George Whitefield

In February 1739, barred from most pulpits in Bristol, Whitefield went out to Kingswood and preached in the open air to the colliers coming off shift. He wrote afterwards that he could see the white gutters made by the tears running down their black cheeks, and that was the moment the revival found its method. Churches held hundreds; a hillside held thousands, and the people who did not go to church came.

The instrument was his voice. Benjamin Franklin, sceptical about the reported crowd sizes, walked backwards down Market Street in Philadelphia until he could no longer hear clearly, calculated the area of the semicircle, and concluded that thirty thousand could indeed have heard him. Franklin also recorded, ruefully, emptying his pockets into the collection for the Georgia orphanage after resolving on the way in to give nothing.

He had been an actor's understudy in temperament if not in fact, and contemporaries described a delivery that was theatrical in the technical sense: he wept, used his whole body, repeated a sermon until it was polished, and had no scruples about doing so. He crossed the Atlantic seven times and preached in every American colony, and the itinerant tour, in which one man moves through many communities and leaves them connected to each other, is essentially his invention. He died at Newburyport in Massachusetts in 1770, on tour, and is buried under the pulpit there.

Whitefield and Wesley worked together, and then in 1740 and 1741 they fell out in public over predestination. Wesley preached and printed a sermon against the doctrine of election; Whitefield, who held it, replied in a long open letter. The revival split into two connexions, the Calvinistic Methodists under Whitefield and Lady Huntingdon's patronage and the Arminian societies under Wesley, and they stayed separate. The personal breach healed. Whitefield asked in advance that Wesley preach his funeral sermon, and Wesley did.

His relation to the American revival ran through Jonathan Edwards, whose pulpit at Northampton he occupied in 1740; Edwards wept through the sermon and afterwards published cautions about the emotional excesses the tours produced, so the two men are a study in the movement's own internal argument about itself.

The part of his record that has to be stated is Georgia. He founded and funded an orphanage at Bethesda near Savannah, and he campaigned publicly for the repeal of the colony's prohibition on slavery, arguing that the plantation economy could not work without it and that the orphanage could not be sustained otherwise. The prohibition was repealed in 1751, and he acquired enslaved people to work the orphanage lands and left them in his will. He had earlier written against the cruelty of slaveholders in the southern colonies, so he did not think the institution required nothing of the owner, and he defended the institution itself. The atlas records both, without adjudication.