F. Marion Crawford - "An American Politician"

Arthur J. Rees - "The Hand in the Dark"

George W. Ogden - "Trail's End"

James Boswell - "No Abolition of Slavery"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

A History of American Christianity

L >> Leonard Woolsey Bacon >> A History of American Christianity




* * * * *

One impression made by this general survey of the colonies is that of
the absence of any sign of unity among the various Christian bodies in
occupation. One corner of the great domain, New England, was thickly
planted with homogeneous churches in mutual fellowship. One order of
Christians, the Quakers, had at least a framework of organization
conterminous with the country. In general there were only scattered
members of a Christian community, awaiting the inbreathing of some
quickening spiritual influence that should bring bone to its bone and
erect the whole into a living church.

Another and very gratifying impression from the story thus far is the
general fidelity of the Christian colonists in the work of the gospel
among the heathen Indians. There was none of the colonies that did not
make profession of a zealous purpose for the Christianizing of the
savages; and it is only just to say, in the face of much unjust and evil
talk, that there was none that did not give proof of its sincerity. In
Virginia, the Puritans Whitaker and Thomas Dale; in Maryland, the
earliest companies of Jesuit missionaries; Campanius among the Swedish
Lutherans; Megapolensis among the Dutchmen, and the Jesuit martyr Jogues
in the forests of New York; in New England, not only John Eliot and
Roger Williams and the Mayhews, but many a village pastor like Fitch of
Norwich and Pierson of Branford, were distinguished in the first
generation by their devotion to this duty.[150:1] The succession of
faithful missionaries has never failed from that day to this. The large
expectations of the churches are indicated by the erection of one of the
earliest buildings at Harvard College for the use of Indian students. At
William and Mary College not less than seventy Indian students at one
time are said to have been gathered for an advanced education. It was no
fault of the colonial churches that these earnest and persistent efforts
yielded small results. "We discover a strange uniformity of feature in
the successive failures.... Always, just when the project seemed most
hopeful, an indiscriminate massacre of missionaries and converts
together swept the enterprise out of existence. The experience of all
was the same."[151:1]

* * * * *

It will be a matter of growing interest, as we proceed, to trace the
relation of the American church to negro slavery.

It is a curious fact, not without some later analogies, that the
introduction into the New World of this "direful spring of woes
unnumbered" was promoted, in the first instance, by the good Las Casas,
as the hopeful preventive of a worse evil. Touched by the spectacle of
whole tribes and nations of the Indians perishing under the cruel
servitude imposed upon them by the Spanish, it seemed to him a less
wrong to transfer the infliction of this injustice to shoulders more
able to bear it. But "man's inhumanity to man" needed no pretext of
philanthropy. From the landing of the Dutch ship at Jamestown in 1619,
with her small invoice of fourteen negroes, the dismal trade went on
increasing, in spite of humane protest and attempted prohibition. The
legislature of Massachusetts, which was the representative of the
church, set forth what it conceived to be the biblical ethics on the
subject. Recognizing that "lawful captives taken in just wars" may be
held in bondage, it declared among its earliest public acts, in 1641,
that, with this exception, no involuntary bond-slavery, villeinage, or
captivity should ever be in the colony; and in 1646 it took measures for
returning to Africa negroes who had been kidnapped by a slaver. It is
not strange that reflection on the golden rule should soon raise doubts
whether the precedents of the Book of Joshua had equal authority with
the law of Christ. In 1675 John Eliot, from the midst of his work among
the Indians, warned the governor against the sale of Indians taken in
war, on the ground that "the selling of souls is dangerous merchandise,"
and "with a bleeding and burning passion" remonstrated against "the
abject condition of the enslaved Africans." In 1700 that typical
Puritan, Judge Samuel Sewall, published his pamphlet on "The Selling of
Joseph," claiming for the negroes the rights of brethren, and predicting
that there would be "no progress in gospeling" until slavery should be
abolished. Those were serious days of antislavery agitation, when
Cotton Mather, in his "Essays to Do Good," spoke of the injustice of
slavery in terms such that his little book had to be expurgated by the
American Tract Society to accommodate it to the degenerate conscience of
a later day, and when the town of Boston in 1701 took measures "to put a
period to negroes being slaves." Such endeavors after universal justice
and freedom, on the part of the Christians of New England, thwarted by
the insatiable greed of British traders and politicians, were not to
cease until, with the first enlargement of independence, they should
bring forth judgment to victory.

