4. Whitefield and Slavery
The middle of the eighteenth century was also the midpoint of Whitefield’s public ministry, an appropriate time for both reflection and recalibration. In fact, a close study of Whitefield’s life and work in the 1750s reveals a conscious shift.1 We can observe him adjusting to a post-revival phase as well as to an expanding yet contested imperial landscape. An acquaintance who “did not approve of his former proceedings, or many of his present ones” was also able to write about some changes he perceived in the bombastic preacher as early as 1748. Remarking on Whitefield’s plans for revising his Journal, James Stonehouse observed that he “is a very different man to what he was; as your Ld may see by his Letter, wch was sent to me, & wch he intends as the Preface to the new Edition of his journal.” Stonehouse went on to offer details on the extent of Whitefield’s change: “he proposes to erase many things that have given offense, & to make a public Recantation of all his Enthusiastic expressions: nor dost he ever more intend to enter so far again into the depths of Calvinism.”2 Without overstating the change Whitefield underwent—Stonehouse noted that his writings were still “rigid, Turbulent, confus’d & abusive”—what cannot be denied is the advent of a new direction based on hard-earned wisdom from the awakenings and their aftermath.
Whereas he had spent the previous two decades importing British Protestant faith and culture to America, in the course of the 1750s he embraced a different vocational trajectory. The alteration is clear in the doubts he expressed about revival’s long-term prospects to a friend: “It tries me to hear that religion is at so low an ebb amongst You. Strange That we should grow older & yet grow worse, Receive more from Xt & yet do less for Him.”3 These pensive words came at a time when he was experiencing renewed hope in other areas of his life, for instance jubilation at the possibility of using enslaved labor to support his enterprise in Georgia. Most strikingly, during this period he became more than a participant in empire who freely made use of Atlantic trade routes and communication tools when expedient. Instead, his life began to more fully embody imperial culture and values—less countercultural post-Puritan and more imperial, if still evangelical, statesman. The previous chapter argued for the end of a general revival season by the middle of the eighteenth century.4 This chapter examines Whitefield’s activities in the years that followed, after the height of revival fervor, in order to understand the changes gripping British Atlantic culture and the ways they influenced his life. Although historians have never treated the last half of Whitefield’s public life as thoroughly as the first half, pursuing his importance for religion in the Atlantic world as a whole will show those latter years were just as important as the former.
Table 1. A Chronology of Whitefield and Slavery
January 9, 1735
Prohibition of slavery in Georgia
December 9, 1738
Malcontents petition Trustees to legalize slavery (117 sign)
April 1740
Whitefield purchases five thousand acres of land in Pennsylvania to build a “school for negroes” and writes to a friend of his intention to purchase “young ones”
April 17, 1740
To the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina, concerning their Negroes
April 1742
The Hard Case of the Distressed People of Georgia
May 1742
Thomas Stephens appears before Parliament, Whitefield accompanies Stephens
Spring 1747
Whitefield purchases 640 acres of land toward a plantation in South Carolina along with slaves; writes letter complaining of the slavery prohibition in Georgia
May 19, 1749
Trustees petition king to repeal prohibition of slavery
October 26, 1749
Trustees’ petition approved
January 1, 1751
Slavery becomes legal in Georgia
1751–1753
Whitefield purchases Ephratah Plantation in Georgia along with enslaved laborers
The exigencies of Whitefield’s numerous religious and philanthropic initiatives across the empire did not fade away when the revivals waned. To be sure, market demand for his published writings, clamor for his public appearances, and pledges for financial gifts all declined precipitously in the latter part of the 1740s. As a result, Whitefield had to find alternative sources of support.5 Once the catalyst of widespread transatlantic revivals, he became by necessity the organizer of a far-flung evangelical network with numerous constituent pieces that were not easily corralled into a coherent movement. In ways he did not anticipate, Whitefield reaped what he had sown as he took stock of the short-lived religious boom he had largely orchestrated. To put it another way, the agent of Anglicization in the colonies was himself becoming Americanized as he traveled across the Atlantic.6 Over two decades of traveling around and obsessing over colonial religious life had left their mark on Whitefield as his religious concerns made room for social, economic, and political realities. Life as an imperial subject meant that even the Grand Itinerant had to adjust to the changing currents of the time.
More specifically, during these middle years of his public career, the revival preacher waded deeper into the marketplace of empire and theater of war. As Whitefield struggled to maintain relevance and influence, he sought additional means of reinvigorating his work across the Atlantic world. So when faced with the legalization of slavery in Georgia and the start of the Seven Years’ War in North America, Whitefield’s response went beyond the merely spiritual concerns of a minister. By resisting the temptation to spiritualize Whitefield’s interests in slavery and war, we will see the extent to which the drive for profit and the allure of politics worked alongside his religious zeal, thus coloring his transatlantic activities in the 1750s. The renowned preacher found himself increasingly preoccupied as a plantation owner and patriotic writer, becoming ever more immersed in the empire. In other words, Whitefield’s continued success lay not only in preaching but in his ability to engage the emerging trends of a society and culture in flux.
Digging into these thornier aspects of Whitefield’s later career presents opportunities for detecting transformations in his transatlantic work, which in turn can shed light on the relationship between empire and religion. Inasmuch as Whitefield’s commercial astuteness enhanced his religious message, so too did his spiritual aspirations push him into the competition of the open market. Not only the hope of converting and civilizing lost souls, but also his desire for profit—and the stability that profit would bring to his Georgia undertaking—nudged Whitefield into slave ownership. Like any entrepreneur, he was willing to take the risks because he saw the potential rewards. In an age of reason and refinement, Whitefield’s earlier, singular focus on the new birth gave way to active participation in an empire of trade and commerce. His forays into plantation management reveal a Whitefield in transition from his Puritan moorings toward a distinctively new evangelical mood.7
In short, this chapter will explore Whitefield’s entanglements in slave ownership in order to assess his struggles to maintain Protestant vitality amid shifting cultural challenges. Appreciating the ways in which his activities were subject to the vicissitudes of Britain’s expansionist schemes can show the interconnectedness of economic forces, political developments, and religious life in the mid-eighteenth century. Crucial to this endeavor will be an evaluation of the ways in which Whitefield struggled to maintain a vision of empire that was theological at heart in spite of distractions created by larger processes of imperial state formation.
Slavery in Georgia
The legalization of slavery in 1751 changed the course of Georgia’s history. Almost overnight, a colony that had been losing settlers and limping along economically witnessed the heartening sight of settlers migrating into its lands. The increasing availability of labor reinvigorated economic output as the number of enslaved African Americans increased over tenfold during a twenty-year period resulting in 10,625 total slaves in Georgia by 1770.8 Thanks to the growing labor force, Savannah’s rice exportation catapulted from 2,299 barrels in 1755 to 22,129 in 1770—a growth figure roughly parallel to the rate of increase in slave labor.9 Restrictions on land grants, so long decried for limiting lots to 50 acres per male head (and 500 acres for those who purchased with their own money) since the beginning of the colony, were also relaxed in 1751. At the news that they could purchase as much land and as many slaves as they could afford, wealthier settlers began pouring into Georgia—in effect pushing out yeoman farmers and extinguishing the Trustees’ hopes of an idealized agrarian society.
Amid the merchants, landlords, and royal officials who benefited from the economic reform and subsequent boom of the 1750s was also George Whitefield.10 With over a decade personally invested in the colony by this time, he was as eager as anybody to reap the fruits of Georgia’s loosening economic policies. And while he had from the beginning advocated for slavery in Georgia, there was a definitive shift in his position during the course of the 1740s. In a 1740 public letter to the inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina, he had equivocated on the crucial point: “Whether it be lawful for Christians to buy slaves, I shall not take upon me to determine.”11 Over a decade later in March 1751, he was expressing an altogether different conviction: “As for the lawfulness of keeping slaves, I have no doubt, since I hear of some that were bought with Abraham’s money, and some that were born in his house.”12 In the years leading up to 1751, Whitefield went from hesitating about the scriptural justification for slavery to articulating a strong theological endorsement, even presenting an array of biblical proof texts to bolster his position. This remarkable change in Whitefield’s stance on slavery is the focus of this chapter.
The problem of slavery reveals much about the long trajectory of evangelical revivalism as a movement. More precisely, the famous revivalist’s involvement in slavery presents an opportunity to understand both evangelical engagement with the emerging world of market exchange and responses to the diminishing returns of revival enthusiasm. Yet interpretive difficulties must be overcome, such as the all too apparent contradiction between his vocal concern for human souls and the harrowing lived experience of enslaved persons. Simple moral evaluations remain woefully inadequate, whether to exonerate him as a person of his times or to excuse him on grounds of naive or overly optimistic idealism.
Historians have grappled with Whitefield’s relationship with slavery in a variety of ways, excoriating him for uncritical scriptural interpretation or implicating him in the origins of slaveholder paternalism in antebellum America.13 Here we build on these previous efforts by focusing on the economic and social possibilities opened by imperial expansion. More specifically, the focus is on Whitefield as an influential actor in Georgia’s tumultuous colonial life. Despite his frantic pace of travel to the hotspots of transatlantic revival, he maintained deep ties to frontier life in Georgia. As a person very much embedded in the local politics and economics of Savannah, the missionary priest was always committed to more than the religious and philanthropic work for which he is most often remembered.
The following pages offer a narrative of the conflicts over slavery in Georgia from 1735, when the Negro Act explicitly banned slavery, to 1751, when the sales of enslaved persons began flooding the markets and plantations of Georgia. An analysis of Whitefield’s participation in this process along with his evolving position on slavery follows, detailing his numerous land purchases, political protests, and aggressive orphanage recruitment as steps integral to his eventual embrace of slave ownership. The chapter concludes with an interpretative reflection on Whitefield’s position on slavery at the middle point of his career that explains much about his direction after the fires of revival cooled. Throughout we will see a movement toward the deployment of slavery for consolidating revival gains and contributing to an increasingly militant imperial ideology. This examination will show that Whitefield’s disappointment at the harvest of the awakenings sowed the seeds for his deepening involvement in slavery. It is a story of how his reaction to religious and theological crisis paved the way for political, social, and economic developments of grave moral consequence.
