A Nation Rising Read Online Free PDF Page B

money than any other cleric for orphanages, schools, libraries, and almshouses across Europe and America. 8 Whitefield’s Christian principles, however, left plenty of room for African slavery, which he advocated and which Franklin himself only gradually came to oppose later in his career.
    Franklin’s esteem made Whitefield what some have called America’s “first celebrity.” There is a notion that the saturation tactics of Madison Avenue media and marketing are a contemporary American invention, but Whitefield pioneered the development of “multiplatform” marketing strategies. As the historian Larry Witham points out, “He achieved this celebrity by a canny use of letters, news accounts, advertising, advance teams, strategic controversies, and dramatically staged events—in a word, the first mass-media campaign in America.” 9
    As Ecclesiastes tells us, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
    The other great force occupying an American pulpit at this time was Jonathan Edwards, a Congregational preacher born in Connecticut in 1703. Having entered Yale at age thirteen, Edwards was head tutor at the college by age twenty. He later took the pulpit at the Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts, where his grandfather had been preacher. A Calvinist of the old school, Edwards believed that grace or salvation was given only to the “elect,” those predestined at birth. But he also gave a nod to the thought of the day by acknowledging science and the philosophy of men like John Locke and Isaac Newton. As he sought to separate the wheat from the chaff, the elect from the hopeless sinners, his preaching had an enormous impact on colonial America.
    Unlike the theatrical Whitefield, whose voice was dramatic and booming, Edwards spoke blandly and without gestures. But his words sent his audiences into paroxysms of wailing and horror. Perhaps his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” conveys some of the sense of dread his congregations must have felt:
    The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome creature over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours.
    This first Great Awakening provoked a controversy over theology that divided many American Protestant denominations of the time into groups called the “New Lights”—followers of Edwards and other Great Awakening fundamentalists—and “Old Lights,” who opposed the emotionalism of the revival movement. The schism eventually split some of these denominations, spawned new ones, and created divisions within some of the prestigious colleges, such as Harvard and Yale, where the faculty and student body were soon choosing sides. Jonathan Edwards himself wore out his welcome, alienating his own flock. Turned out by his congregation, Edwards left Northampton in 1750, and set out to become a missionary to the Indians.
    In the meantime, his son-in-law Aaron Burr (Senior) and his fellow clergyman Jonathan Dickinson, another “New Light” leader, had departed from Yale in a dispute over these differences between “Old Light” and “New Light” and founded the College of New Jersey in 1746. The school was first established in Dickinson’s home in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and Dickinson was elected as its first president. But when he died less than six months later, a victim of smallpox, Burr replaced him as president. Under Burr’s leadership,the College of New Jersey grew to much greater prominence. Moving the school to its permanent home at Prince ton, New Jersey, Burr supervised construction of Nassau Hall, the largest