The voice of New England was echoed from Pennsylvania. The Mennonites of
Germantown, in 1688, framed in quaint and touching language their
petition for the abolition of slavery, and the Quaker yearly meetings
responded one to another with unanimous protest. But the mischief grew
and grew. In the Northern colonies the growth was stunted by the
climate. Elsewhere the institution, beginning with the domestic service
of a few bondmen attached to their masters' families, took on a new type
of malignity as it expanded. In proportion as the servile population
increases to such numbers as to be formidable, laws of increasing
severity are directed to restraining or repressing it. The first
symptoms of insurrection are followed by horrors of bloody vengeance,
and "from that time forth the slave laws have but one quality--that of
ferocity engendered by fear."[153:1] It was not from the willful
inhumanity of the Southern colonies, but from their terrors, that those
slave codes came forth which for nearly two centuries were the shame of
America and the scandal of Christendom. It is a comfort to the heart of
humanity to reflect that the people were better than their laws; it was
only at the recurring periods of fear of insurrection that they were
worse. In ordinary times human sympathy and Christian principle softened
the rigors of the situation. The first practical fruits of the revival
of religion in the Southern colonies were seen in efforts of Christian
kindness toward the souls and bodies of the slaves.


FOOTNOTES:

[129:1] One is touched by the plaintive grief of the Rev. Mr. Muirson,
who has come from the established church of England to make proselytes
from the established churches of Connecticut. He writes to the "S. P.
G.," without a thought of casting any reflections upon his patrons: "It
would require more time than you would willingly bestow on these Lines,
to express how rigidly and severely they treat our People, by taking
their Estate by distress when they do not willingly pay to support their
Ministers" ("Digest of S. P. G. Records," p. 43). The pathos of the
situation is intensified when we bear in mind the relation of this
tender-hearted gentleman's own emoluments to the taxes extorted from the
Congregationalists in his New York parish.

[130:1] See above, p. 107.

[131:1] Newman, "Baptist Churches in the United States," pp. 197, 198,
231.

[131:2] Tiffany, "Protestant Episcopal Church," chaps, iv., v.; C. F.
Adams, "Three Episodes in Massachusetts History," pp. 342, 621.

[133:1] "Digest of S. P. G.," p. 42.

[134:1] Tiffany, chap. v. For a full account of these beginnings in
Connecticut in their historical relations, see L. Bacon on "The
Episcopal Church in Connecticut" ("New Englander," vol. xxv., pp.
283-329).

[135:1] There were on duty in New York in 1730, besides the minister of
Trinity Church, ten missionaries of the "S. P. G.," including several
employed specially among the Indians and the negroes. Fifteen years
later there were reported to the "Venerable Society" in New York and New
Jersey twenty-two churches ("Digest of S. P. G.," pp. 855, 856; Tiffany,
p. 178).

[135:2] "Digest of S. P. G.," p. 68 and note.

[137:1] Corwin, "Reformed (Dutch) Church," p. 115.

[138:1] "Mr. Hooker did often quote a saying out of Mr. Cartwright, that
no man fashioneth his house to his hangings, but his hangings to his
house. It is better that the commonwealth be fashioned to the setting
forth of God's house, which is his church, than to accommodate the
church frame to the civil state" (John Cotton, quoted by L. Bacon,
"Historical Discourses," p. 18).

[139:1] Thomas, "The Society of Friends," p. 239.

[139:2] Corwin, "Reformed (Dutch) Church," pp. 77, 78, 173.

[140:1] Illustrations of the sordid sectarianism of the "Venerable
Society's" operations are painfully frequent in the pages of the "digest
of the S. P. G." See especially on this particular case the action
respecting Messrs. Kocherthal, Ehlig, and Beyse (p. 61).

[143:1] S. G. Fisher, "The Making of Pennsylvania," p. 125; Thomas, "The
Society of Friends," p. 235.

[143:2] "Religion gave birth to wealth, and was devoured by her own
offspring." The aphorism is ascribed to Lord Falkland.

[143:3] Thomas, "The Society of Friends," p. 236.

[144:1] Fisher, "The Making of Pennsylvania," pp. 166-169, 174.