The Malcontents in Georgia
In order to understand Whitefield’s evolving position on slavery, it will be necessary to grasp the general course of Georgia’s history. That history is clearer when we outhne what the Trustees envisioned for the colony and then examine why their efforts generated such strong protests from settlers actually living in the colony. When, in turn, we look at Whitefield’s relationship to the protests, we gain fresh insight into why he would eventually come out as such a strong proponent of slavery. General questions of morality, or of evangelical biblical interpretation, were not unimportant for Whitefield’s stance. But his part in the history of Georgia was just as significant. A side-by-side comparison of the Georgia Malcontents and George Whitefield’s efforts to legalize slavery in Georgia shows that both were animated by concerns for British liberty as well as commercial profit. To understand Whitefield’s position on slavery, therefore, a brief survey of Trustee rule and colonial dissent in early Georgia is in order.
From the beginning, the proprietary colony of Georgia was the product of both an economic and imperial strategy. The Trustees quickly discovered the extent to which these two aspects of the colonial enterprise conflicted, as their work included not merely underwriting the venture but also governing a distant settlement. In an early effort to exert control, a committee appointed by the Trustees proposed three laws on January 9, 1735—prohibiting slavery, outlawing the use of rum and other strong drink, and regulating the Indian trade. With these decrees, the Trustees started on a collision course with settlers living on the ground in Georgia. For it was impossible that the Trustees could be as responsive to the needs of the fast-changing scenery of frontier life as a local governing body. The Trustee policy on slavery, in particular, supplies a prime example of the growing challenges facing British state formation. Paradoxically, but also reflecting a pattern common in imperial history, their location in London elevated their sense of empowerment to rule from afar while at the same time putting them at a disadvantage for the practicalities of governing Georgia.14 Ensconced in their metropolitan seats of privilege, the Trustees initially conceived the ban on slavery as a matter of military strategy, minimizing any possibility of slave insurrection and foreign intrusion. They subsequently failed to accommodate to changing imperial, and especially economic, realities. When the need arose for a nimble response to the growing involvement of settlers in the Atlantic world of trade, the Trustees’ response (or lack of one) deeply troubled Georgians. After all, the Trustees had never expressed the prohibition as an immutable or universal principle. Far from advancing moral qualms about slavery, some of the Trustees owned slaves in other parts of the empire. In fact, General James Oglethorpe, the esteemed servant of the Trustees, operated a plantation in nearby South Carolina with numerous Negro slaves—a path Whitefield himself would follow.
As a chiefly practical matter in the early days of the Georgia settlement, the reasons cited against slavery ranged from fear of inducing laziness in white settlers who acquired them to jealousy in those who could not afford additional laborers to the ease with which silk (unlike rice) could be cultivated such that “Women and Children might be of as much Use in as Negroes.”15 Yet since it was the southernmost British territory in North America, Georgia’s economic prospects were closely tied to, or subsumed under, its priorities as a military outpost. Indeed, the logic behind the land and labor policy of the Trustees owed mainly to the needs of a colony set up to provide a buffer between Spanish Florida and South Carolina. By playing their part in the imperial project, the Trustees aspired to gain greater prominence in their affairs at home. The British subjects who made Georgia home naturally came to view matters from a different vantage point. It was not long before the interests of the Trustees and the aspirations of ordinary Georgians had little to do with each other.
Increasingly the Trustees’ primary interest was in a colony that would serve their cause at home by helping to accumulate wealth and enhance influence. It was the age-old dynamic of imperial primacy over the outlying provinces. For a thriving colony with its own landed gentry presented little benefit to the Trust in London. On the other hand, a colony of middling farmers dependent on the largesse of benefactors in England could provide a source of lucrative trade, bolster their status as philanthropists, and trumpet their zeal as devoted subjects of the king. For good measure, the notion of an imperial buffer against Catholic Spain and its holdings in Florida generated additional positives for their public reputation. Toward that end, in order to populate the colony with as many yeoman soldiers as reasonable, the Trust limited land grants to fifty acres. The intent was to “prevent an Accumulation of several Lots into one Hand, lest the Garrison should be lessened.”16 Since the Spanish had already lured many African slaves away from South Carolina with promises of freedom, the Trustees believed the presence of slaves in Georgia would only further endanger the safety of British colonists with the specter of sedition. Both militarily and economically, slavery made no sense from the vantage point of the London-based Georgia Trustees.
On the ground in Georgia, however, the plan of the Trustees made little sense. Historians have identified a number of different sources that fed the tributaries of discontent. The Malcontents, pejoratively labeled by the Trustees, were a diverse group.17 Though comprised mainly of lowland Scots and English settlers, they represented a wide economic spectrum.18 There were wealthy “adventurers,” charity settlers, a small number of indentured servants, and even a few intrepid employees of the Trustees. In contrast, highland Scots in Darien and German Salzburgers in Ebenezer remained loyal to the Trustees and wrote counter-arguments against the Malcontents. Historians believe these latter refugees, unlikely to self-identify as British, were bound by a debt of gratitude to the Trustees as their benefactors.19 William Stephens, writing as secretary to the Trustees, noted racial tensions that resulted over the slavery issue: “The Trustees’ German Servants in general behave well, and are industrious . . . but this exposes them to the Envy and Hatred of our Negro-Mongers.”20
In contrast, the wealthy adventurers who paid their own way to the colony looking to make a profit became increasingly bold as they dissented against the Georgia proprietors.21 Since they were not “maintained at the Expense of the Publick” and instead driven by their commercial interests, they were at greater liberty to air their grievances.22 Known also as the St. Andrews Club, after the patron saint of Scotland, they shared more than common economic interests. It was a moniker that most certainly pointed out their Scottish origins in a derogatory sense. They met regularly at Jenkins’s tavern in Savannah for social and cultural as much as political reasons. One of the leading Malcontents, Patrick Tailfer, was a well-to-do medical doctor who had little use for the land he received from the Trustees because it was so far from Savannah. Probably for this reason he harbored greater resentments toward the limitations imposed on his economic activity. In spite of the odds stacked against him, he built a successful medical practice in Savannah and married the sister of Robert Williams, a prominent Savannah merchant. David Douglas was another merchant and close associate of Tailfer. He owned property and likely had some contact with Whitefield as the landlord of temporary building space for the preacher’s Bethesda Orphanage.
While the Malcontents’ national provenance never became an explicit issue in the controversies, the fact that they were not English (despite being British subjects of the king) contributed to a heightened sense of marginalization and sensitivity to slights. Since the Act of Union in 1707 had brought England and Scotland together under one British kingdom, the lowland Scots would have felt more entitled to their British rights—given the proximity of their native land to England—than highland Scots in Darien or German refugees in Ebenezer. In many of their petitions to the Trustees, the Malcontents appealed to their rights as subjects of the British king. Despite being a cosmopolitan colony with a pan-European population, Georgia remained at its heart, especially in its most influential settlements and seats of authority, an English colony and therefore exacerbated the internal tensions that existed within a relatively young British kingdom that was also growing rapidly as an overseas empire.23
Although the Scots may have been at the epicenter of protest, they were far from alone. Widespread displeasure among Georgia’s English settlers grew from their sense that the Trustees were infringing on cherished political rights as well as frustrating their economic prospects. And so in addition to the lowland Scots adventurers, there were what one historian has called “constitutional” Malcontents. We should be cautious about too sharply demarcating these two groups, but a delineation can be helpful insofar as we are able to see several distinct groups bound by a common concern for liberty as well as profit in Georgia’s marketplace.24 While Patrick Tailfer led the Malcontents who found themselves on the outer margins of English Georgia, Thomas Stephens arose from within the inner circle of the Trustees. Thomas was the son of William Stephens, Secretary of the Colony and one of the most trusted servants of the Trust. Arriving on December 21, 1737, as his father’s assistant, Thomas provided valuable help to his father at the beginning of their tenure. As he toiled over the land with little noticeable improvement, however, it did not take long for Thomas to become disillusioned with the state of the colony.25
The younger Stephens wrote several treatises detailing what he deemed the foolhardy policy of the Trustees.26 In The Hard Case of the Distressed People of Georgia (1742), he lamented that “after Nine Years Experiments, ’tis evident, that the most zealous industrious Planter is incapable of making out a Livelihood by the Return of his Labour and Expense, this Scheme being utterly impracticable upon the Footing it has been attempted.”27 Signing the pamphlet as “Agent for the People of Georgia,” Thomas considered it his mission in life to help the distressed colonists. Although he was certainly concerned about the economic outlook of the colony, Thomas’s distinctive contribution to the Malcontent cause was the elaboration of a constitutional argument for liberty. One outworking of his logic is the vehemence with which he attacked not only the Trustees’ unjust laws but also their failure to create a legislature or a legislative code in Georgia. In a 1743 pamphlet, he cited the lack of legislative structures as tantamount to withholding English rights from Georgia settlers:
although the Trustees were apply’d to by the People, for a Body of Laws for the Government of the Colony . . . yet they never received, or heard of any other Laws except the Salique Law, one for the Prohibition of Negroes, and a third, prohibiting the Use and Importation of spirituous Liquors; any one of which was sufficient to prevent, or defeat the Settlement of a Colony in their Situation.28
To be sure, the Trust did issue numerous resolutions and guidelines, taking every opportunity to remind settlers of their continuing authority over the colony. According to Stephens, however, withholding a “body of laws” was equivalent to depriving the settlers of the “Rights and Liberties of English Subjects.”29 As his argument went, “It seems a little odd, that three Laws should be form’d, that had a visible Tendency to distress the Colony, and not one fairly calculated for its Increase and Encouragement.”30 In the same vein, Stephens suspected the Trustees of not creating a representative system of government in the colony because of their own despotic hold on power. At least one modern historian agrees with Thomas Stephens: “The strangest feature of the Trustees’ government was the absence of a legislature.” More than dereliction of duty, it was an active form of malfeasance, as he went on to conclude, “This inflexibility plus the failure to allow the colonists to participate in the government was the Trustees’ greatest political failure.”31
If the Trustees were intent on consolidating power, the Malcontents were motivated at least in part by what they considered a struggle for liberty in the face of arbitrary authority. It was only natural that the Georgians should find themselves at cross purposes with the Trustees as they pursued their own welfare in the colony. In this strained relationship, the slavery question became a touchstone issue. When Oglethorpe and his forces successfully repelled the Spanish, war in the southern frontier effectively came to an end in 1742. Besides, “If [slaves] are as well and better treated in Georgia than they can be there [in Florida], where is the Temptation?” Increasingly, as the danger of slaves escaping to St. Augustine faded, the irksome realization dawned upon Georgia’s settlers that their most menacing competition lay to the north. Indeed, many Georgians marveled that the Trustees should so easily hand over the competitive advantage to South Carolinians—“our Neighbors having such an Advantage, as the Privilege of Negroes, can always under-sell us in any Manufacture or Produce.”32 As Stephens made clear, settlers in Georgia became more and more cognizant of their own interests, which went beyond the Trustees’ goal of setting up a defensive barrier to preserve the wealth and ease of their rivals in South Carolina and proprietors in London. If the Trustees’ arguments against slavery were pragmatic rather than moral or theological, the colonists agitating for slave labor also focused on the economic payoffs.
