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Auditing Revival: George Whitefield and Public Accounting in Colonial America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2022
Abstract
This article situates George Whitefield's accounting controversies of the 1740s in the local public accounting cultures of colonial America. It argues that Whitefield developed a novel “commercial theology” and funding strategy for his Georgia orphanage that he believed would allow God to shape every aspect of the institution. While Whitefield's published financial accounts initially provoked little commentary, his critics began to use accounting as an “impartial” tool to disprove the minister's theology. The bold theological claims and lack of institutional oversight embedded in Whitefield's accounts violated the norms of public accounting, and his critics stated that an independent audit was the only way to clear the minister's name. The audit worked, and the combination of Whitefield's experience managing a transatlantic institution and his accounting controversies caused the minister to change his commercial theology. This article uses Whitefield's accounting controversies to make two overarching arguments. First, it argues that religious institutions were key parts of the local public accounting systems that shaped the development of financial ethics in colonial America. Second, it argues that financial accounts both shaped and reflected the religious assumptions of the bookkeepers who produced them.
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Footnotes
This article developed from the first seminar paper I wrote in graduate school, and, as a result, many people have commented on many different iterations of its argument. Christopher Grasso, Karin Wulf, and Nick Popper have read more drafts of this article than I can count. Comments from Jackie Beatty, Kate Carté, Caylin Carbonell, Lauren Duval, Michaela Kleber, Shira Lurie, Simon Middleton, Casey Schmitt, Mark Valeri, Doug Winiarski, William & Mary's “God Squad,” the participants at the “Dartmouth @ 250” Conference, the members of the Warren Center Seminar on Religion in North America (especially Catherine Brekus), and an anonymous reviewer for Church History greatly improved my arguments. The research in this article was made possible by generous support from a Huntington Library Travel Grant to the United Kingdom and the Dean's Fund at William & Mary.
References
1 James Habersham to the Countess of Huntingdon, 3 June 1773, A3/3/3, Countess of Huntingdon Collection, Westminster College, Cambridge, UK. In the published version of this letter, the word “audit” is mistranscribed as “credit.” See Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, vol. 6, The Letters of Hon. James Habersham, 1756–1775, (Savannah, Ga.: The Savannah Morning News Print, 1904), 230.
2 For Whitefield's adaption of market means to spread the Gospel, see Stout, Harry S., The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991)Google Scholar; Lambert, Frank, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Lambert, Frank, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. For itinerancy as an adaptation to commercial modernity, see Hall, Timothy D., Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Breen, T. H. and Hall, Timothy, “Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rhetoric and Experience of Social Change in Eighteenth-Century New England,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1411–1439CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For scholarship that situates the awakening in the economic debates of colonial cities, see Nash, Gary B., The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution, abr. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 99–146Google Scholar; and Remer, Rosalind, “Old Lights and New Money: A Note on Religion, Economics, and the Social Order in 1740 Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 4 (October, 1990): 566–573CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While most of the scholarship on Whitefield touches on his financial controversies, Lambert provides the most sustained attention to this issue and argues that the accounting scandals were part of a broader concern about the commercialization of religion. See Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity, 176–182.
3 My reading of the debates about Whitefield's accounting builds on the work of scholars who examine how accounting methods both shaped and reflected religious assumptions. See the articles in Ken McPhail, Tim Gorringe, and Rob Gray, eds., “Theological Issues in Accounting,” special issue, Accounting, Auditing, & Accountability Journal 17, no. 3 (July 2004), esp. McPhail, Gorringe, and Walker, “Accounting and Theology, an Introduction: Initiating a Dialogue Between Immediacy and Eternity,” 320–326; and Kerry Jacobs and Steven P. Walker, “Accounting and Accountability in the Iona Community,” 361–381. See also Paolo Quattrone, “Accounting for God: Accounting and Accountability Practices in the Society of Jesus, Italy, XVI–XVII Centuries,” Accounting, Organizations, and Society 29, no. 7 (October 2004): 647–683; and Paolo Quattrone, “Governing Social Orders, Unfolding Rationality, and Jesuit Accounting Practices: A Procedural Approach to Institutional Logics,” Administrative Science Quarterly 60, no. 3 (September 2015): 411–445. Alistair Mutch's work, which contrasts how Scottish Presbyterianism fostered a culture of accountability with the ways that the Church of England focused on personal responsibility and custom, has been particularly useful. See Alistair Mutch, “Custom and Personal Accountability in Eighteenth-Century South Nottinghamshire Church Governance,” Midland History 36, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 69–88; Alistair Mutch, “‘Shared Protestantism’ and British Identity: Contrasting Church Governance Practices in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and England,” Social History 38, no. 4 (November 2013): 456–476; Alan McKinlay and Alistair Mutch, “‘Accountable Creatures’: Scottish Presbyterianism, Accountability, and Managerial Capitalism,” Business History 57, no. 2 (March 2015): 241–256; Alistair Mutch, “Religion and Accounting Texts in Eighteenth Century Scotland: Organizational Practices and a Culture of Accountability,” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 29, no. 6 (August 2016): 926–946; Alistair Mutch, Religion and National Identity: Governing Scottish Presbyterianism in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Alistair Mutch, “Marginal Importance: Scottish Accountability and English Watchfulness,” Church History and Religious Culture 96, no. 1/2 (January 2016): 155–178; and Alistair Mutch, “Administrative Practices and the ‘Middling Sort’: Place, Practice and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Rural England,” in People, Places and Identities: Themes in British Social and Cultural History, 1720s–1980s, ed. Alan Kidd and Melanie Tebbutt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 19–38.