[144:2] It is not easy to define the peculiarity of Penn's Indian
policy. It is vulgarly referred to as if it consisted in just dealing,
especially in not taking their land except by fair purchase; and the
"Shackamaxon Treaty," of which nothing is known except by vague report
and tradition, is spoken of as some thing quite unprecedented in this
respect. The fact is that this measure of virtue was common to the
English colonists generally, and eminently to the New England colonists.
A good example of the ordinary cant of historical writers on this
subject is found in "The Making of Pennsylvania," p. 238. The writer
says of the Connecticut Puritans: "They occupied the land by squatter
sovereignty.... It seemed like a pleasant place; they wanted it. They
were the saints, and the saints, as we all know, shall inherit the
earth.... Having originally acquired their land simply by taking it, ...
they naturally grew up with rather liberal views as to their right to
any additional territory that pleased their fancy." No purchase by Penn
was made with more scrupulous regard to the rights of the Indians than
the purchases by which the settlers of Connecticut acquired title to
their lands; but I know of no New England precedent for the somewhat
Punic piece of sharp practice by which the metes and bounds of one of
the Pennsylvania purchases were laid down.

The long exemption of Pennsylvania from trouble with the Indians seems
to be due to the fact that an exceptionally mild, considerate, and
conscientious body of settlers was confronted with a tribe of savages
thoroughly subdued and cowed in recent conflicts with enemies both red
and white. It seems clear, also, that the exceptional ferocity of the
forty years of uninterrupted war with the Indians that ensued was due in
part to the long dereliction by the Quaker government of its duty of
protecting its citizens and punishing murder, robbery, and arson when
committed by its copper-colored subjects.

[145:1] Penn's "Truth Exalted" (quoted in "Encyclopaedia Britannica,"
vol. xviii., p. 493).

[147:1] In 1741, after a decade of great activity and growth, the entire
clerical strength of the American Presbyterian Church, in its four
presbyteries, was forty-seven ministers (Thompson, "Presbyterian
Churches," p. 33).

[148:1] It is a subject of unceasing lament on the part of historians of
the American Episcopal Church that the mother church, all through the
colonial days, should have obstinately refused to the daughter the gift
of the episcopate. There is no denying the grave disadvantages thus
inflicted. But it admits of doubt whether such bishops, with such
conditions, as would have been conceded by the English church of the
eighteenth century, would, after all, have been so very precious a boon.
We shrink from the imputation upon the colonial church of Maryland and
Virginia which is implied in suggesting that it would have been
considerably improved by gaining the disciplinary purity of the English
church of the Georgian era. The long fight in Virginia, culminating in
Patrick Henry's speech in the Parsons' Case, so far Americanized the
Episcopal Church as to make sure that no unwelcome minister was ever to
be forced from outside on one of its parishes. After the Revolution it
became possible to set up the episcopate also on American principles.
Those who are burdened with regret over the long delay of the American
Protestant episcopate may find no small consolation in pondering the
question, what kind of an outfit of bishops, with canons attached, might
have been hoped for from Sir Robert Walpole or Lord Bute? On the whole,
at this point the American Episcopal Church is in the habit of pitying
itself too much. It has something to be thankful for.

[150:1] It is a curious exception, if it is indeed an exception, that
the one Christian colony that shows no record of early Indian missions
should be that of William Penn. Could this be due to the Quaker faith in
the sufficiency of "the Light that lighteneth every man that cometh into
the world"?

The type of theology and method of instruction used by some of the
earliest laborers in this field left something to be desired in point of
adaptedness to the savage mind. Without irreverence to the great name of
Jonathan Edwards, there is room for doubt whether he was just the man
for the Stockbridge Indians. In the case of the Rev. Abraham Pierson, of
Branford, in New Haven Colony, afterward founder of Newark, we have an
illustration both of his good intentions and of his methods, which were
not so good, in "_Some Helps for the Indians: Shewing them how to
Improve their Natural Reason, to Know the True God and the Christian
Religion_." This catechism is printed in the Indian language with an
English version interlined.

"_Q._ How do you prove that there is but one true God?

"_An._ Because the reason why singular things of the same kind are
multiplied is not to be found in the nature of God; for the reason why
such like things are multiplied is from the fruitfulness of their
causes: but God hath no cause of his being, but is of himself. Therefore
he is one." (And so on through _secondly_ and _thirdly_.)

_Per contra_, a sermon to the Stockbridge Indians by the most ponderous
of the metaphysical preachers of New England, Samuel Hopkins, is
beautifully simple and childlike. It is given in full in Park's "Life of
Hopkins," pp. 46-49.