Owing to his prominent family connections, Thomas Stephens appeared before Parliament in 1742 and 1743 to represent the Malcontents’ cause. The Trustees had too many friends in the House of Commons, however, for the young Stephens to carry the day. In defying his father and the powerful Trustees, he only succeeded in putting his own personal fate at significant peril. He was publicly reprimanded by the House of Commons and fortunate to escape imprisonment for libel against the Trustees. It is easy to see why historians generally credit Thomas with having “a genuine concern for the future of Georgia.”33 Maligned by the Trustees and their influential allies in London and disowned by his father, Thomas eventually left Georgia and settled in South Carolina, following a host of other Malcontents who had gone before him. Given the troubles Stephens endured for his support of the Malcontents’ cause and the very little reward he received, there is good reason to presume a sincere motivation for the good of the colony. A sense of outrage over the Trustees’ infractions against the liberties of the colonists seems to have loomed large in his mind. One historian, however, goes too far when she posits, “If any one person can be credited with responsibility for the introduction of black slavery in Georgia then Thomas Stephens . . . was the man.”34 Though not at all a distinction to be coveted, the actual evidence is much greater for George Whitefield. At the very least, it is not convincing to assign credit to Stephens for the legalization of slavery in 1751 that occurred some seven years after he disappeared from the scene. Whitefield held a consistent pro-slavery position that only became more ardent over the course of the 1740s.
Whitefield’s Discontent in Georgia
Juxtaposing our survey of the Malcontents in Georgia with Whitefield’s own pro-slavery activism not only addresses a historiographical lacuna but also sheds light on the religious dimension of British imperial developments in the mid-eighteenth century. Although Whitefield is rarely associated with the Malcontents, they were allies in Georgia’s pro-slavery movement.35 During the same period when the Malcontents were agitating against the Trustees, Whitefield too found himself in an embattled relationship with the Georgia proprietors in London for a variety of reasons that paralleled the Malcontent cause, ranging from struggles over British liberty to economic ambitions to the slavery issue. Unlike most Malcontents who, despairing of change or improvement, moved out of Georgia, Whitefield stayed the course to reap some measure of vindication. Far from exculpating Whitefield’s involvement in slavery, this line of reasoning helps us to understand how the missionary pastor might have constructed intellectual and theological justifications for actions that were also stirred by mercantile and pragmatic designs. It was not a far leap to go from attending to the need for spiritual renewal to assisting settlers through their physical privations. If his preaching of the new birth democratized religious initiative by placing matters of eternal destiny in the hands of individuals, his pursuit of economic freedom and profit similarly insisted on the right of personal agency. Whitefield saw his labors as being “of vast Service to this Northern Part of the Colony,” even if it was “greatly detrimental to [his] own private Interest.”36 As he told John Wesley, while the colony languished, the orphanage shone as one of its few beacons of hope: “Notwithstanding the declining state of Georgia, the Orphan House is in a better situation than ever; and, in a year or two, I trust, it will support itself.”37
Despite allegations of wanderlust and a chronic inability to stay in one place, Whitefield tied his own interests to the long-term prosperity of the colonial enterprise in Georgia. So far did he become embroiled in this project that he sided with the Malcontents in principle. When Thomas Stephens learned that Whitefield was “for allowing Negroes in the Colony, & if examined would declare his opinion that way,” he arranged to have the cleric appear before the House of Commons at the time of his own ill-fated appearance in the spring of 1742. In the end, Whitefield was prevented from testifying because “many exprest their dislike at examining an Enthusiastical Mad Man as they call’d him, & thought it demean’d the dignity of the house.”38 Despite obstructions to his official testimony, his willingness to go before Parliament to argue for slavery in Georgia constitutes in itself a forceful statement. Time and again Whitefield spoke of his strong desire to see slaves in Georgia. Not only was this yet one more example of his inveterate opposition to arbitrary authority, it was also evidence of his economic pragmatism and political prescience.
As further demonstration of Whitefield’s ability to distinguish between matters of moral integrity and economic exigency, he complained almost as much about the prohibition on rum as he did about the ban on slavery. For all his preaching about a regenerated life, Whitefield was a realist who recognized well the constraints with which he needed to work. The prohibition of rum and slaves in Georgia dismayed Whitefield enough that during his first trip to America in the summer of 1738 he criticized the scheme as “absolutely impracticable in so hot a country abroad.”39 Along with the restrictive land policy of the Trustees, these limitations seemed to him “little better than to tie their legs and bid them walk.”40
The activism of James Habersham, a follower of Whitefield who accompanied him during the preacher’s first American trip and settled permanently in Georgia, can help shed further light on Whitefield’s role in advocating for slavery in the colony.41 Habersham initially went to Georgia with Whitefield as a missionary and then stayed to become superintendent of the Bethesda Orphanage. While his mentor traveled around the Atlantic world, Habersham became a leading Georgia planter and merchant. Beginning in the 1750s, he wielded political influence as secretary of Georgia and later as president of the Council. Throughout, he maintained close ties with his friend, Whitefield. As the itinerant’s spiritual disciple and business representative, Habersham would not have staked out a position that was contrary to Whitefield’s wishes. As early as June 26, 1740, he was telling the Earl of Egmont that “he believed the Colony could not possibly go on without [slaves].”42 It was at Habersham’s urging that Whitefield in 1747 purchased a plantation in South Carolina where he could employ slaves. And it was Habersham’s letter to the Trustees in 1748, effectively an economic development plan for the colony, that played a significant role in convincing the Trustees to relent from their long-held position.43 All of these things Habersham did as a friend and associate of Whitefield.
Although Whitefield and Habersham never formally joined the Malcontents, they rallied in common cause with them. In fact, one need not delve deep into the records of the Georgia Trustees to see that Whitefield was as much a thorn in their side as the most vocal Malcontents. The unlikely alliance befuddled Whitefield’s biographer, Luke Tyerman, who remarked regarding the Malcontents’ 1736 petition: “Not only in one, but in all these respects, Whitefield, oddly enough, sympathised with the malcontent inhabitants of Georgia.”44 Despite the fact that his advocacy for the introduction of slavery was a significant feature of his life and ministry during the late 1730s and throughout the 1740s, Whitefield receives little to no attention in the story of Malcontents and their conflict with the Trustees. Yet Whitefield and Habersham were among the most persistent critics of the Trustees’ no-slavery policy. In contrast to most Malcontents who abandoned Georgia, Whitefield and Habersham never let up on their quest to see the introduction of enslaved labor in Georgia. If any one person does indeed deserve blame for the introduction of slavery in Georgia, it may actually be George Whitefield.
Slaves, Schools, and the Search for a Viable Strategy
In the midst of his frenetic transatlantic itinerary, Whitefield somehow found time to make numerous land investments in multiple colonies with the intention of building schools, to lodge vehement protest against the Trustees’ land and labor policies in Georgia, and to stir controversy with strong-arm tactics in bringing children into his Savannah orphanage. When these activities are set alongside his evolving view on slavery, we can detect the development of an ambition, both religious and economic, that spanned the empire. The public letter we will examine in this section shows Whitefield working all of the angles mentioned above. At the height of his revival activities, Whitefield the preacher was also thinking like an imperial investor and looking for a way to combine his religious purposes with the cause of an expanding empire.
Whitefield’s audacious missive, “To the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, concerning their Negroes,” first published on April 17, 1740, in The Pennsylvania Gazette, is filled with harsh words upbraiding slaveholders for their mistreatment of slaves. It is also filled with a copious amount of hedging and prevarication. Far from the expression of a proto-abolitionist sentiment that it is sometimes taken to be, the letter carved out the moral and theological space needed for Whitefield to work out his own beliefs over the course of the coming decade.45 Composed in the midst of his second American tour, it showcases the itinerant’s inchoate, yet fast-growing, awareness of the American landscape and his struggles to form a long-term strategy.
With his strategy in flux, Whitefield’s letter enabled him to gauge the reach of his influence during the heyday of revival. He was sure to receive a wide array of responses from numerous corners of his broad constituency by broaching a subject as complex as slavery. If he had premonitions of requiring slave labor on his own growing land investments throughout the colonies, feedback on the letter would give him a sense of the moral boundaries and economic realities he was up against.
To begin the letter, Whitefield the pastor sounded a grand prophetic note, overflowing with compassion for fellow human beings. “God has a Quarrel with you for your Abuse of and Cruelty to the poor Negroes,” he declared in his opening paragraph. The pathos of his conviction was unmistakable as he wrote, “my Blood has frequently almost run cold within me, to consider how many of your Slaves had neither convenient Food to eat or proper Raiment to put on.”46 Intent on displaying a tender reaction to the brutal treatment of enslaved persons, he did not hesitate to take his protest to the court of public opinion. That he set aside time to write such an open letter illustrates his awareness of a literate audience interested in his opinion. The letter also evinces deep awareness of his own public persona and the need to manage that image for the sake of his larger aims.
In the course of the letter, there was a distinct shift in tone as Whitefield turned pragmatic, even sympathetic toward the slave owners, perhaps rushing to find relief for the tension he had wound up: “Your present and past bad Usage of them, however ill-designed, may thus far do them good, as to break their Wills, increase the Sense of their natural Misery, and consequently better dispose their Minds to accept the Redemption wrought out for them, by the Death and Obedience of Jesus Christ.”47 Having excoriated them publicly, he gave the slaveowners a way out, a chance to save face. Upon closer scrutiny, it is possible to see Whitefield visibly oscillating between two positions despite the surface rhetoric of assured confidence. He recoiled at the horrors of slavery but also recognized the necessity of slave labor for the colonial cause in the South and even pointed out the possibility of redeeming virtues. He had, after all, seen enough to surmise that slavery might provide a much-needed boost to his own Georgia enterprise.