4 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 29–91; Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (New York: Routledge, 1999); Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 168–188; Mark Valeri, “William Petty in Boston: Political Economy, Religion, and Money in Provincial New England,” Early American Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 549–580; Ted McCormick, “Political Arithmetic and Sacred History: Population Thought in the English Enlightenment, 1660–1750,” Journal of British Studies 52 (October 2013): 829–857; Ted McCormick, “Statistics in the Hands of an Angry God? John Graunt's Observations in Cotton Mather's New England,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 72, no. 4 (October 2015): 563–586; and William Deringer, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018), esp. 153–186.
5 The concept of “commercial theology” helps sidestep this assumption by analyzing how religious ideas developed through interactions in the marketplace without favoring the theological predilections of any single Christian group. My use of “practical theologies” draws from E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 1–4, 8–10. For “commerce,” see Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “commerce, n.,” accessed 2 August 2020, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37073?rskey=KIY4C7&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. Particularly influential in my analysis of commercial theology have been Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); Katherine Carté Engel, Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Katherine Carté Engel, “Religion and the Economy: New Methods for an Old Problem,” Early American Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 2010), 483–499; Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Matthew Kadane, The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013).
6 A growing body of literature has focused on the significance of public accounting in England. For the importance of accounting at the state level, see Aaron Graham, “Auditing Leviathan: Corruption and State Formation in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain,” The English Historical Review 128, no. 533 (August 2013): 806–838; and Jacob Soll, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Deringer, Calculated Values, 43–78, 153–187. For local public accounting, see Paul Griffiths, “Local Arithmetic: Information Cultures in Early Modern England,” in Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, ed. Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard, and John Walter (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013). For public accounting in the colonies, see Simon Middleton, “William Fishbourne's ‘misfortune’: Public Accounting and Paper Money in Early Pennsylvania,” Early American Studies 19, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 64–99.
7 See, for example, Susan O'Brien, “A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (October 1986): 811–832; W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening.” An important exception to this pattern of Whitefield's financial controversies remaining largely local are the connections between Scotland and the colonies, especially New England (see below). See also Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England's Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 173, 167–174.
8 For the history of Bethesda, see Edward J. Cashin, Beloved Bethesda: A History of George Whitefield's Home for Boys, 1740–2000 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001); and Peter Y. Choi, George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2018), 17–41, 194–232. For Georgia's origins, see Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 1–23.
9 Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont (London: His Majesty's Stationary Office, 1923), 3:3, 56, 58.
10 J. Griffiths to George Whitefield, DDSe44, The Letters of William Seward, Methodist Archive and Research Centre, John Rylands Library, the University of Manchester. For a more complete overview of how Whitefield designed and revised his commercwcial theology, see Kristen Beales, “George Whitefield's Changing Commercial Theology,” in Dartmouth and the World: Religion and Political Economy @1769, ed. Henry C. Clark (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021), Chapter 4.
11 For the wide variety of charitable schemes in eighteenth-century London, see Donna T. Andrews, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Sarah Lloyd, Charity and Poverty in England, c.1680–1820: Wild and Visionary Schemes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
12 “[Fifth Journal] A Continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield's Journal from his Embarking after the Embargo, to his Arrival at Savannah in Georgia (August 1739–January 1740),” in George Whitefield's Journals (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 334; and George Whitefield, A Continuation Of The Account Of The Orphan-House in Georgia (Edinburgh, 1742), 29. Philippa Koch, “Slavery, Mission, and the Perils of Providence in Eighteenth-Century Christianity: The Writings of Whitefield and the Halle Pietists,” Church History 84, no. 2 (June 2015): 375–380.
