6. Whitefield and His Colleges

6. Whitefield and His Colleges

Losing sight of Whitefield’s later years not only distorts a compelling biographical story but also obscures the shifting tides of British imperial history in the mid-eighteenth century. For it was in these final years that the preacher’s long brewing interest in the empire became most pronounced. At a time when the British Empire was growing at a rapid pace, Whitefield’s ongoing revision of revival strategies contributed much to the remaking of his world. Therefore, following this indomitable preacher into his latter years shows that his most creative work happened after the height of revival, as he struggled to work out alternatives to the revival successes that faded away. During the Great Awakening he lambasted institutions like Harvard and Yale for dead, reified religion, only to spend his years in the aftermath of revival fervor supporting—in many cases fundraising and helping to establish—institutions of higher learning such as Dartmouth, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. Far from evincing outright inconsistency, such changes signify a hierarchy of values and evolution in strategy. In fact, Whitefield went beyond supporting others’ college ventures; he set out to establish a college of his own. Examining the political, theological, and cultural dimensions of the campaign to turn his Bethesda Orphanage into a college provides additional evidence for the significance of Whitefield’s later years in understanding British imperial developments in the mid-eighteenth century. In so doing, this chapter argues that extending attention into the last decade of his life holds the key to understanding religion’s ongoing, albeit tempered, influence in British imperial culture and politics.

Throughout the 1760s, Whitefield poured his remaining energy into a campaign to establish Bethesda College in Georgia, revealing ambitions that reached across the British Empire. In a 1763 remark describing the purpose of his college to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Secker, he said it was to prepare “persons of superiour rank” to “serve their king, their country, and their God, either in church or state.”¹ In this telling comment, Whitefield made it clear that he was not content to limit his influence to the church. His aim rather was an institution that would serve the state as well. Beyond the region surrounding Savannah, moreover, he also announced designs on a broader southern area of the empire, so that his college might rival older institutions in New England. Bethesda and Georgia were no longer side occupations to which Whitefield would turn when he had time to spare. Rather, they became the essential elements of a comprehensive program for empire-wide influence. In these ways, Whitefield showed little interest in continuing to export British culture into the American colonies. To the contrary, he saw the outlying provinces as themselves contributing to the cause of building a worldwide British Empire.²

During these years, Whitefield proved that he was more than the central architect of an international Protestant revival movement; he became an outspoken advocate of the American colonies. Although he had established himself as a chaplain to the London gentry as well as a leader of the Calvinistic methodists scattered across Britain, Whitefield was far from content in the metropole. While demand for his presence remained at a high pitch in the cosmopolitan centers of the British Empire, Whitefield consistently made a beeline for the periphery. A Briton deeply committed to both the heart and outer edges of the empire, the famous itinerant helps us to appreciate the centrifugal force of British imperialism. That a person of such international prominence and widespread transatlantic connections should set his sights so persistently on a rural project in the American South speaks volumes about the allure of emerging provincial centers in the colonial landscape. Notwithstanding Whitefield’s vaunted ambitions for Bethesda’s regional impact in the southern colonies, Savannah was located at the geographical margins of colonial life. With Congregationalism dominant in New England, Protestant pluralism thriving in Pennsylvania, and Anglicanism entrenched in Virginia, however, Georgia was a fitting site for the experiments of a lifelong outsider like Whitefield. That he attempted to make the hinterlands of colonial society the center of his imperial enterprise was one of Whitefield’s most significant innovations, the culmination of his lifelong devotion to a theology of the margins. His Bethesda efforts were only the most visible activities of a wide-ranging involvement in developing institutions across the American colonies. In his view, the center of influence in the empire had shifted from Britain to America, and from London to—of all places—Savannah and other colonial towns.

Far from a schismatic or a revolutionary, however, Whitefield saw himself as a loyal subject of the king and servant of the church. As such he toiled to make contributions toward a transatlantic and pan-Protestant British society. In this labor, Bethesda allowed Whitefield the satisfaction of local entrenchment without the loss of an international platform.³ From the brief sketch in the following pages, a much more complex image of Whitefield will emerge than that simply of revival preacher. From the beginning of his career he declined the role of a parish priest, and he disregarded parish boundaries throughout his life. His preferred title was “presbyter at large,” and he saw culture-making as a critical component of his vocation. In this combination of self-invention, imperial fixation, and long-term projects that reflected both, he eventually articulated a distinct role for America in the empire.

Along the way, we will also see the Achilles’s heel in the process of British state formation in the eighteenth century. It was not because Anglicization failed that a final rupture between the colonies and their motherland occurred. Instead, it was because the process of transplanting British culture, along with its values and ideals, succeeded so spectacularly that activities like the building of colleges and the making of culture shifted easily into a movement for liberty and independence (albeit after Whitefield’s death).⁴ There is no evidence to suggest that Whitefield had premonitions of a coming revolution. Yet there are ample reasons to argue that the preacher’s lifelong and intensifying emphasis on British liberties contributed to the formation of a distinctly American style of religion and culture.⁵ In other words, Whitefield’s life is an object lesson in the corrosive effects, in the long term, of Anglicization on imperial cohesion. As the empire grew and subjects like Whitefield sought to carry British liberties to the colonial fringes, solidarity with fellow Britons buckled under the burden of distance. Although not evident at the time, Whitefield’s attempts to build a college in the Georgia forests represented a subversion of the imperial cause as well as an outworking of the imperial logic.

With Whitefield’s campaign for Bethesda College as an entry point, this chapter argues for the enduring if emended role of religion in mediating the torrent of political and cultural change in the period between the Great Awakening and the American Revolution. My approach centers on unifying a heretofore patchwork understanding of Whitefield’s struggles to establish Bethesda College against the backdrop of broader colonial agitation for a place in the wider imperial landscape.

The chapter begins with a survey of various efforts to establish colonial colleges in which Whitefield had some degree of involvement. We will then trace the development of Whitefield’s dreams for his own Bethesda College, which had origins in the complex crucible of post-revival ennui, the growing web of transatlantic evangelicalism, the strategic frontier position of Georgia with the other southern colonies, and Britain’s growing imperialism during and after the Seven Years’ War. In examining this period, recognition of the post-war reconstruction character of colonial life is vital; in this vein, the Seven Years’ War of the immediate past looms larger as an interpretive factor than the specter of the Revolutionary War in the not-so-distant future. After tracing the history of Whitefield’s quest for a college charter in this way, we will proceed to explore the meaning of his Bethesda vision, from his tactical accommodation of imperial politics to his theological affection for the margins to finally his vision of social and cultural renewal. Understood in its larger context, the Bethesda project was an attempt to further the vision of an ascendant Protestant society, through both triumph and turmoil, on the fluid canvas of colonial life.

Whitefield and Colonial Colleges

Whitefield came into contact with numerous colonial colleges at one point or another in the course of his American career. These interactions shaped his interest in a college project of his own. Though his first encounters with Harvard and Yale during the height of the Great Awakening were bitterly antagonistic, he sought to mend relations with these institutions in his later years. He also directed his energies toward helping not only fellow revivalists but also friends like Benjamin Franklin in their respective college-building efforts. Since these activities influenced his vision for Bethesda College, the first part of this chapter will explore Whitefield’s various connections to colleges in the New World.

An allegorical pamphlet by William Smith published in 1753 can help us understand the general appeal of colonial colleges in the mid-eighteenth century. Smith was a graduate of the University of Aberdeen who assisted in the campaign for a college in New York. Upon the publication of his pamphlet, he received an invitation to Philadelphia from Benjamin Franklin, who was duly impressed with Smith’s vision. The guest lecture led to a permanent position, and so valuable were Smith’s contributions to Franklin’s efforts that he became the first provost of the new college. An excerpt from the conclusion of his pamphlet is instructive for our purposes, especially as he explains the benefits of a provincial college:

A single Province has a vast Advantage, in the Execution of a Scheme of this Nature, above an extensive Monarchy. In large and populous Countries, Education cannot be immediately the Care of the Legislature; they can only enact good Laws for Education, and devolve the Execution of them upon fit Persons, in every particular Seminary: But in a single Province, where all the Youth may be collected into one general Seminary, the Legislature, or those commission’d by them, may, and should, be the immediate Superintendents of Education; than which nothing can be more worthy their Care.⁶

As Smith saw it, a provincial college helped establish a direct line of influence within the local region and without relying on ties to the imperial center by way of “immediate superintendents.” Education particularized to a province, in other words, contributed to a cohesive local or regional culture.

This dynamic of greater provincial independence is likely what Thomas Penn, son of Pennsylvania colony’s founder, had in mind when he wrote to Governor Hamilton on February 12, 1750, expressing doubts about the advisability of a college in Philadelphia. “I find people here think we go too fast with regard to the matter,” wrote Penn, “and it gives an opportunity to those fools who are always telling their fears that the Colonies will set up for themselves.”⁷ A colonial college not only served to bring greater stability to a province distant from the metropole; it also reinforced the separation that existed between the two. By setting out to establish colonial colleges, provincial leaders like Franklin in Pennsylvania, Gilbert Tennent and Samuel Davies in New Jersey, and Eleazar Wheelock in Connecticut (and later New Hampshire) contributed to the building of a colonial infrastructure that set the colonies on a centrifugal course away from the centralizing tendencies of imperial culture. With this larger colonial backdrop in mind, we can better assess Whitefield’s labors in provincial Georgia as well as the potent resistance he met in his efforts to establish Bethesda College.