Owing to his internal struggles with the institution of slavery, Whitefield tried alternative means of securing labor and raising profits to support his religious aims before himself turning to slave ownership. Such considerations were likely part of the picture when in the spring of 1740 he purchased a large plot of land in the backwoods of Pennsylvania to establish a “school for negroes.” He had already demanded five hundred acres of land in Georgia, an amount ordinarily reserved for wealthy adventurers who paid their own way to the colony. In April 1740, he purchased a much larger amount of land in Pennsylvania. William Seward, Whitefield’s close friend and publicist with substantial wealth of his own, had just parted from Whitefield in May 1740 and was on his way from Philadelphia to London when he wrote to the Trustees of Georgia, informing them that he “had assisted Mr. Whitefield to take up 5000 Acres of Land in Pensilvania in order to erect a Negroe-School.” As if he could not disassociate the two issues, in the same sentence he criticized the prohibition of slavery in Georgia: “I did not doubt, but if the Obstacles, which now hindered, were removed, and the Colony put upon an equal footing with the other Provinces, many Persons would take over their Families and Fortunes, which till then they would not do.”48 Seward clearly had slavery in mind at the top of his list when he mentioned “obstacles” to the prosperity of Georgia. By their close proximity in his letter to the Trustees, it appears that the issue of a “school for negroes” in a remote part of Pennsylvania was tied to the urgent need of slave labor in Georgia.
The sheer magnitude of this Pennsylvania purchase requires further thought. To be sure, the disjunction of space needed for an academic institution and the staggering space of five thousand acres can only mean that Whitefield and Seward had other purposes in mind for the land in addition to the education of displaced Africans. The preacher said as much when he wrote to a friend in London that he had “actually taken up 5000 Acres of very good Land, in order to erect a School for the Education and Maintenance of all such Negroes, whether young or old, that shall be sent unto me—Young ones I intend to buy, and do not despair of seeing a Room full of that despised Generation in a short Time making Melody with Grace in their Hearts unto the Lord.”49
He glossed over the intention to buy slaves by claiming to have their physical and spiritual welfare foremost in his mind. In fact, as we will soon see with Whitefield in Bethesda, there was great potential for combining the industriousness of students and the possibility of a profit-making industry. Under the guise of a school, Whitefield was building a massive plantation and purchasing slaves to make the investment profitable. To judge from William Seward’s words in 1740, Whitefield was perhaps more interested in these Pennsylvania efforts, given their rich prospects, than in his beloved Bethesda in Georgia: “Many desire to go to Georgia, and some I believe Mr. Whitefield will take, but most of them he puts off, designing to employ them in the Negroe School, or settle them in Societies in Philadelphia.”50 There is credible evidence, therefore, that the establishment of schools was one way of getting around the hard restrictions against slavery in Georgia.
In May 1740, the same month that Seward was writing about a school in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania, Whitefield was also formulating a plan for a “school for negroes” closer to the urban center of Philadelphia. Although he had to shelve those ambitions for the moment, two months later in July the idea still lingered in his mind, with the addition of possible new ventures closer to his Georgia headquarters: “Had I time and proper schoolmasters, I might immediately erect a negro school in South Carolina, as well as in Pennsylvania.”51 To summarize, in addition to his orphanage in Georgia, Whitefield also had his sights on two additional schools in Pennsylvania (one rural, one urban) and a fourth in South Carolina. Though he lacked time and personnel for such undertakings, there is also mounting evidence that he was casting about for a more robust financial base for his American operations and that schools presented the possibility of serving a dual, spiritual and economic, purpose. Even as he itinerated for more converts throughout the colonies, Whitefield was also devising a strategy for acquiring more capital and laborers to support the cause of revival.
School Master in Savannah
From his earliest days in America, Whitefield fixed on a simple solution for making his Bethesda Orphanage economically viable: the labor supply of his orphans.52 These able-bodied children, who were beneficiaries of his charity, would take part in building and maintaining the institution. They would serve not only as objects of compassion but as workers for the larger cause of Protestant renewal across the Atlantic world. Toward this end, he prescribed a daily regimen for the children at Bethesda that would not only strengthen their spiritual discipline but also provide economical labor. “Not a moment of innocent recreation tho necessary to the health & strengthening of growing children is allow’d in the whole day,” was the Earl of Egmont’s criticism of Whitefield’s daily schedule for the pupils at Bethesda.53 The earl, as a visitor, quibbled with the excess of prayer and singing of psalms and hymns. What he missed, however, was the plan to put the orphans to work. Whitefield prescribed a meticulous daily schedule that began with a morning bell at five o’clock in the morning. He then appointed hours in the morning and in the afternoon for “their respective Employs, as carding, spinning, picking Cotton or Wool, sewing, knitting.”54 With the children’s lives strictly regulated, Whitefield boasted that “tho’ we are about seventy in Family, yet we hear no more Noise than if it was a private House.”55 One historian has noted the economic dimension of Whitefield’s orphanage in this way: “Bethesda might well be called the artisan nursery of the colony, because its children were all taught trades.”56 This use of orphan labor takes on greater significance as we trace Whitefield’s evolving position on slavery and the questionable means by which he attempted to increase the number of orphans at Bethesda.
Whitefield’s efforts to recruit orphans and students for his school in Savannah served a purpose that went beyond charity work. If slave labor was outlawed in Georgia, the children provided another way of securing a steady flow of economic output. Before pursuing slaves as an option, Whitefield explored the possibility of using the children he already possessed to fulfill the same purpose. He soon discovered, however, that many of the orphans at Bethesda were too young to work and that there was a finite, limited supply of them. He therefore went out of his way to corral youth who had no need of his assistance.
In other words, he went after prospective “orphans” aggressively, in some cases where there was no apparent need for his philanthropy or intervention. In several controversial and high-profile situations, he separated individuals from siblings and guardians, insisting on the authority granted to him by the Trustees. At a meeting of the magistrates in the home of William Stephens on February 9, 1739, Henry Parker protested the injustice of Whitefield taking an orphan from him. Strikingly, he framed his complaint as the loss of an economic investment. The boy in question, Tondee, was a “Lad of fifteen or sixteen Years of Age” and “he thought it would be a great Hardship to have that Boy taken from him, now he is grown capable of doing him some service, after living so long with him when he could do him none.” How Whitefield responded to Parker’s protest is revealing as well, for he engaged the argument on purely economic terms stating simply that “[Tondee] could be employed for the Benefit of the other Orphans.”57 What made this matter particularly galling for Parker was the timing, which happened to fall during planting season, when he needed all the hands he could muster. As William Stephens observed, growing increasingly sympathetic to the complaint against Whitefield, it was a “great [economic] Loss and Disappointment to Parker; as indeed it must be in his planting, to be deprived of the Benefit of such an Youth’s Labour, now grown to a good Stature.”58 By the end of the month, Oglethorpe himself was weighing in on the controversy, saying “he thought [Whitefield] had gone beyond what the Trust intended, in taking some Orphans into his Keeping, who were well grown, and might have been of good Service this planting Time, to the Masters they lived with.”59 Revealingly, Oglethorpe also saw the matter as one with financial consequences.
The next summer, in June 1740, it appears Whitefield was at it again. This time the boy in question was a child of one of the original forty Georgia settlers, whom Oglethorpe had shown “particular Marks of his Favour to, for their Father’s Sake.” The lad is described as being “an active, diligent, and well-grown Youth . . . [who] was become serviceable, in many Cases, to his good Patron, and employed by him variously, as Occasion required.” In other words, the youth had become a valuable source of labor when “Mr. Whitefield came, with the Power which the trust had granted him,” and took the young Mellidge away, “leaving the Elder at home.” The boy’s sister and brother lodged vehement protest, not only at the loss of a family member but also at the timing of this loss “when he could be of so much Use.”60 This overreach by Whitefield was more than Oglethorpe could stomach, and he immediately issued an order to have the child returned to his family, thus restoring not only their brother but a reliable source of income.
The question as to why Whitefield felt compelled to round up youths who already had decent homes is an important one. Studies of Whitefield have refrained from making any judgments about his collection of “orphans” that go beyond the overzealous ardor of his compassion.61 Before absolving Whitefield of any illicit motivation, however, the matter is worth further exploration. Why did Whitefield go out of his way, even inviting controversy and criticism, during a time when he had many other matters vying for his attention? The common denominator in these two cases spread out over more than a year is the “usefulness” of both Tondee and Mellidge toward work that Whitefield needed to be done on the grounds of Bethesda. On more than one occasion, he appears to have forcibly taken children out of their homes because of the economic service they could render. It is possible there were philanthropic or religious motivations as well, but those were not the reasons he cited—and quite forcefully at that—when he faced criticism for his actions. It is not necessary to go as far as to insinuate that he was seeking to build a profitable business under the guise of orphan relief. Instead it is sufficient to posit that Whitefield mixed moral and religious goals with imperial and mercantile aims. More likely than a sinister explanation, in fact, is that he was fumbling his way toward a firmer understanding about what he needed in order to secure a stable footing for the orphanage. It is manifestly clear that this effort was leading him toward the sanctioning of slave labor. Despite the huge sums of money he raised for his charity work in Georgia, the challenge of creating a sustainable institution dogged Whitefield throughout his life. Consciousness of his need to act as a preacher for the empire, in turn, lay behind this search for a stable institutional base.
The Merchant of Savannah
As early as August of 1740, onlookers reported signs of trouble in Bethesda’s future. “Ever since Mr. Whitefield left Georgia the latter End of August in [1740] . . . it has decayed a-pace,” wrote Patrick Tailfer, the Scottish Malcontent leader. Although the orphanage housed as many as a hundred at one point, it had difficulty maintaining those numbers. Tailfer went on to describe an unfinished main building, sixty feet long and forty feet wide, with a shingled roof and not much more. The houses and huts that accompanied this unfinished building added to its dilapidated appearance. There were more worrisome signs than the incomplete and ramshackle buildings, according to Tailfer, as he wondered out loud: even “if it were finished, where is the Fund for its support?”62 Problems lay beyond Bethesda, moreover, since a thriving orphanage would have little to offer a destitute colony: “What Service can an Orphan-House be in a Desert and a forsaken Colony[?]” These words of Whitefield corroborated Tailfer when he lamented the low state of the colony’s welfare. As revivals came and went, his investment in the imperial outpost of Georgia remained. It was incumbent upon him to find a means of supporting the enterprise when the support of fellow enthusiasts waned.
