described her childhood as one marked by unremitting filial duty and, like Bosanquet, precocious spirituality. She highlighted her moments of spiritual awakenings: when she was visited by the devil as a child one night after forgetting to pray, and when she had a dream, during her frivolous teenage years, that she had died and saw the awfulness of the hell that awaited her, only to be forgiven by God.60 As a teenager, Roe realized she was different when she began to exhibit an innate seriousness, despite her teenage flirtation with dancing and parties. In her autobiography, much as in Bosanquet’s, her path to Methodism was marked by inevitability and the isolation of this individualized calling. Like Bosanquet, she risked much in converting to Methodism. In her journal, she highlighted the gulf that existed between her birth family and the Methodist family; the former was familiar and safe, but the latter was fairly exotic and dangerous. As a teenager, Roe heard others compare Methodism to Catholicism. The word on the street confirmed that both religions produced false piety and imitations of prophecy. She heard that “they deceived the illiterate and were little better than common pick-pockets.”61 Echoing the themes of anti-Methodist literature, her friends warned her that Methodism perverted people’s minds; it made some presumptuous and unbearable, others insane. She also heard that they were incredibly antisocial, caring only for their own members.62
Figure 4. Hester Roe Rogers, engraving by John Chester Buttre, ca. 1871. Courtesy of the Drew University Methodist Collection.
All of these voices of public and private condemnation followed her to her first Methodist meeting in the early 1770s, when she heard Reverend David Simpson preach on the sinfulness of dancing and other diversions. For Roe, unlike Bosanquet, the stages of discovering this alternate religiosity and discord with her family were greatly compressed. Upon hearing Simpson, she immediately set about to shred all her “fine caps and clothes,” cut her hair, and commit herself to rooting out her intrinsic sinfulness. Her friends were stunned and her mother, horrified. Her mother told Hester that she “thought I was losing my Senses.”63 Like Bosanquet’s mother, Mrs. Roe likewise saw madness in her daughter’s behavior.64 Mrs. Roe’s initial response was even stronger than Bosanquet’s parental censure. Hester Roe wrote in her autobiography, “I knew if I persisted in hearing the Methodists I must litterally give up all. My mother had already threatened, if ever she knew me to hear them—She would disown me—Every friend and Relation I had in the World—I had reason to believe would do so also—I had no acquaintance even among the Methodists to take me in—nor knew any refuge to fly to but my God.”65 Roe felt estranged from her family’s ways almost immediately, and she started going to prayer groups and reading evangelical literature in secrecy. Her mother insisted that converting to Methodism meant losing her blood family, but she had no new family yet, so she felt the need to keep her evangelical life hidden from her mother for some time. When her mother discovered her daughter’s clandestine life, “a flood of persecution opened upon me—but in that time of need, God raised me up a friend in my Uncle Roe which kept my mother from turning me out of doors. Yet what I suffered, sometimes thro’ her tears and entreaties, and at other times her severity, is known only to God.”66
Though Roe did have a sympathetic uncle, she became increasingly isolated within her family. Her relatives coordinated a campaign to turn her away from Methodism, but Roe outtalked them all. Her mother resorted to subtler means of pressuring her to leave Methodism; she tried taking her daughter out of town for an extended trip. Instead of joining in the social outings, Hester literally refused to dress the part and insisted on staying home to pray several times a day. “[I]n a little time finding all their Efforts in vain, they began to let me Alone—only I was made to understand, I had now nothing to expect from my Godmother as to temporal things, this however weighed nothing with me.”67 Roe emphasized that economic pressure was an ineffective tool on her. In fact, in the ultimate act of obedient disobedience, she inverted this threat of economic sanction by offering herself as the house servant, much to her mother’s horror. Her mother allowed her to go to Methodist meetings in exchange for cleaning the house, “believing I who had never been Accustomed to Hard Labour, would soon be weary and give it up.”68 Roe had less to gamble with than Bosanquet, but the stakes were still high in terms of comfort and familial support. Roe cited the large body of Methodist literature and John Wesley’s work on sanctification, in particular, as aids during this difficult period of isolation. It was this literature, she insisted, that helped her endure living and working as a servant, incurring her mother’s prolonged and pronounced displeasure.69
In fact, the hardships she endured seem to have been incentives toward Methodism, because they fed her self-image as the lone, suffering saint. Roe wrote, “[S]he has been Sever with me—yet Glory be to god my Soul is at peace—I know these Crosses are for my good and the happiness I enjoy in God, more than repays my Soul.”70 Even as her widowed mother attempted to enforce her social conformity, Roe insisted that her true self was inaccessible to her mother. She wrote, “My Mother insisted on my going with her to dine and drink Tea with her at an uncles—and I was not Suffered to attend Preaching Morning or Night—but I had secret intercourse with my God which none could hinder.”71 Roe began to grow further and further apart from her mother by beginning new friendships outside of her family’s social circles and taking up a spiritual life that she did not share with her mother.
Eventually, Roe’s secret life won out, and her mother allowed her to become a member of the Methodist family, albeit grudgingly. Roe’s biography became a Methodist model for disobedience and refusal to participate in frivolous ungodly company at any cost. Her willingness to give up her class comforts, to become a servant rather than go against her spiritual calling, was a hallmark of the religious sacrifice necessary for converts. Roe marked her alienation from the norms of her family by upending them completely and becoming their servant. Persevering through suffering her mother’s persecution sealed Roe’s fate as a member of the Methodist family. She rejoiced, “I now am enrolled by Name among thy Dear People.”72
Catherine Livingston’s Narrative
Although Catherine Livingston was across the ocean and living in a remarkably different setting from Roe or Bosanquet, Livingston’s narrative demonstrates the striking similarities between the conversion narratives of American and English Methodists. Livingston (1752–1849) was born into a large, prominent family in New York. The Livingstons were well established with extensive landholdings in upstate New York, where their name is still as prominent as the houses they built on the banks of the Hudson. Catherine Livingston’s mother brought a considerable landholding of her own into the Livingston clan, and Catherine’s father was a judge.73 Catherine Livingston would become widely regarded as a leader of Methodism in New York State, a distinction her family could not have wished for her. Like Bosanquet and Roe, Livingston was well loved by her parents and reported a happy childhood. Her parents adhered to traditional churches; her mother was a Dutch Calvinist, her father an Anglican, and the children were raised in both traditions.74 In 1775, her father died suddenly when she was twenty-three, and the family went through considerable upheaval during the Revolutionary War, when the British set fire to her family home of Clermont. However, the Revolution did not merit mention in her spiritual autobiography, which she wrote in 1817.
As a young woman in elite circles, Livingston had a full social calendar, reporting invitations to no fewer than five balls one week. Like Hester Roe, she realized her difference from others in her family when she was a teenager. Livingston, though, always had a sense that she lacked fulfillment in the circuits of her class: “If the smiles of the world and the pleasures of it could have bestowed happiness, I should certainly have enjoyed it, but no, there was something wanting, and a dear friend, who was also an inmate in the same dwelling, and myself would sit up after returning from brilliant balls, and gay parties, and moralize on their emptiness, till it became burdensome to accept of invitations.”75 An awakening followed the death of her sister-in-law Margaret Livingston in 1785, when Catherine Livingston