This college project was far from a novel idea that dawned on him during the twilight of his life; there are hints of it in Whitefield’s writings from early in his American career. At the beginning of his second American trip in a letter dated November 10, 1739, he said as much: “I have had great intimations from above concerning Georgia. Who knows but we may have a college of pious youths at Savannah?”⁸ Perhaps for this reason, he paid careful attention to the colleges he visited during his early travels around the colonies, writing down largely negative judgments about their state. In those early years, Whitefield’s primary concern was revival preaching and his eyes were fixed upon these institutions’ moral and spiritual deficiencies. Yet it is also possible that his early criticism of colonial educational institutions was motivated by an ambition to build his own college that fit his particular vision of spiritual renewal.

Alongside criticism, Whitefield also recorded quite specific details about their organization. In a visit to Williamsburg, Virginia on December 15, 1739, he noted there were “eight scholars, a president, two masters, and professors in the several sciences.”⁹ The fact that “Christ or Christianity is scarcely so much as named amongst them” led Whitefield to dream about a remedy: “we may hope for some primitive schools to be erected and encouraged amongst us.”¹⁰ In September of the following year, he was at Harvard, where again he was meticulous to note: “one president, four tutors, and about a hundred students.” Here too, he was not impressed, writing, “The college is scarce as big as one of our least colleges at Oxford.” Even more disconcerting, “Discipline is at a low ebb. Bad books are become fashionable among the tutors and students. Tillotson and Clark are read, instead of Shepard, Stoddard, and such-like evangelical writers.”¹¹ Yale College in New Haven was even less inspiring, being “about one-third part as big as that of Cambridge.” Whitefield continued to jot down very specific details, as if sizing up his would-be competitors: “It has one Rector, three Tutors, and about a hundred students.” As we will see in the following narrative, Whitefield’s relationship with colonial colleges evolved over the course of his career. First was criticism and then came cooperation; both led to the idea of his own chartered college.

A College in New Jersey

Whitefield was not merely an obstructionist critic when it came to colonial colleges. In fact, there were a number of schools he supported with the full weight of his considerable influence. He early expressed enthusiasm for William Tennent’s Log College, a forerunner of the College of New Jersey at Princeton.¹² In a November 21, 1748, letter that shows his broad reach, he wrote from London of his efforts in Scotland to raise funds for schools in America: “I have been endeavoring in Scotland to do all the service I could to [Wheelock’s] Indian school and the New-Jersey college whilst I was there.”¹³ Two years later, he expressed enthusiasm for the strategic geographical location of the college in New Jersey, since “the spreading of the gospel in Maryland and Virginia in a great measure depends upon it.”¹⁴

He was no doubt familiar with the efforts of Gilbert Tennent and Samuel Davies in promoting the college in New Jersey. The rationale held out by these revival preachers featured a strong imperial theme. For instance, Tennent and Davies, revivalists like Whitefield, transferred their immense energies to the college in New Jersey even as the fruits of revival withered. In 1754, they spelled out what they had in mind just as tensions between the British and French empires were breaking out into open warfare. Their explanation took a distinct step beyond religious to political rationales: “Nor would such a Seminary answer a religious End only; it would also serve a political View: For sure, if from us Learning and good Manners could be propagated thro’ these Savages, it would be a Means of engaging them more firmly in the British Interest.”¹⁵ In their view, as the colonies grew, there were emerging needs that “the Two Colleges in New-England . . . [were] unable to supply.”¹⁶ If there was the possibility of inter-colonial competition, they were also quick to point out the imperial dimensions:

A Design! which is not calculated to promote the low Purposes of a Party, but in its Views and Consequences affects the Protestant Interest in general, and Great-Britain in particular, both in Religious and Civil Respects; since by this, the filial Duty of her Descendants will be inculcated, their Manners reformed, and her Trade increased, which is the Basis of her Empire, Glory and Felicity.¹⁷

Not only would an “English College,” as they called it, help preserve British culture in the colonies. Such an institution would also be vital in the process of assimilating non-English settlers. Tennent and Davies went out of their way to stress the importance of teaching English to the Germans among them “so national Prejudices may be removed, and they more easily incorporated with the rest of His Majesty’s Subjects.”¹⁸

A College in Pennsylvania

Around the same time that Tennent and Davies made their appeal, in nearby Pennsylvania Whitefield showcased his ability to juggle a variety of tasks as he communicated with Franklin over the latter’s efforts to establish a school in Philadelphia. Back in 1740 during the height of the revivals, Whitefield’s preaching in that city had led to the construction of an edifice to accommodate his religious services. The “New Building” as it came to be known was principally used by Whitefield for his revivalistic purposes in its early days. In fact, he was the first to preach there in November 1740, before its roof had even been placed. From the beginning, however, those who initiated the building project had a larger purpose in mind. The New Building was sponsored by leading merchants and religious leaders who wanted to provide space for a charity school as well as revival services. In a July 1740 advertisement, the proponents of the building described their purpose as “to erect a large building for a charity school for the instruction of poor children gratis in useful literature and the knowledge of the Christian religion and also for a house of publick worship, the houses in this place being insufficient to contain the great numbers who convene on such occasions and it being impracticable to meet in the open air at all times of the year because of the inclemency of the weather.”¹⁹ Whitefield was not only the most popular preacher at the New Building; he was also selected one of its Trustees. In a letter he wrote to a friend on December 4, 1740, he sounded an enthusiastic tone: “As I am chosen one of the Trustees and have promised to procure a master and mistress for the first scholars, I think it my duty to make what interest I can towards carrying on so good a work.”²⁰

As with so many other colonial projects of Whitefield, however, this one too languished while the preacher devoted himself to his first love, proclaiming the new birth across the Atlantic world.²¹ In the meantime, it fell to Benjamin Franklin to revive the work for a college; in 1749 he opened the campaign with a letter in The Pennsylvania Gazette saying that “those times are come, and numbers of our inhabitants are both able and willing to give their sons a good education, if it might be had at home, free from the extraordinary expense and hazard in sending them abroad for that purpose.”²² In a lengthier piece entitled “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania” that was also published in 1749, Franklin urged the necessity of a school that “might supply the succeeding Age with Men qualified to serve the Publick with Honour to themselves, and to their country.”²³ He may even have been trying to provoke a competitive spirit among his peers in Philadelphia by going as far as to say: “The present Race are not thought to be generally of equal Ability. For though the American Youth are allow’d not to want Capacity; yet the best Capacities require Cultivation, it being truly with them, as with the best Ground, which unless well tilled and sowed with profitable Seed, produces only ranker Weeds.”²⁴

Franklin shared his plans for the college with Whitefield, who replied promptly with an honest critique. For starters, he was not happy that Franklin included Archbishop Tillotson in his list of recommended readings, whom Whitefield had reviled as knowing no more about Christianity than Mohammed.²⁵ Yet he also expressed support for his old friend and tactfully, if firmly, offered some choice suggestions for improving the plan, which he described as deserving of “general approbation,” while hastening to add, “I think there wants aliquid Christi [something of Christ] in it, to make it so useful as I would desire it might be.”²⁶ Whitefield went on to stress the need “to convince [students] of their natural depravity,” as well as the services of “a well-approved Christian Orator” whose lessons would be as frequent as one to two hours a day. Furthermore, he reminded Franklin, who took pride in his own narrative of self-made success, about the importance of a “free education of the poorer sort.” He almost certainly had his own life story in mind when he said, “It hath been often found, that some of our brightest men in church and state, have arisen from such an obscure condition.”²⁷

Franklin went on to build his college, and today a statue of Whitefield stands on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, identifying him as a founder of the university. The plaque in front of the statue bears a quotation from Benjamin Franklin: “I knew him intimately upwards of thirty years. His integrity, disinterestedness and indefatigable zeal in prosecuting every good work I have never seen equalled and shall never see excelled.”²⁸ In spite of profound disagreements over the course of their long friendship, it is clear Franklin saw Whitefield as a likeminded partner in the colonial enterprise.

A College in Connecticut and New Hampshire

We saw in the previous chapter how war in North America kept Whitefield in Britain from 1755 to 1763. Once war ended, however, the restless itinerant once again threw himself into a variety of projects in America. The general interest he harbored toward colonial colleges took on more specific form as he provided aid to Eleazar Wheelock’s efforts to establish an Indian school. A Congregational minister, Wheelock was a recent Yale graduate and a young itinerant preacher during the awakenings of the 1740s when he first became acquainted with Whitefield’s stunning ministry. When he turned to the task of establishing a school later in life, he naturally turned to Whitefield. “I have preferr’d a Memorial to the Assembly now sitting here, for such an Incorporation as may perpetuate my School, & secure the Design of the Benefactors,” he wrote Whitefield on May 18, 1764. He valued the wisdom Whitefield might have to impart to his cause, saying “I wish I had thot of desiring you by Mr Smith to send one, or some minuits of ye Form of such a Society.”²⁹ In August of that year, Wheelock again wrote Whitefield, informing him, “My prospects are daily increasing. It looks as tho’ God had been laying out for this design for many Years past.”³⁰

This partnership between kindred spirits, however, was not without difficulty. The strains in their friendship reveal the extent to which Whitefield involved himself in colonial matters. Over the course of their tenuous relationship, a number of episodes heightened the tension between them. For instance, when Wheelock sent one of his most trusted and talented converts, Samson Occom, as a missionary to the Oneida in New York in the summer of 1764, it became the occasion for an open disagreement. Believing Occom to lack what Whitefield deemed sufficient funds and other means of support, he chastised Wheelock for his “imprudent scheme” regarding “Mr. Occum and His Companion in their intended mission.”³¹ Refusing to concede the point, Wheelock made Whitefield’s lack of good judgment toward the Indians the issue, complaining to a friend: “He labors under the discouraging apprehension that the Pagans of America are Canaanites, to be cut off before God’s people, and never to be gathered into his Family. However I hope in God he will yet have the Pleasure of seeing himself mistaken.”³² Apart from the theological disagreement, what is so illuminating about this incident is the wide range of Whitefield’s involvement in the affairs of a burgeoning Indian school in the hinterlands of Connecticut (later Wheelock would move the school to New Hampshire and establish it as Dartmouth College). Whitefield felt confident enough in his role as elder statesman to take the liberty of sending Samson Occom back to New England from New York. Eleazar Wheelock could hardly contain his anger when he heard the news. Writing a fellow minister, John Brainerd, he complained about the severe consequences of Whitefield’s intervention: “The blow which Mr. Whitefield gave this school in sending Mr Occom back from New York was beyond any it has received from the first.”³³ Whitefield continued to meddle, however, and Wheelock could ill afford to lose Whitefield’s assistance in England.