Therefore, although he had successfully established a sprawhng revival network, Whitefield could hardly rest. If he wanted a stable institutional base for that network, he would have to work for it. He looked for creative solutions to the ebb and flow of financial support that mirrored the unstable temperature of revival fervor. It should come as no surprise that the same individual who lugged British consumer goods across the Atlantic Ocean during his first missionary trip to America sought ways to use a further supply of such goods as a funding source for his ongoing efforts at institution building. Whitefield used some of the items he imported to provide aid to those in need, but he also functioned as a merchant, using the proceeds from the sale of British goods to finance his travels throughout the colonies. For example, during his second American trip (August 1739 to March 1741), he enlisted Benjamin Franklin’s help as he frequently advertised items for sale in The Pennsylvania Gazette. The following notice, which appeared on November 8, 1739, was a regular feature in the paper:
TO BE SOLD,
At the House of the Rev. Mr. Whitefield,
In Second-Street (the same in which Capt. Blair,
lately dwelt) the following GOODS;
Being the Benefactions of CHARITABLE PEOPLE
In England, towards Building an Orphan-House
In Georgia.63
The list of goods included sundry items, from brass candlesticks to pistol powder to buttons and sewing silk. This advertisement shows the complex transactions contrived in support of Whitefield’s ministry. By buying English goods in London with the contributions he received there and selling them in the colonies, he was actually able to turn a profit. One can almost sense Whitefield’s glee as he describes the process that yielded an extra income “as much by them at Philadelphia as nearly defrayed the Family’s Expence of coming over.”64 With sixty to seventy orphans, moreover, he managed a large staff: “Sometimes (Labourers and all) I have had a Hundred and Twenty to provide for daily.”65 Responsible for the livelihood of so many people, Whitefield had to function both as a businessman and as a clergyman. Such extracurricular activities for a minister would have been unthinkable in the Puritan world of the previous century. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, however, Whitefield had few qualms about entering the marketplace.
In fact, when all was said and done, his ministerial credentials proved an asset for his business ventures. To be sure, there were critics who found the preacher’s use of commercial tactics unseemly and even demeaning. But many more thronged to hear what he had to say, to purchase his writings, and to contribute to his many charitable causes. Because of his investments throughout the British Empire, his affairs in the world of trade proved an integral part of his growing ministry, a necessary means toward a greater end. His entrance into the world of trade gave him further opportunity to announce the work of the gospel in which he was engaged. As a peripatetic revivalist who cultivated close ties with clergymen as well as merchants, he used the colonial markets to strengthen his American labors based in Savannah.
As he labored to establish a foothold in the imperial outpost of Georgia, changing conceptions of the market whirled all around Whitefield. The warning of Puritan divines against the temptations and vices rampant in commercial activities were giving way to a post-Puritan endorsement of the market economy.66 British settlers in America were becoming increasingly attuned to trends in material fashion as well as fashionable ideas. In a telling remark concerning a collection of Gilbert Tennent’s sermons, Simon Frost, a devotee of Whitefield, told the Boston merchant and judge Samuel Savage that although he “shou’d have been fond to have had ’em bound up in ye best manner” since he planned to lend the copy out to friends, a “Common Cover will do.”67 Frost went on also to request the latest Whitefield items that might be available. As revivals exploded across the colonies, the demand for revival goods stirred a flurry of commercial activity. One historian has observed the significance of a merchant’s obsession over details like paint color: “Timothy Orne, an eighteenth-century Salem merchant who figured among the town’s ‘codfish aristocracy,’ contracted with a local artisan, detailing the exact paint colors for walls and trim in each room in his new house.”68 If attention to such details is a sign of membership in the new economic class of “men of moveable property,” then Whitefield’s instructions for the design of Bethesda—and, in particular, his living quarters—qualified him. The preacher proved a scrupulous consumer in providing instructions for the buildings at Bethesda. Revival fervor in the context of imperial expansion not only enlarged the field of religious missionary work, it heightened prospects for wealth and status.
Yet, the revivals were episodic and so was the fundraising dependent on them. Whitefield needed productive, income-generating work at Bethesda because it was impossible to raise enough subscriptions of support from converts and admirers to keep the enterprise going. Benjamin Colman, his friend and advocate as well as the moderate pastor of Brattle Street Church in Boston, harbored early uncertainties about the financial viability of the orphanage. In a letter of 1742 to a friend in Glasgow, Colman expressed those doubts: “But how it can subsist, and flourish, and answer the Founder’s End, is the Enquiry here, and will be a Marvel in the Providence of God, if it do so.”69 Unlike Professor Francke’s school in Prussia, Bethesda was too isolated, “the one being in the midst of Europe the other in the Confines of America.”70 Not a little miffed at Colman’s words, Whitefield tried to surmount criticism by sounding a pious note, “How it can subsist and flourish for the future, I am not sollicitous about: God can help us in Georgia, as well as he helped Professor Francke in Germany.”71 Yet four years after this letter, six after Bethesda’s inception, Whitefield was still struggling to find a workable scheme for the long-term viability of the orphanage. Writing in 1746, he rejoiced that “friends have raised an annual Subscription sufficient for discharging [the arrears] till the Family may be able to provide for itself.” His plan for achieving self-sufficiency was “to use the Plow” and “to have many Acres of good Oats and Barley.”72 He would need a substantial labor force for it all to work.
From what we have observed, Whitefield functioned as a salesman of British goods as well as an evangelist of the gospel. His activities in the service of faith and world of trade served complementary purposes and thrust the itinerant into the marketplace of empire. As one historian noted: “Religious sanction for market exchange had become a commonplace in Boston by the 1740s.”73 In this milieu, Whitefield was merely one among a cadre of ministers who sought to leverage the market for their spiritual work. Such observations make it less surprising that from the beginning of his American career, Whitefield lobbied for legal sanction of enslaved labor in Georgia. Why would an itinerant preacher merely passing through the colony take the time and go to the trouble of lobbying for slavery in the backcountry of a fledgling colony? The most plausible explanation is that he had larger designs in mind than the work of a parish priest. That plan included not just converting souls but building a movement with component pieces such as schools, storefronts, and plantations. Unsurprisingly, he came to see that all these efforts required a labor force to support the work. That he was concerned about Georgia’s position on slavery bolsters evidence of a long-range strategic vision and supports the notion that more than revival itinerancy drove his numerous trips to the colonies.
A Plantation Owner in South Carolina
As it turns out, his plan for a self-subsisting operation in Georgia did not get very far. By the spring of 1747, Whitefield had to make the tactical switch to a plantation in South Carolina where he could employ slaves to provide for the ongoing needs at Bethesda. He justified his purchase of “a plantation of six hundred and forty acres of excellent land” by saying that “it is impossible for the inhabitants [of Georgia] to subsist themselves without the use of slaves.”74 In the same letter he mentioned the gift of “one negro” and his plans to purchase more. With his hands tied in Georgia, he found a convenient solution nearby. His excitement was palpable as he wrote numerous friends and associates about his newly acquired Carolina plantation that he intended to use for the upkeep of his work at Bethesda in Georgia.75 This development he took to be a sign of God delivering him out of his embarrassments. Whatever moral qualms he may have had, he assuaged his conscience by telling his friends that many of the enslaved were “brought under conviction.”76 Since the intervening years had not been kind to the Bethesda project, Whitefield was under a barrage of accusations regarding his financial dealings.
Specifically, opponents charged him with traveling across the Atlantic world tugging at the heart strings of Britons to raise untold sums of money for an orphanage that continually suffered neglect in a dilapidated state. For his part, Whitefield endeavored to construct the best defense he could by going on the offense to build a prosperous institution. Yet he faced the embarrassment of arrears on his Bethesda property, even the threat of imprisonment for his debts in the early months of 1741. According to his biographer Tyerman, “Whitefield was in debt, and was constantly speaking as though he was about to be sent to prison.”77 After he purchased a plantation and slaves in South Carolina, he intended “to devote [them] to the use of Bethesda” and insisted they would help create “a visible fund for the Orphan house.”78 To close friends, he gave the impression that these financial matters were carnal annoyances beneath his dignity: “surely the Lord will deliver me from money matters by and by,” he confided to Howel Harris in September of 1747.79 To John Wesley, mentor and friend as well as rival, he sounded a more pious note: “I hope ere long to be delivered from my outward embarrassments. I long to owe no man anything but love.”80 In a February 28, 1748, letter to Harris, however, Whitefield still had not found a solution for his debts, which he described as “a load which has lain on me for years.”81 What cannot be doubted from these many references is the extent to which his financial woes troubled and humiliated Whitefield. Given his ambivalent stance on slavery at the outset, it is not surprising that the potential of profiting from slave labor grew ever more tempting in his eyes. It is true that Whitefield recoiled at the cruel realities of slavery in the New World. It is also an undeniable fact that, as he constantly skirted close to the brink of financial ruin for his initiatives in Georgia, he ultimately found it hard to resist the solution of enslaved labor. So impatient was Whitefield for change that, according to historian Thomas Kidd, he began using slave labor in Georgia in 1749, two years before it became legal.82
Part of the problem for Whitefield was that as the revivals waned, he faced intense competition from a prospering consumer economy. By the late 1740s, his main competition was not theological, in the form of Arminianism or Antinomianism, but rather material, in the context of a culture increasingly enamored with British imperial affluence. And so Nathaniel Sargent, a Massachusetts lawyer who would later become the second chief justice of the United States, writing to Samuel Savage in the late summer days of 1747 could pivot seamlessly from singing the praises of Whitefield’s sermon—“I can heartily join with you in your Sentiments, & really think him an Extraordinary person & one that is sent out from God, &c.”—to asking about the price of paper, cheese, and coffee.83 Rather than back down from fear of obsolescence and fierce competition, Whitefield fought hard to maintain a foothold in the marketplace of public opinion. Some years later, in 1759, a Philadelphia merchant, William Shippen, would in effect illustrate Whitefield’s success in bringing the worlds of religion and commerce together. On Sunday, September 9, 1759, Shippen’s economy of words combined Whitefield’s sermon and the evening’s supper into one brief and fragmentary entry: “spent at Mr DeBerdh. & hearing Mr. Whitefield with Mr. Clarkson supp’d upon Philadelphia cranberry Rye very fine.”84 On the following Sabbath, the merchant recorded his impressions of Whitefield in the same terms he might have used to describe the quality of coffee and dessert: “afternoon Mr. Candor a scholar a bad preacher Evening Mr Whitefield always ag’reable.”85
Remorse as well as recalibration characterized Whitefield’s response to the meandering course of the revivals. In an apologetic letter to the Trustees of Georgia on December 6, 1748, Whitefield attempted to mend relations. He also advanced his most forceful case to date for the necessity of slavery in Georgia and attempted to justify his investment in a slave plantation in South Carolina. Acknowledging “too great an opinion of my own sufficiency” and “misguided zeal,” he nevertheless pleaded for recognition of his “disinterested” motives.86 For the troubled state of Georgia and his orphanage there, he fixed squarely on the inability to use slaves. “Upwards of five thousand pounds have been expended in that undertaking [at Bethesda], and yet very little proficiency made in the cultivation of my tract of land, and that entirely owing to the necessity I lay under of making use of white hands.” He could not resist adding wistfully: “Had a negro been allowed, I should now have had a sufficiency to support a great many orphans, without expending above half the sum which hath been laid out.”87 Though the Trustees’ resolve against slavery had weakened somewhat by this time, it is still possible to overstate the case. In other words, there was nothing inevitable about Whitefield’s insistence on slavery. His position still faced considerable counterarguments. One example is a sermon Thomas Francklin preached before the Trustees as late as March 16, 1750, in which he argued “how inconsistent Negroes are with it, as likewise with the Welfare of GEORGIA; and, if GEORGIA should receive them, how prejudicial they would be to SOUTH-CAROLINA: How needless also they are for the Products which are designed to be raised there.”88 That Francklin’s arguments were less moral and more pragmatic is one indication of the diminishing strength of the anti-slavery sentiment in Georgia.