[151:1] McConnell, "History of the American Episcopal Church," p. 7. The
statement calls for qualification in detail, but the general fact is
unmistakable.

[153:1] H. C. Lodge, "English Colonies," p. 67 _et seq._




CHAPTER XI.

THE GREAT AWAKENING


It was not wholly dark in American Christendom before the dawn of the
Great Awakening. The censoriousness which was the besetting sin of the
evangelists in that great religious movement, the rhetorical temptation
to glorify the revival by intensifying the contrast with the antecedent
condition, and the exaggerated _revivalism_ ever since so prevalent in
the American church,--the tendency to consider religion as consisting
mainly in scenes and periods of special fervor, and the intervals
between as so much void space and waste time,--all these have combined
to deepen the dark tints in which the former state is set before us in
history.

The power of godliness was manifest in the earlier days by many
infallible signs, not excluding those "times of refreshing" in which the
simultaneous earnestness of many souls compels the general attention.
Even in Northampton, where the doctrine of the venerable Stoddard as to
the conditions of communion has been thought to be the low-water mark of
church vitality, not less than five such "harvest seasons" were within
recent memory. It was to this parish in a country town on the frontier
of civilization, but the most important in Massachusetts outside of
Boston, that there came, in the year 1727, to serve as colleague to his
aged grandfather, Pastor Stoddard, a young man whose wonderful
intellectual and spiritual gifts had from his childhood awakened the
pious hopes of all who had known him, and who was destined in his future
career to be recognized as the most illustrious of the saints and
doctors of the American church. The authentic facts of the boyhood of
Jonathan Edwards read like the myths that adorn the legendary Lives of
the Saints. As an undergraduate of Yale College, before the age of
seventeen, his reflections on the mysteries of God, and the universe,
and the human mind, were such as even yet command the attention and
respect of students of philosophy. He remained at New Haven two years
after graduation, for the further study of theology, and then spent
eight months in charge of the newly organized Presbyterian church in New
York.[156:1] After this he spent two years as tutor at Yale,--"one of
the pillar tutors, and the glory of the college,"--at the critical
period after the defection of Rector Cutler to the Church of
England.[156:2] From this position he was called in 1726, at the age of
twenty-three, to the church at Northampton. There he was ordained
February 15, 1727, and thither a few months later he brought his
"espoused saint," Sarah Pierpont, consummate flower of Puritan
womanhood, thenceforth the companion not only of his pastoral cares and
sorrows, but of his seraphic contemplations of divine things.

The intensely earnest sermons, the holy life, and the loving prayers of
one of the greatest preachers in the history of the church were not long
in bearing abundant fruit. In a time of spiritual and moral depression,
when the world, the flesh, and the devil seemed to be gaining against
the gospel, sometime in the year 1733 signs began to be visible of
yielding to the power of God's Word. The frivolous or wanton frolics of
the youth began to be exchanged for meetings for religious conference.
The pastor was encouraged to renewed tenderness and solemnity in his
preaching. His themes were justification by faith, the awfulness of
God's justice, the excellency of Christ, the duty of pressing into the
kingdom of God. Presently a young woman, a leader in the village
gayeties, became "serious, giving evidence," even to the severe judgment
of Edwards, "of a heart truly broken and sanctified." A general
seriousness began to spread over the whole town. Hardly a single person,
old or young, but felt concerned about eternal things. According to
Edwards's "Narrative":

"The work of God, as it was carried on, and the number of true
saints multiplied, soon made a glorious alteration in the
town, so that in the spring and summer, anno 1735, the town
seemed to be full of the presence of God. It was never so full
of love, nor so full of joy, and yet so full of distress, as
it was then. There were remarkable tokens of God's presence in
almost every house. It was a time of joy in families on the
account of salvation's being brought unto them; parents
rejoicing over their children as being new-born, and husbands
over their wives, and wives over their husbands. The goings of
God were then seen in his sanctuary. God's day was a delight,
and his tabernacles were amiable. Our public assemblies were
then beautiful; the congregation was alive in God's service,
every one intent on the public worship, every hearer eager to
drink in the words of the minister as they came from his
mouth; the assembly in general were from time to time in tears
while the Word was preached, some weeping with sorrow and
distress, others with joy and love, others with pity and
concern for the souls of their neighbors. Our public praises
were then greatly enlivened; God was then served in our
psalmody in some measure in the beauty of holiness."

