showed he was willing to risk the loss of his relationship with the Erskines for the sake of gaining a broader audience. In fact, there too he was careful to cultivate relationships with nobles and titled ladies so that he could boast of “Christian intimacy with persons of distinguished rank in Scotland.”³³

In the closing months of 1742, while safely ensconced in London, “in [his] winter quarters, preparing for a fresh campaign,” Whitefield surveyed the whole of British imperial territory.³⁴ He dispatched letters on a regular basis to Wales, Scotland, and New England. One such letter went to Boston, as he sought to comfort and strengthen his friend, Benjamin Colman, the influential Boston minister, by his impending return: “The confusion in New England has given me concern. . . . When I shall come to Boston, the Lord Jesus only knows. I believe it will not be long.”³⁵ Six days after writing Colman, Whitefield was planning the next step of his fresh campaign for Bethesda Orphanage by writing a letter to Gotthilf August Francke at Halle, Germany. “I should be glad to know how it is with your Orphan House”—Whitefield sought to establish a connection with the pietist work in Europe—“and whether you have any commands for Georgia.”³⁶ As busy as he was with myriad religious and political affairs in Britain, Whitefield did not lose sight of the ongoing importance of broader connections in the old as well as the new world.

The Tactical Theologian

Whitefield was an ordained Anglican priest who could make alliances with Scottish Presbyterians, New England Congregationalists, Philadelphia Quakers, and Moravian refugees in Georgia. He either had a knack for glossing over theological differences or a skill in negotiating his way through them. Historians have routinely assumed the former; this book argues the latter. Whitefield was admittedly not the most nuanced theologian, but neither was he a theological pushover. When he felt the stakes were high enough on certain doctrinal matters, he readily confronted even towering figures like John Wesley and Count Zinzendorf. With Wesley, he parried over predestination. From Zinzendorf, he was gratified to receive an “imperious censure” for teaching “the abominable doctrine of reprobation.”³⁷ And this is not to speak of several well-documented clashes with his Anglican superiors, such as Alexander Garden, the Commissary in Charleston, Edmund Gibson, the Bishop of London, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Secker.

A letter written to Whitefield in 1741 by one of his converts is instructive for how the sermonic themes of this gifted preacher moved beyond traditional ecclesiastical boundaries. Sixty-three-year-old Thomas Webb was a church clerk and tailor by trade in Bretforton, Worcestershire, who had spent much of his life duty-bound to his parish. Webb’s letter to the preacher detailed a model conversion for Whitefield, who proudly printed the entire letter in the August 14, 1739, entry of his Journals. Webb described what he heard from Whitefield as “a new language,” confessing, “though I remembered the letter of these doctrines, yet the spiritual sense thereof I was an utter stranger to.” Conscientious church clerk that he was, he “searched an old Exposition of the Catechism, the Church Articles, and Book of Homilies, which I found exactly to correspond with what I had heard you deliver.”³⁸ This observation was in keeping with Whitefield’s oft-repeated rejoinder to naysayers that he was merely preaching what Protestant orthodoxy had always taught, but had laid aside or forgotten in recent times.

To be sure, however, a forceful challenge to establishment norms permeated his sermons as well. When he preached “On Regeneration,” for example, Whitefield assailed common standards of membership in the Church of England. He lambasted the folly of assuming that everyone “baptized into Christ’s church” might be said “to be in Christ.” He pointed to the paramount importance of “an inward change and purity of heart” accompanying outward profession. By placing the accent on a conscious inward change, Whitefield defied an important church teaching on baptism found in Article 27 of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, which linked baptism with regeneration. Revival preachers worried that presuming regeneration obviated the need for spiritual alertness and discipline. As a corrective measure, Whitefield swung the pendulum in the other direction and denied any relationship between baptism and regeneration altogether. He placed the new birth decisively in the realm of individual experience apart from baptism. In so doing, Whitefield’s interpretation represented a significant downgrading of the church’s teaching on baptism—something that even his Puritan forebears had not attempted. Not content to attack Article 27, Whitefield in another sermon entitled “Marks of a True Conversion” went as far as to decry baptism as “a sorry rotten foundation.”³⁹

Though an ordained Anglican priest, Whitefield was reaching back to the Separatist argument of Henry Barrow, an English Puritan. Barrow, who was executed for his views in 1593, had opposed John Calvin’s indiscriminate practice in Geneva of receiving “the whole state, even al the profane and ignorant people into the bozome of the Church.”⁴⁰ Unlike the Separatists who abandoned the church, however, Whitefield seized the corrupt state of the church as an opportunity to fly headlong back into the church. By the mid-eighteenth century, Whitefield held that the danger of merely notional religious adherence spread by the state church had become so pervasive that it justified his evangelistic tours of parishes throughout Britain and the American colonies. Whitefield’s preaching of the new birth among professing Anglicans amounted to an audacious rebuke of their parish priests, calling the bluff on what many awakeners saw as superficial religion.

He ran further afoul of the established church in his sermon The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth in Christ Jesus when he described his insistence on new birth “as an infallible rule for every person of whatever denomination, age, degree or quality, to judge himself by.”⁴¹ This trans-denominational message was heard by many of his Anglican colleagues as another form of all-out assault on the Church of England. In this manner, Whitefield’s fast and furious travels placed contradictory impulses on display. He was an Anglican who preached a dissenting doctrine. At the same time, he traveled the breadth of the empire and sought to unite persons of all denominations. Rather than stake his claim on a single corner of the empire, he laid claim to all of it.

A key component that tied the content of Whitefield’s preaching to the shape of his travel was his ceaseless networking for causes not directly related to individual churches. These activities demonstrated that his aim was more than a religion of the heart. Whitefield embodied this aspect of his religion by supporting—and at times building—numerous orphanages, schools, and other institutions for the public good. Worth noting for our purposes is the fact that Whitefield’s institution building activity took place in the backwoods of Georgia, the countryside of Pennsylvania, the southern part of Bristol, and so on. So prominent was this entrepreneurial streak that Benjamin Franklin noticed and proposed they work together to build a colony in the Ohio territory.⁴² Given all of his activity, it might be said that Whitefield was one of the most creative empire builders of the early modern period.

A telling incident early in his career demonstrates this preference for far-flung networking over local religious efforts. In 1738, when the Board of Trustees of the Georgia colony charged him with the parish ministry at Savannah, it was an assignment he would utterly fail to fulfill, though not for lack of earnestness. The Trustees wanted him to erect a building for the church as soon as possible. To their consternation, however, he quickly got sidetracked into other projects. One of the first things he did early in 1740 was to break ground for his orphanage in the outskirts of Savannah. Not content with this work in Georgia, he agreed to purchase five thousand acres of land in Pennsylvania in order to build what he envisioned as “a school for negroes.”⁴³ Back in England, he purchased another five hundred acres of land in Kingswood to start a school for children of colliers. An interest in charity work and institution building outside the church had been present even while he was a student at Oxford, as evidenced by his interest in prison ministry.⁴⁴ And so while these other projects absorbed his attention, the plan for an Anglican church building in Savannah languished.⁴⁵

Previous studies have underappreciated the significance of these early institution-building efforts scattered across the Atlantic world, which testified to Whitefield’s strategic emphasis in diverse areas of empire. These projects also contradict the notion of Whitefield as a young anti-institutionalist who only in his later years saw the folly of his ways. Though by no means a comprehensively articulated vision, the imperial shape of his early labors is discernible in the ways he employed new birth preaching to spark entrepreneurial activity in various parts of British territory.

A tragic aspect of Whitefield’s career comes into focus when we follow his frantic institution-building activity, which had a number of regrettable developments. As we will see more fully in the next chapter, so invested did Whitefield become in the fledgling imperial project in Georgia that he changed course from his early criticism of slavery and lobbied for the introduction of slavery in the struggling colony. Nimble theological footwork that envisioned proselytizing enslaved Africans aside, this example of moral attrition serves to highlight the close competition between religious and imperial concerns in the Grand Itinerant’s ministry.