Yet, determined not to be stymied any longer, Whitefield found alternative means of getting around the Trustees. He wanted the Trustees to know that he had weighed his options and found those in Georgia wanting. It was because his hands were tied, he claimed, that he was “prevailed on” to “purchase a plantation in South-Carolina, where negroes are allowed.”89 One can sense Whitefield straining to provide a justification for his actions. Likely aware of others in Georgia who were already disregarding the Trustees’ prohibitions, Whitefield added: “But notwithstanding my private judgement, I am determined that not one of mine shall ever be allowed to work at the Orphan-house, till I can do it in a legal manner, and by the approbation of the honourable Trustees.”90 A generous reading would suggest that Whitefield intended to abide by the rules in 1748, though he would change his mind by the following year.
Itinerating in Bermuda
In the spring of 1748, Whitefield spent two months on a preaching tour through Bermuda during which time he reached upwards of half the population.91 Judging from his journal entries in Bermuda, Whitefield appears to have experienced a veritable paradise: “The simplicity and plainness of the people, together with the pleasant situation of the island, much delighted me.”92 His time in the Caribbean was filled with positive encounters with all levels of society there, from government officials to slaves. Bermuda was a prospering colony with an extraordinary sensus communis, where people “came together across socioeconomic, racial, and gender lines.”93 It was, moreover, a society that prized refinement with regular formal balls, Masonic lodges, literary clubs, and private libraries. Governor Alured Popple’s eleven-hundred-volume library was the envy of Bermudian society, and people regularly borrowed, lent, and read books together.
In addition to the fair climate, thriving economy, and social harmony, Whitefield witnessed a society where racially mixed audiences gathered for religious services and literate slaves engaged him in astute theological conversations. He was impressed enough to record in his journal: “From all which I infer, that these Bermudas negroes are more knowing than I supposed; that their consciences are awake, and consequently prepared, in a good measure, for hearing the Gospel preached unto them.”94 If Whitefield enjoyed his conversation with the enslaved Bermudians, he also learned to refine his preaching in a way that conformed to slave society: “I believe the Lord enabled me so to discourse as to touch the negroes, and yet not to give them the least umbrage to flight or behave imperiously to their masters. If ever a minister in preaching, need the wisdom of the serpent to be joined with the harmlessness of the dove, it must be when discoursing to negroes.”95
Even as he made the free offer of the gospel to all, Whitefield discerned clear racial and social boundaries that he would need to tread with caution. So seriously did he take this balancing act that he called upon “the wisdom of the serpent.” His travels around the empire were teaching Whitefield the possibilities for reimagining British society in the colonial margins even while maintaining and reinscribing traditional boundaries.
Slave Owner in Georgia
The long and winding path Whitefield traversed in search of a viable strategy in Georgia helps us understand his response to the legalization of slavery in 1751. Upon hearing the news, he burst into doxology. “Thanks be to God, that the time for favoring that Colony seems to be come,” he wrote to a colleague in ministry. In addition to praise of the Almighty, his letter mingled relief with regret as it revealed the extent of his involvement in Georgia affairs. Relief because slave labor would provide a much-needed boost to Georgia’s ailing economy. Regret because the decision had come after long and costly delay. He could not help looking back and lamenting the many lost opportunities: “What a flourishing country might Georgia have been, had the use of [slaves] been permitted years ago?”96 The end result for Whitefield was a deepening resolve to see things through in the colony.
More than a story of one person’s fluctuating fortunes, Whitefield’s circumstances reflected broader realities on the ground in Georgia colony. The 1740s were a period of war and recession, where the early promise of a new enterprise had given way to stagnation and despair. After a moribund period of social and political unrest, Georgia was finally regaining its footing in the early 1750s. At its lowest point the population of the colony had dwindled to three thousand whites and six hundred blacks, but now was turning the corner toward a slow yet steady resurgence. Though many gave up and left Georgia, the few remaining Malcontents who had long protested the Trustees’ land and labor policies began to see what they deemed encouraging signs of change. To the delight of many, the ban on slavery was lifted in 1749. The subsequent legalization of slavery in 1751 and the transfer of the colony to a royal charter in 1752 fueled a stream, if not a flood, of migration from South Carolina. By one account, nearly a thousand slaves were brought from the neighboring colony into Georgia. In a similar vein, “between 1745 and 1766, South Carolina accounted for ‘more of Georgia’s new settlers . . . than . . . Europe or any other American colony.’”97 The tide had finally turned so that Georgia not only stopped losing settlers to its neighbor to the north but gained new residents to work the land and breathe new life into its economy.
Not by coincidence, it was during this time that Whitefield also began sharing some of his new insights regarding Africans. “I think now is the season for us to exert our utmost for the good of the poor Ethiopians,” he wrote to a friend in March 1751. He had just observed, no doubt referring to the slavery issue, that “the time for favouring that Colony seems to be come.” The letter also remains one of the few extant sources that reveal Whitefield’s theological position on slavery. He applied not one but three biblical examples in support of slavery. Not always the most systematic thinker, he cited the apostles, the Gibeonites (Joshua 9), and Abraham (Genesis 21) as he jumped between the Old and New Testaments with no discernible sense of reasoning or purpose. To scriptural argumentation he added economic necessity: “it is plain to a demonstration, that hot countries cannot be cultivated without negroes.” He also evinced a racial bias as he lamented: “How many white people have been destroyed for want of them, and how many thousands of pounds spent to no purpose at all?”98
As profit-seeking South Carolinians began moving into Georgia with their enslaved laborers, Whitefield hastened to sell his own Providence Plantation in South Carolina and set up Ephratah, a new plantation adjacent to his orphanage in Georgia. He sent instructions to sell Providence, at a loss if necessary: “I would only observe, that I had rather it should be sold for somewhat less than its real value, than to keep it any longer in my hands.”99 He wrote letters rejoicing that slave labor would improve future prospects at Bethesda: “I am glad to hear that Ephratah plantation is in some degree opened, and thereby a preparation made for a future progress this spring.”100
As his plan unfolded, Whitefield was not only responsible for leading the charge to legalize slavery in Georgia; he was also very much active in reaping the benefits of slave labor. Although details of Whitefield’s economic acitivity in Georgia are scant, we do know that by summer of 1753 the plantation near his orphanage had planted “about 50 acres of corn and rice.”101 Entering into the rice industry required more labor and equipment than a crop like cotton, as well as greater managerial efficiency.102 In other words, it was not a work to be lightly engaged; rather, it took firm resolve, a large capital investment, and a long-term plan. Jonathan Bryan, a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner himself who also began investing in Georgia, was a revival convert and follower of Whitefield. In his letter to Whitefield, there is a sense of both nervousness and embarrassment that he has failed to secure the laborers needed to support Whitefield’s crops: “I am sorry, those negroes expected from Doctor Brisbane are not yet bought.” We do not know how Whitefield responded to this setback, but it is clear Bryan felt the need to pad his report with as much positive news as possible, as he took pains to point out: “your people are now making shingles for sale.”103 This comment also gives a helpful glimpse into the complex economic operation in process around Bethesda. We can be sure that much of the push for economic efficiency came from Whitefield, whose religious convictions led him to spurn idleness as detrimental to the soul. Though a landed member of the gentry, with holdings in both South Carolina and Georgia, Bryan sounds at times like a groveling employee before Whitefield. Judging by his earlier letter and Whitefield’s own incessant writing about his financial travails, as well as his financial hopes, it is hard to exaggerate the interest with which both men followed the economic development of Whitefield’s property in Georgia. Two years later, Whitefield was still struggling to maintain the orphanage and frustrated in his attempts to buy slaves: “I am determined to take in no more than the plantation will maintain, till I can buy more negroes.”104 Despite the hurdles, his resolve was as strong as ever.
Slavery, Whitefield, and the Life Cycle of Revivals
Whitefield’s active participation in efforts to legalize slavery in Georgia sheds fresh light on how the political and economic realities of imperial expansion influenced the work of revivalists after the revivals peaked. Despite the impossibility of establishing a direct causal relationship, there can be little doubt that his decision to use the labor of enslaved persons for supporting the work of Bethesda was tied to the fleeting fruits of revival. Whatever worries he may have had about the morality of slavery faded as the revivals themselves dwindled and other concerns took priority. He had orphans to feed and clothe. There were more preaching appointments to meet and new places to reach across the Atlantic world. He had building projects of chapels in Philadelphia, Bristol, and London. He also began to harbor dreams of building a college and seminary.
And so we come again to Whitefield’s pensive words from the winter of 1750: “It tries me to hear that religion is at so low an ebb amongst You. Strange That we should grow older & yet grow worse, Receive more from Xt & yet do less for Him.”105 He appears to have been trying to make sense of what it meant that the high season of revivals had passed. At the intersection of the awakenings’ downward trend and his growing interest in other ventures, including slavery, it is noteworthy that George Whitefield not only was a religious leader but had also become a formidable economic and political force. His activism led him into arenas of imperial life where the Bible had little direct bearing, at least as he interpreted it. His facile attempts at scriptural justification aside, Whitefield saw economic activity as a necessary extension of his spiritual ambitions. For this reason, he detected no contradiction between owning slave plantations and preaching to tens of thousands of people in outdoor fields. To him, both were vital demonstrations of faith in action. He moved seamlessly from one mode of operation to another, and, as we retrace those steps carefully, we might also discern a pattern to the cycle of revivals emerging in evangelical religion. To put it another way, we can see the revivals as more than a religious campaign. The evangelical renewal was also a social, economic, and political movement that progressed along a series of phases. The phenomenon historians call the Great Awakening began with isolated and localized awakenings, spread to a more general network of revivals, then finally entered a later phase of revivalism, where the longing for heightened religious zeal lingered more than the actual experience.