The crucial test of the divineness of the work was given when the people
presented themselves before the Lord with a solemn act of thanksgiving
for his great goodness and his gracious presence in the town of
Northampton, with publicly recorded vows to renounce their evil ways and
put away their abominations from before his eyes. They solemnly promise
thenceforth, in all dealings with their neighbor, to be governed by the
rules of honesty, justice, and uprightness; not to overreach or defraud
him, nor anywise to injure him, whether willfully or through want of
care; to regard not only their own interest, but his; particularly, to
be faithful in the payment of just debts; in the case of past wrongs
against any, never to rest till they have made full reparation; to
refrain from evil speaking, and from everything that feeds a spirit of
bitterness; to do nothing in a spirit of revenge; not to be led by
private or partisan interest into any course hurtful to the interests of
Christ's kingdom; particularly, in public affairs, not to allow ambition
or partisanship to lead them counter to the interest of true religion.
Those who are young promise to allow themselves in no diversions that
would hinder a devout spirit, and to avoid everything that tends to
lasciviousness, and which will not be approved by the infinitely pure
and holy eye of God. Finally, they consecrate themselves watchfully to
perform the relative duties of parents and children, husbands and wives,
brothers and sisters, masters, mistresses, and servants.

So great a work as this could not be hid. The whole region of the
Connecticut Valley, in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and neighboring
regions felt the influence of it. The fame of it went abroad. A letter
of Edwards's in reply to inquiries from his friend, Dr. Colman, of
Boston, was forwarded to Dr. Watts and Dr. Guise, of London, and by them
published under the title of "Narrative of Surprising Conversions." A
copy of the little book was carried in his pocket for wayside reading on
a walk from London to Oxford by John Wesley, in the year 1738. Not yet
in the course of his work had he "seen it on this fashion," and he
writes in his journal: "Surely this is the Lord's doing, and it is
marvelous in our eyes."

Both in this narrative and in a later work on "The Distinguishing Marks
of a Work of the Spirit of God," one cannot but admire the divine gift
of a calm wisdom with which Edwards had been endowed as if for this
exigency. He is never dazzled by the incidents of the work, nor
distracted by them from the essence of it. His argument for the
divineness of the work is not founded on the unusual or extraordinary
character of it, nor on the impressive bodily effects sometimes
attending it, such as tears, groans, outcries, convulsions, or
faintings, nor on visions or ecstasies or "impressions." What he claims
is that the work may be divine, _notwithstanding_ the presence of these
incidents.[159:1] It was doubtless owing to the firm and judicious
guidance of such a pastor that the intense religious fervor of this
first awakening at Northampton was marked by so much of sobriety and
order. In later years, in other regions, and under the influence of
preachers not of greater earnestness, but of less wisdom and discretion,
there were habitual scenes of extravagant and senseless enthusiasm,
which make the closing pages of this chapter of church history painfully
instructive.

It is not difficult to understand how one of the first places at a
distance to feel the kindling example of Northampton should be the
neighborhood of Newark. To this region, planted, as we have seen, with
so strong a stock from New England, from old England, and from Scotland,
came, in 1708, a youth of twenty years, Jonathan Dickinson, a native of
the historic little town of Hatfield, next neighbor to Northampton. He
was pastor at Elizabeth, but his influence and activity extended through
all that part of New Jersey, and he became easily the leader of the
rapidly growing communion of Presbyterian churches in that province, and
the opponent, in the interest of Christian liberty and sincerity, of
rigid terms of subscription, demanded by men of little faith. There is a
great career before him; but that which concerns the present topic is
his account of what took place "sometime in August, 1739 (the summer
before Mr. Whitefield came first into these parts), when there was a
remarkable revival at Newark.... This revival of religion was chiefly
observable among the younger people, till the following March, when the
whole town in general was brought under an uncommon concern about their
eternal interests, and the congregation appeared universally affected
under some sermons that were then preached to them."

Like scenes of spiritual quickening were witnessed that same season in
other parts of New Jersey; but special interest attaches to the report
from New Londonderry, Penn., where a Scotch-Irish community received as
its pastor, in the spring of 1740, Samuel Blair, a native of Ireland,
trained in the Log College of William Tennent. He describes the people,
at his first knowledge of them, as sunk in a religious torpor,
ignorance, and indifference. The first sign of vitality was observed in
March, 1740, during the pastor's absence, when, under an alarming sermon
from a neighbor minister:

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