The Whitefield who exploited emerging imperial possibilities for new preaching opportunities, nonetheless, did not accept every aspect of empire without criticism. While attention to the imperial context appears to have heightened his concern for the strong evangelistic focus in his preaching, his message also conveyed a compelling critique of the state of empire. A prime example is Whitefield’s critique of wealth and worldly amusement amid his efforts to promote the new birth in the fiercely competitive marketplace of a growing empire. He made known to his listeners that the wealth and glamor of Charleston, bearing striking resemblance to London, grated on his pious sensibilities: “I question whether the court-end of London could exceed them in affected finery, gaiety of dress, and a deportment ill-becoming persons who have had such Divine judgments lately sent amongst them.”⁴⁶ For Whitefield, the divine judgment of imperial warfare served as a reminder that Charleston was not London. Rather than repeat the mistakes of London, a city like Charleston, exposed as it was on the fringe of empire, had an opportunity—and obligation—to carve out an improved Christian identity.

In Philadelphia, Whitefield’s deputy William Seward stirred controversy when he wrote in The Pennsylvania Gazette that “since Mr. Whitefield’s Preaching there, the Dancing-School and Concert-Room have been shut up, as inconsistent with the Doctrines of the Gospel.”⁴⁷ As publicist for Whitefield’s American tour, Seward routinely submitted his brief notices and summaries of the preaching sensation without much controversy. This time, however, a spokesman for the dancing school in Philadelphia took Seward to task for his spin on the facts. With a rejoinder in the following week’s paper, he accused Seward of misrepresentation, “as tho’ [Whitefield] had met with great Success among the better Sort of People in Pennsylvania, when at the same Time, to his great Mortification, he can’t but be sensible that he has been neglected by them.”⁴⁸ Thus a protracted battle commenced between Whitefield and some of the Philadelphia elite.

Benjamin Franklin himself joined the conflict on Whitefield’s side, using the pseudonym Obadiah Plainman and objecting vigorously to the unfortunate choice of words in “the better sort.” Marshaling the “New Whig” argument of authors like John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Franklin decried the elite condescension of wealthy Philadelphians who gathered among themselves in institutions like the dancing school.⁴⁹ In this light, it is apparent that a controversy over “innocent diversion” represented, more than fussy moralism, a critique of the wealthy elite in that city. Some might dismiss the controversy as curmudgeonly interference with harmless social entertainment. As Franklin knew, however, much more than an innocent form of amusement was at stake. The ensuing battle in the public square of colonial Philadelphia demonstrated the combustibility of Whitefield’s new birth theology and its potent critique of the social order. His message not only offered spiritual hope indiscriminately to all social classes, but it did so by attempting to level the playing field for all sorts throughout British society.

Beyond the New Birth

So far this section has explored the content of Whitefield’s new birth preaching, the imperial context in which he proclaimed that message, and the transatlantic ramifications of his empire-wide ministry. We saw the ways in which Whitefield’s confrontation with historical debates over theology and ecclesiology shaped his impact in society and empire. He preached a fiery religious message, but his was also a homiletical strategy focused on the growing edges of empire and responding to the challenges of identity in a constantly expanding and contested world. The progress of empire proved difficult to manage as religious controversies, military conflicts, and scientific discoveries piled on throughout the eighteenth century. Revival religion, and more specifically the hope of new birth, became one way to articulate British identity during this period. What Susan O’Brien has called “a transatlantic community of saints” also amounted—through the efforts of itinerant preaching, letter writing, and institution building—to a reimagined empire of Protestant Britons.⁵⁰

But to put empire at the center of Whitefield’s career also enables a charting of significant changes in his religious interests. In fact, a study of Whitefield’s early emphasis on the new birth prepares the way for a deeper understanding of developments in his later life. One of the untold stories of that life is the dramatic homiletical shifts that occurred in his later years. For all of his early energy advocating the new birth, Whitefield’s later years witnessed much less attention to regeneration in his public ministry. At the very least, he became less vocal about the new birth. This change must be understood in terms of the life cycle of a revival, which has an inevitable end.

And so it is appropriate to conclude this section with a reflection on the devolution of Whitefield’s new birth emphasis over the course of his career. His published Journals, which cover his life through the year 1741, contain forty-eight separate references to spiritual regeneration and the new birth. In volume one of his collected works with letters in the period 1735–1742, there are no less than sixteen references. Yet these high figures, indicative of Whitefield’s preoccupation with this particular doctrine, declined dramatically in the period after the peak of revival.⁵¹ For instance, in the second volume of his collected works, which covers the years 1742–1753, the new birth is mentioned in only two letters written in 1749. In the third volume, containing letters from the final period of his life, 1753–1770, there is not a single mention of either regeneration or the new birth. While any attempt to extrapolate from these numbers should proceed with caution, it is nevertheless reasonable to infer that in the years following revival fervor Whitefield’s other activities appear to have eclipsed new birth preaching. Having reckoned with the transitory nature of revival gains, Whitefield would turn his attention to encouraging imperial expansion, establishing networks to hold British identity together in the growing Atlantic world, and building institutions that embodied revivalistic ideals. At the very point where religious historians lose interest, Whitefield’s revival theology began developing the cultural sophistication necessary to make it useful to British imperial society. For this shift to happen, the new birth’s focus on personal interiority had to give way to broad-level interaction between a theology of renewal and a politics of empire.

When revival embers died down and Whitefield struggled to fan the flames of a movement beset by backsliders, his religious message evolved. Only by duly noting the emphatic focus on new birth preaching in the early phase of his ministry can we also appreciate the changes that occurred later. Though Whitefield never stopped preaching the gospel of new life, he tempered his sermons and recalibrated his strategy along the way. By the end of his life, he had become a fully invested builder of institutions, spending the last decade of his life trying to turn his orphanage in Georgia into a college and seminary of higher learning.

In an age of sweeping commercial and cultural changes, Whitefield presented old doctrines in new garb as he adapted to a period of enlightenment critique and imperial warfare. The combination of open philosophical inquiry and economic as well as political acquisitiveness created the very setting in which a post-Puritan like Whitefield could thrive.⁵² As he oversaw the power of new birth preaching to disrupt the social order, to remake individuals, and to reconcile individual piety with imperial expansion, what was once a Puritan dilemma between self and society became an evangelical opportunity.⁵³ His success shows the ways in which religious revivalism and empire building each informed the other during the period of the First Great Awakening.

Whitefield was not merely a subject of the British king but also a product of the British Empire. Whitefieldian revival rode the coattails of imperial expansion. With his help, religious practice and meaning imbued a sprawhng empire with a cogent sense of identity, or at least the possibility of one. To put it another way, the evangelical revivals may have helped anglicize British imperial outposts far more effectively than direct political pressure. Before John Wesley uttered the same saying, Whitefield declared, “The world is my parish.” He might more accurately have said, “The empire is my parish.” Whatever pious language Whitefield may have used to color over his frenetic activities, his actions reveal a wide-ranging ambition with pretentions for the whole empire. This section on Whitefield’s preaching has sought to uncover both the religious power and historical contingency of his new birth preaching in the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. To the decline of revival and to Whitefield’s improvisational work in consolidating religious gains throughout the empire we now turn.

The Decline of Revival

The revivals, like most things in life, faded over time. Before long, Whitefield’s preaching of the new birth, which once sparked the Great Awakening, gave way to the doldrums of ordinary life and institutional management. This later development is a neglected feature of the story due to the inordinate attention historians have given to the heyday of revival. Retrieving a fuller picture of the Great Awakening’s history in order to capture not only its climax but also its denouement is a fruitful historical endeavor. For if a single snapshot can reveal much that is intriguing, a series of pictures encompassing a longer story offers the possibility of uncovering larger trends, especially if they represent a sustained period from a variety of angles.

By listening to diverse voices, including naysayers, evangelical supporters, and Whitefield’s own perspective on the changing arc of revival, this next section documents the decline of enthusiastic religion, followed by another section that establishes a more direct alignment between the revival’s winding course and British empire building. To do so is to recognize that, however lasting the effects of the Great Awakening, the sharp downturn in religious intensity that followed also merits examination. To follow the course of revival has the potential to deepen our understanding of both religious and imperial forces at work in the British Atlantic world of the mid-eighteenth century. While subsequent chapters will probe Whitefield’s post-revival activities in the last two decades of his life, the remainder of this chapter will treat the period of transition in the 1740s and the immediate aftermath of the Great Awakening. As spiritual fervor waned during these years, Whitefield cast about for stronger moorings. Because he was a controversial public figure, many of his adversaries relished the crisis of religion that so quickly followed on the heels of those remarkable years of apparent revitalization. Listening closely to these critical voices will permit a clearer assessment of what happened after revival.