When the Grand Itinerant formulated a plan to send Occom on a preaching and fundraising tour through England, Wheelock set aside any lingering resentment and readily gave his consent. From February 1766 to July 1767, Occom proved a sensation throughout England, winning support for Wheelock’s school from the king himself and the Earl of Dartmouth among numerous others and totaling contributions of £12,000. Whitefield relished his role in guiding Samson Occom through his sojourn in England; although the specific cause was Wheelock’s school, the wide publicity for colonial schools could only have bolstered the cause in Georgia as well.

Beyond his support, Whitefield also evinced a paternalistic and controlling temperament, expressing irritation where he saw Occom overstepping the bounds of propriety he had set up in his own mind. To take one example, he took enough interest and had sufficient influence to provide advice on where Occom should vacation, as well as the places a proper Indian should avoid: “Mr. Occum should not go to Bath, Coltan is a proper retirement for body & soul. Honest Indians love a straight path.”³⁴ The following year in a letter to Wheelock, he showed similar concerns for Occom maintaining a sense of his place in English society and not forgetting his eventual return to the American context: “Occum still attracts the approbation of all. He really behaves well. Only I wish His continuance in England may not spoil Him for the wilderness.”³⁵ Even on his best behavior, Occom was incapable of completely allaying Whitefield’s fears.

Wheelock himself was not beyond the reach of Whitefield’s critical judgments. In fact, Whitefield felt free to nitpick Wheelock over his expenditures and his lack of transparent bookkeeping: “But how came you to draw for so many hundreds this last year? And why no account of the disbursements? This must be annually and punctually remitted.”³⁶ Whitefield may have forgotten the accusations of financial corruption made against his orphanage in Georgia, or it is possible he wanted to spare Wheelock the pain of such an ordeal. What is most remarkable is that Whitefield had the boldness to demand Wheelock disclose to him the details of the Indian school affair.

Colleges and the Long Path of Protestant Renewal

Whitefield’s long and varied involvement in colonial colleges reveals a pattern of engagement that goes beyond ephemeral revival services. Criticisms of Whitefield’s “ready, fire, aim” approach are valid, and there is no denying his inability to linger in any one place for too long.³⁷ At the same time, extending our study into his latter years shows that his rapid movements across the Atlantic world did not preclude a bigger, more comprehensive vision of Protestant renewal. Few accounts of his life trace the ways his longstanding involvement in a variety of educational efforts throughout the colonies culminated in his own college building project in the final decade of his life. By paying attention to the full scope of his life, including “the final discharge of his public duty,” which this chapter seeks to flesh out, we will be in a better position to understand how the grassroots dimension of popular revival services gave rise to a program of cultural institutions that moved beyond the revival emphasis on individual piety. The awakenings represented more than bursts of religious energy released by socioeconomic crises or the catalytic charisma of traveling preachers. Beyond isolated socio-cultural episodes or a transatlantic religious movement, the history of evangelical revivals in the eighteenth century is also an essential part of the story of British imperial growth and the ongoing need for cultural adaptation in the face of relentless change. As a response to tectonic shifts in the broader social and political landscape, developments in evangelicalism during the eighteenth century illuminate revival religion and British and American cultures in the long term. Not content with the passing fruits of revival as an adequate answer to the challenges of imperial expansion and cultural enlightenment, Whitefield sought an alternative means of further reformation. By his evolving strategy, Whitefield displayed the conviction that more than an outward revival of religion would be needed to make an enduring evangelical impact on British culture.

While Bethesda represented a regional work in the colony of Georgia, Whitefield traversed far-flung networks that connected America to the British Empire.³⁸ Whitefield’s understanding of educational institutions in England had an inevitable impact on his understanding of his own endeavors. Schools were deemed so essential to building British national character that King George III once justified his interest in Eton College and his “regard for the education of youth” by declaring it as the site where “most essentially depend my hopes of an advantageous change in the manners of the nation.”³⁹ As Oxford and Cambridge grew increasingly aristocratic and thus lay further beyond the reach of the common people in England, however, a simultaneous proliferation of academies and colleges sought to fill the spaces those older, venerable institutions vacated in broader society. Reaching for intellectual and cultural influence in America, Whitefield’s Bethesda project in the South stands as a sensible enterprise in the face of these emerging trends.⁴⁰ Whitefield’s Bethesda College would seek to sustain the work of cultural renewal that elite colleges in the British Empire seemed to be forsaking.

Bethesda College in Georgia

In the light of his involvement in a wide range of college experiments in the colonies, Whitefield’s interest in building a college of his own in Georgia takes on greater significance. For the remainder of this chapter, we will study the sequence of events in his Bethesda College campaign and offer an analysis of his activities and their significance for the changing imperial landscape of the mid-eighteenth century.

To understand what Whitefield might have had in mind for these last years of his life, a contemporary observer can provide perspective. Just as the imperial war came to a close in 1764, Eleazar Wheelock wrote a letter to John Erskine in Scotland revealing his view on the state of Whitefield’s present health and future plans. “Mr. Whitefield’s low State of Health has forbid his preaching very frequently in America,” he wrote, referring to Whitefield’s diminished preaching ministry. Furthermore, Wheelock appeared to resent Whitefield’s preoccupation with his Georgia affairs, which came at the expense of projects like his Indian school in New England: “And his own Necessities (apprehending he shall soon be incapable of public service) and the necessities of his orphan House (which have far exceeded his expectation) have engross’d the most he has had opportunity to collect in America.”⁴¹ This remark by Wheelock is helpful because it points out the ways in which Whitefield was growing old and was also accommodating his ministry strategy based upon this irrefutable fact of life.

The dream of a college in Georgia underwent a long period of gestation, in part due to Whitefield’s busy preaching schedule, but also because his attention was scattered in so many different directions across the British Empire.⁴² On December 9, 1749, Whitefield wrote explicitly of his plan for a college: “We propose having an academy or college at the Orphan-house in Georgia.”⁴³ Almost a decade later, he mentioned “the proposals about the Georgia college” to a possible benefactor in April 1757.⁴⁴ His absence from America during the Seven Years’ War, however, delayed action, and it was not until February 1760 that he was able to write, “thoughts of a College are revived.”⁴⁵

In the aftermath of war, finally able to return to America, Whitefield perceived a changed playing field in which the revivals were but a distant memory and new challenges abounded. His letters to friends and supporters mark this shift in Whitefield’s thinking and his apprehensions about the start of a new phase in his Georgia labors. “[T]o America,” he wrote a friend on January 15, 1763, “I think there is a manifest call at this time, both as to the bracing up my poor, feeble, crazy body, and adjusting all things relating to Bethesda.”⁴⁶ Six months later he was crossing the ocean to begin his American work anew. In a sharp break with former patterns, his sense of call to America at this juncture made no mention of preaching, identifying instead the reordering of Bethesda as the matter of highest priority. Signaling his intentions to mark a new beginning for Bethesda, Whitefield sent instructions on December 7, 1763, to “have the family lessened as much as may be, and all things contracted into as small a compass as possible.”⁴⁷ He spent the first part of his trip traveling through the Middle Colonies and New England raising support for the college. By December of the following year he was on his way to Georgia with a resolute plan in mind. It was a season of new beginnings, and Whitefield wanted to clear the ground for an ambitious restart. Though he would not announce his plans until the following year, Whitefield was finding his stride to launch a college of his own at Bethesda.

At long last on December 18, 1764, Whitefield submitted his official proposal for Bethesda College, “The Memorial of George Whitefield,” to magistrates in Georgia.⁴⁸ To preempt the criticism he expected, Whitefield described the college as a logical extension of his charity work, which had already helped so many people and thereby kept them “from leaving the colony in its infant state.” He emphasized the fact that he had spent over twenty-five years and expended upwards of twelve thousand pounds sterling to help establish the colony. As he described the full extent of his benefactions for the colony in his memorial, he emphasized the numerous strategic benefits that Bethesda College would bring to Georgia. Whitefield had good reasons to feel confident about the prospects of a college charter. The president of the state senate was his longtime friend and one-time disciple, James Habersham. The royal governor of Georgia, James Wright, fully backed the plan, pointing out its “utmost utility to this and the neighbouring provinces” and calling it “beautiful, rational, and practicable.” As further encouragement, he was finally debt-free at Bethesda, declaring on February 18, 1765: “All arrears are paid off . . . so that one great load is taken off.”⁴⁹ This milestone brought welcome conclusion to a constant struggle of two-and-a-half decades. The resulting financial freedom enabled Whitefield to focus on higher pursuits.

