Book Reviews

BOOK REVIEWS Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakenings 1625-1760. By MARILYN J. WESTERKAMP. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 266p. Maps, bibliography, index. $29.95.) The Great Awakening appears very different in light of Marilyn Wes- terkamp's new book. In it neither Jonathan Edwards nor George Whitefield emerges as important as previous works have suggested. Westerkamp set out to study the Great Awakening among Presbyterians in the Middle colonies. Many others have focused on New England. Perry Miller and his disciples depicted the movement as a sudden and unanticipated response to the preaching of a reformulated Calvinism. Other historians examined the social, economic, and psychological circumstances of revival converts but typically retained the focus on New England. Westerkamp began with such a social analysis but found no patterns that might explain revivals. She then turned to the study of revivalism as ritual and asked "could these rituals have a life of their own?" Of course the answer is "yes." Westerkamp found a revival tradition among Presbyterians beginning in Ireland in 1625. Might Whitefield have recognized these early "revivals" as something similar to his own? Again the answer is "yes." They were very large meetings, often outdoors, which lasted several days; they were marked by intense emotion; and they were intended to free participants from guilt and to enable them to identify with the larger religious community. While revivals were not constant, the tradition was unbroken until at least 1760 and, Westerkamp implies, much later. In Scotland and Ireland itinerants had been common and controversial, long before Whitefield began to preach. Revival narratives had been pub- lished often, long before Edwards wrote his. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey the revivals historians call "The Great Awakening" broke out shortly after large numbers of Scots and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians arrived. Although her book does not extend to Virginia and the Carolinas, Westerkamp tells us that revivalism followed the migration of the Scots and Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania to these areas. The role of the laity, highlighted by her title, constitutes a secondary theme in Westerkamp's book. While she finds less conflict between the laity and clergy than do some historians, she depicts a constant lay demand for religious revivals through periods in which many clergy were drawn to rationalism or other expressions of the faith. The Great Awakening occurred because the clergy returned to the tradition which lay people had kept alive. It was a "triumph" for the laity. 636 BOOK REVIEWS October In the end, Westerkamp did not write a history of the Great Awakening among Middle colony Presbyterians. Most of her book focuses on the revival tradition in Ireland and Scotland. A survey of revivalism in Pennsylvania and New Jersey remains to be written, along with other studies which might connect the tradition she has discovered to the Great Awakening in New England, to the American Revolution, and to nineteenth-century evangel- icalism. Moreover, further study of the laity who were so central to the revival tradition she describes would be appropriate. Westerkamp has told us little about their families, for instance, and nothing about how these revivals functioned in their day-to-day lives. Yet surely it is unfair to point out what is missing in a book that studies Scotland, Ireland, and the Middle colonies over 140 years. Westerkamp helps us better understand the Great Awakening in the Middle colonies and, by implication, challenges our view of the Awakening elsewhere. Her work should result in a fresh approach to the Great Awakening as one episode in the evolution of a major religious tradition. Jonathan Edwards, step aside—pending further work which might link this new uncovered Presbyterian tradition to more familiar strands of Amer- ican religious history. Ohio State University at Newark RICHARD D. SHIELS Gilbert Tennent, Son of Thunder: A Case Study oj Continental Pietism}s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies. By MlLTON J. COALTER, JR. (New York and Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986. xx, 227p. Appendix, bibliography, index. $35.00.) Partially in response to a provocative 1982 essay by Jon Butler, recent studies of the eighteenth-century revival of religion have tended to focus on "fleshing out" our understanding of the several revivals that we have collectively called "the" Great Awakening. Milton Coalter's study of Gilbert Tennent (1703-1764), the leading "awakener" among the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the Middle colonies, is one such study. The author professes modest goals. He wishes to augment "the traditional search for the social and religious threads that made the Awakening an inter-colonial event" with "equally intensive investigations into the critical variations among the colonists' revival experience" (p. 168). In essaying the first book-length work to focus on Tennent, Coalter also attempts to enrich our understanding of the Scotch-Irish Calvinist revival by arguing that it was