Whitefield’s relationship to the Anglican mission of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), and to one SPG cleric in particular, is a good place to begin an account of the revivalist after the revival. Despite Whitefield’s Anglican credentials, missionary priests of the SPG generally found him irksome. Established in 1701, the SPG arose out of the conviction that America offered not only political and commercial benefits but also obliged faithful Protestants to evangelistic witness among the natives. In contrast to Whitefield’s wide-ranging itinerancy, SPG missionaries settled where they ministered. In typical fashion, William Becket heeded the call to missionary work and in 1721 settled in Lewes, Sussex County, in Delaware, where he labored faithfully into the 1740s. His letterbook chronicles a life devoted to dutiful execution of his responsibilities as a missionary priest of the Church of England. Setting down his roots in a sparsely populated region, Becket was the sole spiritual authority for several scattered villages. “I must ride generally 40 or 50 miles every week, sometimes 60–70 miles in summer, else I cannot do the duties of this County,” he reported with a sense of pride to his superiors back home.⁵⁴ So arduous was this routine that “A Horse lasts me a year or 2, and a suit of cloths half a year.”⁵⁵ Judging by their repetition throughout a letterbook covering several decades, his requests for additional funding to meet the expenses of this demanding environment went largely unanswered. It was thankless work in a remote parish larger than anything seen back in England.

Yet Becket appears to have made good of a difficult situation. And others provided a good report of his work, including the Deputy Governor of Pennsylvania, Patrick Gordon, who described Becket as “a man of a sober good character likewise” in charge of “The Church of Lewestown & two other Churches or Chapels.”⁵⁶ The honeymoon between Becket and Gordon, however, did not last long. The governor managed to offend Becket with his meddling in ecclesiastical affairs when he gave dissenting ministers the authority to sign marriage licenses. Becket wrote to his superiors protesting this grave offense, citing that he “hath granted marriage licenses promiscuously to be lodged with us & the Presbyterian ministers, a thing never done before in this Government except only in the last year of Sr Wm Keith his immediate Predecessor when his fortune grew precarious & he was willing by any means to raise money.”⁵⁷ With deep investment in the social, religious, and political life of his colony, Becket was an active public leader. As such, he was sensitive to slights against Anglicanism and protective of his standing as the parish minister and guardian of theological orthodoxy. His turf protectiveness against the governor’s liberal policies reveals the complex nature of ecclesiastical politics and colonial identity during this time. On the one hand, Becket held fast to the distinctions and authority afforded him by his ordained office in the established church. He sought to do his part in upholding some semblance of order, which meant replicating the ways of Lambeth and Whitehall. On the other hand, the colonial context provided little of the familiar stability and advantage he may have expected as an Anglican priest.

In early 1738, Becket still saw the world through a British lens. He described the people of his parish as being “generally Professors of the Ch of England and . . . little inclined either to Bigotry, or Enthusiasm.”⁵⁸ Though there were dissenting parties, he was not too worried about their influence. In a revealing statement, he noted, “Quakerism decays strangely, even in this Province, the Nursery of it; only for want of Opposition. The Missionaries here are generally of Opinion, That let it alone & it will die of itself. We study to be quiet & mind our own Business.”⁵⁹ A year prior to Whitefield’s arrival in Lewes, Becket assured himself and others that he possessed an adequate strategy for dealing with religious enthusiasm. He was in for a great surprise.

Becket appears also to have developed a severe case of wanderlust by 1738, after years of grueling and repetitive work in Lewes. An appreciation of his relative geographical immobility is helpful for understanding the intensity of his contempt for Whitefield, which was influenced to some degree by envy. He requested an exchange with the SPG’s agent on Staten Island, the details of which he had worked out beforehand with the New York missionary, Brother Harris. He wrote an impassioned letter to the Society, describing the attraction of city life for a family man like himself as well as the eminent suitability of a rural parish for the aging Harris. Lewes was “generally poor” but the society’s salary would “well support a single person, as [Harris] is.” After years of being passed over for a raise, this was yet another attempt to let his needs be known. Besides, “as this is a very private Corner of the World, [Harris] desires to end his Days in Retirement, being now about the Age of Sixty.” He also assured the society that the people of Staten Island and their governor were agreeable to the exchange and eager for his services, “more especially because they want a Man of Learning to assist in the Education of their Sons.” Becket believed he could fill this void by a move to the city. The relative comfort and glamor of an urban context no doubt appealed to Becket as well, who observed that the parents of that place were “not only able but willing to be at the Expence of as good an Education as may be had for their Children.” It is possible he felt that his good education and strong pastoral skills were being underutilized in Lewes and wanted the opportunities available in a more densely populated setting like Staten Island. In concluding his letter, Becket appealed to the Society’s concern for learning and the common good. “If the Hon Society judges that this Affair will be of any Service to Learning & Rel; as well as to My Health & Interest”—Becket’s words turned almost to pleading—“I know they will grant the Prayer of my Petition.”⁶⁰

The following year, in the fall of 1739, Becket was still unhappily stationed in Lewes when the upstart itinerant preacher George Whitefield passed through his parish. In this celebrity priest, Becket perceived a rival more than an ally. He saw in Whitefield all that was wrong with religious enthusiasm and the frustrations of his own missionary work in a colonial setting. Though little is known about his time in Lewes, Whitefield began his second American tour by landing at this port town in October 1739 where he preached a few sermons before making the 120-mile trek by land to Philadelphia. Even in this short period, Whitefield managed to ruffle feathers, including Becket’s. In a letter of March 18, 1740, Becket offered perfunctory thanks for the published letters and journals Whitefield had sent him and quickly moved to a scathing critique of the itinerant’s ministry. Perhaps Becket sensed that the packet of books was not merely a sign of friendship but part of Whitefield’s aggressive strategy of preaching and printing to reach as wide an audience as possible. Among other things, he protested Whitefield’s “fathering of Adam’s sin upon us . . . damning of infants . . . accusing the mercy and justice of God by absolute Predestination . . . [and] inward feelings which are no evidence to any one (besides yourself) . . . and throw[ing] about you Hell and Damnation Fire and brimstone enough to have burnt a Wooden Frame.” So upset was this missionary priest of Lewes that by the end of the letter he ascribed to Whitefield “the highest impudence from a beardless Boy.” (He seems to have had second thoughts about an overly acerbic tone and later crossed out “from a beardless boy” in his letterbook.)⁶¹ Historians have recognized the powerful effects of Whitefield’s approach: “In a number of complex ways, Whitefield’s revival reshaped both the oral present and the printed past, and it did so on a scale hitherto undreamt of. His preaching was accompanied by printed accounts of its impact, published in both England and the colonies.”⁶² By coordinating his preaching appearances with his published accounts, Whitefield sought to broaden his impact. Becket had no desire to aid and abet the evangelist’s schemes.

Writing to Whitefield apparently put Becket in an apoplectic mood and he took a break in his letterbook to sketch out a “recipe to make a Methodist.” It seems likely that he was thinking specifically of Whitefield as he called for “‘two tablespoons of impudence’ to a concoction that also included ‘the tongue and teeth of a rattlesnake’ along with ‘the heart and gall of a Pharisee.’”⁶³ Becket was furious with Whitefield for consorting with the very Presbyterians he reviled and for wreaking havoc on the decades of work he had poured with great sacrifice into Lewes. In his view, the revivalist “hath done more mischief in America by reviling the Clergy, & misrepresenting Xanity than all the Dissenters put together,” he wrote to his superiors the following March. Shedding greater light on Becket’s situation not only helps us understand his fury but also the broader impact of Whitefield’s itinerant ministry on existing conditions in the American colonies.