More specifically, the benefits Whitefield cited for the college were cultural, economic, and empire-wide. First, he argued that a college in Georgia would help build the region’s cultural base. The fact “that several gentlemen have been obliged to send their sons to the northern provinces” was not merely a matter of strain on familial ties. He feared “their affections being alienated from their native country.” In this way, Whitefield identified a distinct region in the southern provinces that he called its own “native country.” He also noted that the existence of an institution like Bethesda College would “keep considerable sums of money from being carried out of this into other provinces.” His was a sensible and straightforward case, Whitefield believed, for a self-sufficient economy that could enter into competitive trade relations with other parts of the empire. For this reason, he was not at all trying to seal the colony off from the flow of imperial traffic, especially since he envisioned Georgia becoming a center of learning and culture for a strategically targeted segment of the empire. He reckoned the proposed college “would probably occasion many youths to be sent from the British West India islands and other parts.” Whitefield’s interest in slavery had no doubt served to deepen his familiarity with imperial topography. He knew the lay of the land not only because he itinerated through it but also due to the business interests and relationships he had built along the way. With good reason, he expected such an imperial appeal would be easily apprehended by his hearers. It merely sufficed for him to observe: “The many advantages accruing thereby to this province, must be considerable.”⁵⁰

It took only two days for Whitefield’s memorial to garner an enthusiastic response from both Houses of Assembly in Georgia as well as the governor. A statement dated December 20, 1764, addressed to the governor and signed by James Habersham, president of the upper House, and Alexander Wylly, speaker of the Commons House, sounded a ringing endorsement:

The many and singular obligations Georgia has continually laid under that Reverend gentleman, from its very infant state, would in gratitude induce us, by every means in our power, to promote any measure he might recommend; but in the present instance, where the interest of the province, the advancement of religion, and the pleasing prospect of obtaining proper education for our youth, so clearly coincide with his views, we cannot in justice but request your Excellency to use your utmost endeavours to promote so desirable an event, and to transmit home our sincere and very fervent wishes, for the accomplishment of so useful, so beneficent, and so laudable an undertaking.⁵¹

Whitefield could not have asked for a stronger statement of support, with the House mounting a religious, social, cultural, and political argument for the valuable contributions of the proposed college. Governor Wright provided an immediate response on the same day, telling the legislature and Whitefield that they “may rest assured, that I shall transmit your address home, with my best endeavours for the success of the great point in view.”⁵² The chasm, however, between the colony and metropole was wider than any of the players anticipated.

After securing the support of the Georgia magistrates, Whitefield spent the first half of 1765 traveling north in the colonies and preaching and raising funds for Bethesda. In those ventures he commonly referred to it as a future college rather than an orphanage. When he returned to England in July, propitious developments in English politics at first augured well for his college dream. Lord Dartmouth, a friend of the Countess of Huntingdon, was head of the Board of Trade, and Whitefield counted on his support as his proposal went before the Privy Council. In the following year, however, prospects soured. The government of the First Rockingham ministry, headed by the Marquess of Rockingham, fell and Lord Dartmouth resigned. These developments deprived Whitefield of a powerful ally in Dartmouth. Making matters worse, Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury and a long-time critic of Whitefield, showed no amenable signs of cooperation.⁵³ As a supporter of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and, for a season, its president, Secker had taken strong exception to Whitefield’s criticism of SPG missionaries during the awakenings of the early 1740s. Though Whitefield did not need Secker’s approval to move forward with his college plans, he misjudged his odds, overestimated the weight of his own popularity, and became embroiled in a protracted game of bureaucratic brinkmanship.

It soon became evident that the archbishop would be a markedly different kind of audience for Whitefield than his allies in America. Sensing the nature of the challenge before him, he made a few telling revisions to the memorial he had earlier written to the governor and magistrates of Georgia when he sent it to the archbishop a few years later in 1767.⁵⁴ Rather than naming “the British West India islands and other parts” as he had to the Georgia magistrates, Whitefield mentioned “the neighbouring southern provinces” as the geographical region that would benefit from the founding of a college in Georgia. The itinerant preacher may have seen the greater appeal of a more general region to an archbishop of the established church who was farther removed and less informed about the geographical nuances of the New World. His request for two thousand acres of land to support the college in his earlier memorial to the Georgia officials having already been granted, Whitefield happily noted this development. He importuned the archbishop “that numbers both in Georgia and South-Carolina are waiting with impatience to have their sons initiated in academical exercises.” He pointed to the plan of New Jersey College as an inspiring precedent and template for Bethesda. As if all that were not enough, and in what might have been a sign of desperation, he pledged to give the entirety of his considerable possessions in Georgia—“all lands, negroes, goods, and chattels, which he now stands possessed of in the province of Georgia”—toward the founding of the college.⁵⁵ In other words, Whitefield was fully committed to the enterprise. The college was to be the final, culminating achievement of his long career.

Secker, however, was not impressed. More than that, he was decidedly opposed to setting up schools for Dissenters in America. He had already turned down an entreaty of support for Wheelock’s school in Connecticut. To be sure, it was not for lack of interest in the colonies or imagination for strategic thinking. “My first Notion was, that our Society might send children to be educated there, who might afterwds be sent out by us as Missionaries,” Secker wrote in 1767, displaying an agile missionary interest in America. Being apprised of the school’s distinctly Presbyterian emphasis, however, he wrote “in the civillest Terms I could, that we thought it would be best, that the Church of England & the Dissenters from it should each maintain their own Schools.”⁵⁶ Despite similarities, dealing with Whitefield’s petition was not as straightforward a matter as Wheelock’s. Whitefield was an ordained minister of the Church of England and notwithstanding his past acrimony with church officials, the priest expressed a submissive spirit and willingness to cooperate.

Secker decided to test the extent of Whitefield’s loyalty to the church. Taking a ruthless pen to the plan of the charter, he “proposed several Alterations in it.” Though extant details are sparse, the archbishop appears to have mandated rules regarding its governance and liturgy that would have secured the college as an institution of the church.⁵⁷ In response, Whitefield trod carefully and acknowledged his high esteem for the church but also appealed to the fact of a broad fundraising base, with many Dissenters from outside the church having already contributed toward the college. In the end, the primate and his priest were unable to find common ground on essential matters. Secker noted Whitefield’s efforts to comply, but it is also clear that in key matters there was no disposition toward compromise from either side, as Whitefield wrote:

He agreed to almost all of them; but refused his Consent to two: which were, that, as in the charter of New York College, the Head shd be always a Member of the Church of England, & the publick Prayers in the College shd be not extempore, but either the Liturgy of the Church of England, or part of it, or some Form approved by the Governors.⁵⁸

During this period, Secker rejected another petition for a colonial academy, a Rhode Island college that in his view “tended to Perpetuate the Notions of the Anabaptists there.”⁵⁹

The archbishop’s rejection of three colonial colleges in the course of 1767 reveals a pattern of both engagement and detachment. Not only did colonial leaders see some kind of connection to the Church of England as helpful to their enterprise; Secker also recognized the strategic value of colleges as sites for missionary training and ecclesiastical control. He disliked, nevertheless, the idea of nonconformist colleges spreading their influence in the colonies. Also noteworthy is the fact that, in these colonial matters, Secker had a network of informants who kept him updated on fresh developments in America. The archbishop mentioned receiving more accurate insights from a Mr. Apthorp, an SPG missionary in New England, regarding Wheelock’s Indian school.⁶⁰ As he considered Whitefield’s plans for a college, he heard from at least two informants who provided unfavorable news.⁶¹ William Smith, the provost of the college in Philadelphia we encountered earlier, shared his misgivings with the secretary of the SPG, who likely passed the word on to the archbishop.⁶² Evangelicals were not the only group with a sophisticated network of communication.

For Secker, the Bethesda affair was one administrative detail in a sea of urgent ecclesiastical matters vying for his attention, but for Whitefield it was the dearest cause of his final years. In noting the blow of this failure, it must also be asked why he sought a charter from the archbishop in the first place. According to one historian, “Not one of the six colleges founded between 1745 and 1775 had been chartered by the Crown. All had been incorporated directly, without referring to Whitehall.”⁶³ In 1749, Bishop George Berkeley advised against such a move: “I would not advise the applying to England for Charters or Statutes (which might cause great trouble, expense and delay), but to do the business quietly within themselves.”⁶⁴ Why then did Whitefield pursue a royal charter? While historians generally point to the practical reasons, such as Whitefield’s confidence in the successful bid for a charter or his desire for as many advantages as possible for the college, our study of the imperial dimension of Whitefield’s revival ministry provides yet another angle for answering this question.⁶⁵ We can only surmise that Whitefield pursued royal endorsement for his work in Georgia because of his desire to see Bethesda serve as an imperial institution for the furtherance of the British Protestant cause in a turbulent world. Watching Samson Occom’s gallant success throughout England (including a personal contribution of £200 from the king himself) at the very same time he had locked horns with Thomas Secker could only have served to deepen his resolve. Wheelock would not need to worry himself with a charter application for his Indian school, but Whitefield persisted because he had more lofty ambitions for his college.

It is significant that when plans for the college charter finally ran aground, it was not because of challenges in Georgia but due to opposition in England. Whitefield faced a formidable opponent in the implacable Archbishop Secker. In the face of Whitefield’s pleas, by turns unctuous and truculent, Secker harbored many misgivings about what the college might mean for provincial life and imperial culture. In an indirect way, the prelate’s opposition highlights the potential of what Whitefield’s dream college could have meant. A man of considerable piety and genuine concern for the welfare of the church, Secker’s resistance signified more than petty politicking with a longtime critic and thorn in his side. The clash between Whitefield and Secker represented competing views of the role of religion in the empire’s future. Although an ordained Anglican cleric, Whitefield’s view of religious life in the Atlantic world was expansive and ecumenical. In contrast, Secker wanted to tighten the reins of control.

With his centrifugal vision of empire, Whitefield piously expressed concerns for the colony: “I humbly hope, the province of Georgia, in the end, will be no loser by this negotiation.” As for his next steps, he intended to pursue a “public academy,” which would circumvent the need for a royal charter. Even so, Whitefield persisted in his hopes for a college: “In the mean time, a proper trust may be formed to act after my decease, or even before, with this proviso, that no opportunity shall be omitted of making fresh application for a college charter.”⁶⁶ In this way, death itself should prove no barrier to the dream of a college in Georgia.