13 Griffith Jones to William Seward, 30 March 1738, DDSe4, The Letters of William Seward.
14 Whitefield to Mr. M---, New Brunswick, 28 April 1740, in The Works Of The Reverend George Whitefield, M. A. Late of Pembroke-College, Oxford, and Chaplain to the Rt. Hon. the Countess of Huntingdon, ed. [John Gillies] (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1771), 1:167.
15 Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Ormond Seavey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 109; and Whitefield to Rev. Mr. B. I., Savanah, 28 March 1740, in Works of Whitefield, 1:158.
16 For charity sermons, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, “The Fashion Among More Superior People: Charity and Social Change in Provincial New England, 1700–1740,” American Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 107–124; Andrew, Philanthropy and Police, 5–8, 80–81; Donna T. Andrew, “On Reading Charity Sermons: Eighteenth-Century Anglican Solicitation and Exhortation,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43, no. 4 (October 1992): 581–591; Laura M. Stevens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibilities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 4–29, 85–95; and Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22–25.
17 “The Conversion of Zaccheus,” in Works of Whitefield, 6:49–50, 57, 58; and George Whitefield, An Exhortation to come and see Jesus: A Sermon Preached at Moorfields, May 20, 1739 (London: printed for C. Whitefield, 1739), 14. For its fundraising success, see William Seward, Journal Of A Voyage From Savannah to Philadelphia, And From Philadelphia to England, (London, 1740), 9. For an analysis of Zaccheus, see Stout, The Divine Dramatist, 104–105.
18 George Whitefield, An Account Of Money Received and Disbursed For The Orphan-House In Georgia. To which is prefixed A Plan Of The Building (London, 1741), 17.
19 Whitefield, An Account Of Money Received and Disbursed For The Orphan-House In Georgia, 5–6; Whitefield, A Continuation Of The Account Of The Orphan-House in Georgia, 26–84.
20 Despite the dominance of mercantile double-entry bookkeeping in the accounting literature, a large body of scholarship has demonstrated that it was not commonly used in either public or private accounting in early America. See William T. Baxter, “Accounting in Colonial America,” in Studies in the History of Accounting, ed. Ananias C. Littleton and Basil S. Yamey (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1956), 272–287; Daniel Vickers, “Errors Expected: The Culture of Credit in Rural New England, 1750–1800,” The Economic History Review, n.s., 63, no. 4 (November 2010): 1032–1057; and Daniel Vickers, “Neighbors and Hedges: Shopkeeping in Early New England,” in Market Ethics and Practices, c. 1300–1850, ed. Simon Middleton and James E. Shaw (New York: Routledge, 2018), 109–128. For an overview of single-entry accounting in public finance, see Middleton, “William Fishbourn's ‘misfortune,’” 80–84.
21 This and the next paragraph draw on John K. Nelson, A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 11–84; Mutch, “Custom and Personal Accountability in Eighteenth-Century South Nottinghamshire Church Governance”; Mutch, “‘Shared Protestantism’ and British Identity”; Mutch, “Marginal Importance”; Mutch, “Administrative Practices and the ‘Middling Sort’: Place, Practice and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Rural England”; Griffiths, “Local Arithmetic”; and Middleton, “William Fishbourne's ‘misfortune.’” For SPG accounting, see Gale A. Swanson and John C. Gardner, “Not-for-Profit Accounting and Auditing in the Early Eighteenth Century: Some Archival Evidence,” The Accounting Review 63, no. 3 (July 1988), 436–447; Stevens, The Poor Indians, 86–94; and Glasson, Mastering Christianity, 22–25.
22 Mutch, “‘Shared Protestantism’ and British Identity,” 473. See also Mutch, “Custom and Personal Accountability in Eighteenth-Century South Nottinghamshire Church Governance”; Mutch, “Marginal Importance”; Mutch, “Administrative Practices and the ‘Middling Sort”; and Middleton, “William Fishbourn's ‘misfortune,’”86–89.
23 The SPG and King's Chapel were consistent in their auditing practices, while William & Mary and Pennsylvania were not. See below for King's Chapel and for the SPG. See Swanson and Gardner, “Not-for-Profit Accounting,” 436–447. Although William & Mary was supposed to have annual public audit days, there was a conflict in the late seventeenth century that revealed that this ritual had lapsed. See documents in William Stevens Perry, ed., Historical Collections Relations to the American Colonial Church, vol. 1, Virginia (Hartford, Conn.: Church Press Company, 1870), 18–29, 64, 95. For Pennsylvania, see Middleton, “William Fishbourn's ‘misfortune,’”87–89. For an overview of colonial commercial auditing, see Dale S. Flesher, Gary John Previts, and William D. Samson, “Auditing in the United States: A Historical Perspective,” Abacus 41, no. 1 (February 2005), 22–26.
