PRESBYTERIANS

Presbyterianism in early America traced its origins to the Reformed wing of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, and particularly to the teachings of the Swiss theologian John Calvin (1509–1564). Reformed Protestants believed that God was in control, or was "sovereign," over all of his creation; that human beings by nature were sinners or "depraved"; and that God, as an act of grace, chose to save, or "redeem," some of his sinful creation through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. The Reformed tradition taught that human beings, because of their depravity, were incapable of obtaining salvation apart from a sovereign God who, before the creation of the world, predestined or elected those who would be saved and those who would be damned.

In opposition to the Roman Catholic Church, Presbyterians, like most Protestants, reduced the number of sacraments from seven to two, namely infant baptism and the Lord's Supper, or communion. Unlike Catholicism, which taught that baptism regenerated an infant by washing away original sin, British Presbyterians believed baptism served as the infant's initiation into the community faith in the hopes that God would regenerate the child at a later time. Presbyterians rejected the Catholic Mass, affirming that communion was a memorial of the death of Christ, not a sacrament in which the bread and the wine actually became the body and blood of Christ.

What distinguished Presbyterians from other Reformed Protestants were their views on how the church should be governed. Unlike early New England Puritans who invested power in individual congregations, Presbyterians placed religious authority in the hands of presbyteries. Presbyteries consisted of the clergy and appointed lay representatives from a particular geographical region. A presbytery was responsible for appointing ministers to vacant pulpits, enforcing church discipline, monitoring the financial state of congregations, and educating ministers and laymen and -women. While presbyteries presided over the regular activity of Presbyterian life, they were held accountable by synods (made up of all the presbyteries in a geographical region) and, after 1789, the General Assembly (made up of all American synods).

colonial years

Though Presbyterians could be found throughout the British American colonies, they were concentrated in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In 1706 eight ministers, led by Francis Makemie, the so-called father of American Presbyterianism, met in Philadelphia to establish the first American presbytery. During its first two decades, this presbytery was faced with the task of merging two distinct forms of early American Presbyterianism into a unified religious body. The earliest Presbyterian congregations in America were made up of clergymen and settlers who migrated to the New Jersey–Philadelphia region from New England. Many of these Presbyterians were descendants of New England Puritans who had adopted a presbyterian form of church government. The other group of Presbyterians was Scots-Irish in ethnic makeup. These were Presbyterians who migrated from Scotland to Ireland and then migrated again from Ireland to America searching for new land and opportunity or else fleeing persecution under the Test Act of 1704, which prohibited all dissenting (non-Anglican) forms of Protestantism in Ireland. The Scots-Irish, or Ulster Presbyterians, would dominate the church in America well into the nineteenth century.

New England–style Presbyterians, who were prevalent in the New Jersey congregations at Newark, Elizabethtown, Woodbridge, and Fairfield, tended to stress personal piety and an adherence to the teachings of the Bible as the sole rule of faith and practice. Scots-Irish Presbyterians, while not neglecting the importance of piety and the Bible, required that ministers subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechism (1647)—a statement of Presbyterian belief that served as a theological litmus test for membership in Scotland's national church (the Church of Scotland). These differences resulted in several controversies within the early American Presbyterian Church until they were resolved by a compromise between the two groups in 1729 called the Adopting Act.

In 1716 two new presbyteries had been formed at Long Island and New Castle, and the seventeen Presbyterian clergymen then ministering in America formed the Philadelphia General Synod one year later. With the controversy over subscription largely alleviated, early American Presbyterians now became divided over the issue of revivalism. As the first Great Awakening—an evangelical Protestant revival that stressed immediate conversion and aggressive evangelization—made its way throughout the colonies, Presbyterians debated how the church should respond to this new religious phenomenon. Some ministers, known as New Siders, emphasized the importance of personal conversion or the "new birth" as an essential element of the Christian life. William Tennent (1673–1746), the Presbyterian minister at Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, began training clergymen at his Log College to take up the mantle of this evangelical form of Christianity. His son, Gilbert Tennent (1703–1764), the minister of the New Brunswick, New Jersey, church, traveled throughout the region informing fellow clergy members of their spiritual "deadness" apart from a "born-again" experience.

Not all Presbyterians, however, embraced this Great Awakening. Known as the Old Side faction, Presbyterians such as Francis Alison (1705–1779), who ran an academy in New London, Pennsylvania, believed that this new emphasis on immediate conversion and personal piety undermined the historic Presbyterian commitment to a rational brand of Protestantism informed by the teachings of the Westminster Confession. They criticized the Log College men for making religious experience, rather than the strict adherence to theological standards, the most important qualification for those seeking ordination in the church. In 1738 the Old Side gained control of the Philadelphia Synod and three years later expelled the New Side New Brunswick Presbytery for its continued ordination of clergymen (many of them Log College men) who did not have formal degrees from a European college or from Yale or Harvard. As a result, the nearly one hundred congregations of the Presbyterian Church in British colonial America would remain formally divided between Old Side and New Side factions until they were reunited in 1758.