The Meaning of Bethesda

Based on the foregoing survey of Whitefield’s petition for a college charter, we are now ready to examine the meaning of the Bethesda project. The vision of a college in Georgia provides a clue to understanding both Whitefield and the British Empire in the mid-eighteenth century. For Bethesda became the contentious focal point of Whitefield’s final drive for Protestant renewal and Archbishop Secker’s efforts to maintain ecclesiastical uniformity. As such, Bethesda was nothing less than a test site for the limits of imperial expansion and coercion. Significantly for evangelical religion, Bethesda also represented an effort to harness the revival spirit in an ongoing institutional form.

There are few better examples of Whitefield’s evolving sense of purpose than his efforts to build an academic college out of his philanthropic project in Georgia. In a colony where disillusioned abandonment outpaced fresh arrivals for the first twenty years, Whitefield’s orphanage helped sustain the colony and even raised a number of colonial leaders. When the economic prospering of the colonies throughout the 1750s created new opportunities, Whitefield proved himself a skilled entrepreneur despite being an absentee landlord. By the beginning of the 1760s, Georgia had a population of approximately ten thousand, a few libraries dotted the landscape as symbols of growing refinement, and the establishment of The Georgia Gazette in 1763 signaled its progress toward becoming a mature colony.

As circumstances in the colony changed, so did the religious emphases of Whitefield’s ministry. The revival soil that the gifted preacher tilled with great enthusiasm in his early years did not bear the kind of widespread and long-lasting fruit for which its participants hoped. Rather than persisting with the same tried-and-failed revival tactics of the 1740s, Whitefield came to the realization that the awakenings had made only an ephemeral impact. Precisely because of this realism, he reemerged in America for his sixth visit—which also marked the commencement of his Bethesda College campaign—responding to new trends and formulating revised strategies, all the while reaching for lasting fruits the revivals had failed to deliver. The time of his return to America in 1763 also coincided with the end of the Seven Years’ War, and Whitefield apprehended a time of ripening opportunity in America. Georgia had benefited from the war—with an expanded territory secured in the Proclamation of 1763, a new phase of friendly relations with Native Americans, and a popular governor who worked well with the legislature. Encouraged by these developments, Whitefield expressed eagerness to reengage the work at Bethesda.

The shift in his approach was unmistakable. No longer did preaching to the masses represent Whitefield’s primary occupation, nor did maintaining the orphanage at Bethesda. Instead, the vision of establishing a southern college absorbed most of his energy. How do we account for this dramatic turn in the life of a person who had devoted his life to preaching the evangelical new birth? To understand Whitefield’s unwavering commitment to Bethesda College in his latter years requires an exploration of its imperial significance. Only by examining the place of Whitefield’s proposed colonial college in the larger context of the British Empire and the expanded opportunities for influence that it represented to the evangelical statesman can we explain his absorption with it. Toward that end, we will observe the ways in which Bethesda served as the meeting place of a number of different interests that had animated Whitefield throughout his public career, much of which had been a balancing act between imperial and religious ambitions. By containing, if not melding, these divergent and at times vigorously conflicting forces, Bethesda became a rehearsal site for the ideological contests of cultural formation in America. A tour of the various possibilities inherent in Bethesda, to which we now turn, will reveal how much the meaning of Bethesda intersected with developments in the outlying frontiers of British imperialism.

An Imperial Institution

Whitefield went to a great deal of trouble in his efforts to attain a royal charter for Bethesda College. To understand why, it may help to remember that the successful establishment of Bethesda College would have dramatically increased Whitefield’s profile in the mid-eighteenth-century British Empire. Georgia lay not only at the southernmost tip of the mainland colonies but also represented a fast-growing edge of the empire. Whitefield himself emphasized the recent changes to imperial boundaries that resulted from victory over the French, when he wrote on December 18, 1764, “the late addition of the two Floridas renders Georgia more centrical for the southern district.” In other words, he was familiar enough with the map of empire to highlight the shift of Georgia’s position from the periphery to the emerging center of the American South. As Whitefield took pains to observe, “The many advantages accruing thereby to this province,” as well as to his own interests we might add, “must be very considerable.”⁶⁷ To explore the extent of Whitefield’s involvement in the imperial dimensions of his work in America, we will examine a letter from Franklin to Whitefield in 1756 and a farewell sermon by the itinerant in 1763, marking his cognizance of imperial politics at the beginning and end of the Seven Years’ War. Both documents reveal the ways in which the preacher’s empire-wide aspirations influenced his enduring concern for the usefulness of the southern outpost that was Georgia. In addition, a diary of an unidentified Bostonian visiting England will help us understand how Whitefield’s message was heard and interpreted in a time of heightened political tension in the British Empire. This source presents a helpful reminder that the preacher’s college in Georgia was part of a wider transatlantic program of Protestant renewal.

Whitefield’s contact with imperial politics could only have grown through his unlikely friendship with Benjamin Franklin. This influential colonial leader once invited Whitefield to dream with him about starting a new colony together, in a letter dated July 2, 1756:

I sometimes wish, that you and I were jointly employ’d by the Crown to settle a Colony on the Ohio. I imagine we could do it effectually. . . . What a glorious Thing it would be, to settle in that fine Country a large Strong Body of Religious and Industrious People! What a Security to the other Colonies; and Advantage to Britain, by Increasing her People, Territory, Strength and Commerce.⁶⁸

Whitefield’s response to Franklin is unknown, yet it cannot have been far from enthusiastic affirmation of the dream, perhaps a line or two offered toward embellishing—even improving (as he did with Franklin’s plan for an academy)—the vision. At the very least he would have agreed that such work, if unrealistic in remote regions, merited pursuit in more immediate and present circumstances. Indeed, he might have replied to Franklin that the very thing his friend proposed to do, he himself was already attempting in the outskirts of Savannah.

The timing of Franklin’s musings as well as his choice of Whitefield as confidant offer a portrait of the famous preacher that may not be gleaned from his own writings. Franklin wrote his letter in the early phase of the Seven Years’ War, a time when tensions and fears ran high.⁶⁹ The horrors of war would ravage the very territory where Franklin dreamed of setthng a new colony. In fact, it was most likely French and Indian aggression that led him to contemplate, “What a Security to the other Colonies” such an enterprise would become. In other words, Franklin was not recruiting Whitefield to the pipe dream of a social and spiritual commune; he was inviting him, albeit hypothetically, to partner with him in an expansionist political, even military, venture. By invoking the “Advantage to Britain” such an enterprise would have secured, Franklin wooed Whitefield the imperial citizen. Far from mere idle words of an armchair dreamer, this 1756 letter to Whitefield reveals Franklin’s apprehension of the rebel priest as a patriotic imperial subject and shrewd political strategist. We may not know all of what Whitefield said to give Franklin such ideas; we do know, because Franklin himself mentions it in the same letter, that the preacher had often expressed a desire to become an army chaplain. At any rate, Franklin had heard or seen enough to believe his dream of an Ohio settlement—wishful banter though it may have been—would not fall on deaf ears with Whitefield.

Likely boosting Franklin’s confidence in this regard was the active interest Whitefield had earlier taken in his school building efforts in Philadelphia. The alliance between Franklin and Whitefield continued to deepen so that when Franklin in 1766 testified before the House of Commons during the Stamp Act crisis, Whitefield was there by his side. Joseph Galloway, a leading figure in colonial politics from Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to William Franklin, recounting his father’s admirable performance before Parliament. In that letter, he also mentions Whitefield, showing how much the preacher’s reputation had grown since 1743 when he was seen as too much of an embarrassment and liability to testify before the House (see chapter 2). “Who Dare deny Mr. Whitefield’s authority?” wrote Galloway. “Will the Church? Will the Presbyterians?”⁷⁰ In this way, Franklin’s longstanding relationship with his preacher friend underscores the point that Whitefield’s interests went far beyond evangelistic preaching to matters of empire.

Understanding the ways Whitefield’s vision both embraced and transcended regional and colonial spheres of influence helps identify the extent of his ambition. In “Jacob’s Ladder,” his farewell sermon preached in England in June 1763 (four months after the war ended), he expressed his love for both the colonies and England. Before embarking on yet another Atlantic crossing, he went so far as to pronounce a benediction on the imperial bond:

And the gentlemen of America, from one end to the other, are of such an hospitable temper, as I have not only been told, but have found among them upwards of thirty years, that they would not let public houses be licensed, that they may have an opportunity of entertaining English friends. May God, of His infinite mercy, grant this union may never be dissolved!⁷¹

In this way, Whitefield praised America and hastened to add a word about the indissoluble bond shared with Britain. Lest there be any doubt of his love for the mother country, he voiced his sincere desire to return to England: “For, let people say what they will, I have not so much as a single thought of setthng abroad, on this side eternity.”⁷² Whitefield was evidently apprised of naysayers who questioned his devotion to England—not without reason, given his ceaseless travels. Yet, ever the sojourner, he avoided the prospect of becoming a settler. While he always knew where his eternal home would be, he also appears to have had no qualms about being an Englishman throughout his life, despite his many years of traveling abroad and the many conflicts he endured with the Anglican establishment. He viewed himself as a connective link between Britain and America, and, more than that, a mediating figure who sought to bring together the best of both worlds. In this way, the older Whitefield was a man urgently seeking reform yet also keen for conciliatory union as he devised plans for a college with which to engage a hollow political landscape.

Whitefield returned from his sixth visit to America in the late summer of 1765. Even as he engaged in the struggle of his life in trying to attain a charter for the college in Georgia, his ministry of preaching Christian and British liberties continued, though on a reduced basis. The remarks of an unidentified tourist from Boston traveling in England from 1768 to 1769 can shed light on the kind of political climate that prevailed during this time and the place of Whitefield’s influence in this volatile period. The Bostonian’s impressions of Whitefield’s sermons in the context of other speakers and events during his visit provide an additional vantage point that lies outside the usual perspectives on the Grand Itinerant, which tend toward either fierce criticism or fawning admiration.

