In sum, the Wesley brothers were seemingly naive about the need to respect certain colonial power structures and inflamed the wrong people.66 While the English colonists were jealously establishing favor with Oglethorpe and monitoring divisions of land parcels, some saw religion as superfluous, or worse, an obstruction to the colonists’ economic success.67 Overall, the Wesley brothers’ rigid social and religious expectations made them ill-suited to the Georgia mission. The colonists accused John Wesley of being such a stickler for proper ceremony, titles, membership, and sacraments, which seemed so inappropriate in this hardscrabble colony, that they took him to be a Catholic in disguise.68
Yet America continued to influence Wesley long after he left Savannah. The most immediate effect of his Georgia mission and its disastrous final chapters was that it drove him to publish his first journals. In order to defend his excommunication of Sophy Hopkey, Wesley was compelled to print an account that emphasized the righteousness of his holy mission.69 Long-lasting effects included Wesley’s foundation of the social structure of Methodism, women’s centrality to this structure, and Methodist attention to the ideals of missionary work.
Revivals in England and America
Despite the significance of the American mission to John Wesley’s formulation of Methodist practice and thought, he left behind no sustainable Methodist organization in America. Methodist historians have tended to view American Methodism as taking root in 1766, when Wesleyan Methodist immigrants formed a significant, if small, society in New York.70 Yet from 1738 to 1766, Methodism did exist in America, though it was mainly unattached to Wesleyan Methodism and under the leadership of George Whitefield. Whitefield, an ordained Anglican minister and fellow Holy Club member, picked up where Wesley left off his mission in Georgia. Whitefield arrived in Savannah on May 7, 1738, with some desire to cultivate the nascent Methodist organization there, but he observed “many divisions amongst the inhabitants.”71 The evangelical seeds had scattered, and it was difficult to see much obvious flowering left behind by the Wesleyan mission.72
Whitefield made successive preaching tours in America, attracting large crowds during his wildly popular tour of America in 1739. He preached to large interdenominational crowds everywhere he went, and he was widely known throughout America, England, and Wales.73 His emotional, charismatic style of preaching was not altogether new to the colonies at this point. Whitefield followed in the footsteps of American revivalists like Jonathan Edwards and Gilbert Tennent, who were even more emphatic about Judgment, hell, and damnation than Whitefield.74 And like Edwards and Tennent, Whitefield’s theological underpinning was primarily Calvinist, emphasizing the unchangeable election of the saints and the burden of original sin.75 Whitefield was a truly transatlantic itinerant, gathering large crowds on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1742, he reveled in the level of revivalism he had seen in England, Scotland, Wales, and New England, and he rhapsodized, “I believe there is such a work begun, as neither we nor our fathers have heard of. The beginnings are amazing; how unspeakably glorious will the end be!”76
Like Wesley, Whitefield had a sense of being a missionary in the colonial American arena, and he, likewise, saw it as part of his mission to work at converting African Americans. However, while evangelical preachers paid more explicit attention to converting slaves, some scholars argue that Calvinist theology naturally inhibited slave conversion through its emphasis on the predestined elite.77 The Church of England saw its missionary efforts through the SPG and the church’s colonial establishment as working toward a “Humane and Christian system of slavery,” which would do nothing to challenge slavery. Instead, Anglican pastors saw their mission as improving slaves’ commitment to obedience and hard work through their sense of religious duty.78 Whitefield, though critical of the SPG and the Anglican Church, operated within this sense of Anglican mission while in America. While Whitefield converted slaves, he directly promoted slavery by supporting the establishment of slavery in Georgia and by becoming a slave owner in the 1750s.79
Figure 2. Enthusiasm Display’d, or The Moor-Fields Congregation (London: C. Corbett, 1739). George Whitefield is standing on two women; one has a mask and is named “Hypocrisy,” and the other Janus-faced woman is “Deceit.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
While Whitefield and Wesley had both approached America with a sense of mission, their methods and their theological message were quite different. Whitefield’s emphasis on the theology of predestination had caused some friction with Wesley. Contrasting with Whitefield’s Calvinist views, Wesley espoused an Arminian emphasis on the potential for universal salvation or “free grace.” As well, Wesleyan Methodists distinguished themselves from their Calvinist counterparts by searching ceaselessly for entire sanctification, a true assurance that one had reached a perfect, sinless state. In 1740, Wesley gave a sermon in Bristol where he declared that Calvinism implied that God abandoned people and incited the nonelect to antinomianism.80 Unlike Wesley, Whitefield separated from the Anglican Church, openly criticizing its efficacy in America. He further charged that Anglican missionaries were “corrupt in their principles and immoral in their practices.”81 After his death in 1770, Whitefield’s followers were folded into what became the predominant strain of American Methodism, Wesleyan Methodism. Despite theological differences, Wesley and Whitefield remained friends; the Wesleys and George Whitefield considered themselves a “threefold cord,” working toward the same goal.82 As perhaps a final testament to their friendship, Whitefield had designated Wesley to conduct his funeral.
Even while distinguishing his own movement from Whitefield’s, John Wesley kept a close eye on the spread of American revivalism.83 Wesley had read Jonathan Edwards’s collection of New England conversion accounts, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, and Wesley was deeply affected by this collection. He drew parallels between American conversion experiences and those in his own circle.84 Wesley not only admired Edwards’s book, he reprinted it in London in the 1740s and 1750s.85 As Wesley saw the connections between the experiences of converts in America and England, he began to conceive the scope of his mission as transatlantic, even worldwide. Surveying the numerous reports of large revivals in the 1740s, Wesley wrote, “Many sinners are saved from their sins at this day, in London … in many other parts of England; in Wales, in Ireland, in Scotland; upon the continent of Europe; in Asia and in America. This I term a great work of God; so great as I have not read of for several ages.”86
Throughout the transatlantic world, the publication of conversion narratives exploded during the mid-eighteenth century. Sharing conversion experiences was an important way for evangelicals to connect to one another. Publishing conversion narratives served various functions, asserting both the universality of this experience and the common components evangelicals found in their journeys toward salvation. Conversion narratives provided Methodists and other evangelicals with the sense that their experiences were unique but not singular. This transatlantic network of writing created a spiritual community that crossed denominational and national boundaries.87
By the late 1730s, Wesley began to conceive of a religious community centered on the conversion experience, social discipline, and spiritual fellowship. In 1738, Wesley established the Fetter Lane Society in London; this society was cooperatively run with the Moravians. The society attracted