Wheelock's World: Letters and the Communication of Revival in Great Awakening New England

Wheelock^s World: Letters and the Communication of Revival in Great Awakening New England JOHN FEA LEAZAR WHEELOCK (1711-1779) is known best as the In- dian missionary, educator, and foimder of the school that Ebecame Dananouth College in 1770. His well-known na- tive converts to Christianity—such as Samsom Occom—and his voluminous collection of personal papers make him a dominant personality in any account of early American Indian history. Yet Wheelock's well-chronicled ventures into the education of Indi- ans cannot be grasped fully without an appreciation of his partic- ipation in the awakening of reHgious concern that pervaded New England in the early 1740s. As an itinerant preacher and a settled minister whose Lebanon Crank, Connecticut, congregation experienced a revival of its own, Wheelock forged a regional network of New Lights that would become foundational to the eco- nomic and religious support of his Indian schools. While historians have been long aware of the links between the Great Versions of this essay were delivered in July 1996 at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publication at the American Antiquarian Society and at the 1998 Meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Indi- anapolis. I am grateful to Richard D. Brown, Charles E. Clark, David D. Hall, Timothy D. Hall, Kevin Gumienny, Ned Landsman, Sheila Mclntyre, Eric J. Miller, Donna Rilling, Caroline Sloat, Nancy Tomes, and an anonymous reviewer for their advice, assistance, and encouragement. JOHN EEA is a postdoctoral fellow in the Lilly Fellows Program in Arts and Humanities and a lecturer in the Department of History, both at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. Copyright © 2001 by American Antiquarian Society 99 ioo American Antiquarian Society Awakening and colonial Indian missions, they have generally ignored, or simply brushed over, Wheelock's role in the New England religious world prior to 1745. Such an approach neglects the deeply embedded evangelical roots of Wheelock's missionary career.' AVheelock was a prolific religious communicator—a 'chief in- telligencer of revival news.'^ It was in this capacity that he made his greatest contribudon to the spread and preservadon of the Great Awakening in New England. Wheelock sent and received news of local awakenings occurring throughout the countryside with remarkable frequency. Ministers and lay people from all parts of the region wrote to the Connecdcut clergyman to de- scribe their local revivals, invite him to preach, request spiritual counsel, or discuss religious polidcs. William Gaylord, Congre- gadonal minister at Norwalk, Connecdcut, began a 1740 letter to Wheelock by remarking that 'Since we can see one another but seldom, I am glad to do my part toward supplying ... a frequent exchange of letters.' Numerous New Englanders during the Great Awakening could echo the words of Eldad Tupper of Sand- wich, Massachusetts, when he thanked Wheelock for 'the things you acquaint me with being Glorious things Concerning the city ofGod.'3 This essay thus is concerned not with Wheelock the Indian school principal, but with Wheelock the Great Awakening letter writer. While scholarship on religious communicadon in early 1. Biographical accounts of Wheelock include James Dow McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Publications, 1939; reprint New York: Amo Press, 1969); Frederick Chase, A History of Dartmouth College and the Town of Hanover, New Hamp- shire (Brattleboro, Vt.: Vermont Publishing Co., 1928), James Axtell, 'Mr. Wheelock's Lit- tle Red School,' in The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial A?ner- ica (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 87—109; Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 204-15. Chase, A History of Dartmouth, 4, had suggested the links between Wheelock's Great Awakening networks and his Indian school networks. 2. Edwin Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper & Broth- ers, 1957), 74. 3. Wilham Gaylord to Eleazar Wheelock (hereafter E^V), November 24, 1740, Whee- lock Papers (Microfilm edition), Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H. (hereafter WP). El- dad Tupper to Eleazar Wheelock, June 6, 1740. Wheelock's World ioi America has flourished in the last two decades, much of the at- tention has been paid to the role of print, orality, and itinerant preaching as a means of diffusing information, spreading revival, and creating regenerate communities.'^ Few scholars, with the ex- ception of Richard D. Brown, in his work on eighteenth-century ministerial networks;, and Susan O'Brien, in her article on transatlantic letter writing, have examined correspondence as an important cultural medium in the early New England religious world.5 In an attempt to help fill this historiographie void, I have examined over 150 personal letters that Wheelock sent and received between 1739 and [745, the height of the Great Awakening in New England.*^ My concern is with how correspondence served 4. For an introduction to scholarship on American religious communication and an ex- tensive bibliography, see Leonard L Sweet, ed.. Communication and Change in American Re- ligious History (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993). See also Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, iyoo-iS6; (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 65-81; Francis Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610—16^2 (Boston: North- eastern University Press, 1994); David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1987); Susan O'Brien, 'A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735-1755,' American Historical Review 91 (October 1986): 811-32; Michael Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England's Revival Tradition in its British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modem Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1991); Frank Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Lambert, Inventing the Great Awakening (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); Timothy D. Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). 5. Brown, Knowledge is P<rwer, 65-81; Brown, 'Spreading the Word: Rural Clergymen and the Communication Network of 18th Century New England,' Proceedings of the Mass- achusetts Historical Society 94 (1982): 1-14; O'Brien, 'A Transatlantic Community of Saints.' See also Sheila Mclntyre, 'This Loving Correspondency: New England Alinisterial Com- munication and Association, 1670-1730' (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1996). For two accounts that do not deal vdth letter writing specifically, but are sensitive to the role of correspondence in communicating revival, see Hall, Contested Boundaries, 30, 33, and Craw- ford, Seasons of Grace. 6. My database consists of only those Wheelock letters that make reference to the religious revivals. The majoritj' of Wheelock's surviving letters are housed at the Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, New Hampshire. I have supplemented these letters, which I viewed on microfilm, with unpublished Wheelock correspondence and letters in the pos- session of the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia and the Simon Gratz Col- lection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. For a guide to the Dartmouth Collection, see A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the Papers ofEleazar Wheelock (Hanover, N.H.: Dart- mouth College Library, 1971). Also see tables i and 2 in this article. 102 American Antiquarian Society as an agent in the creation, preservation, definition, and redefini- tion of a revival community. Using Wheelock's network as an interpretive window, it is my contention that letters were a signi- ficant means of spreading news of the revival and linking New England to a more widely shared evangelical experience. Further- more, Wheelock used correspondence to help define and redefine his own ministry specifically, and the revival community of ministers generally, after the Great Awakening took a radical turn in 1742. The majority of Wheelock's Great Awakening letters were ex- changed with New England ministers who were either undergo- ing revivals in their congregations or had not experienced such an awakening but longed to ignite one. For clergymen, letter writing was an indispensable aspect of professional development. The practice provided an opportunity to converse with like-minded clerics on issues of practical theology—the discipline of contextu- alizing and communicating one's formal divinity training to un- schooled parishioners. Ministers were often the only educated members of New England communities and thus, through what- ever cosmopolitan connections they maintained, important nodes of communication. 7 Clerical letters were the products of overlapping networks of professional associations, college friendships, or family connections and could touch upon an array of topics ranging from church business to matters of doctrine. WTieelock was a member of the Wlndham Association of Ministers, a fellowship

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