We know little about this American visitor except that he came from Boston, stayed for a little over a year in London, and exhibited a wide-ranging interest in the life of the imperial capital. His interests fell primarily into political and religious categories. He was a close follower of parliamentary activities (especially obsessed with controversies surrounding the radical English politician John Wilkes) and enjoyed listening to preachers of all stripes, from Whitefield and Wesley to the Sandemanians (a sect originating from Scotland that denied the need for a national and institutional church since the body of Christ is essentially spiritual). As a colonial visitor, the Bostonian displayed sensitivity throughout his diary to the abuses of the British government with their “Arbitrary Insults” against liberty.⁷³

It becomes apparent from the entries of this unknown diarist that Whitefield still possessed his homiletical genius in the last years of his life. After attending one of his services at the Tabernacle in London, the Bostonian wrote for two pages reflecting on how Whitefield’s sermon taught him “what [it] is to be really Dead to Sin in the World & alive to God in Christ Jesus by a Strict Adherence to the Denial of our Selves & by our Mortifying every Carnal Lust.” But Whitefield also brought the spiritual message to bear on political circumstances, so that his sermon on Isaiah was “a very Serious & Instructive Discourse and a Solemn Warning to the Wicked with his Earnest Petition to God that he would Avert these Threating [sic] Judgments from our Land & Town.”⁷⁴ For the visitor from Boston, applying Whitefield’s sermon to his life meant siding with the freeholders who continued voting Wilkes into office despite his imprisonment for libel against political opponents, because they were “determined not to have such Arbitrary Insults and Encroachments on their Liberties as Englishmen.”⁷⁵ For hearers like this Bostonian, whose diary alternated between sermon notes and political reflections, the religious message of salvation in Christ turned seamlessly into a rallying cry for the protection of British liberties.

Whitefield’s continuing popularity might be explained by the fact that whether in Britain or America, whether petitioning for a college charter or preaching the virtues of British Protestantism, he proclaimed a message that conflated evangelical and imperial concerns. Because of his high ambitions, and despite Bethesda’s physical location in the margins, his vision for the college from the beginning had an unabashedly elitist focus, marking a decisive shift from the mission of Bethesda Orphanage. In fact, Whitefield’s primary goal for the college, as noted earlier, was to make “further provision for the education of persons of superiour rank, who thereby may be qualified to serve their king, their country, and their God, either in church or state.”⁷⁶ Just as Whitefield was not content to leave Bethesda an orphanage, neither was he satisfied with the mere goal of training ministers. His was a lofty vision reaching for significant contributions to church and state, reverberating in not only spiritual but also social, cultural, and political influence, which can be inferred from his expansive reference to “church or state,” an intentionally ambiguous statement that reflected a blurring of the boundaries, which Whitefield intended for strategic purposes.

In addition to transcending church and state, or religious and political, boundaries, Whitefield also included in his Bethesda plan a broad geographical reach. He intended Bethesda College to serve not only Georgia but the entire southern region. His ambitions aligned him with the cause of the empire; in addition, Whitefield had no qualms about using the tide of worldly affairs to his advantage. He would not hesitate to translate the political fortunes of war, however pyrrhic, into religious opportunities. The indefatigable itinerant harbored not merely religious motivations but extensive social and political aspirations. As the only college south of Virginia’s College of William and Mary, Bethesda would have enabled Whitefield to play a major role in the intellectual, social, and political life not only of Georgia but the larger southern region.⁷⁷ Having not quite fit in at Oxford during his student days and with Harvard and Yale snubs of the revival years lingering, even if faintly by now, Whitefield set out to build an ivory tower of his own. In that venture, he would draw prospective students away from elite northern colleges and help a thriving southern culture to hold its own.

A Subversive Kingdom

Bethesda’s geographical position on the imperial frontier not only afforded a chance for Whitefield’s appropriation of Britain’s imperial expansionism; it also placed his labors squarely in the margins of colonial life. Yet here too was an opportunity, for the margins were where Whitefield felt most comfortable. Overcoming great odds was what this preacher with a booming voice that could rise above the cacophony of detractors did best. To put it another way, the political openings Whitefield apprehended required, for a man steeped in his religious beliefs, a theological interpretation. In a context of imperial languor and institutional frailty, geographical outposts provided the ideal playing field for Whitefield’s activism late in life. Despite his Oxford education and extraordinary ministry successes, Whitefield continued to be acutely aware of his outsider status. Perhaps he never forgot the intimidation he felt upon first meeting the Wesleys during college. Certainly he sensed a calling greater than traditional ecclesiastical categories could hold. At any rate, it is nearly impossible to imagine Whitefield setthng into a parish post in New England or even London. Georgia, on the other hand, was a place fit for his outsized personality.

An incident that happened after Archbishop Secker’s rejection of a college charter for Bethesda further shows Whitefield’s ongoing struggles with seemingly arbitrary authority. Whitefield was back in London, catching his breath before his seventh trip to America. He was still smarting from the defeat of his campaign for a college charter before an archbishop who insisted that it follow Anglican forms. When he heard in the spring of 1768 about the expulsion of six students from Oxford for their practice of extempore prayer, Whitefield forgot the moderate persona he had been attempting to cultivate in his later years and threw himself once again eagerly into the fray. In an openly indignant twelve-thousand-word epistolary parry, the old combative Whitefield was back. He appeared to relish the dual role of one who was simultaneously an insider as well as outsider. Embracing the tension, Whitefield fancied himself close enough in social status to the Vice Chancellor of Oxford, David Durell, to confront him. He did so, all the while fixing his own position outside the corrupt institutional culture that Durell represented. Whitefield came to the defense of the British students who, he protested, were being treated unjustly not only for their religious practices but also for their socioeconomic standing. He wrote, “It is true indeed, one article of impeachment was, ‘that some of them were of Trades before they entered into the University.’ But what evil or crime worthy of expulsion can there be in that?”⁷⁸ He declared with righteous anger that originating from the “meanest mechanic employ” was no just grounds for prejudice or persecution.

Whitefield pulled out all the stops in his letter, going as far as to declare even papists more lenient than Durell. His tirade is worth quoting at length:

Popish countries, Popish seminaries, think it no shame, no disgrace to be heard singing the high praises of their God in their Convents, their Houses, or even in their Streets; and why Protestants in general, and Protestant Students in particular, should be any more ashamed of, or restrained from the free exercise of such acts of devotion, either in secret or in private societies, no good reason can be given; unless it be proved to be good reasoning to assert, that Protestants ought to be less devout than Papists.⁷⁹

Whitefield thus maneuvered through dangerous accusations by deft and delicate argumentation, conjuring up the Catholic threat that remained a live issue in England and just as much (if not more so) in the southern colonial region where settlers still harbored lingering memories of French and Spanish incursions. Lest he be judged to have gone too far, Whitefield also added later in the letter: “But what a mercy is it, Reverend Sir, that we live under a free government . . . and under a King who in his first most gracious and never-to-be-forgotten Speech from the throne, gave his people the strongest assurances [of religious freedom].”⁸⁰ The goal of Whitefield’s reveling in the margins, after all, was to attain for himself a foothold in the empire’s center of influence.

As Whitefield self-consciously straddled the line between Anglican and dissenting churches, detractors often highlighted his Methodist associations as a sign of his outsider status. Flexing his nonconformist muscles, Whitefield did not shy away from the title of methodist in his letter, clarifying by declaring: “If you should desire, Reverend Sir, a definition of Methodism itself, as well as of a Methodist, you may easily be gratified—It is no more nor less than Faith working by love—A holy method of living and dying, to the glory of God—It is an universal morality, founded upon the love of God shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost.”⁸¹ In other words, as far as Whitefield was concerned, to be a Methodist was to be what any good Anglican should have been in the first place. In the face of efforts to exclude him from influence, Whitefield turned the table on his opponents by redefining what it meant to be an outsider. To find oneself excluded from the fellowship table of patent hypocrites was an occasion for boasting.

The fiery response occasioned by the Oxford incident provides a window into the charged religious landscape in which Whitefield labored. This context also helps us understand the resolve that shaped Whitefield’s aspirations for Bethesda College. In colonial Georgia, far (though not far enough as it turned out) from the meddling tentacles of ecclesial politics but still within the bounds of English and Anglican identity, Whitefield found the ideal site for community experimentation. A college in these distant regions would have provided the base of operations Whitefield needed to reimagine what was possible for faith and social formation. No wonder he found it to be the one abiding passion that could even surpass his devotion to preaching the gospel. During his last visit to Bethesda, on January 11, 1770, he wrote: “Every thing exceeds my most sanguine expectations. I am almost tempted to say, it is good for me to be here; but all must give way to gospel ranging—divine employ!”⁸² Bethesda was a place he could hardly tear himself away from, even for the sake of preaching, that other prized calling of his life.

Consideration of Bethesda’s hold on Whitefield reveals a strain of personal redemption, or compensation, which seems to have infused Whitefield’s extensive involvement with colonial educational enterprises. His familiarity with social margins encouraged his preference for imperial outposts and allowed him to negotiate a path to influence from a position of obscurity. He was the model ideological frontiersman for a literal, colonial frontier. Hence, flowing from his past life on the margins and his future hope of an influential center, there was a two-pronged principle to Whitefield’s educational philosophy: train the elite but also raise up the lowly, and, in a hinterland like Georgia, establish a base for the British Empire as well as the kingdom of God. Instead of building a church, Whitefield pursued a college, intentionally blurring religious, social, and political boundaries. His Bethesda campaign reflects and presages broader trends in American ambivalence toward established religion. That he attempted to make the margins of colonial society the center of his colonial community making was Whitefield’s true innovation, reflecting a persistent theology of the margins.

