dressing.104 To become a member of a class meeting, one had to be deemed fit for this select circle. This fitness was symbolized by the granting of a class ticket, which was a piece of paper that stated one’s name and location. Proving one’s mettle this way sometimes took months of regular attendance at preaching, prayer meetings, and interviews. Preachers and experienced Methodists were the judge and jury as to a new Methodist’s real intentions or seriousness. Many eighteenth-century Methodists describe the moment of acquiring their membership ticket as an essential step in their road to a rarefied spirituality.105 Getting this ticket, this symbol and certificate of acceptance, meant joining a specific Methodist family that would include mentors and guides (brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers) throughout each dedicated Methodist’s life. Class meetings defined the basis for membership within this family, who was inside and outside this group. When Francis Asbury arrived in America in 1771, one of the first things he did was to be sure that the class meetings were made up of qualified Methodists and that outsiders were not allowed to meet with them.106
The bands, class meetings, and circuits were extra-institutional structures of Methodism that established its character as a social movement from the beginning. The people of Methodism were the basis for its organization. While many Methodists, especially those in England, might be nominal members of the Church of England and attend services regularly, Methodist social structures provided the backbone for their religious association outside of more traditional brick-and-mortar sites for worship. Aside from the central motivation for spiritual growth, the goals of the Methodist structures were social ones: discipline, identification, association, and fellowship.
While Wesleyan Methodism did not officially take root in America until the end of the Great Awakening, this wave of revivalism paved the way for the Methodist movement to come. Evangelical Baptists, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Moravians all had a hand in establishing the predominant evangelical message of new birth. In particular, Baptists paved an important path for Methodists in the South, where they used some similar elements of emphasizing emotional preaching styles and the centrality of rebirth.107 Despite this wave of evangelical growth in America, Wesley waited a while to include America in his missionary plan.108 In essence, Whitefield was the primary evangelizer and Methodist leader, underlining the Calvinist flavor of the First Great Awakening. Until the late 1760s, he seemed content to allow lay Methodists to drive the American Methodist movement. In the 1760s and 1770s, some Wesleyan Methodists began immigrating to America, and this seems to have prompted Wesley to advance his mission there.109
In the 1760s and 1770s, Wesleyan Methodism found areas of expansion, like the Delmarva Peninsula, where there were great numbers of English settlers and where the Church of England was established but not thriving.110 The most significant growth took place in Maryland, Delaware, New York, and Philadelphia, where many Irish Anglican immigrants settled. David Hempton argues that these regions were ripe for evangelizing because “Methodism offered a more enthusiastic religion for Anglicans in an environment unsuitable to liturgical and moralistic refinement.”111 Methodists thrived in areas with strong Anglican Church establishment, because many Methodists were dependent upon and connected to the Church of England as their home institution. Methodists were routinely baptized in and often official members of the Church of England. They often attended their locally established churches, but met with Methodists outside those services. The Church of England offered sacraments and legitimacy to many English and American Methodists, especially prior to the 1780s. Methodism offered believers more than a sacramental home; it gave them a fellowship and way of life. Early Methodists felt strongly that real fellowship was essential to converting one’s soul and to staying on the right religious path.
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