Yet, by 1741, Whitefield’s brand of religious enthusiasm had faded as suddenly as it swept the area. Although schismatic factions persisted, it appears Becket soon regained control of his parish. His church services were once again well-attended, with overflow services happening outside “under the green trees” in summertime.⁶⁴ On September 26, 1742, he wrote a routine report to his SPG superiors that likely contained some embellishments but also depicted the ephemeral state of Whitefieldian revival:

I have the pleasure to acqt you now, yt Enthusiasm abates, as fast as it once increased here. Mr. Whitefield & followers have recanted, some of them the most considerable in Print. And the truth is, your Missionaries have conquer’d & convinced them, not so much by Opposition, as by Patience and by Studying to be quiet & to mind their own Business.⁶⁵

Two things about his remarks are worth noting: the timing and the mode of the alleged abatement. In the fall of 1742, Whitefield was back in England embroiled in theological controversy with the Wesleys, traveling to Scotland, and laying the groundwork for the Calvinistic Methodist Association for which he would become the inaugural moderator in the following year. In other words, at the very height of the revival years, those revival gains in other parts of the empire were already vanishing. Furthermore, it is striking that Becket should point out the use of print in “recanting” the advances made by Whitefield and his followers. The very tools Whitefield so creatively used were being used against him.

Thanks to Becket’s letterbook, the situation in Lewes reminds us of the limits of traveling itinerants like Whitefield who passed through towns offering a new and exhilarating message of religious vibrancy but rarely lingered long enough to see the established fruits of their labor. Through little more than “patience and by studying to be quiet,” but also by the sheer weight of enduring presence, missionaries of the Anglican Church successfully resisted and in some cases quelled the revivals.

Lewes presents, moreover, a lesson in contrasts. Unlike nearby Philadelphia, Boston, or even Savannah, which held strategic value for Whitefield’s burgeoning imperial work and which received his concentrated attention, there were many other places that fell by the wayside in the afterglow of revival. Inasmuch as the awakenings presented the opportunity of an inter-colonial movement, for Whitefield it was the bigger imperial picture that received his full attention. From his earliest period in America, he demonstrated this preference for a transatlantic consolidation of evangelical revivalism. Any attempt to view Whitefield’s influence on only one side of the Atlantic fails because he had a markedly bilateral strategy when it came to his itinerancy and institution building activities.

Far from a lone voice in the wilderness, Becket provides evidence for the kind of vehement opposition Whitefield faced. When Whitefield returned to America in August 1744, the publication of anti-Whitefieldian literature had become a burgeoning industry. Penned by a growing coalition of parish ministers as well as college professors and presidents, the attacks on Whitefield ranged from defamation of his personal character to charges of doctrinal negligence and cultural nescience.⁶⁶ By the mid-1740s, some nonconformists in New England tried to dismiss Whitefield’s brand of revival religion by referring to it as “imported Divinity.”⁶⁷ The fact that these British colonists objected to the perceived British “importation” of religion (in much the same way that Scottish Presbyterians had heaped scorn on Whitefield’s ties to the corrupt Church of England) provides evidence of an inchoate sense of American differentness that was already forming in the early 1740s. In his peculiarly bellicose way, Whitefield labored to hold together a fragmenting British imperial identity. What appears on the one hand as a scattershot approach to his travels in preaching, emerges upon deeper inspection as an intentionally broad vision and strategy. The elusive nature of lasting and widespread revival, in other words, ought not to detract from the more focused goal of a distinctly British vision rooted in Protestant religious vitality. An appreciation of Whitefield’s imperial-minded thinking provides the groundwork for apprehending the scale of not only the high aspirations but also the deep disappointments of his imperial hopes in the mid-eighteenth century. The decline of enthusiasm is just as much a part of the story of the Great Awakening and Whitefield’s part as its most well-known champion.

Not only anti-revivalists but also radical revivalists hampered the revival’s momentum. During Whitefield’s time away from America between 1741 and 1744, there were several high-profile incidents that caused embarrassment to the revivalists, discrediting the awakenings in the eyes of many.⁶⁸ A notable example can be found in the life of Hugh Bryan, a wealthy planter in South Carolina who converted under Whitefield’s preaching ministry in June 1740. Bryan’s new religious convictions soon became a source of consternation for his neighbors in South Carolina when he combined prophetic tirades against immoral settler behavior with a paternalistic rhetoric of sympathy toward slaves. Two years later, when Bryan, who had been growing increasingly unstable, attempted to part a river by smiting it with a stick and nearly drowned while trying to cross the unresponsive river, his neighbors took full advantage of the opportunity to put him in his place.⁶⁹

A year later, on March 6, 1743, a radical revivalist named James Davenport, whose erratic behavior had for some time worried his fellow revivalists, created a bonfire of religious protest in New London, Connecticut. At his instigation, participants hurled not only books but items of clothing they had torn away from persons in their midst. Adding insult to the injury of Davenport’s bonfire, Andrew Croswell, a Harvard graduate and Connecticut pastor, called for separation from existing churches, thereby throwing down a gauntlet that would be hard to take back.⁷⁰ In his enthusiasm, Croswell began criticizing several prominent moderates—including Eleazar Wheelock, missionary and college founder in New Hampshire, and Thomas Foxcroft, a New Light pastor and defender of Whitefield in Boston. When critics accused Croswell of saying “where a Minister and his People are at Peace, Satan is at the Head of it,” he denied saying it while simultaneously declaring, “There seems too much Truth in the Remark.”⁷¹ Such outbursts roused a few but proved unpalatable for most enthusiasts. In these ways, it was not only the opposition of anti-revivalists but also the radicalism of some pro-revivalists that led to the stifling of revival fires.

Moderate critics also began to express qualms about the Awakening’s tendency toward extremism. A few weeks before Whitefield landed on American soil for his third tour, Boston pro-revivalist Thomas Foxcroft penned a letter to Samuel Philips on October 10, 1744, defending the Grand Itinerant, though not without a fair amount of equivocation. He acknowledged that Whitefield “may not always have so happily expressed himself, with that nice judgment and care of exact distinction between different cases, which it were to be wished he had.” As best as he could, Foxcroft attempted to salvage what was possible from the publication of Whitefield’s Journals. He blamed “the slips of a young pen” and admitted that “he has sometimes been greatly injudicious in the Choice of his Phrases . . . spoken in terms abundantly too strong.” Because of Whitefield’s frequent travels, which meant he was often “writing in haste and as it were extempore,” Foxcroft requested “charity which covereth a multitude of sins.”⁷² He might as well have issued a public apology on behalf of Whitefield.

By 1745, even the stalwart Benjamin Colman had wearied of Whitefield’s antics. In a draft of a letter to Whitefield, he apologized for an earlier indiscretion, in all probability referring to some strong expression of doubt or criticism toward the itinerant: “if there was any thing too sudden, severe, suspicious or judging in mine to you, I retract & ask pardon for it.”⁷³ Yet if Colman needed to patch up relations with Whitefield, that task was even more urgent with ministers close to home. With the revivals rapidly becoming a distant memory, Colman did not have the luxury like Whitefield of setting sail for a new destination. Instead, he had to contend with the residual effects of division and a bitter partisan spirit. He vented to Solomon Wiliams, “You will bewail the Spirit of Wrath, Bitterness, & Contention, Scorn & Division, with wch our Papers & Prints here are overflowing from week to week.” He expressed relief that Whitefield himself “seems to grow more & more sensible of the Evil Spirit of Alienation and Animosity among us & the wrath of our Ministers.” Such a sentiment coming from one of Whitefield’s staunchest allies in Boston gives some indication of the dire straits in which revivalists found themselves at this late stage of the Awakening. Notwithstanding the challenges he faced in New England, Whitefield, who had only recently returned from England, was preoccupied with thoughts of Georgia, according to a leery Colman: “He speaks of hastening toward Georgia and was hesitating last week whether directly by water.” While acknowledging Whitefield’s orphanage there as a worthy charitable effort, Colman also expressed doubts about its broader utility, wondering, “how the house will answer the expence in benefits to the church and state, is a matter of doubtful event in my dark mind.”⁷⁴ To judge from Colman’s concerns about whirling controversies and philanthropic distractions, there was a very real sense that the revival movement was coming apart at the seams.

Thus when Whitefield returned to America in the fall of 1744, there was no hero’s welcome, no rabble of fawning fans. The resounding positive press he enjoyed only a few years prior had weakened to a barely perceptible whisper. To make matters worse, he suffered a serious illness during the sea voyage that left him bedridden for the first few weeks of his third American visit. During this period, much of the blame for the abatement of revival also fell on Whitefield and the publication of his Journals. The criticisms so stung the itinerant that in 1756 he would issue a revised version with some of the most controversial parts excised. Until then, however, Whitefield had to live with the consequences of his rash, immodest words.

