“Savages Abroad, Savages at Home”: Triangulating Evangelical Missions in New England, Northern England, and the Colonial South

This paper examines the network of printed texts and their circulation that connected mid-eighteenth century British-American evangelical Protestant missions to Native Americans in New England, industrial workers in Northern England, and slave populations in the colonial South. The transatlantic revival of the 1730s and 1740s connected widespread communities of believers through the circulation of periodicals, sermons, and other devotional works. The “evangelical publics” thus created through print have been variously characterized by recent scholarship as “counter” to a secular, Enlightenment concept of the public (Mee, Lambert), or as actively participating within the norms of Enlightenment public discourse (Warner). Much of this work urges attention less on the doctrinal issues that formed early evangelicalism, and more on the discursive formations (of print and preaching) that shaped its culture and concerns. 

“Savages abroad, savages at home” suggests that discourse and doctrine were instead inextricably linked in early evangelicalism, and that the circulation of doctrinally-heterogenous, printed religious texts enabled believers to negotiate a sense of themselves as occupying temporal, local, and particular contexts while simultaneously belonging to a global, eternal, transcendant community of the saved.  The paper focuses on three missionary texts of the 1740s—David Brainerd’s published diaries of his work among Native Americans in New England; George Whitefield’s published journals of his missions to enslaved populations in Georgia; and John Wesley’s journals documenting his itinerancy in the industrial north of England.  Each of these works depicts a specific individual’s missionary efforts within a specific geographical location, to a specific population.  Each uses this spatiotemporal specificity to invoke an audience of readers that transcends such specificity through its difference from the localized subjects of the text’s missionary efforts, while retaining individual identity and agency.