authorities were moving to prosecute him on further related charges, he escaped to Charleston and then sailed to England.60
Wesley’s hasty retreat from Georgia and the mission’s altogether ignoble conclusion embarrassed not only Wesley but also subsequent historians of Methodism. Wesley first published his journal in order to quell the controversy that arose from his rumored unscrupulous behavior in Georgia. Historians have struggled to explain why this successful evangelical organizer was so ineffective at either evangelizing or organizing in this first attempt. Many biographers have framed this rocky period, as well as other episodes in the romantic lives of John and Charles Wesley, with a familiar narrative of good men who were unwittingly snared by besotted women. Methodist historian Frank Baker suggests that the Wesley brothers were bound to find trouble in the Georgia colony, due to their bachelor status and their personal charms. Baker writes, “Both brothers suffered from the fact that they were earnest and eligible bachelors, becoming focal points for dissimulation, jealousy, intrigue, and gossip.”61 Henry Rack confirms this sentiment in the title and content of his chapter on the Georgia mission, “Serpents in Eden.” This title refers primarily to three women in Georgia, Sophy Hopkey, Beata Hawkins, and Anne Welch, though Hopkey is singled out as “the worst of all the serpents in [John Wesley’s] Eden.”62 The other “serpents,” Hawkins and Welch, had reportedly caused Charles Wesley’s early departure from the colony. According to Charles Wesley, Hawkins and Welch led him to believe that they had had adulterous affairs with Georgia’s founder James Oglethorpe. When he tried to confront Oglethorpe about the accusations, the women reputedly recanted their initial accusations and made Charles Wesley the offender instead. Regarding these difficulties in Georgia, Rack concludes: “The whole episode suggests murky undercurrents of sexual jealousy and hysteria of which these idealistic and inexperienced clergymen were more or less innocent victims.”63 Wesley biographers have described the “pack of angry women”64 in Georgia as “scheming,” “petty,” and “malicious,” in order to dismiss the women’s accusations against John and Charles Wesley in this period.
In some ways, historians have simply reflected the ambiguity that John Wesley, in particular, felt about marriage. Both Charles and John Wesley were at critical junctures in their lives, on the precipice of starting a new religious movement, and also considering whether they needed to be married or single to be effective religious leaders. In his parting words to Charles Wesley, Oglethorpe told him that he believed Wesley needed to marry to save himself future trouble, and he also thought marriage suited Charles Wesley and his spiritual mission. “On many accounts I should recommend to you marriage, rather than celibacy. You are of a social temper, and would find in a married state the difficulties of working out your salvation exceedingly lessened and your helps as much increased.”65 In contrast to his brother, John Wesley did not possess the same “social temper.” A proper marriage would legitimize his social standing and his leadership of a religious group, but he was still uncertain. John Wesley was ambivalent about how central women were to his personal mission, even as they were increasingly important to the broader Methodist family.
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