In truth, the dissemination of Whitefield’s Journals flummoxed many of his friends even as they roused the opposition. Though Whitefield insisted that they were published prematurely without his consent, he regularly sent copies to friend and foe alike on both sides of the Atlantic. Unusual for their self-conscious disclosures and self-aggrandizing details, the Journals left an indelible imprint on Whitefield’s public image. For instance, when he drew parallels between the circumstances of his birth in an inn and Jesus’s birth in a manger, he elicited ridicule rather than awe or admiration. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that the outcry against the Journals constrained Whitefield’s writing and publishing activity for much of the rest of his career. The fact that he published so little subsequent to the Journals represents not only a tactical shift but a profound change in his overall approach to his transatlantic work. Instead of aiming for large-scale impact through personal missives, he would use isolated and incremental pieces of communication. Though he never quite ceased being the inveterate self-promoter, he began much more to rally attention not around himself but rather around British imperial concerns.

Print coming from Whitefield himself was not the only evidence for the decline of revivals; the magazines that had served to promote revival were also going out of business. The Christian History published weekly stories about the revivals in a transatlantic market over the course of two years, from March 1743 to February 1745. As a compilation of the most riveting accounts culled from across the British Empire, the magazine sought to inform, promote, and shape the revivals. It featured some of the most prominent revivalists, such as Tennent and Whitefield, but also shared news of lesser known preachers in remote places, such as James Robe in Kilsyth, Scotland. Readers in New England learned of similar revivals affecting communities across the Atlantic. By presenting the revivals as an empire-wide phenomenon, the Christian History presented a new way of looking at the world, which those who experienced the revivals in turn had the opportunity to refashion.

Despite its ambitious goal of introducing a new hermeneutic of revival that helped participants reshape their world, the publication came to an abrupt end during the early part of 1745.⁷⁵ Though declining interest and plummeting sales may be the most obvious reasons, it appears that Thomas Prince Jr. also had trouble finding current stories of revival. Evincing scarcity of new materials, the last two months of the Christian History (in January–February 1745) presented little more than rehashed narratives of Whitefield’s ministry from 1740 and 1741. In the last section of the final issue, there was the hope of new issues based on fresh stories: “it is propos’d to publish [new narratives daily expected] in intire Pieces of about three Sheets once a Quarter at 12d New Tenor; and those who would encourage their Publication are desired to send their Names to Kneeland & Green in Queen-street.”⁷⁶ It appears new materials were difficult to attain. That no further issues were published is not surprising given what we know about the general lessening of revival episodes after the mid-1740s. It is reasonable to surmise that the suspension of the Christian History resulted from the decline of actual incidents and, therefore, a diminishing reportage of revival.

On the other side of their mountaintop experiences, Whitefield and his fellow revivalists had to contend with the challenge of maintaining a revival movement that was spread thin across the Atlantic world. Whitefield spent the first half of the decade shutthng from New England to the American South to the English countryside. He traveled both east and west of London, journeyed to Wales, and made two trips to Scotland. After a three-year tour around Britain, Whitefield returned to America in the middle of 1744 only to resume his fast-paced travels through the American colonies. It is as if he believed that by his furious pace he could keep the flame of transatlantic revivals burning all by himself.

An argument for the downward turn of the Great Awakening by the mid-1740s is persuasive in the end because its most prominent proponents said as much. Major pro-revivalists like Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Prince, and Gilbert Tennent all declared the revivals to be over in the mid-1740s. Though their precise dating varied, there was unanimity in their declaration about the end of revival. By the middle of the decade, numerous revival preachers including Edwards, Colman, and Whitefield himself were speaking and writing about the late great and glorious work of God, relinquishing the season of revival to the past.⁷⁷ One historian has argued that “as early as 1746, no semblance of an extensive, uniform, intercolonial revival could any longer be found.”⁷⁸ In that year, Prince was found once again writing about the “Greatness of that Salvation God has given us,” by which he meant not religious revival but military victory. Gilbert Tennent could pronounce in 1749 that “the Church is now in its ordinary State.” In short, the late revivals appeared to have been thoroughly “conquered”—to use William Becket’s words—in areas where they had only recently spread like wildfire.

Religious Revival and Imperial War

In a century filled with war, the decade of the 1740s had more than its share of military conflicts. During the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748) in Europe and King George’s War (1744–1748) in America, Britain and France faced off in a number of battles across the Atlantic world. Compounding this picture was the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1748), a conflict with Spain. War came to the home front as well. With Jacobite aspirations to reclaim the British throne, Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, landed with an invading force in Scotland in 1745. His defeat and a decisive victory for Hanoverian reign at Culloden in the Scottish Highlands provided sorely needed encouragement for beleaguered Britons across the Atlantic world.

Meanwhile, back in America, Colonel William Pepperell called on his preacher friend Whitefield to help raise troops for the expedition against French Cape Breton in present-day Canada. Though Whitefield balked at first, he later confided in a letter that “Providence seemed to force me into it.”⁷⁹ After sleeping on the matter, he issued the motto, “Nil desperandum Christo duce” (no need to fear with Christ as leader) and preached on the importance of national duty at such a critical juncture.⁸⁰ Whitefield mingled political and spiritual efforts in order to bolster both and in the process cast his lot with the empire. The eventual capture of Louisbourg, capital of the French colony of Île-Royal, further helped rally British patriotism among provincials in America. Amid the tumult and triumph, Whitefield got his first taste of mixing war with religion. It would certainly not be his last.

In fact, the relationship between imperial war and revival religion became increasingly complicated in the aftermath of the Great Awakening. One common view has been that worries over an impending war superseded the religious concerns that had helped to enflame revival.⁸¹ Far from seeing war as a distraction to religious concerns, however, Whitefield capitalized on the conditions of fear and uncertainty produced by war to reassert his religious message. Furthermore, he saw the opportunity for war and religion to be allied around the shared cause of British Protestantism. In a 1747 letter to Wesley, he credited military threats with extraordinary yields in religious awakening: “I rejoice to find that the Rebellion has been over-ruled for the awakening of many souls. Our Lord generally builds His temple in troublesome times.”⁸² Whitefield came to see that, rather than displacing religious revivals, the imperial wars were a means of catalyzing a new wave of revivals.

In contrast, Wesley was convinced that where the tide of war dominated, the flood of revival must correspondingly fade.⁸³ Along these lines, the methodist leader lamented, “wherever war breaks out, God is forgotten, if He be not set at open defiance. What a glorious work of God was at Cambuslang and Kilsyth from 1740 to 1744! But the war that followed tore it all up by the roots and left scarce any trace of it behind.”⁸⁴ On the other hand, revivalists like Samuel Davies and George Whitefield “were expressing with much less reservation the necessity” of war.⁸⁵ Indeed, there were moments when Whitefield, in direct contradiction to Wesley, equated the cause of religion with that of the British Empire. In this view, military skirmishes with Catholic and heathen forces on the outskirts of colonial settlements did not supplant revivals as the object of evangelical passion; they supplied new fuel for religious fervor.

What Wesley described as two antithetical forces were viewed as mutually reinforcing, allied influences by ministers such as Whitefield, Davies, and Thomas Prince, a Boston minister and popularizer of revival news. Prince’s “The Salvation of God in 1746” and Whitefield’s Philadelphia sermon, “Britain’s Mercies, Britain’s Duties” (also preached in 1746), provide compelling evidence for this evangelical conflation of war and religion. To celebrate news of British victory in Culloden and Louisbourg in 1746, evangelical ministers preached sermons attributing victory to God’s providential care. While such sermons might provide evidence that war had pushed revival aside as the focal point of New Light ministers, there is another possible interpretation. Rather than causing religious concerns to fade, war provided another venue for promoting religious vitality and highlighting the outpouring of God’s Spirit into the lives of British subjects. Without denying the fact of revival’s decline, it is possible to understand the revivalists’ use of war as a means of maintaining, or salvaging, revival gains.