The first Great Awakening resulted in an increased demand for clergymen who upheld the New Side commitments to the importance of the new birth and experimental piety. Several New Side clergymen sought to alleviate this demand by establishing a college in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, in 1746. Jonathan Dickinson, the minister at Elizabethtown and a New Side sympathizer, was chosen as the first president. Dickinson died in 1747; the second president, Aaron Burr (father of the future vice president), moved the college to Princeton, New Jersey. The College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) would be the first major institution of higher education in the mid-Atlantic region and, under the direction of New Side presidents, would serve as a bastion of eighteenth-century evangelical Presbyterianism.

the american revolution

As some in the British colonies began to rethink their relationship to England after the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), Presbyterians became some of the most outspoken proponents of American independence. Official Presbyterian pronouncements on the American Revolution stressed the defense of liberty—especially religious liberty—against an English government which, they believed, was undermining freedom. Presbyterians understood the American Revolution in moral terms. They believed that for the Revolution to be successful, the American colonists needed to be willing to sacrifice their own self-interest for the greater good of the Revolutionary cause. Presbyterian ministers urged their congregations to confess personal sins and, more broadly, to repent of public sins that might hinder God from answering their prayers for independence and religious liberty.

The College of New Jersey at Princeton became the primary center of Presbyterian Revolutionary activity. In 1768 the college appointed John Wither-spoon as its sixth president. Witherspoon transformed the college into a school focused on the training of statesmen and politicians for leadership roles in the new American Republic. During the 1770s students at Princeton (with Witherspoon's approval) engaged in a variety of responses to supposed British tyranny. They wore homespun robes at commencement ceremonies to protest the importation of British-made clothing and staged a tea party similar to the one that occurred in Boston Harbor in 1773. Witherspoon was an outspoken clerical voice in support of revolution, publishing sermons and tracts connecting religious liberty with political independence from England. He was an active member of the Continental Congress, serving from 1776 to 1782, and was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence.

With the American victory in the War for Independence, Presbyterians began plans to construct a national church. In 1780 the church maintained over 400 congregations under the umbrella of the Synod of New York and Philadelphia, which had been established in 1758 after the New Side-Old Side reunion. With Presbyterian churches forming throughout the new Republic, including many in the southern states and on the frontier, administrative changes were essential. In 1789 the First General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States met in Philadelphia. The General Assembly would serve as the unifying agent for four newly designed synods—New York-New Jersey, Philadelphia, Virginia, and the Carolinas—sixteen presbyteries, 177 ministers, and 419 congregations.

the early american republic

Presbyterians entered the nineteenth century with a new governmental structure in place and a renewed vision for spreading their Reformed faith throughout the frontier regions of the American Republic. In 1801 the church joined with the Congregationalists of New England in a Plan of Union designed to share the burden of missionary activity in the West. They were also influential in the early years of a new national revival often referred to as the Second Great Awakening. James McGready, a Presbyterian clergyman from Kentucky, led several religious revivals at frontier gatherings known as camp meetings. These revivals, the most famous of which was held in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801, gained a reputation for the religious enthusiasm of the participants. Reports described new converts falling down, "jerking," and even barking under the influence of evangelical preaching. In the North, the Second Great Awakening was spread by Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), another Presbyterian minister. Finney challenged the traditional Calvinist understanding of a religious revival by suggesting that all human beings had the potential, if they performed the correct procedures, or "measures," to initiate an awakening of God's people.

Like the first Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening also bred controversy. As an increasing number of converts embraced the evangelical gospel, it became clear that for many American Protestants a conversion experience was now becoming a more important sign of authentic Christianity than rational assent to the particular confessional beliefs of a specific denomination. Presbyterian critics of the revival pointed to the 1801 Plan of Union and the ecumenical flavor of the frontier camp meetings as an example of the broad evangelical cooperation that undermined the distinctive beliefs of traditional Presbyterianism.

Moreover, Presbyterian revivalists such as Finney were advocating a theology of conversion that celebrated individual free will. The idea that human beings had the potential to choose whether to accept or reject the gospel meshed very well with the democratic values that were beginning to define the nation in the early nineteenth century, but it largely undermined the traditional Calvinist idea that individual salvation and corporate revival were the works of God, not men or women. Divisions over these issues would eventually lead to another major split in the Presbyterian Church in 1837. New School Presbyterians were those who supported the revivals and cooperation with other evangelical denominations in the spread of the Awakening. Old School Presbyterians opposed the revivals and became staunch defenders of traditional Presbyterian orthodoxy as articulated in the Westminster Confession of Faith and other Reformed confessions.

Early national Presbyterians also began establishing theological seminaries. The number of ministerial students at the College of New Jersey had diminished considerably since the American Revolution, and Presbyterian leaders saw the need to develop a separate theological school designed solely for ministerial preparation. In 1811 the General Assembly approved the opening of Princeton Theological Seminary. Archibald Alexander became the first professor at the new seminary and Princeton would develop a reputation throughout the nineteenth century as a theological stronghold of Old School Presbyterianism. Shortly after the founding of Princeton, the General Assembly opened Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, and Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina.

As the Presbyterian Church entered the pre–Civil War era, it remained divided over how to preserve a historically confessional faith defined by limits, order, and subscription to the Westminster standards in an American religious culture becoming increasingly defined by individualism, opportunity, freedom of choice, and democracy. In addition to these theological and cultural differences, regional divisions over the institution of slavery would also rack the church. Many of these theological, moral, and regional disagreements would not be resolved until the twentieth century.

bibliography

Fea, John. "The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian's Rural Enlightenment." Journal of American History 90 (2003): 462–490.

Landsman, Ned C. Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Marsden, George M. The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology in Nineteenth-Century America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970. Best treatment of Presbyterians in early national America.

Noll, Mark A. Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Best intellectual history of Presbyterians in the age of the American Revolution.

Nybakken, Elizabeth. "New Light on the Old Side: Irish Influence on Colonial Presbyterianism." Journal of American History 68 (1982): 813–832.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Trinterud, Leonard J. The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-examination of Colonial Presbyterianism. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949. Remains the standard work on colonial Presbyterianism.

Westerkamp, Marilyn J. Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–1760. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

John Fea