In a sermon preached before Georgia officials in the last year of his life, Whitefield more fully articulated his vision for the community Bethesda College would help fashion. He announced hopes of social and cultural as well as religious renewal:

the wished-for period is now come, after having supported the family for thirty-two years, by a change of constitution and the smiles of government, with liberal donations from the northern, and especially the adjacent provinces, the same hands that laid the foundation, are now called to finish it, by making an addition of a seat of learning, the whole products and profits of which, are to go towards the increase of the fund, as at the beginning, for destitute orphans, or such youths as may be called of God to the sacred ministry of his Gospel.⁸³

In this late expression of the Bethesda vision, three key aspects of Whitefield’s aspirations emerge in bold relief. First, Whitefield makes no mention of the transatlantic support he has gathered for Bethesda, instead highlighting the support of “adjacent provinces” and presenting Bethesda as an inter-colonial project. Second, the financial benefits of a college, the “whole products and profits” that are cited as an incentive for the colony, bespeak not only pragmatic motivations but also Whitefield’s recognition of the vital role of local economic systems. His embrace of Bethesda’s role in the colonial marketplace reinforces the notion of his bid for a regionally sufficient and perpetuating social ecosystem.⁸⁴ Finally, Whitefield stated his intentions to continue care for orphans and training for ministry even with the “addition of a seat of learning.” With a nod to critics leery of his shift away from charity work, Whitefield reaffirmed the philanthropic component of Bethesda while simultaneously extending the purpose of Bethesda into a distinctly academic institute. Several years after the failure of his quest for a college charter, in other words, Whitefield made key concessions even while solidifying his core agenda for a college. Far from attenuating zeal, he displayed a focus as sharp and determined as in the heydays of the Great Awakening. If it is difficult to recognize the revivalist fighter in the elderly Whitefield, it is because the scope of his religious work had grown to include broader social and cultural dimensions. The ease with which Whitefield pivoted between the roles of evangelistic preacher and determined college founder not only sheds light on his religious convictions but also illuminates the ways these convictions interacted with the political and cultural climate in which he lived.

Whitefield’s work on behalf of the colonies and the empire did not go unnoticed. In a note on January 29, 1770, appreciation for Whitefield overflowed into the Journals of Georgia’s House of Assembly, remarking that neighboring residents “were sensibly affected, when they saw the happy success which has attended Mr. Whitefield’s indefatigable zeal for promoting the welfare of the province in general, and the Orphan House in particular.”⁸⁵ The appreciation was mutual. To the very end, Whitefield not only sought international support for Bethesda but also welcomed Savannah neighbors and Georgian politicians. On the very same day the Georgia legislature was gushing about Whitefield, the minister posted a public invitation to Savannah’s leading residents to come and visit Bethesda: “A more particular application being impracticable, the Rev. Mr. Whitefield takes this method of begging the favour of the company of as many gentlemen and captains of ships in and about Savannah, as it may suit to accept this invitation, to dine with him at the Orphan House next Sunday.”⁸⁶ His special designation of gentlemen and ship captains revealed once again his eye for the commercial and maritime dimensions of empire.

Conclusion

With his health failing, grudging acceptance of his limitations as well as growing awareness of his mortality pressed Whitefield to look for a college with not only a “broad bottom” but a long legacy. As it turned out, the Bethesda campaign demanded a great deal from him. In the bigger picture, Whitefield’s commitment to the Bethesda enterprise marked his entire American career, from beginning to end. That commitment charted not only his overall course but also its points of retrenchment and redirection. Support for the orphanage was the initial charge that brought him to America, and it was an unfinished project that occupied much of his time and space in his letters to the very last days of his life. Not only did Bethesda provide bookends for Whitefield’s American career; it was the central anchor, as he confided in a letter to Benjamin Franklin in 1747: “if the Orphan-house should be given up [before] my departure to my Native Country, America, in all probability, would see me no more. Whilst that stands, I shall have a visible call to visit these parts again.”⁸⁷ In the same letter, Whitefield called the orphan house “my darling,” foreshadowing the many years of toil he would pour into caring for this labor of love. That he did not tire of such a costly operation, which became only more burdensome throughout his life, is a testament to the central importance Bethesda held in Whitefield’s vision for his life and ministry. In fact, as we have seen, far from waning, the Grand Itinerant’s intentions for Bethesda only intensified in his last decade as he worked to turn the orphanage into a college.

Whitefield’s quest for Bethesda College in Georgia reveals that he was more than a controversial revival preacher. Without detracting from the prominent homiletical feature of his career, the Bethesda campaign provides a wider frame for understanding the famous preacher’s vision for his life and ministry. In addition, the broader implications of Whitefield’s campaign for Bethesda are instructive for understanding life in the American colonies during a period surrounded by two epochal events, the Great Awakening and the American Revolution. The peripatetic Whitefield labored during a time when the bonds of imperial community were undergoing rapid changes in the eighteenth century. Similarly, shifting circumstances exerted profound pressures on conceptions and practices of Christianity in America. As the fruits of revival withered and the effects of British imperial expansion became more pronounced in the American colonies, evangelical ministers like Whitefield did not sit idly by in the face of vacillating spiritual interest. Instead, they threw themselves into the public arena, jockeying for position and vying for influence. Whitefield’s labors in the American South were especially important because of his regional as well as international prominence.

To understand the meaning of Whitefield’s religious motivations, this study has sought to expand an understanding of the political and cultural climate of regional, colonial affairs in the larger context of the British Empire. At the height of unprecedented imperial strength after victory over France, the colonies presented British rulers with the unforeseen challenge of making peace, which proved a more fluid and complex task than waging war. Whitefield’s activities during this period offer an alternative entry point into colonial life and culture during the 1760s.⁸⁸ Approaching Whitefield’s quest for Bethesda College in this way affirms the meaning of ideas in their lived context, and the imbricated nature of theological and political influences on colonial life. That a transatlantic celebrity poured himself into cultivating the margins of colonial society, bypassing traditional centers of political and cultural power while locating religious creativity and activism outside the institutional church, provides the outhnes of the story. At its heart stands a spirit of evangelical improvisation emerging in the context of a growing empire under duress. In this process, Whitefield’s appropriation of British imperial politics, his theological use of the margins, and his vision for cultural renewal, all focused through his efforts at institution building, remind us that religion remained a vital force in the British colonies in America during the 1760s. After all, Whitefield continued to attract large crowds in his preaching tours even if he expanded the repertoire of his kingdom-building techniques beyond exegeting Scripture and exhorting the swooning masses. And he never gave up pursuing individual conversion even as he sought to make lasting cultural contributions.

Absent the fervor of revivals and predating the surge of revolutionary mobilization, and in a period lacking extraordinary, epochal markers, the contours of colonial life took form through the efforts of pioneers like Whitefield. Through Bethesda he worked the borders of political and religious worlds to present new schemes for imagining community life in ordinary time. In the context of an enlarged yet hollow imperial space, Whitefield’s efforts to start a college did not necessarily foreshadow the building of a new nation. Rather, the fits and starts of the Bethesda project reflected a society in flux, where in one corner some labored to establish a colony out of a forest and others an institution of higher learning out of an orphan charity. In this process, Georgia proved to be a field of community making, the patterns of which would be retraced on numerous occasions in the years ahead as liberated colonists—no longer the subjects of an empire—forged ahead to become the shapers of a new republic. In that new space of independence and free enterprise, the earlier halting steps toward community building would provide the outhnes of one new nation formed out of many, disparate ideological threads. Because of efforts like Whitefield’s to reconcile divergent political, theological, and social worlds, seemingly incompatible ideas would prove moveable and surmountable, if recurring, obstacles in the decades to come.

1. “To His Excellency James Wright, Esq; Captain General and Governor in Chief of his Majesty’s province of Georgia, and to the members of his Majesty’s council in the said province. The Memorial of George Whitefield,” in Works, 3:470.

2. As one historian has written, “Now the ‘new’ world became not only a challenge to the comfortable intellectual assumptions of the old; it became a possible replacement for it.” Anthony Pagden, “The Challenge of the New,” in Canny and Morgan, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World: 1450–1850, 461. Pagden also quotes William Robertson, a Scottish historian in the eighteenth century, who gave expression to the new possibilities teeming during this period: “[It was the age] when Providence decreed that men were to pass the limits within which they had been so long confined, and open themselves to a more ample field wherein to display their talents, their enterprise and courage” (450).

3. Whitefield knew how to negotiate the empire’s characteristic tension, which Jack P. Greene has described as existing “between centripetal impulses toward centralization and centrifugal tendencies toward localism.” Greene, Creating the British Atlantic, 36.

4. The comparison of British state formation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made by Patrick Griffin provides a helpful backdrop to this discussion. To summarize: “ideas that underwrote stability could support rebellion. Ideas that animated the state could also be used to undo it.” Griffin, America’s Revolution, 114.

5. My analysis stands in contrast to Michael Zuckerman’s contention that the American Revolution was merely a political dissolution and “that the colonists of British America always strove to be Britons and that they attained political independence at the end of the eighteenth century without ever declaring their common character or distinctive identity.” Michael Zuckerman, “Identity in British America: Unease in Eden,” in Nicholas P. Canny and Anthony Pagden, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 115.

6. William Smith, A General Idea of the College of Mirania (New York: J. Parker and W. Weyman, 1753), 75.

7. Cited in Joshua L. Chamberlain, The University of Pennsylvania: Its History, Influence, Equipment and Characteristics (Boston: R. Herndon Company, 1901), 55.