24 James B. Bell, ed., The Colonial Records of Kings Chapel, 1688–1776 (Boston, Mass.: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2019), 1:122, 125.
25 Church Records 1669–1767, in the Boston, Mass. Old South Church records, New England's Hidden Histories: Colonial Era-Church Records, Congregational Library, 27, 33, 215. http://congregationallibrary.org/nehh/series1/BostonOldSouth0028.
26 [Samuel Moody], The Vain Youth Summoned to Appear at Christ's Bar, 2nd ed., (Boston, 1707), 3.
27 [James Honeyman], A Sermon Preached at the King's-Chapel in Boston, (Boston, 1733), 9.
28 Matthew Hale, The Great Audit; or, Good Steward, 11th ed. (Boston, 1749).
29 Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity, 62–69.
30 Philalethes [pseud.], “Mr. Timothy,” Postscript To The South-Carolina Gazette, no. 383, 25 June 1741, [1]; and Zealot the Second [pseud.], “Mad with Revenge he gather'd all his Wind,” Postscript To The South-Carolina Gazette, no. 287, 23 July 1741, [1]–[2].
31 Philanthropos [pseud.], “Mr. Timothy,” Postscript To The South-Carolina Gazette, no. 383, 25 June 1741, [2].
32 “Extract of a Letter from Charlestown in South Carolina, Dated March 20th, 1742–3,” The Boston Evening-Post, no. 405, May 9, 1743, [4]. The letter is printed anonymously in the newspapers, but Alexander Garden is identified as the author in “Letters of Cotton Mather, Samuel Sewall, John Callender, Adam Winthrop,” The New-England Historical and Genealogical Register and Antiquarian Journal 24 (April 1870): 117–118.
33 James Hutchinson, “Boston,” The Boston Evening-Post, no. 407, 23 May 1743, [2].
34 “A Letter from a Gentleman in Boston, to a Minister in the Country containing a brief Account of Mr. D---t's later preaching in Boston and Dorchester, with some Remarks, &c.,” The Boston Evening-Post, no. 365, 8 August 1742, [1]; and Richard Warch, “The Shepherd's Tent: Education and Enthusiasm in the Great Awakening” American Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 190–192; and Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, 285–364, esp. 357–358.
35 The literature on these disruptions is vast, but see in particular Harvey H. Jackson, “Hugh Bryan and the Evangelical Movement in Colonial South Carolina,” The William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 4 (October 1986): 594–614; Alan Gallay, The Formation of a Planter Elite: Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 30–55; Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening,” 181–221, 240–250; and Kidd, The Great Awakening, 94–188.
36 Publicola [pseud.], “To the Managers of the Orphan-House in Georgia, in the Absence of Mr. Whitefield,” Supplement To The South-Carolina Gazette, no. 484, 4 July 1743, [1].
37 Publicola [pseud.], “A Second Letter to the Managers of the Orphan-House in Georgia, in the Absence of Mr. Whitefield,” Postscript to The South-Carolina Gazette, no. 544, 27 August 1744, [1].
38 Publicola [pseud.], “To the Managers of the Orphan-House in Georgia,” [1]. Critics frequently condemned fanciful charitable projects by comparing them to the South Sea and other financial bubbles. See Lloyd, Charity and Poverty in England, 98–104.
39 Publicola [pseud.], “To the Managers of the Orphan-House in Georgia,” [1]; and Publicola [pseud.], “Queries concerning the Orphan-House in Georgia” Supplement To The South-Carolina Gazette, no. 484, 4 July 1743, [1].
40 James Habersham, “Georgia, Oct. 1, 1744—,” The South-Carolina Gazette, no. 551, 15 October 1744, [3].
41 “Publicola's third Letter to the Managers of the Orphan House in Georgia,” The South-Carolina Gazette, no. 556, 19 November 1744, [1]–[2].
42 Alexander Garden, “Negro School-House at Charles-Town Accompt,” The South-Carolina Gazette, no. 523, 2 April 1744, [2]. For the relationship between Garden's school and Whitefield, see Fred W. Witzig, Sanctifying Slavery and Politics in South Carolina: The Life of the Reverend Alexander Garden, 1685–1756 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), 145–147. Colonists had a tradition of weaponizing audits to attack political opponents. See Middleton, “William Fishbourn's ‘misfortune,” where Fishbourn faced an antagonistic, retrospective audit that exposed a decade of financial malfeasance.
