Certainly, Wesleyan convert Barbara Heck, an emigrant from Ireland, felt that a Methodist community needed to be established in New York to keep evangelical converts on the right path. In 1766, Heck helped light the Wesleyan Methodist fires in America. Heck and other immigrants, who had been converted during Wesley’s Irish campaign, settled in New York City. One night in the fall of 1766, Heck interrupted a card game in another immigrant’s home by seizing the cards off the table and throwing them into the fireplace. Heck was symbolically renewing vows to keep to the Methodist rules of avoiding trivial diversions and pointing out the fate of their souls if they kept at this; their souls would burn in hell, like so many cards in the fire. She also reportedly urged Philip Embury, a fellow Irish immigrant, to begin itinerating in New York.112 Heck and Embury formed singlesex classes in New York City in 1766, and soon after there was a “modest Methodist community” in Philadelphia as well.113
The New York society was important in cultivating an early Methodist organizer and preacher, Thomas Webb. Captain Webb had fought in the Seven Years’ War, converted to Methodism in England, and was very close to John Wesley, who encouraged his enthusiasm. He began preaching in various New York meeting spaces and organized a Methodist class in Brooklyn that balanced a mixed black and white membership. Heck, Webb, Embury, and other newly immigrated English Methodists built the first meetinghouse in New York City, and this was done largely without formal support from Wesleyan Methodists in England or leadership on Wesley’s part. Captain Webb also ventured to other regions with new Methodist societies springing up throughout the middle colonies and upper South.114
During the 1760s, the promising religious field of America attracted evangelizing Methodists, since there were a number of denominations and a variety of new immigrants, especially in the middle colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Unlike Methodists in England, American Methodists did not have to contend with a powerful and pervasive Church of England. While Methodists succeeded in some places where Anglicans were established, there were areas of America that were free of any religious authority altogether, and Methodism’s evangelical itinerant system was well suited to exploit these open areas.
Alongside Irish and English immigrants, one of the primary groups of early American Methodist converts was African Americans. African Americans began to join evangelicals in significant numbers during the latter part of the Great Awakening, when the South saw its greatest revivals in the 1760s with Separate Baptists groups springing up in Virginia. Methodist meetings and revivals began sweeping the Middle Atlantic and the South in the 1770s and then surged strongly at the turn of the nineteenth century. During the initial expansion of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century, slave populations were expanding as well, which facilitated acculturation of English language and customs into African American populations. Given the concentrated populations of slaves in the South, the oftentimes remote location of slaves, and their understandable aversion to groups that emphasized formal religious education (such as the Anglican and Presbyterian churches), evangelical sects were better suited to converting African Americans.115
In the Revolutionary period, white Methodist preachers were especially ardent in their pursuit of African American converts, who, historian Don Mathews argues, “were often more responsive to the evocative Methodist preaching than were whites.”116 African Americans’ increased attraction to evangelicalism had many causes, including the method and message of evangelicalism, its attention to spirituality, the primacy of the Bible, and congregational participation. Like evangelical revivals, traditional African spirituality was more participatory than traditional Christian churches; many African Americans contributed to the evangelical ethos of lay participation. The swapping of religious practices and influences between African Americans and European Americans was an ongoing, collaborative process. From the 1760s and 1770s onward, influenced by African American participation, Methodists promoted a responsive, physical form of worship, which included crying, shouting, singing, and stamping.117
Evangelical leaders began to consider African American communities as a previously untapped arena for new souls in the competitive religious marketplace.118 Robert Strawbridge, a gifted preacher who led Methodist societies in the upper South, had drawn a large number of African Americans to Methodist meetings in Maryland. In a society in Long Island that formed in 1768, black and white members were in exactly equal numbers. As Cynthia Lynn Lyerly writes, “Methodism was born in America as a biracial lay movement.”119 As Wesley’s dream of African conversion was finally starting to be realized in America by the 1760s, it was remarkably different from the missionary ideals espoused by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The SPG envisioned formal catechisms as the basis for inculcating faith among non-Christians, but African Americans did not respond to this formal teaching, nor had the Anglican Church been terribly effective at convincing slaveholders to allow them access to slaves.120 While John and Charles Wesley initially saw African Americans as part of a wider and perhaps overly optimistic missionary evangelical project in the latter part of the 1730s, by the 1760s and 1770s, African American Methodists were central to the American Methodist connection.
Conclusions
The transcendence, sociability, and mobility of the Methodist organization were powerful ideas for African Americans. Slave and free African Americans could appreciate the transformative elements of conversion and transcendence of the physical world. The sociability of the Methodist family was a powerful element of association among African Americans and between white and black converts. The mobility of the itinerant preachers, particularly in the beginning of Methodist expansion in America, was central to its success at reaching populations that were not served by established churches. This was especially true for reaching slaves.
While the Wesley brothers did not see their time in America as an overwhelming success, it was clearly an important period for the birth of Methodism. From the 1730s and 1740s, when the Wesleys experimented with their missionary ideals, the transatlantic arena and its mobile populations were central to their formulations of Methodist practice. The early period of Methodism demonstrates its absorbent and ecumenical qualities. Methodists took in the social practices of religious meetings and experimented freely with various forms, keeping the bands and classes as central components in effective religious fellowship and as official forums for membership and discipline.
Early Methodists’ social orientation formulated a tenet that was central to this group’s success: while it drew the boundaries and discipline for belonging, it was also open to new members. It emphasized the certainty and benefits of belonging to this group, through having a ticket for class meetings and defining rules for living. They identified each other through these literal and material practices and by calling each other by family names. While their familial nature mattered, it was not a natal sense of belonging. One was not born into it; one had to earn it through commitment to true conversion and salvation. In many ways this is a profoundly eighteenth-century ideal, underlined by the universal promise of salvation. In the same way that true evangelical conversion pulled individuals out of their familial ties, conversion pulled individuals out of their bodily constraints and physical locations. Conversion made individuals members of a transnational and unearthly family, one in which members might not even meet in this world but were guaranteed to do so in the next.