Thomas Prince reflected this way of thinking when he criticized those who viewed war through a non-providential lens: “In short, they act too much like Atheists who view these Things as a meer Piece of News, or the meer Operations of created Causes, to please their vain Curiosity, and don’t religiously behold them as the Works of God in Providence: And they don’t act like Christians who don’t in the Exercise of Faith behold them as the Providential Works of our exalted Saviour in the Rule of the World.”⁸⁶ Rather than allow war to usurp the place of religion, Prince called for a religious interpretation of the military events overtaking his world. Though Prince and Whitefield proclaimed the same basic message, a close reading of both sermons serves the purpose of demonstrating that Whitefield’s wartime rhetoric outhned a broader Protestant evangelical message tying the future of revival with that of empire.

This linkage of war and religion explains the long history lesson Prince provided throughout his thanksgiving sermon, where he recounted the tumultuous history of Catholic antagonism that characterized much of the previous century. In that recitation, he began with Charles I’s marriage to a “Spanish Papist” in 1623, brought the story to a crescendo with the revolution of 1688, and reminded hearers of the recent French invasion of English soil in the winter of 1745. The consistent thread throughout this rehearsal of history was the threat to the “Protestant Interest” posed by the forces of Catholic tyranny. At stake, in Prince’s view, was the very survival of British Protestant culture. Should the unthinkable happen and a Jacobite insurrection prove successful, “it is to be feared that upon their Army’s seizing London, He or his Regent would apprehend it necessary to employ his Popish barbarous Highlanders and other numerous Papists thro’ the Nation, at once to massacre all the chief Friends of the Hanover Succession, if not of the Protestant Party in the City and Kingdom.” As Prince saw it, the consequences of Catholic victory over Protestant Britain would be catastrophic, for “As in such a horrible Scene as this, the City of London wou’d run down with Blood; so all the immense Treasures of the Protestants therein wou’d be suddenly seized.” The destruction levied would not be limited to the mother country, as “Cruel Papists would quickly fill the British Colonies, seize our Estates, abuse our Wives and Daughters, and barbarously murder us.” Geo-political implications would reverberate to the rest of Europe as well, and even “Holland wou’d be suddenly overwhelmed by them, and the reformed Interest in other Parts of Europe soon follow the fate of Great Britain.”⁸⁷

With a heightened sense of what was at stake during the mid-1740s in the aftermath of revival, we can better appreciate the highly aspirational character of Whitefield’s 1746 thanksgiving sermon preached in Philadelphia. On August 24 Whitefield preached one of his most famous sermons; he spoke to an audience in Philadelphia, but his thoughts were with events near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. Good news of national salvation spread throughout the empire with the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s forces at the Battle of Culloden. In part to quell suspicions of Methodist disloyalty to the crown, but also in order to resuscitate a waning revival, Whitefield spoke of “Britain’s Mercies and Britain’s Duty” in a sermon that expounded a dual theme, describing the unmerited favor of divine rescue (mercies) and emphasizing the need for renewed religious attentiveness (duty).⁸⁸

Whitefield took pains to connect Britain’s salvation with America’s well-being. He proclaimed, “if the Lord had not been on our side, Great Britain, not to say America, would, in a few weeks or months have been an Akeldama, a field of blood [Acts 1:19].” By evoking the site of Judas Iscariot’s death, Whitefield warned his audience against both spiritual perfidy and political treason. The consequences he warned of, moreover, would be far-reaching, leading to economic, social, and military calamities. In the course of his sermon, he hypothesized “that the sinking of the national debt,” the “rending away the funded property of the people,” and “the dissolution of the present happy union between the two kingdoms” would all have been the “immediate consequences of [the Young Pretender’s] success.”⁸⁹

The sermon presented more than high-sounding triumphalism. Whitefield took the opportunity to point out grave failures on the part of his Christian audience. He contrasted the mercy of God and the stubbornness of the people, lamenting “that as God has not dealt so bountifully with any people as with us, so no nation under heaven has dealt more ungratefully with him.”⁹⁰ To make his point, Whitefield issued some of the harshest words found in any of his sermons, combining lament with accusation: “We have played the harlot against God, both in regard to principles and practices.” After quoting a litany of prophetic verses, he declared, “We have crucified the Son of God afresh and put him to an open shame.”⁹¹

One can only imagine how his words affected the mood of his hearers, but we can be sure about their intended effect. Though lacking poetic subtlety, Whitefield sought to lead hearers to dramatic heights as well as desperate lows. A walloping barrage of condemnations followed a glorious crescendo of triumph. In the middle of 1746, Whitefield knew exactly what he was doing. He endeavored to reap spiritual benefit out of imperial events. Citing the victory at Culloden, he pleaded with his hearers, “But, O let our rejoicing be in the Lord and run in a religious channel.”⁹² He called on the colonists in Philadelphia to stand in contrast to “those ungrateful Israelites, who are branded in the book of God,” and to live instead in a manner worthy of the mercies bestowed upon them. He wanted nothing less than “a national Reformation,” lest they be struck with the blows of “other arrows in [God’s] quiver.”⁹³ Whitefield’s jeremiad was not perfunctory, but rather filled with pathos and marked by a sense of urgency. He exhibited keen political and religious sensibilities about the times in which he lived.

The prophetic, even apocalyptic, tone of both Prince and Whitefield, with their dire warnings of local as well as international consequences, provides an apt reminder of the religious dimension of imperial wars. The transatlantic revival networks, developed only shortly before, meant that French incursions into Canada, Spanish fortifications in Florida, and Jacobite insurrection against Scotland all held spiritual significance. There was the potential for a domino effect that could send an international Protestant edifice careening out of control. In this way, the imperial wars were not a distraction or a displacement of the religious stirrings of the Great Awakening. If anything might be said of the connection between war and revival, it may be that imperial battles upped the ante for religion. Despite their volatile nature, with capacity for rapid decline as much as sudden upsurge, the awakenings also provided a common, empire-wide frame of reference for experiential religion.

Conclusion

For religious enthusiasts swept off their feet by the awakenings, subsequent years required coming to grips with a multitude of post-revival disappointments in order to forge a new way forward. This process was not merely one of consolation but also one of consolidation and damage containment. It did not happen in a vacuum but rather in the thicket of a social and political milieu in flux. Though the Great Awakening has been amply documented in primary sources, studies have largely neglected the years that followed revival. Four decades ago, Nathan Hatch criticized the lack of serious inquiry into what happened after the height of the revivals: “while recent scholarship has focused on the exultant hopes that characterized the Awakening, it has conspicuously avoided the same careful analysis of New Light thought in the years of the revival’s demise.”⁹⁴ Hatch’s book focused on the convergence of religious and revolutionary ideologies, but his backgrounding of the story in the revivals took seriously the abiding influences, however scattered, of revival experiences. In discussing the different explanatory courses various pastors and theologians took, Hatch described the fertile soil of a new “civil millennialism” that presented an amalgamation of the theological with the political. Without necessarily acceding to a cynical view of Whitefield’s tactical shifts, it is possible at the very least to notice the famous preacher’s growing attention to geopolitical developments, especially as they impinged on the religious liberty and outlook of Britons. As we will see in the next chapter, Whitefield began in the 1750s to scan the horizon with an increasingly watchful eye for imperial warfare and especially Catholic incursions.

Some historians have pointed to Whitefield’s perseverance in itinerant preaching as a sign of revival’s persistence: “While other itinerant preachers settled down to tend local parishes, Whitefield continued to travel and preach to vast crowds as if the revival was still going. As far as Whitefield was concerned, the revival never really ended.”⁹⁵ This characterization is not entirely accurate, however, as a closer examination of Whitefield’s efforts in the last two decades of his life will demonstrate. Not only did Whitefield draw smaller crowds, he faced stiffening, at times violent, resistance to his preaching. Confronted with these changing realities, the stubborn preacher began employing new tactics. Whether he was riding on the coattails of British imperialism or fighting on the frontiers of British liberty, one thing is clear: Whitefield exhibited no qualms about mixing religion and politics in order to counter the decline of revival fervor.

