empowered women. Methodist women did have more powerful positions within this group than in the Church of England, due to the increased emphasis on lay participation. Even though female preaching was not broadly encouraged, Methodist founder John Wesley approved some English female preachers. There was an expansive network of female leaders within English and American Methodism.30 Many women took on a more widely acceptable feminine role as exhorters, who spoke publicly to lead prayer or expand on a particular biblical passage, oftentimes in connection with a preacher’s sermon.31 Women also assumed lay leadership of classes and bands, two of the basic units of Methodist organization. Classes were groups that met regularly to provide discipline and improve each other spiritually. Female band leaders organized selective groups of women, who met in small, intimate sessions to provide mutual spiritual support. Similar to other evangelical denominations, Methodism seemed initially open to female lay leadership and even preaching, but by the nineteenth century most Wesleyan Methodist women were limited to being band leaders and exhorters. As the nineteenth century progressed, an increasingly hierarchical conservatism was compounded by the embourgeoisement of Wesleyan Methodism in England and America.32
Yet, early Methodism did not always mirror the larger Anglo-American society. In the evangelical family, separation and isolation from the corrupting influences of the world were the optimum conditions for leading religious lives. This tendency to separate from the world, Greven argues, intensified both the cohesion of the nuclear family and the authority of parents over children, as well as husbands over wives.33 I complicate some of Greven’s assertions by demonstrating the ways in which many Methodists loosened ties to their birth families. This work illustrates how Methodists formed an alternative family, which lessened the cohesion and isolation of the traditional hierarchal, patriarchal family. Though early Methodists formulated a strong sense of hierarchy and men were at the top levels of institutional power, the extent of female participation in this group tended to mitigate patriarchal tendencies both within individual families and in the religious group as a whole.
Transatlantic Methodism
The test for eighteenth-century Methodists was to be truly “one family under God” and to expand this family in a coherent way over a large geographic area. The Methodist family was transatlantic in the sense that there was a steady interaction between English and American religious culture in this period. For example, the popular preacher George Whitefield was a member of the Holy Club, the Oxford meeting that helped formulate Methodism in the 1730s.34 He was also one of the main engineers of the Great Awakening in America, which spread to broad areas of the eastern seaboard in the 1740s and 1750s, even while he continued his ministry in England. The exchange of ideas between America and England continued in the eighteenth century, as American revivals greatly influenced English Wesleyan Methodism. John Wesley’s emphasis on the conversion narrative, his encouragement of evangelical visions, his establishment of the band meeting, and the basis for his pietistic theology all reveal the deep and lasting influence of Wesley’s visit to America and his interest in American religious ideas.35
The chronology of Methodism’s rise on both sides of the Atlantic makes it a difficult story to tell within the existing categories of revivalism in American and English history. While the Methodist movement had a role in sparking the Great Awakening in America, Methodism did not establish itself as a distinct religious group in America until the 1760s. Thus, it was only at the end of the Great Awakening that American Methodists began to organize (and to catch the attention and resources of English leadership). Paradoxically, while every other religious group was struggling to get their congregants to attend church through the American Revolutionary War, Methodists were gaining in numbers and growing their organization.
Scholars of English Methodism have been for the most part unconcerned with its connections to American Methodists, and vice versa.36 Histories of American evangelicalism have been very good at explaining the regional forces that have complicated or abetted in the rise of revivalism but have sometimes slighted the wider transatlantic connections and contexts.37 In the established historiography, the calls for revival were issued locally and triggered by regional issues: in the case of New England, the dissipation of the Puritan community; in the Middle Atlantic, with the diversity of eighteenth-century immigration; and in the South, opposition to the gentry class and the low levels of ardent religiosity within many southern communities. Methodist histories of the South have been particularly convincing in showing how evangelicalism appealed to southern men and women by overturning embedded class and race hierarchies.38 Yet, by expanding the framework into the much broader situation of early Methodism in England and America, we obtain a different picture of early evangelicals; we see a constant exchange of religious ideas and practices that influenced the way that Methodism was enacted on both sides of the Atlantic. As Methodist personnel and print culture circulated throughout the Atlantic world, evangelicals in England and America shared common views about how to live a religious life, a common language to speak about their deepest spiritual desires, and common ideas about their place in society. English and American Methodists also shared the same organizational structures; bands, classes, circuits, and conferences took root on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the recent decades, religious historians have delved into these transatlantic waters; transatlantic studies of revivalism, Quakerism, and Moravianism expand our understanding of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious culture.39 Scholars of transatlantic evangelicalism in particular have focused on the extent to which eighteenth-century print networks helped to create a transatlantic culture of revivalism. Frank Lambert’s study of George Whitefield, for instance, emphasizes the commercial aspects of revivalism and the many ways in which his success relied upon newspapers and evangelical magazines to spread the news of his preaching.40 Similarly, Susan O’Brien’s research on transatlantic networks shows how the fervid letters exchanged between preachers and the laity became fodder for a transatlantic print culture.41 Crucial to transatlantic studies, however, is the recognition that the Atlantic was a circulatory system of culture, rather than a unidirectional transmission of people and practices.
This book looks at these transatlantic cultural links in order to examine the cohesion of the Methodist family. Transatlantic religious links were present throughout the eighteenth century, but they also persisted beyond the American Revolution and into the early nineteenth century. As the Methodist movement circulated evangelical experience, ideas, and persons throughout the Atlantic world, it became a family bound together across national, regional, racial, and political lines.
The Politics of Early Methodism
Political developments of the eighteenth century obscure rather than clarify the boundaries of this emergent transatlantic movement. In many ways, English Methodists envisioned American Methodists as simply a branch of the same family, one that included Irish, Scottish, and Welsh Methodists under the same umbrella. In other ways, American Methodism quickly emerged as a distinctive branch and during the Revolutionary era became a peculiar offshoot with its own problems, in terms of integration into the English Methodist religious structure. As the Revolutionary era progressed, English and American Methodists struggled to redefine the purpose, organization, and scope of the collective Methodist mission. This book, spanning the first eighty-five years of Methodism, circa 1730–1815, examines the ways in which religious communities reformed themselves during the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era.
During the Revolutionary and early national period in America, Methodists experienced a crisis of identity. As the American Revolution progressed, divisive politics and the ultimate formation of the Methodist church as a distinct denomination challenged Methodists on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1770s and 1780s. Whether American and English Methodists could remain a coherent, unified transatlantic family was subject to intense debate.
Even as they struggled to formulate possibly opposing political and social identities, Methodists on both sides of the Atlantic tried to maintain symbolic, political, and pragmatic ties that they conceived and enacted as familial bonds.