One benefit to this kind of analysis is the focus it brings to a neglected but important feature of what might be called revival twilight—the long, calmer, and cooler aftermath of the white-hot bursts that had spread with the speed and intensity of a forest fire during the awakenings. While the image of Whitefield ingrained in historical memory is a young, brash revival preacher, our view of his involvement in slavery opens a wider angle that takes his later years into account. To illuminate the latter, more opaque phase of Whitefield’s public life exposes the ways in which mercantile ambitions—and not merely moral or religious motivations—energized his involvement in the emerging plantation economy of the American South at the very same time his revival project faced diminishing returns. This claim will sound like a self-evident statement of fact to some and cruel, even blasphemous, slander to others. Suspending judgment and paving a middle way through both of these evaluative responses allows us to see how post-revival dynamics set up ideal conditions for the conflation of religious, political, and economic forces. Without intending to do so, Whitefield pushed religious concerns into the realm of imperial economy and politics. His advocacy for slavery was the most obvious, and tragic, consequence of this fact.
To put this matter in broader context, even as a prospering economy expanded the number of material choices available to ordinary people, the revivals emphasized the importance of making good religious choices in all spheres of life. As one historian put it, “The revival moment . . . deepened evangelicals’ sense—an often tacit assumption—that free trade and piety, market behaviors and social solidarity, were compatible.”106 After the early spectacular revivals, the challenge of maintaining and consolidating revival gains dovetailed with growing evangelical participation in the world of market exchange. At a time when the clergy were relaxing earlier strictures, ceding more economic freedom to merchants, and articulating a vocabulary of faithful engagement with imperial policies, Whitefield rushed headlong into the market system himself. As the early eighteenth-century colonial world witnessed a transformation of religious attitudes toward economic activity, Whitefield placed himself at the forefront of that sea change. Not merely a preacher providing guidance, he became an active participant in the world of commerce.
For this reason, a fresh look at Whitefield’s changing attitudes toward slavery, which the preceding pages have tried to offer, is an integral part of any attempt to understand revival religion, and for that matter any social or religious movement with a tempestuous crescendo followed by a protracted settlement period. That examination has revealed Whitefield’s drive for economic stability despite his loud and repetitive denials, often with accompanying denunciations, of what he called “temporal” motives. It is not necessary to judge or deny the sincerity of Whitefield’s interest in the spiritual well-being of all persons in Georgia—including British colonists and enslaved Africans—to recognize that he was also subject to the political and economic realities of imperial life. By placing the issue of slavery into the larger narrative arc of Whitefield’s revival ministry, we can discern a relationship between slavery and the revivals that points to a pattern in which opportunities concerning the former counteracted the waning influence of the latter.
Conclusion
Whitefield’s evolving stance on slavery reminds us that the expanding imperial landscape resulted in a bewildering array of socioeconomic opportunities, cultural encounters, and ethical choices, which elicited problematic responses. In addition to posing pragmatic questions about sustainable economies, the moral quagmire involved in enslaving another human being engendered a spiritual and theological crisis.107 In this instance, the imperial experiment influenced scriptural interpretation and theological conviction. The capitulation to slavery, moreover, attenuated the moral clarity of evangelicalism and exposed the vulnerabilities of the awakenings as a sustainable movement. In the process, the honey-tongued evangelist also tied the cause of revivalism to the engine of a growing commercial empire, consequently captivated by the allure of an expanding British state on a seemingly unstoppable arc of growth.
Whitefield’s relationship to slavery allows us to discern distinct steps along this journey. Once so preoccupied with preaching to the masses that he hardly had time to write letters to close friends, he entered into another period of life during the decade of the 1740s in which he began organizing a lobby to introduce land and labor reforms in the small outpost colony of Georgia. For this reason, his life can serve as a proxy for discerning the transition in evangelical heart religion from winning souls to maintaining a movement. The awakenings in their early years had been impulsive, local events. They subsequently spread to create a more general phenomenon of revivals, which were transatlantic in scope, even international to some extent. The revivals then gave way to a process of routinization, with the spirit of evangelical religion becoming less spontaneous and more institutionalized. The focus turned from sparking revivals to sustaining revivalism and somewhere along the way the experience of revivals was supplanted by the longing for revivals. For John Wesley this sequence led to his organization of connectional Methodist societies; for Whitefield it led to his reorganization of Britain’s imperial economy.
It is striking to see this sequence of stages in Whitefield’s life. As he penned a public letter to the inhabitants of the southern colonies in 1740, he sounded tentative about slavery because the letter was composed at the height of revival fervor at a time when he was constantly on the move, rushing from one memorable revival triumph to another. As such, the letter sought to establish some semblance of authority over a fast-growing movement spread across a wide geographical region. Whitefield’s purpose in writing the letter was not so much to formulate rules but to encourage an attitude of piety and perhaps just as much to test the boundaries of his influence. A decade later, Whitefield was in a dramatically different frame of mind. He was focused on more mundane matters—like legislative reform, rice cultivation, and real estate transactions. To account for this change in Whitefield’s life is one way of getting at the adaptations of early evangelicalism to the realities of time and space.
Examining the relationship between Whitefield and slavery has revealed the ways in which the religious event of the Great Awakening conformed to the values and priorities of imperial state formation. When war erupted across the empire once more in the middle of the 1750s, the boundary between religion and society would be blurred again.
1. Frank Lambert has noted the change in Whitefield beginning with his fourth trip (1751–1752) to America this way: “When Whitefield embarked for Georgia aboard the Antelope in 1751, he was a different person from the young minister who had first sailed for America in 1737. . . . In his last four colonial visits, Whitefield’s persona was that of evangelical statesman as opposed to partisan warrior.” Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity,” 199.
2. Extract of a letter to “My Lord” [Lavington] from “Dr. S. of N.” [James Stonehouse] concerning George Whitefield, his changing views, and the new edition of his journal. October 1748. In the hand of Lavington. The Papers of George Lavington, Secker 8, f. 46, Lambeth Palace Library.
3. Whitefield to William Bradford on February 24, 1750, American Philosophical Society.
4. To be sure, isolated and persistent episodes of revivals continued to reverberate into the latter half of the century. Some scholars have argued that there is no divide between the Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening, conflating two epochal moments into one. For instance, Thomas Kidd has argued, “There was simply no clear break between the First and Second Great Awakenings.” Kidd, The Great Awakening, 321. One way to read the seemingly conflicting reports is to acknowledge that a kind of low-grade revivalism continued well into the nineteenth century after the burst of concentrated revivals in the early 1740s.
5. The decline of the sale of religious titles provides clear evidence of a shift in public consumption. For a description of this downward trend from majority of sales in 1739 to 20 percent by the 1760s, see Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity,” 201.
6. In his last chapter entitled “The Americanization of Whitefield,” Frank Lambert argues for a “direct link between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution.” Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity,” 198. In contrast, my analysis focuses on the changes in Whitefield himself and not so much the patriotic uses to which he was put during the revolutionary era. Consequently, my study conceives of “Americanization” as a process in which new cross-cultural encounters led to symbiotic exchange, resulting in profound alterations to both sides. A work along these lines that received wide acclaim when it first appeared yet received little scholarly engagement is James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Though quite different in their methods as well as the stories they tell, Rachel Wheeler picked up where Axtell left off, over two decades later. See Rachel M. Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Both works represent meaningful efforts to place Christian missionary efforts in the larger context of the British Empire. A teleology of British triumph limited Axtell’s choices to resistance and accommodation in the British-Indian encounter. Wheeler moved past Axtell’s two-pronged fork in the road by positing the third way of a genuine Mohican conversion that received Christianity without compromising indigenous integrity or agency. My work seeks to investigate the other side of the European–American encounter, investigating ways in which Whitefield’s own social, cultural, and religious views were changed by his travels around the empire. By evaluating the changes in Whitefield’s message and strategy through the lens of symbiotic adaptation, beyond a false dichotomy between resistance and accommodation, I argue that the world that made George Whitefield was itself undergoing profound changes, which reverberated into his life and ministry. To quote Wheeler: “Cultural encounter transformed not only the missionized but also the missionaries.” Wheeler, To Live upon Hope, 226.
7. For an in-depth study of this transition from the seventeenth-century Puritan suspicion to the eighteenth-century evangelical embrace of commerce, see Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
8. Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 22.
9. Smith, Slavery and Rice Culture, 213.
10. Julia Floyd Smith has written about the making of a Georgian aristocracy, to which Whitefield was vitally connected if not an actual member: “The tidewater experiment in rice planting and the liberal land policy evinced during the twenty-four years of royal government created a society of exclusive slaveholding planters in coastal Georgia, not unlike the society along the coast of South Carolina. These Georgia aristocrats, representing a small minority of the white population, attained wealth in land and slaves because of the benefits accruing to them from imperial policy.” Smith, Slavery and Rice Culture, 28. Thomas Kidd has acknowledged that by his involvement in slavery “Whitefield contributed to evangelical Christians’ troubling record on race relations and ethnic inequality.” Kidd, George Whitefield, 261.
11. A Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina, in George Whitefield, Three Letters from the Reverend Mr. G. Whitefield (Philadelphia, 1740), 13; emphasis added.
12. Whitefield to Mr. B—, March 22, 1751, in Works, 2:408; emphasis added. Kidd, George Whitefield, 255.
13. For an example of the former, see Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity.” For an example of the latter, see Allan Gallay, “The Origins of Slaveholders’ Paternalism: George Whitefield, the Bryan Family, and the Great Awakening in the South,” The Journal of Southern History 53, no. 3 (1987): 369–94.
14. For a fuller description of state formation as the “struggle to come up with ways of governing space and bringing diverse peoples within the state,” see Griffin, America’s Revolution, esp. 39–41.
15. An Account, Shewing the Progress of the Colony of Georgia in America, From Its First Establishment: Published Per Order of the Honorable the Trustees (Jonas Green, at his printing-office, in Annapolis, 1741). Also in Trevor R. Reese, The Clamorous Malcontents: Criticisms & Defenses of the Colony of Georgia, 1741–1743 (Savannah: The Beehive Press, 1973), 190–92.