In part this admixture of religion and empire proved so alluring because each needed the other. More to the point, religion was not the only force needing a jump start; imperial politics had much to gain from the support of religious rhetoric. Notwithstanding the fast pace of territorial expansion during this period, British ascendancy remained contested and uneven. One historian attempted to debunk notions of the relative stability of British political life during the reign of George II, detecting instead cracks in the facade: “It is possible to argue . . . that the surface calm of political life for much of the final years of George II’s reign is potentially very misleading. One of the most important themes in political life in this period was a sense of mounting vulnerability to French international ambition and military power.”⁹⁶ Another historian described a pervasive British Protestant worry over “the prospect in the first half of the eighteenth century of a Catholic monarchy being restored in Britain by force, together with recurrent wars with Catholic states.”⁹⁷ Not only was there “a vast superstructure of prejudice” against all things Catholic and foreign, there was also a crying need to fill in the meaning of British identity with content more substantial than what mere English bluster had to offer.⁹⁸

External threats dovetailed with internal weaknesses, much more visible in hindsight but no less influential on British imperial life in the mid-eighteenth century. Because George II was born before the Glorious Revolution, he may have been conscious of a more tenuous hold on the crown. If British weakness indeed rose “from a failure of nerve and from a lack of dynastic confidence and continuity,” as one historian has noted, the mismatch created by imperial growth and dynastic insecurity amounted to a serious vulnerability. Compounding these issues were “the pressures and politics of space,” as the growing royal family spread out through London in rival centers like Leicester House and Carlton House due to the cramped quarters of the court.⁹⁹ The royal family’s politics of space, one might well imagine, paralleled the larger dynamic of territorial expansion that attended imperial growth. Protestant dissidents, methodists, and evangelicals, as they came to be called, were also scattering at this time of increasing political and geographical outreach. That their religious hopes mixed with imperial realities on the ground and overseas does not come as a surprise.

Against the backdrop of a congested metropole, a capacious periphery gave Whitefield and his boundless energy plenty of room to maneuver. Calling Whitefield “an international phenomenon,” Harry Stout observed that “London was the center of commerce and exporter of culture throughout the British Empire” from where he launched his international revival movement.¹⁰⁰ Whitefield’s frequent travels throughout England, Scotland, and the North American colonies enabled the famous preacher to weave together a network of likeminded religious persons. In this scheme, his itinerancy stands out as a vital point of connection for regions otherwise riddled by persistent differences. The tension becomes even more interesting when we view Whitefield’s preaching routes as a means of exploring and reinforcing the bounds of imperial identity in a way that united religious and political perspectives. As he mediated these cultural and geographical boundaries, the evangelical leader found himself increasingly entangled in the worldly affairs of the British Empire, including moral quagmires that compromised his religious calling.

1. Richard F. Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1979); Nash, The Urban Crucible; Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried.” More recently, we have seen scholarly treatments that have attempted a broader assessment of the revivals as representing the vital interaction of transatlantic factors; notable examples include Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism; Kidd, The Great Awakening; Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening.

2. Benjamin Franklin is another eighteenth-century figure who traveled broadly and enjoyed extensive international connections, but his forays across the Atlantic began after Whitefield’s and rose to a significant level in the latter half of the century.

3. Writing in 1745, as war on several fronts raged, Wesley expressed only the most gloomy thoughts on war: “Our armies broken in pieces; and thousands of our men either killed on the spot, or made prisoners in one day. Nor is this all. We have now war at our own doors; our own countrymen turning their swords against their brethren.” From “A Word in Season: Or, Advice to an Englishman,” in John Wesley, The Works of the Reverend John Wesley: First American Complete and Standard Edition (New York: J. Emory and B. Waugh, 1831), 365. See also S. W. Rankin, “Wesley and War: Guidance for Modern Day Heirs?,” Methodist Review: A Journal of Wesleyan and Methodist Studies (2011): 101–39.

4. H. V. Boven, War and British Society, 1688–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

5. See Tyerman, Life, 1:493. See also George Whitefield, A Continuation of the Account of the Orphan-House in Georgia, From January 1740/1 to June 1742 (Edinburgh: T. Lumisden and J. Robertson, 1742).

6. Tyerman, Life, 2:11.

7. David Ceri Jones, Boyd Stanley Schlenther, and Eryn Mant White, The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735–1811 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), 42–69. Contrary to the widespread notion that Whitefield lacked John Wesley’s gifts for organization, “Whitefield, with the example and assistance of Howel Harris, put in place a highly effective organisational structure in England which mirrored that established by the Welsh Methodists.” Jones, Schlenther, and White, The Elect Methodists, 62.

8. Whitefield, A Continuation of the Account.

9. Tyerman, Life, 2:26.

10. Harry Stout, “George Whitefield in Three Countries,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also Mahaffey, Preaching Politics; Mahaffey, The Accidental Revolutionary.

11. Kathleen Wilson, “Empire of Virtue,” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (London: Routledge, 1994), 129.

12. Stone, An Imperial State at War, 131. For Whitefield’s commercial know-how, see Lambert, “Subscribing for Profits and Piety”; Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity”; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening.” For individual response, see Whitefield’s sermons “On Regeneration” and “True Marks of the New Birth.”

13. Whitefield, Journals, 69. Whitefield would strike these words from the 1756 revised edition of his Journals, likely in response to the torrent of criticism he received for portraying himself in a divinely favored, self-aggrandizing style.

14. Whitefield, Journals, 395.

15. William Seward, Journal of a Voyage from Savannah to Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia to England (London, 1741), 10.

16. Seward, Journal of a Voyage, 10; emphasis added.

17. Josiah Smith, The Character, Preaching, &c. Of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield (Boston: Rogers for Edwards and Foster, 1740), 16.

18. Smith, The Character, Preaching, &c., i.

19. The Pennsylvania Gazette, November 8, 1739, and November 15, 1739.

20. Boven, War and British Society, 1.

21. Cited in Boven, War and British Society, 1.

22. Boven, War and British Society, 3.

23. Whitefield, A Continuation of the Account, 21.

24. Whitefield, A Continuation of the Account, 21.

25. Tyerman, Life, 2:23.

26. James Habersham to George Whitefield, July 11, 1742, in Works, 3:460.

27. James Habersham to George Whitefield, August 19, 1742, in Works, 3:463.

28. George Whitefield to James Habersham, May 21, 1743, in Tyerman, Life, 2:60.

29. Tyerman, Life, 2:37.

30. Tyerman, Life, 2:37.

31. Boyd Stanley Schlenther, Queen of the Methodists: The Countess of Huntingdon and the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Faith and Society (Durham: Durham Academic Press, 1997).

32. Tyerman, Life, 2:37.

33. Tyerman, Life, 2:37–39.

34. November 15 and December 18, 1742, in Tyerman, Life, 2:38, 45.

35. George Whitefield to Benjamin Colman, November 18, 1742, in Tyerman, Life, 2:39.

36. Tyerman, Life, 2:44.

37. Tyerman, Life, 2:68.

38. Whitefield, Journals, 359.

39. George Whitefield, Sermons of George Whitefield (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2009), 69.

40. Morgan, Visible Saints, 24.

41. George Whitefield, The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth in Christ Jesus, in Order to Salvation (London, 1737), 23. The sermon, later reprinted as “On Regeneration,” can be found in Lee Gatiss, ed., The Sermons of George Whitefield (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012), 2:275–87.

42. Benjamin Franklin to George Whitefield, July 2, 1756, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 42 vols. to date, ed. Leonard W. Larabee et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–), 6:468–69.

43. Seward, Journal of a Voyage, 80.

44. Whitefield, Journals, 98–100.

45. Kenneth Coleman attributes part of the reason to the lack of Trustee willingness to fund the project. This claim is discredited in notes by the Earl of Egmont: “Mr Geo. Whitefield attended, and deliver’d in an acct of the money received by him and Mr Habersham for building a Church at Savannah, and disbursements made by him on that Acct.” January 23, 1744, The Journal of the Earl of Egmont, in Candler, Colonial Records, 5:714.

46. Whitefield, Journals, 421.

47. The Pennsylvania Gazette, May 1, 1740. Also in Whitefield, Journals, 16–17.

48. The Pennsylvania Gazette, May 8, 1740.

49. For a fuller discussion of the embattled Habermasian “public square” in Philadelphia and of the significance of Whitefield’s and Franklin’s contributions, see William Pencak, “Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship: Benjamin Franklin, George Whitefield, the ‘Dancing School Blockheads,’ and a Defense of the ‘Meaner Sort,’” Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 19, no. 1 (2002): 45–50.

50. O’Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints.” For the role of Protestantism in fashioning British identity, see also Colley, Britons.

