By the 1740s Protestants throughout the British Empire were experiencing a reformation of sorts, a broad-based, multi-confessional revival driven in part by the activities of mission societies and evangelical networks dedicated to spreading the gospel both at home and in foreign parts. This awakening was not conhned to the colonies, nor was it the exclusive preserve of evangelicals like Whiteheld. In the Highlands, the Scottish SPCK—founded in 1709 as the Presbyterian Church of Scotland’s counterpart to the eponymous society in England and the colonies—supported 176 schools by the 1750s, offering instruction in Protestant Christianity and the English language to nearly 6,500 Gaelic-speaking pupils. The English SPCK achieved similar results in Wales, where it combined English-language instruction with the provision of Bibles in the native tongue. Although the Great Awakening that swept the American colonies during the 1740s and 1750s was probably the best-known phase of this revival, its roots were both transatlantic and interdenominational, and they reached back into the closing decades of seventeenth century. The Christianizing of British America also owed more than is sometimes realized to Anglican organizations and activities.
The London-based SPG was the wealthiest and most powerful. Although the Society’s founder, Thomas Bray, insisted that its purpose was not ‘to intermeddle, where Christianity under any form has obtained Possession’, its Anglican missionaries clashed repeatedly with Dissenters, who were numerically superior in every colony outside the Chesapeake. The most dramatic conflicts occurred in New England, where the SPG built churches, forced colonial legislatures to grant Anglicans toleration, and—during the famous (or notorious) coup of 1722—induced Timothy Cutler, the Congregational rector of Yale College, to conform to the Church of England, together with two students and four nearby Congregational ministers. Despite its associations with polite society, Anglicanism proved especially successful in New England’s outlying districts and among the poor, prompting New Hampshire’s governor John Wentworth to claim that, ‘if the Church service was performed without Expense or any zealous attempts to proselyte, the People would naturally flock to it’. SPG missionaries were also active in the Middle Colonies, the Lower South, and the West Indies, where they took an early lead in evangelizing both white settlers and enslaved Africans. On eve of the Revolution, Anglicans belonged to the fastest-growing colonial church, and the only one that could claim a presence from Newfoundland to the Lesser Antilles.
Although the SPCK was a less sectarian body, its impact was equally widespread. As an indication of its multi-confessional character, the Society maintained close ties with its Scottish Presbyterian affiliate and helped sustain a German-based network that included the pietist theologian August Herrmann Francke of the University of Halle, the Lutheran mission at Tranquebar in south India, and the Salzburgers and Moravians who sought refuge in Georgia during the 1730s. ‘Casting my eye on a mapp of the world,’ remarked the New England-born secretary of the SPCK Henry Newman in 1719, ‘I [can] not help observing that Germany is near the centre of the extreams of the known habitable parts of our globe, and consequently by her situation the fittest country to invigorate the most distant nations with the most important truths.’ Anglicans were among the chief beneficiaries of this network. As the Jacobite rumours that haunted its early years suggest, the Society was a particular favourite of high-church Anglicans and Tories, among them Samuel Wesley and his Methodist sons Charles and John. In 1718 Yale’s acceptance of an unsolicited gift of books from the SPCK foreshadowed the apostasy of Timothy Cutler four years later. By the final decade of the eighteenth century the Society had founded fifty lending libraries in the colonies and sent an additional 34,000 volumes for distribution in North America and Bermuda, many by English churchmen.