43 “A Letter from the Country, &C.,” The Boston Evening-Post, no. 485, 19 November 1744, [1].
44 Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 17–18.
45 Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions, 13–118; David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); John G. A. Pocock, “Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment,” Huntington Library Quarterly 60, no. 1/2 (1997): 7–28; and McCormick, “Political Arithmetic and Sacred History,” 833.
46 Testimony Of the President, Professors, Tutors, and Hebrew Instructor of Harvard College in Cambridge (Boston, 1744), 4, 8, 11–12.
47 George Whitefield, A Letter To the Rev. The President, and Professors, Tutors, and Hebrew Instructor, of Harvard-College in Cambridge (Boston, 1745), 13–14.
48 Edward Wigglesworth, A Letter to the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield (Boston, 1745), 41.
49 Benjamin Prescott, A Letter To the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield (Boston, 1745), 7. Although not all of the testimonies against Whitefield mentioned his collections, many said that they had a “full and hearty Concurrence” with Harvard's Testimony, and thus presumably with the idea that Whitefield's collections were symptoms of his enthusiasm. See, for example, The Sentiments and Resolution Of An Association of Ministers (Convened at Weymouth, Jan. 15th, 1744,5), (Boston, 1745), 11.
50 A Letter From A Gentleman in Scotland (Boston, 1743), 4; “At the Desire of Several of Our Readers,” The Boston Evening-Post, no. 408, 30 May 1743, [1]–[2]; and Crawford, Seasons of Grace, 173, 167–174.
51 “To the Publisher of the Thursday's News-Letter,” The Boston Weekly New-Letter, no. 2043, 26 May 1743, [2]; Whitefield, A Continuation Of The Account Of The Orphan House In Georgia [1742], 3; and Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts On The State of Religion In New-England (Boston, 1743), 36.
52 Whitefield, George, A Letter To the Reverend Dr. Chauncy (Boston, 1745), 6–7Google Scholar; and Chauncy, Charles, A Letter To the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield (Boston, 1745), 15–16Google Scholar.
53 Whitefield to Mr. J. H., London, 25 March 1741, in Works of Whitefield 1:256–257.
54 Whitefield to Rev. Mr. S---, The Betsy, 24 June 1748 in Works of Whitefield 2:143.
55 Whitefield to “a generous Benefactor unknown,” Charles-Town, 15 March 1747, in Works of Whitefield, 2:90. For more on Providence, see Koch, “Slavery, Mission, and the Perils of Providence in Eighteenth-Century Christianity,” esp. 385; Kidd, George Whitefield, 199; and Gallay, The Formation of a Planter Elite, 47–54. For Whitefield's understanding of the difference between enslaved labor and orphan labor, see Choi, Evangelist for God and Empire, 127–168, esp. 148–151.
56 Whitefield to “My very dear, dear Brother,” New York, 29 January 1747, in Works of Whitefield, 2:110.
57 Whitefield to Mr. H--- B---, London, 7 January 1753, in Works of Whitefield, 2:471–472.
58 Whitefield to Mr. Thomas Jones, Bohemia, 16 June 1746, in John W. Christie, ed., “Newly Discovered Letters of George Whitefield 1745–1746, Part III,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society (1943–1961) 32, no. 4 (December 1954): 256.
59 See, for example, “Sunday last the Reverend Mr. Whitefield,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, no. 1344, Sept. 26, 1754, [2].
60 Whitefield, George, A Further Account Of God's dealings with the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, (Philadelphia, 1746), [65]Google Scholar.
61 Seward, Journal Of A Voyage From Savannah to Philadelphia, 53–54; Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont, 3:149; E. Merton Coulter, ed., The Journal of William Stephens 1741–1743 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1958), 132; and Whitefield, An Account Of Money Received and Disbursed For The Orphan-House In Georgia, 29, 32.
62 Sam Fore, “William Ewen (ca. 1720–1776/1777),” New Georgia Encyclopedia, last edited 21 August 2013, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/william-ewen-ca-1720-1776-1777/.
63 Coulter, The Journal of William Stephens 1741–1743, 133.
64 George Whitefield, “Mr. Franklin,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, no. 910, 22 May 1746, [1]; and A Further Account Of God's dealings with the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, From the Time of his Ordination to his Embarking for Georgia (Philadelphia, 1746), [65].
65 James Habersham to the Countess of Huntingdon, 3 June 1773, A3/3/3, Countess of Huntingdon Collection.
66 For the insight that religion is expensive, see Peterson, The Price of Redemption, 2; and Engel, Religion and Profit, 4.