8. Whitefield to Mr. —, November 10, 1739, in Works, 1:84.

9. December 15, 1739, entry in Whitefield, Journals, 407.

10. Whitefield, Journals, 408.

11. Whitefield, Journals, 505–6.

12. David Calhoun writes, “George Whitefield’s early contact with the Log College and his unstinting praise for the school and its founder elevated the whole enterprise in the minds of American Christians, especially as Whitefield moved from his earlier controversial reputation (which divided Christians, including Presbyterians, over his emphases and tactics) to a revered status, among Protestants, as a kind of American church father.” Archibald Alexander, The Log College: Biographical Sketches of William Tennent and His Students (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1968), iv. According to Archibald Alexander, “the Log College was the germ of the College of New Jersey.”

13. Whitefield to Rev. Mr. P—, November 21, 1748, in Works, 2:206.

14. Whitefield to Rev. Mr. M—, May 14, 1750, in Works, 2:349.

15. Samuel Davies and Gilbert Tennent, A General Account of the Rise and State of the College, Lately Established in the Province of New-Jersey, in America (Edinburgh, 1754), 3; emphasis added.

16. Davies and Tennent, A General Account, 4.

17. Davies and Tennent, A General Account, 7–8.

18. Davies and Tennent, A General Account, 1–2.

19. Chamberlain, The University of Pennsylvania, 48.

20. Cited in Chamberlain, The University of Pennsylvania, 48. This letter is not found in any of Whitefield’s published writings.

21. A detailed history of the transfer of the “New Building” to a new Trusteeship intending to build an academy and eventually a college can be found in Chamberlain, The University of Pennsylvania, 47–55.

22. Cited in Chamberlain, The University of Pennsylvania, 51.

23. Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (Pennsylvania, 1749), 5.

24. Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth, 6.

25. Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth, 13. In a letter to a friend, he defended his statement, noted the controversy that erupted around his comment, and attributed the idea to John Wesley, who “if I mistake not, first spoke it in a private Society.” Whitefield, Three Letters From the Reverend Mr. G. Whitefield, 2.

26. Whitefield to Benjamin Franklin, February 26, 1750, in Works, 2:336.

27. Whitefield to Benjamin Franklin, in Works, 2:337.

28. The statue was commissioned by a group of alumni who wanted to mark the bicentennial of Whitefield’s birth for his key role in the founding of the institution.

29. Eleazar Wheelock to George Whitefield, May 18, 1764, MS764318.1, The Papers of Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth College.

30. Eleazar Wheelock to George Whitefield, August 7, 1764, MS764457, The Papers of Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth College.

31. George Whitefield to Eleazar Wheelock, September 5, 1764, MS764505, The Papers of Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth College.

32. Eleazar Wheelock to J. Erskine, September 29, 1764, MS764529, The Papers of Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth College.

33. Eleazar Wheelock to John Brainerd, January 14, 1765, MS765114.3, The Papers of Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth College. The incident is also described in Kidd, The Great Awakening, 209–10.

34. George Whitefield to N. Whitaker, August 11, 1766, MS766461.4, The Papers of Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth College.

35. George Whitefield to Eleazar Wheelock, February 9, 1767, MS767159.4, The Papers of Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth College.

36. George Whitefield to Eleazar Wheelock, February 9, 1767.

37. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism, 108; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 44.

38. Of Whitefield’s international connections, Boyd Schlenther has commented: “Whitefield’s career is a parable of [the] transatlantic context.” Schlenther, “Religious Faith and Commercial Empire,” in Marshall, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 2:144.

39. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 83.

40. According to Paul Langford: “Numbers at both universities [Oxford and Cambridge] fell markedly in the mid-eighteenth century. Together they admitted about five hundred annually in the 1720s. By the 1760s the figure was not much above three hundred. It rose somewhat to four hundred by the 1780s but hardly in line with the population growth of the period.” Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 89.

41. Eleazar Wheelock to J. Erskine, September 29, 1764, MS764529, The Papers of Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth College.

42. Robert L. McCaul, “Whitefield’s Bethesda College Project and Other Attempts to Found Colonial Colleges: Part I,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 44, no. 3 (1960): 263–77.

43. Whitefield to Mr W— L—, December 9, 1749, in Works, 2:297.

44. Whitefield to Lord H—, April 20, 1757, in Works, 3:203.

45. Whitefield to Mr. D—, February 5, 1760, in Works, 3:259.

46. Tyerman, Life, 2:457; emphasis added.

47. Tyerman, Life, 2:470.

48. “To His Excellency James Wright, Esq.; Captain General and Governor in Chief of his Majesty’s province of Georgia, and to the members of his Majesty’s council in the said province. The Memorial of George Whitefield,” in Works, 3:469–70; emphasis added. For brevity, this document will hereafter be referred to as “The Memorial of George Whitefield to Governor Wright.”

49. Whitefield to Mr. R— K—n, February 13, 1765, in Works, 3:323.

50. “The Memorial of George Whitefield to Governor Wright,” in Works, 3:470.

51. “The Address of Both Houses of Assembly in Georgia,” in Works, 3:471.

52. James Wright to the Houses of Assembly in Georgia, December 20, 1764, in Works, 3:472; emphasis added.

53. In 1746, Whitefield had written Secker to point out how in a recent sermon the latter was “misinform’d as to some particulars.” Whitefield also thought he had a better perspective on a range of matters due to his travels: “As I have lately been in most parts of America, I am better able to judge of some things than those who live in England.” George Whitefield to Secker, June 9, 1746, MS1123/1, Lambeth Palace Library. An account of this early “icy exchange” can be found in William Gibson, “Whitefield and the Church of England,” in George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy, ed. Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Also in Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century, 223–24.

54. “To the King’s most Excellent Majesty. The Memorial of George Whitefield,” in Works 3:473–75. This document will hereafter be referred to as “The Memorial of George Whitefield to Archbishop Secker.”

55. Whitefield to Thomas Secker, June 17, 1767, in Works, 3:479.

56. Folio 74, 1764, in Thomas Secker, The Autobiography of Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury (Lawrence: University of Kansas Libraries, 1988), 58.

57. Whitefield to Thomas Secker, June 17, 1767, in Works, 3:475–77.

58. Folio 88, 1767, in Secker, Autobiography, 65.

59. Folio 90, 1767–1768, in Secker, Autobiography, 66.

60. Folio 74, 1767, in Secker, Autobiography, 58.

61. Folio 87, 1767, in Secker, Autobiography, 64.

62. McCaul, “Whitefield’s Bethesda College Project,” 276.

63. McCaul, “Whitefield’s Bethesda College Project,” 272.

64. Cited in McCaul, “Whitefield’s Bethesda College Project,” 273.

65. McCaul points out Whitefield must “have felt confident that his application for a charter would move smoothly and expeditiously through the English governmental channels.” He also points out Whitefield’s desire to secure as many “positive advantages” for his institution as possible—including freedom from criticisms, especially since the charter for the College of New Jersey granted by Governor Belcher was challenged. McCaul, “Whitefield’s Bethesda College Project,” 274.

66. Whitefield to Thomas Secker, February 12, 1768, in Works, 3:484.

67. “The Memorial of George Whitefield to Governor Wright,” in Works, 3:470; emphasis added. In his petition to Secker, Whitefield changed “this province” to “Georgia.” “The Memorial of George Whitefield to Archbishop Secker,” in Works, 3:474.

68. Benjamin Franklin to George Whitefield, July 2, 1756, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 6:468–69.

69. Silver, Our Savage Neighbors.

70. Joseph Galloway to William Franklin, April 29, 1766, B:F85 XLVIII, 123, American Philosophical Society.

71. George Whitefield, “Jacob’s Ladder,” in The Works of George Whitefield, Additional Sermons (Meadow View: Quinta Press, 2000), 226.

72. Whitefield, The Works of George Whitefield, Additional Sermons, 237.

73. Diary of an Unidentified Bostonian, HM175, Huntington Library, 31.

74. Diary of an Unidentified Bostonian, 14.

75. Diary of an Unidentified Bostonian, 31.

76. “The Memorial of George Whitefield to Governor Wright,” in Works, 3:470. This statement also appears in “The Memorial of George Whitefield to Archbishop Secker,” in Works, 3:474.

77. Harold E. Davis, The Fledgling Province: Social and Cultural Life in Colonial Georgia, 1733–1776 (Williamsburg: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1976), 247.

78. George Whitefield, A Letter to the Reverend Dr. Durell, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford; Occasioned By a Late Expulsion of Six Students From Edmund-Hall (Boston, 1768), 7.

79. Whitefield, A Letter to the Reverend Dr. Durell, 12.

80. Whitefield, A Letter to the Reverend Dr. Durell, 19.

81. Whitefield, A Letter to the Reverend Dr. Durell, 24.

82. Gillies, Memoirs, 205.

83. Sermon LVII, “A Caution Against Despising the Day of Small Things,” preached before the Governor, and Council, and the House of Assembly, in Georgia, on January 28, 1770, in Works, 6:358–75.

84. According to Boyd Schlenther, the increased economic autonomy of British citizens during the eighteenth century had religious foundations: “The Great Awakening had taught men to make new choices in open market terms and had greatly increased the sense of individual destiny in America. As they revolted against an Empire based on commercial control to claim free trade and open access to new lands, the Americans at the same time laid claim to an unhindered religious life.” Schlenther, “Religious Faith and Commercial Empire,” in Marshall, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 149. For a discussion of the power of commercial goods and choice in the pre-revolutionary period, see Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution.

85. Tyerman, Life, 2:575.

86. Originally published in The Georgia Gazette on January 29, 1770; quoted in Tyerman, Life, 2:577–78.

87. Whitefield to Benjamin Franklin, June 23, 1747, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 3:144.

88. Even as Colin Calloway has sought to view this period in the light of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, this chapter represents an attempt to understand the interwar years as a period of creative reassessment of what was deemed possible in the expanding empire. Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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