None of British America’s dissenting churches and denominations matched these Anglican efforts in geographical reach or institutional coherence. During the SPG’s initial forays, Congregationalists in New England sought closer ties with dissenting churches in London. As their numbers grew, Scottish, Irish, and German immigrants made similar eVorts to stay in contact with synods, classes, and consistories in Europe. More often than not, though, such collaboration produced disagreement and, occasionally, schism. Although English Dissenters sympathized with their New England brethren, they also lectured them on the need to respect the ‘Liberty of Conscience’ of other Protestants, especially Quakers and Anglicans. In a similar fashion, Scots Irish settlers who began migrating to Pennsylvania during the 1720s adhered to an Irish ‘Old Side’ Presbyterianism whose emphasis on ‘local autonomy’ and ‘tolerance of nonessential differences’ clashed with the more hierarchical, doctrinaire principles of the Church’s increasingly evangelical Scottish and American clergy. Between 1741 and 1758 the two factions split, with Gilbert Tennent and the evangelicals establishing their own synod at New York and college at Princeton. Even after the schism was healed, New Side evangelicals sought to limit the influence of Old Side faculty at the College of New Jersey, and in 1773 they persuaded the Philadelphia Synod to pass a ‘non-importation act’, effectively barring Irish clergy from Pennsylvania pulpits without the body’s approval. In western Pennsylvania, where Scots Irish churches predominated, the controversy ensured that for a time three counties had no settled ministers at all.
If they lacked Anglicanism’s centralized, disciplined organization, Dissenters wielded two countervailing advantages during the revivals of the 1740s and 1750s. The first was a set of ecclesiastical structures that permitted local self-government and the ordination of ministers in the colonies. Unlike the Church of England, which had ‘commissaries’ instead of bishops and whose priests had to cross the Atlantic to be ordained by the Bishop of London, dissenting churches in British America possessed full rights of ordination and governance. As a result, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and (after 1771) Dutch Reformed churches were able to replicate the essential features of their respective hierarchies in America, including schools, academies, and—by the middle decades of the eighteenth century—colleges. As the Presbyterian schism of 1741 showed, such ecclesiastical powers were occasionally the source of discord, but by the time of the American Revolution the largest colonial denominations were remarkably self-sufficient, maintaining ties to co-religionists in Europe while supplying their own clergy and settling their own rules and regulations. ‘We are a Rope of Sand,’ complained the Anglican Henry Caner in 1763: ‘there is no union, no authority among us; we cannot even summon a Convention for united Counsell and advance, while the Dissenting ministers have their Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual Associations, Conventions, &c., to advise, assist, and support each other.’
The Dissenters’ other advantage was their receptivity to itinerant preaching. As the prosecution of the Connecticut evangelical James Davenport for itinerancy showed, moderate Dissenters had little tolerance for revivalists who ‘boast[ed] in another man’s line’ by preaching without licence. Yet most evangelicals embraced itinerancy in one form or another. The most famous example was the ‘Grand Itinerant’ George Whiteheld, who, despite his Anglican ordination and Oxford degree, opposed the Church of England’s commissaries by preaching in colonial parishes without their permission, held open-air meetings that reportedly attracted as many as 30,000 people, and helped found the Methodist movement whose American branch split off in 1784 as an independent denomination. Following the American Revolution, Methodist and Baptist itinerants perfected Whiteheld’s techniques, making theirs the fastest-growing denominations in the Englishspeaking Atlantic and displacing Anglicanism as the dominant church south of Pennsylvania. Unlike the Church of England’s well-funded missionaries, such men typically supported themselves, maintaining farms while preaching to all that would listen. As the SPG missionary Charles Woodmason complained of his frontier parish in South Carolina during the 1760s, the entire backcountry seemed to be ‘eaten up by Itinerant Teachers, Preachers, and Impostors from New England and Pennsylvania—Baptists, New Lights, Presbyterians, Independents, and an hundred other Sects’.
Despite their many differences, participants in British America’s midcentury revivals shared a number of characteristics. The first was a pervasive willingness to be ‘peddlers of divinity’, and to use the British Atlantic’s expanding markets to spread the gospel. With their portable hierarchies and embrace of itinerancy, Dissenters were especially well suited to commercialized forms of evangelism. As Susan O’Brien has shown, the British and American revivals of the mid-eighteenth century created a ‘transatlantic community of saints’—an evangelical network bound together by letters, published sermons, newspaper and magazine literature, and long-distance travel. The United Concert of Prayer, which originated during the 1730s in Scotland and England and which Jonathan Edwards helped turn into a day of thanksgiving throughout Britain’s Atlantic empire, was probably the network’s best-known achievement. The interconnectedness of British evangelicalism was also evident in the passages that Nicholas Gilman read to his Durham, New Hampshire, parishioners from the Glasgow Weekly History; the transatlantic donations raised during the 1740s and 1750s for Whitefield’s Georgia Orphan House and Tennent’s College of New Jersey; and the London Spa Fields Tabernacle hymn from 1742 that proclaimed ‘Great things in England, Wales and Scotland wrought | And in America to pass are brought.’ Although Anglicanism’s legal establishment made it less dependent on commercial networks, its ministers in New England and the middle colonies freely participated in this marketplace of creeds, soliciting donations for schools and missions, distributing literature through the SPCK, and competing for souls with the colonies’ other churches and denominations.