51. This downturn also helps signal a pivot away from revival preaching to other kinds of activities and strengthens the argument made in the next section of this chapter that the revivals came to an end in the early 1740s.

52. Foster claimed that Whitefield “fatally rupture[d] the Puritan movement.” Foster, The Long Argument, 290.

53. See Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma; Foster, The Long Argument.

54. Reverend William Becket’s Notices and Letters Concerning Incidents at Lewes Town, 1727–1742, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 128.

55. William Becket’s Notices and Letters, 128.

56. P. Gordon to the Lord Bishop of London, July 19, 1726, in William Stevens Perry, Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church (Hartford: The Church Press, 1871), 2:150. Delaware was part of the Penn proprietorship from 1682 to 1776 and was under Pennsylvania’s jurisdiction.

57. W. Becket to the Lord Bishop of London, March 15, 1728, in Perry, Historical Collections, 2:150.

58. Letter dated March 29, 1738, in William Becket’s Notices and Letters, 82.

59. William Becket’s Notices and Letters, 82.

60. William Becket’s Notices and Letters, 82–84.

61. William Becket’s Notices and Letters, 103–4.

62. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, A History of the Book in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 50.

63. “A Receipt to make a Methodist,” March 4, 1740, in William Becket’s Notices and Letters, 115.

64. It appears Becket was not bashful about employing some Whitefieldian techniques himself. Becket, letter on October 16, 1741, in William Becket’s Notices and Letters, 127.

65. William Becket’s Notices and Letters, 134.

66. For examples of the opposition to Whitefield, see Charles Chauncey, Enthusiasm described and caution’d against (1742); The Testimony of the Pastors of the Churches in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, in New England, at their Annual Convention in Boston, May 25, 1743, against several Errors in Doctrine and Disorders in Practice, which have of late obtained in various parts of the Land (Boston: Printed by Rogers and Fowle, for S. Eliot in Cornhill, 1743); “The Testimony and Advice of a Number of Laymen, respecting Religion and the Teachers of it. Addressed to the Pastors of New England” (Boston, September 12, 1743); “A Letter from two neighbouring Associations of Ministers in the Country, to the Associated Ministers of Boston and Charlestown, relating to the admission of Mr. Whitefield into their pulpits” (December 26, 1744); Edward Wigglesworth, D.D., and Rev. Edward Holyoke, “A Testimony from the President and Professors, Tutors, and Hebrew Instructor of Harvard College, against the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield and his Conduct” (December 28, 1744); A Letter to the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, by way of Reply to his Answer to the College Testimony against him and his Conduct. By Edward Wigglesworth, D. D., Professor of Divinity in said College. To which is added the Reverend President’s Answer to the things charged upon him, by the said Mr. Whitefield, as Inconsistencies. Boston, New England, 1745 (Boston: T. Fleet, 1745).

67. While Kidd attributes this phrase to Thomas Foxcroft, he was actually citing the words (and evoking the caricature) deployed by Whitefield’s enemies. Kidd, The Great Awakening, 50; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 88.

68. For the growing rift between moderate and radical revivalists, see Kidd, The Great Awakening, 65–67.

69. A detailed account is in Harvey H. Jackson, “Prophecy and Community: Hugh Bryan, George Whitefield, and the Stoney Creek Independent Presbyterian Church,” American Presbyterians 69, no. 1 (1991): 15–17.

70. One historian has protested the lack of scholarly attention on Croswell’s infamy: “Croswell was more persistent and visible, provoked more controversies, itinerated longer, and published more tracts than any other incendiary New Light, including James Davenport.” Leigh Eric Schmidt, “‘A Second and Glorious Reformation’: The New Light Extremism of Andrew Croswell,” The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History and Culture 43, no. 2 (1986): 214.

71. Cited in Schmidt, “‘A Second and Glorious Reformation,’” 222.

72. Thomas Foxcroft to Samuel Philips, October 10, 1744, Gratz Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

73. Draft of letter, Benjamin Colman to George Whitefield, January 14, 1745, Benjamin Colman Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

74. Benjamin Colman to Solomon Williams, April 12, 1745, Gratz Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

75. On “hermeneutic of revival,” see Tim D. Hall, “Imagining a Transatlantic Awakening: The Christian History and the Hermeneutics of Revival,” in Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Mark Kamrath and Sharon M. Harris (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 29–46.

76. Christian History, No. 104, February 23, 1745.

77. Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 251–53.

78. Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 251–52. Lambert assigned blame for this stifling of revival to religious squabbling, in the form of Old Light critique as well as internal schisms rising out of the imprudence of ministers like Davenport and Croswell. In addition, he asserted the role of “Whitefield’s own indiscretions” in contributing to the decline of revival. Others have emphasized the continuation of revival, albeit at a reduced tenor and in more localized forms; see Kidd, The Great Awakening; Catherine A. Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

79. Letter dated Boston, July 29, 1745, in Tyerman, Life, 2:150.

80. Translation: “Nothing is hopeless where Christ leads.” In recounting this moment, Tyerman notes: “To say the least, this is a curious episode in English history,—Whitefield, the despised Methodist preacher, associated with one of England’s conquests,—a conquest so important, that King George II raised Colonel Pepperell to the dignity of a baronet of Great Britain; and London and other places went mad with joy.” Tyerman, Life, 2:151–52.

81. Scholars like Frank Lambert posited a causal link between the declining interest in religion and a corresponding rise in public attention on war (in addition to connecting the decline of religion to internal controversies; see note 78 above). He therefore put part of the blame for revival’s demise on war as well as religious controversies and infighting. See Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 252–53. Jerome Mahaffey emphasized the influence of conspiratorial suspicions that endangered methodists’ public standing in turning their evangelical concerns toward politics. He made the case that, in an age of intrigue when “spies and plots were everywhere,”“Whitefield understood the severity of the charges [of treason].” Mahaffey, The Accidental Revolutionary, 77–78. My study takes a different approach. Whereas Lambert builds on the presumed incompatibility of war and religion and Mahaffey detects political maneuvering in the face of military danger and social instability, I argue that Whitefield sought to imbue imperial war with religious meaning.

82. George Whitefield to John Wesley, September 11, 1747, in Tyerman, Life, 2:176.

83. This is basically the view of Frank Lambert. See notes 78 and 81 above.

84. John Wesley to Thomas Rankin, May 19, 1775, in John Wesley, The Works of the Rev. John Wesley: With the Last Corrections of the Author (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1872), 12:326–27. Cited in Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism, 259.

85. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism, 260.

86. Thomas Prince, A Sermon Delivered At the South Church in Boston, August 14, 1746, Being the Day of General Thanksgiving for the Great Deliverance of the British Nations By the Glorious and Happy Victory Near Culloden (Boston, 1746), 7.

87. Thomas Prince, A Sermon Delivered At the South Church in Boston, 13–18.

88. George Whitefield, Britain’s Mercies and Britain’s Duty (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1746).

89. Whitefield, Britain’s Mercies, 10.

90. Whitefield, Britain’s Mercies, 12.

91. Whitefield, Britain’s Mercies, 12.

92. Whitefield, Britain’s Mercies, 15.

93. Whitefield, Britain’s Mercies, 21.

94. Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 27. Similarly, William H. Kenney III argued that after 1744 Whitefield was able to marshal widespread personal support only when he joined in the invective against the arbitrary power and Catholicism of France: “The uniformly feared French and Indian threat continued to be Whitefield’s only avenue to his former following.” Cited in Hatch, Sacred Cause of Liberty, 32.

95. Mahaffey, Preaching Politics, 147. Mahaffey goes on to observe a tendency to combine religious and military/political purposes: “After 1745 Whitefield viewed his evolving enterprise as having a twofold function: first was his well-known mission to preach the gospel wherever he could find an audience, but second, he felt a call to protect Protestant freedoms as well as British civil liberties.”

96. Mahaffey, Preaching Politics, 147.

97. Colley, Britons, 25.

98. Colley, Britons, 36.

99. Colley, Britons, 198–99.

100. Harry Stout, “George Whitefield in Three Countries” in Noll, Bebbington, and Rawlyk, Evangelicalism, 58–59. Stout presents a more disjointed view (i.e., his language of “three [distinct] countries”) of the pan-Protestant British national identity than Colley, but both help us to see the liminal and emerging nature of British identity.

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