16. An Account, Shewing the Progress of the Colony of Georgia in America, From Its First Establishment: Published Per Order of the Honorable the Trustees. Also in Reese, The Clamorous Malcontents, 186. Reese presents this pamphlet as the authoritative version of the Trustees’ defense, which “all historians of early Georgia have used . . . as the most reliable contemporary account available.” Reese, The Clamorous Malcontents, xiv.
17. In attempting a definition, Betty Wood at first applies a highly technical requirement: “an individual who actively opposed the Trustees’ scheme by signing one or more of the following documents: the three major petitions sent from Georgia in 1738 and 1740, and Thomas Stephens’ Commission as ‘Agent for the Malcontents,’ drawn up in October, 1741.” Betty Wood, “A Note on the Georgia Malcontents,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 63, no. 2 (1979): 264. Only a few pages later, she appears to regret this strict definition, claiming, “The malcontents were not a monolithic, unchanging group,” and going as far as to assert that the group was “quite fluid in terms of its personnel.” Wood, “A Note on the Georgia Malcontents,” 273.
18. According to Wood, “Almost ninety percent of the 212 malcontents [who signed a formal petition] can be positively identified as English or Lowland Scots in origin.” Wood, “A Note on the Georgia Malcontents,” 271.
19. Wood, “A Note on the Georgia Malcontents,” 271.
20. William Stephens, A State of the Province of Georgia: Attested Upon Oath in the Court of Savannah, November 10, 1740 (London, 1752), 27.
21. Milton Ready, “The Georgia Trustees and the Malcontents: The Politics of Philanthropy,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 60, no. 3 (1976): 265.
22. Reese, The Clamorous Malcontents, viii; An Account, Shewing the Progress of the Colony of Georgia in America, From Its First Establishment: Published Per Order of the Honorable the Trustees, 188.
23. See John Pitts Corry, “Racial Elements in Colonial Georgia,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1936): especially 30–31.
24. In contrasting the “constitutional” Malcontents with those who were Scots “adventurers,” Milton Ready goes too far when he asserts that they were “motivated not by a desire for personal gain but rather by a wish to reform the existing Trust system.” To impugn the motives of one group while valorizing the other group introduces an unrealistic standard of unadulterated virtue. At the same time, the distinction between the lowland Scots and the English is a helpful one. Ready, “Georgia Trustees and the Malcontents,” 273.
25. For a detailed account of the contentious father-son relationship between William Stephens and Thomas Stephens, see Julie Anne Sweet, “William Stephens versus Thomas Stephens: A Family Feud in Colonial Georgia,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 92, no. 1 (2008): 1–36.
26. Thomas Stephens, The Hard Case of the Distressed People of Georgia (London, 1742); Thomas Stephens, A Brief Account of the Causes That Have Retarded the Progress of the Colony of Georgia in America (London, 1743).
27. Stephens, Hard Case, 260; emphasis in original.
28. Stephens, Brief Account, 280–81.
29. Stephens, Brief Account, 278.
30. Stephens, Brief Account, 281; emphasis in original.
31. Coleman, Colonial Georgia, 102, 110.
32. Stephens, Hard Case, 2.
33. Betty Wood, “Thomas Stephens and the Introduction of Black Slavery in Georgia,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 58, no. 1 (1974): 38.
34. Wood, “Thomas Stephens,” 24.
35. Whitefield is absent in the best historical treatments of the Malcontents, such as Wood, “A Note on the Georgia Malcontents”; Ready, “Georgia Trustees and the Malcontents.”
36. George Whitefield, A Brief Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present Situation of the Orphan-House in Georgia (1746), 62–64.
37. George Whitefield to John Wesley, October 14, 1746, in Tyerman, Life, 2:165.
38. Candler, Colonial Records, 5:480.
39. Gillies, Memoirs, 32.
40. Gillies, Memoirs; Tyerman, Life, 1:141.
41. Habersham arrived in Georgia only six months after William and Thomas Stephens and patiently built a life for himself, eventually becoming secretary of the colony then later president. During the 1740s, he served as the headmaster of Whitefield’s orphanage and became the revival preacher’s most trusted spokesperson. For more, see Frank Lambert, James Habersham: Loyalty, Politics, and Commerce in Colonial Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).
42. Candler, Colonial Records, 5:376.
43. Lambert, James Habersham, 74–80.
44. Tyerman, Life, 1:141.
45. Whitefield, A Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina, in Whitefield, Three Letters, 13–16; Tyerman, Life, 1:353. The Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet quotes from this letter of Whitefield in a letter to the Countess of Huntingdon on May 20, 1774, citing it as an example par excellence of Christian virtue; see John R. Tyson and Boyd Schlenther, In the Midst of Early Methodism: Lady Huntingdon and Her Correspondence (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 227–29.
46. Whitefield, Three Letters, 13.
47. Whitefield, Three Letters, 15.
48. Seward, Journal of a Voyage, 52–53.
49. George Whitefield, “A Letter from the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield to a Friend in London, Dated at New-Brunswick in New Jersey, April 27, 1740” (London, 1740); emphasis added.
50. Seward, Journal of a Voyage, 11.
51. Whitefield, Journals, 462, 487.
52. Frank Lambert writes that Whitefield and his associate James Habersham identified “two types of dependent labor: indentured servants and orphans.” Lambert, James Habersham, 46.
53. Journal of the Earl of Egmont, in Candler, Colonial Records, 5:359.
54. George Whitefield, “The Manner of the Children Spending their Time at the Orphan-House in Georgia,” 2. Appended to “A Letter from the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield to a Friend in London, dated at New-Brunswick in New Jersey, April 27, 1740.”
55. Whitefield, “The Manner of the Children Spending their Time,” 3.
56. Coleman, Colonial Georgia, 141.
57. William Stephens, A Journal of the Proceedings in Georgia (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), 272–73; emphasis added. For another account of this incident, see Lambert, James Habersham, 47.
58. Stephens, Journal of the Proceedings, 2:277.
59. Stephens, Journal of the Proceedings, 2:294–96.
60. Stephens, Journal of the Proceedings, 2:409.
61. For example, Stuart Henry is likely correct, but only partially so, to defend Whitefield, “It must not be imagined, however, that Whitefield was perpetrating pious fraud upon the colonists in his ardor to watch over the homeless.” Stuart Clark Henry, George Whitefield: Wayfaring Witness (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1957), 58.
62. Patrick Tailfer, Hugh Anderson, and Da. Douglas, A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia (Charles-Town, SC: Printed for P. Timothy, 1741), 72.
63. The Pennsylvania Gazette, November 8, 1739.
64. Whitefield, Brief Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present Situation, 56.
65. Whitefield, Brief Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present Situation, 57.
66. See Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize.
67. Simon Frost to Savage, April 15, 1741, in Samuel Savage Papers, MS N-855.1, Massachusetts Historical Society.
68. Phyllis Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 11.
69. The State of Religion in New England, Since the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield’s Arrival There (Glasgow, 1742), 44.
70. The State of Religion in New England, 44.
71. Whitefield, Continuation of the Account, 17.
72. Whitefield, Brief Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present Situation, 59.
73. Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize, 235.
74. Letter to a generous Benefactor unknown, Charles-Town, March 15, 1747, in Works, 2:93–95.
75. Letter on June 1, 1747, in Works, 2:108. Another letter on June 29, 1747, in Works, 2:113–15.
76. Whitefield, Works, 2:123–31.
77. Tyerman, Life, 1:460.
78. Whitefield to Mr. H—, June 1, 1747; Whitefield to —, June 29, 1747, in Works, 2:105, 110.
79. Whitefield to Howel Harris, September 11, 1747, in Works, 2:125.
80. Whitefield to John Wesley, September 11, 1747, in Works, 2:127.
81. Tyerman, Life, 2:179.
82. Kidd, George Whitefield, 209.
83. Nathaniel Sargent to Savage, August 24, 1747, Ms N-885.1, Samuel Savage Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
84. Sunday, August 9, 1759, Mss.b.sh61, William Shippen Journal, American Philosophical Society.
85. Sunday, August 16, 1759, Mss.b.sh61, William Shippen Journal.
86. Whitefield to the Honorable Trustees of Georgia, December 6, 1748, in Works, 2:208–9.
87. Whitefield to Trustees, in Works, 2:209; emphasis added.
88. Thomas Francklin, A Sermon Preached Before the Honourable Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America, and the Associates of the Late Rev. Dr. Bray; March 16, 1749–50. In the Parish Church of St. Margaret, Westminster (London, 1750).
89. Whitefield to Trustees, in Works, 2:209.
90. Whitefield to Trustees, in Works, 2:209.
91. Michael J. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010), 304. Though Whitefield stopped publishing his journals in 1741, portions of his journal entries from Bermuda are preserved in John Gillies, Memoirs of the Life of the Reverend George Whitefield (Meadow View: Quinta Press, 2000), 121–33.
92. March 1748 (precise date unknown), in Gillies, Memoirs, 121.
93. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 303.
94. May 7, 1748, entry in Gillies, Memoirs, 130.
95. May 1, 1748, entry in Gillies, Memoirs, 128.
96. Whitefield to Mr. B—, March 22, 1751, in Works, 2:404.
97. Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 91.
98. Whitefield to Mr. B—, March 22, 1751, in Works, 2:404–5.
99. Whitefield to Mr. H— B—, January 7, 1753, in Works, 2:476.
100. Whitefield to Mr. J— B—, February 1, 1753, in Works, 3:7.
101. Jonathan Bryan to George Whitefield, July 1, 1753, Letter 34 in George Whitefield Papers, Library of Congress.
102. Smith, Slavery and Rice Culture.
103. Jonathan Bryan to George Whitefield, July 1, 1753, Letter 34 in George Whitefield Papers, Library of Congress.
104. Whitefield to Mrs. C—, August 30, 1755, in Works, 3:217.
105. George Whitefield to William Bradford, February 24, 1750, in Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, American Philosophical Society.
106. Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize, 244.
107. Whitefield lived in a time when belief in common human origins, or monogenesis, was an accepted fact of life. However, intellectual rationalizations for chattel slavery and the increasing pluralistic understandings of humankind began to undermine status quo assumptions. For a study of crumbling Mosaic foundations due to an undermining of common human origins, see Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). To understand the complexity of the questions arising in this period, we might look ahead to the proffered solution of polygenesis in the nineteenth century that proved profoundly troubling from the perspective of European theological orthodoxy.