The second defining characteristic of British America’s Protestant missions and evangelical networks was a growing attachment to—and, often, reverence for—ecclesiastical authority. In none of the colonial denominations that experienced awakenings during the eighteenth century did lay revivalists and movements gain more than a temporary advantage. Except for the Baptists, evangelical leaders were invariably ordained ministers, whose jeremiads on the ‘danger[s] of an unconverted ministry’ (to quote Tennent’s famous schism-producing sermon) did not mean they were in any way anticlerical. Indeed, most revivals strengthened the position of their denominations’ clergy and of the synods, conventions, and associations charged with supervising them. When interlopers preached doctrines with which they disagreed, evangelical clergy could be as disparaging of itinerancy as their Anglican opponents. In 1779 the Presbytery of Hanover, Virginia, founded twenty years earlier by the itinerant Samuel Davies, warned that its parishioners were in danger of being ‘utterly lost by the prevalency... of many ignorant and irreligious sectaries’. Even Baptists, whom students of American religion depict as typifying the eighteenth-century revivals’ democratic tendencies, tried to keep popular enthusiasm within the bounds of denominational authority. Such constraints were also evident in the Society of Friends’ Yearly Meetings, which, despite the Quakers’ well-known toleration and anticlericalism, sought to establish mandatory positions for the society’s 300 meetings on the conduct proper for Christians in times of war, the payment of taxes in support of military activities, and the abolition of slavery.
Occasionally evangelical ministers even used the rituals of popular magic to buttress their authority, adopting the personae of ‘holy men’ with charismatic, supernatural powers. In the case of Whiteheld, whose corpse became an object of veneration for Methodists who visited his tomb in Newbury- port, Massachusetts, during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this quasi-apotheosis occurred without his endorsement. On the other hand, Gilbert Tennent and his brothers freely claimed to have witnessed miracles, entered into altered states, and come face to face with the Devil. Although consistent with the prophetic traditions of the Old Testament and the early Church, such claims were also meant to appeal to would- be converts who, to varying degrees, still believed in magic and the occult. Satirizing this conjunction, Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine likened both Whiteheld and the Tennents to ‘Holy Necromancers’; one of Gilbert Tennent’s Old Side critics was sure he had ‘some cunning Art, beyond what is common to Man’.
At the time of the American Revolution the effects of this Protestant revival were evident in every part of British America except predominantly Catholic Grenada and Quebec. With half a million members each, the Anglican Church and the Congregational Standing Orders were the largest mainland denominations, possessing 480 and 658 churches respectively. In New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey the Presbyterian Church, whose overall numbers had grown from a dozen congregations at the start of the eighteenth century to 543 churches with 400,000 adherents, was the largest denomination (and third largest in North America), while Baptists already had 498 churches, chiefly in New England and the South. (In the colonies that became the United States there were about 25,000 Catholics with fifty churches in 1776, and perhaps 1,500 Jews.) Only in the West Indies did Anglicans hold undisputed sway, although Methodists, Moravians, and Baptists were starting to gain converts. To varying degrees, each denomination in this expansion benefited from the revival that Whitefield helped initiate, including the Church of England. American Protestants in 1776 were more likely to be church members than their ancestors one hundred years earlier; their affiliations bound them as never before into a transatlantic community of missionaries and evangelicals, synods and bishops, colleges and universities, associations and councils.