Dee E. Andrews. The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800: The Shaping of an
Evangelical Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xv + 367 pp. $62.50 (cloth),
ISBN 978-0-691-00958-2.
Reviewed by Richard D. Shiels (Department of History, The Ohio State University)
Published on H-SHEAR (January, 2002)
More New Light on Early American Methodism
Presbyterian churches, but were often farmboys with little formal education. They spoke (and sang) the language
For nearly a decade Nathan Hatch has been alerting of the people. At the same time they challenged the social
the profession about “the scholarly neglect of American order by converting large numbers of women, youth and
Methodism.”[1] The Methodists and Revolutionary Amer- African-Americans. They even condemned the instituica is the latest addition to a surprising number of fine tion of slavery, albeit briefly. For Hatch early American
studies that have appeared over that period. This book
Methodism was in part a product of the American Revois both important and impressive. It is exhaustively relution; for all three of them it seems revolutionary.[2]
searched and elegantly written. It is all the more imporChristine Leigh Heyrman, Rachel Klein and
tant because of the wealth of other studies that have apStephanie McCurry have written from a different perpeared in recent years.
spective and drawn different conclusions. None of their
Hatch initiated a new line of inquiry on the rela- books are primarily about Methodism; only Heyrman’s is
tionship of Methodism to American culture. His De- primarily about religion. Southern Cross: The Beginnings
mocratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale
of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), HeyrUniversity Press, 1989) won numerous awards includman’s latest book, focuses on the rise of evangelicalism
ing the SHEAR prize for the best book published in in the South. In it she treats Baptists and evangelical
1989 on the Early American Republic. John Wigger, Presbyterians as well as Methodists- but her sources are
who studied with Hatch at Notre Dame, added Taking best for the Methodists. She gives greater attention than
Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Hatch, Wigger or Lyerly to the years after 1800 when
Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University
Methodism had already begun to change. Klein’s UnifiPress, 1997). Cynthia Lynn Lyerly contributed Methodcation of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the
ism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810 (New York: Ox- South Carolina Backcountry 1760-1808 (Chapel Hill: The
ford University Press, 1998). These are all fine books. University of North Carolina Press, 1990) and McCurry’s
Together they present the Methodists as harbingers of Masters of Small Worlds: Yoeman Households, Gender Rea new force in American religion in the generation fol- lations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South
lowing the American Revolution. Like four other groups
Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University
Hatch’s book discusses (Baptists, Black Baptists, ChrisPress, 1995) each discuss religion in a single chapter.
tians and Mormons) the Methodists were popular and
Methodism appears far less liberating or revolutiondemocratic. Their leaders were not college-educated
elites as was true in the Anglican, Congregational or ary in these three studies. As a church they repealed any
More New Light on Early American Methodism
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early anti-slavery policies in the 1790s. In the decades
following 1800, circut riders (all men) shifted their attention to a male audience and embraced repressive expectations for women. In short, Methodism sanctified slavery and patriarchy in the South. Heyrman believes that
Methodist leaders decided to do so deliberately in order
to win converts and argues that evangelicalism swept the
South only after that development.
their striving followers,” she argues (p. 222).
Finally, they were not all Jeffersonians. The political affiliation of American Methodists varied from state
to state, depending upon what was best for the group in
each locale. Hence, they were Democratic Republicans
fighting for disestablishment in Federalist New England,
but voted Federalist in Delaware where no church was
legally established and their numbers were higher. The
Dee Andrews began work on her book even before point is that while the movement was inevitably subany of these other studies appeared. The issues that di- ject to all the tensions of American culture, it had at its
vide Hatch from Heyrman had not yet arisen. She did not core a British concept of the gospel. What made a conset out to ask whether early American Methodism was vert a Methodist was not class standing, political leaning
democratic or repressive. Instead she asks, “How Amer- or commitment to egalitarianism but adherence to John
ican was early American Methodism? ” She cannot be Wesley’s understanding of religious experience.
identified with either side in the ongoing conversation
Similarly Andrews qualifies Christine Heyrman’s aramong historians, but of course her work corrects both
gument
that Methodism did not attract a significant porsides and deepens our understanding of Methodism and
tion
of
the population until its leaders embraced paAmerican culture.
triarchy and slavery. Her book supplements HeyrAndrews agrees with Hatch that sometime in the man’s work on the South with material drawn from
early nineteenth century Methodism “became the Amer- Methodist societies in Baltimore, New York and Philadelican religion” (p. 5). Her book, however, is largely about phia. What she finds suggests that early Methodism
the eighteenth century, when Methodism was a British must have seemed liberating to large numbers of women.
import. Whereas Hatch begins his book with a chapter Women led class meetings more often than men in Weson the social and cultural impact of the American Revolu- ley’s Foundery Chapel in London in the 1740s. While
tion, Andrews opens with a discussion of the missionary the same was never true in America, women constituted
interests of John Wesley’s mother. Early chapters trace the majority of Methodist converts here as well. Women
the rise of Methodism from Wesley’s childhood, educa- of diverse ethnic backgrounds joined Methodist societies
tion at Oxford and missionary efforts in Georgia in the while they were yet young and single. They joined in the
1730s. What Andrews wants to explain is how a British company of other women. Those who joined as married
missionary movement became America’s dominant de- women did so with their sisters and mothers; husbands
nomination. The Revolution, she believes, is only part of were much less likely to join. The preachers did not glothe story.
rify married life but spoke of marriage as dangerous for
the life of the spirit. “Methodist women were entering a
This book qualifies The Democratization of American
unique social world, one in which female association preChristianity. Hatch argued that American Methodism dominated, separate from patriarchal family structures
“veered sharply away from the course of British Method- and community ties alike,” Andrews writes. Methodism
ism” in the period he studies, roughly 1780 to 1830.[3] provided “a Protestant version of a Catholic sisterhood.”
