Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [132]
On the afternoon of November 15, Whitefield launched his New York tour with an open-air prayer meeting in the Common. His theme was the need for a “New Birth”—a reawakening of the faith without which there can be no salvation. According to a newspaper account probably written by Pemberton, “many Hundreds of People” turned out to hear him. Most were “very serious and attentive,” but a fair number of hecklers also gathered on the fringes of the crowd, “Giggling, Scoffing, Talking and Laughing.” Whitefield faced them down, delivered a blistering attack on “the boldness and Zeal with which the Devil’s Vassals serve him,” and left the entire crowd “hush’d and still,” their faces glowing with “solemn Awe and Reverence.”
Pemberton was hard-pressed for words to describe what had taken place. “A mighty Energy attended the Word,” he said. “I heard and felt something astonishing and surprizing.” So, evidently, had many others. Over two thousand people jammed into the Presbyterian church that evening, during which an awed Pemberton reported, “The Peoples Eyes and Ears hung on his Lips. They greedily devour’d every Word. I came Home astonished!”
Whitefield continued for four days, speaking at least twice a day, afternoons in the Common and evenings in the Presbyterian church. Despite chilly weather, the crowds grew ever larger and more emotional. People who couldn’t find a seat or get close enough to hear him wept openly with disappointment. One member of the audience, finding himself seated next to a lady who sobbed loudly through the entire service, later asked “which part of the sermon had most particularly affected her.” “Oh! Sir,” she told him, “it was when he said Gethsemane! Gethsemane!” Whitefield himself wrote in his journal that “the people seemed exceedingly attentive, and I have not felt greater freedom in preaching, and more power in prayer, since I came to America, than I have had here in New York. I find that little of the work of God has been seen in it for many years.”
It was the same story when he returned the following year, once in the spring and again in the autumn. Five, six, and seven thousand people at a time allegedly thronged the Common to hear him speak, now from a specially constructed scaffold. New York—polyglot, urbane, skeptical New York—appeared to be in the throes of a full-scale religious revival.
Whitefield was probably tapping the same vein of popular restiveness mined by the Morrisites just a few years earlier. His chief targets—complacent and even corrupt leaders, a loss of old-time zeal, indifference to basic principles, the advent of a heartless, legalistic formalism—echoed almost exactly, albeit with a religious rather than political vocabulary, the opposition to Cosby. If there was a difference it lay in the breadth of Whitefield’s audience/The crowds that flocked to hear him in 1739-40 included numerous representatives of the city’s lower classes—apprentices and laborers, the poor and the enslaved—whose exclusion from the municipal corporation rendered them invisible to the Morrisites. During his 1740 tour, indeed, Whitefield had called openly for the humane treatment of slaves and for instructing them in the Christian religion, issues that had never troubled Morris (one of the city’s leading slaveowners) or his followers.
Leaders of New York’s Anglican-Reformed establishment were horrified. As one conservative Dutch dominie declared in 1741, Whitefield’s attacks on the sincerity of the orthodox clergy struck at the authority of all organized religion. A “spirit of confusion is ever blazing up more and more,” he wrote. Many went further and insisted that the revivalists had called into question the authority of all institutions—a not unreasonable fear, it turned out, for only months after Whitefield’s last visit, it appeared that scores of slaves and poor whites had banded together in a frightful plot to burn the city.
“G—D D——