influenced in significant ways, through Tennent, by Continental 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 637 pietism in general and by the Dutch cleric Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen in particular. Between 1729 and 1758 Tennent stood at the center of the tumultuous events surrounding the outbreak of heart-felt religion in the Raritan River Valley and eastern Pennsylvania, the consequent bitter debates between Presbyterian supporters and opponents of the revival, the schism that then officially divided the denomination into New and Old Side synods between 1741 and 1758, and the eventual Presbyterian reunification in the latter year. He was, with Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, the most important of the American awakeners. Despite his significance, materials for a satisfactory biography of Tennent do not exist (for instance, we do not even know the name of his first wife), and Coalter's work is least successful as biography. His life is not in any essential way the basis of the book's structure and organization; indeed, Tennent himself never dominates the narrative and does not emerge as a fully developed actor in the story Coalter tells. The available material apparently will not yield insight into motivation, and the student of pietistic spirituality will find little of interest here. While much richer than any previously available, Coalter's portrait is nonetheless seriously limited. Nor is the author entirely successful in justifying his book's cumbersome subtitle. Two leading Continental pietists, Frelinghuysen and the Moravian Nicholas Ludwig Count von Zinzendorf, figure prominently in two sections of his analysis, in which Coalter successfully demonstrates the importance of the former's positive influence on Gilbert Tennent in the 1730s as well as the significance of Tennent's opposition to the latter in the 1740s. But Coalter fails to establish the centrality of either to the career of the "son of thunder" or to the course of the Awakening in the Middle colonies. All that said, Coalter's study of Tennent remains a significant achieve- ment. It is, of course, useful as a reminder of the complex influence on the awakeners and of the ecumenical scope of the transatlantic revival, what Susan O'Brien recently has called "the first evangelical network." In ad- dition to his insights on Tennent's interactions with Frelinghuysen, Coalter analyzes the Presbyterian's relationship with the Anglican Whitefield in useful and provocative ways and points up Tennent's continuing cooperation with New England supporters of the revival. The book also provides much information about the actual practice of ministry in the first half of the eighteenth century in British America. But Coalter makes his greatest con- tribution in his thorough and thoughtful analysis of Presbyterian politics between 1730 and 1760. His narration of the Subscription Controversy and Adopting Act, the debate over itinerancy, pastoral education and the locus of sovereignty in the denomination, the Presbyterian schism and subsequent 638 BOOK REVIEWS October reunion is simply the best we have and could be read with profit by any student of the revival. And that is no minor accomplishment. University of Texas at Austin HOWARD MILLER "To serve well and faithfully": Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800. By SHARON V. SALINGER. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1987. xiii, 192p. Appendixes, index. $29.95.) Over one half of the white people who migrated to the American colonies from Britain and Continental Europe were servants, and Pennsylvania was one of their main destinations. Indentured laborers served terms varying from four to seven years without wages in return for freedom dues of land and money when they completed their service. They are not an easy group to trace because few of them left any personal records. Sharon Salinger, however, has worked diligently on court records, probate data, tax lists, shipping notices, and newspaper advertisements to present the first mono- graph on this significant group of migrants since Cheeseman A. Herrick's White Servitude in Pennsylvania: Indentured and Redemption Labor in the Colony and Commonwealth (1926). Salinger argues that there were three main stages in the development of bound labor in Pennsylvania. Between the founding of the colony and the 1720s, when most immigrants came from England, she considers that servitude was a benign, paternalistic, largely rural institution based on oral agreements, personal ties, and minimal overt conflict between masters and employees. From the 1720s to the mid-century, she suggests that the system altered, for German and Scotch-Irish servants outnumbered those from England and indentured servitude became more impersonal, exploitative, harsh and urban, and dominated by written contracts. She characterizes the final phase between 1750 and 1800 as a time that witnessed the withering of servitude and the emergence of free wage labor as the predominant type of work in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the first five chapters include major arguments that are not fully substantiated.

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