It did so in part because American Methodists were able (p.115) Here women “found their place apart from the
to avoid class conflict. Andrews has uncovered class tenclaims of family loyalty” (p. 117).
sions within the movement however. In Philadelphia, for
example, the tensions between the merchant elite and
Yet it can be said that these women “had exchanged
the laboring rank and file led to schism and the forma- one form of patriarchy for another: [going] from obeytion of two separate Methodist churches by 1800. All ing their fathers’ dictates to those of the Methodist Episacross the country Methodist circuit riders were drawn copal Church clergy” (p. 118). There was almost no place
largely from the working class, but Andrews is less in- for women preachers in these Methodist societies–far
clined than Hatch to credit the Methodists with democ- fewer places than in the Methodist societies in England.
ratization. Methodist polity was highly centralized and Furthermore, the male leadership was “masculinized”
hierarchical. Francis Asbury, the first Bishop, ruled the in nineteenth century camp meetings. Whereas earlier
movement from the top down. Further, there was a preachers had rejected aggressive,competitive, violent
“strong ideological effort to elevate the preachers above behavior for a more gentle, perhaps feminine persona,
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preachers in camp meetings did not. Soon Methodist
men and women alike began striving for gentility and
adopted the norms of middle class society. None of this
would surprise Heyrman, but Andrews rejects the argument that Methodist leaders deliberately changed their
message to appeal to men or even the argument that their
success depended upon the change. Rather “Methodist
militancy appears to have increased alongside Methodist
popularity rather than before it” (p. 229).
slavery society. Andrews presents it as essentially a missionary society. Methodists were the most successful–
and perhaps the most committed–missionaries to slaves
and free blacks. Twenty-one percent of America’s
Methodists were African-Americans in 1800. These included slaves, servants, artisans and others. The vast
majority, based upon the records for the cities Andrews studies, were women. From the beginning most
Methodist classes, societies and churches were segregated by race. Consequently some African-Americans
were given leadership positions. Harry Hosier became
something of a celebrity travelling throughout the country with Garrettson and other white preachers, exhorting crowds of both races after the official preaching
was done by his white companion. Richard Allen became a preacher and the founder of one of two AfricanAmerican Methodist denominations. “The Methodist
Church all too quickly jettisoned its anti-slavery militancy,” Andrews concludes, “but black followers applied
its message of liberation to their own condition…. A viable African-American alternative (emerged) within the
movement” (p. 124).
Finally, what about the relationship of Methodism to
slavery and racism? Heyrman believes that retreat from
an early critique of slavery was necessary for Methodist
growth just as much as a retreat from countercultural
ideas on gender. Andrews documents the initial antislavery position and its demise as official policy of the
Methodist Church. She begins once again with Wesley.
Interestingly, Wesley owed his anti-slavery sentiments
to the American Quaker Anthony Benezet. Wesely made
his views known by publishing Thoughts on Slavery in
1774. His American followers embraced anti-slavery first
in a conference in Baltimore six years later. The minutes
of that conference declare slavery “contrary to the laws
of God, man and nature, and hurtful to society, contrary
to the dictates of conscience and pure religion and doing that which we would not want others do to us and
ours” (p. 125). The first discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, published in 1785, echoed these words and
the church circulated a petition that year asking for the
aboliton of slavery by legislative action in the State of
Virginia. Public reaction was so great that the petition
was dropped and the discipline’s section on slavery was
suspended within six months.
Hence the relationship of Methodism to American
culture in this period was complex. How could it not
be? The culture itself was experiencing fundamental
changes which varied from one place to the next. Many
American farm boys were becoming circuit riders and
speaking for a movement begun by an English Tory who
was opposed to slavery. Converts came from all social classes, two races and a broad range of ethnic backgrounds. Most of the converts were women, but the leadership was male. With all of this diversity, what defined
Methodism was a common understanding of religious experience and a polity unlike that of any other denomination. Both of these defining characteristics it inherited
from John Wesley.
However the church did not retreat from its antislavery teachings overnight. Slavery was condemned by
its general conference in 1796 and there were efforts to
approve a stronger condemnatin in 1800. In 1804, in the
aftermath of Gabriel’s Rebellion, the church published
two versions of its discipline: one for Virginia and the
northern states with a condemnation of slavery and another for the rest of the South without it. Andrews provides these details and then argues that there is more
to consider than the official pronouncements of the denomination. Freeborn Garrettson and many other Southerners freed their slaves after joining the church. “The
Methodist manumission records in the lower Middle Atlantic states…is impressive,” (p. 130) she concludes. Up
north, Jacob Baker and others joined anti-slavery societies as well as Methodist churches.
Notes
[1]. Nathan Hatch, “The Puzzle of American Methodism,” Church History 63 (1994), 175-189.
[2]. Other recent studies which are not discussed
in this review include Russell Richey, Early American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991); Russell Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller
Schmidt, Perspectives on American Methodism: Interpretive Essays (Nashville, Tennessee: Kingswood Books,
1993); A. Gregory Schneider, The Way of the Cross Leads
Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and Nathan O.
Hatch and John Wigger, eds. Methodism and the Shaping
But of course the Methodist church was not an anti-
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of American Culture (Nashville, Tennessee: Kingswood
Books, 2001).
[3]. Hatch, Democratization, 6-7.
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Citation: Richard D. Shiels. Review of Andrews, Dee E., The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800: The
Shaping of an Evangelical Culture. H-SHEAR, H-Net Reviews. January, 2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5844
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