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Support of the Federalist Party and opposition to the Democratic‐Republicans afforded Lemuel Haynes his first engagement with a public sphere beyond church congregations and revival audiences. He supported Federalists George Washington and John Adams, both of whom had some reputation in the early republic as enemies of slaveholding. New Englanders Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight, each man a president of Yale College, articulated a vision of blacks and whites united in a Christian postslavery society. This was a patrician vision that Haynes and black contemporaries like Richard Allen, leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, found convincing insofar as it suggested that a class of social and religious leaders would act to protect black rights. However, Jeffersonian ideology spread even into western Vermont; in 1818, Haynes was dismissed from his pulpit because of his Federalism and his criticism of the War of 1812.

The churches, meetinghouses, and synagogues where colonial Americans participated in religious life could be a source of political mobilization or a source of civic impasse. The political allegiances of many Newport, Rhode Island, residents drew upon the prevailing New England conflicts between Congregationalists and Anglicans. In addition, the religious diversity of Newport's residents‐including Baptists, Quakers, Jews, and others‐fostered a pluralistic political climate. Amidst the acceptance and flexibility that characterized a cosmopolitan city, Ezra Stiles observed that this religious diversity also caused suspicion and contention. The urban setting also provided fertile ground for religious revivals among women and blacks, such as those at the home of Sarah Osborn. While the attendant social agitation (especially against slavery) failed to create lasting revolutionary transformation, such revivals nevertheless had a significant impact on public life.

This chapter focuses on Daniels's encounter with Victor C. Turner Sr., who worked for the Negro Cooperative Extension System of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Turner's biography as a representative of the educated black middle class is presented, including his participation in an officers' training program at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, during World War I. Turner told Daniels about racial violence and debt peonage in Lowndes County, Alabama, mentioning a planter named Dickson. Historical research connects a peonage case involving Lowndes County sheriff J.W. Dickson in 1903 with a case involving his younger brother, Robert Stiles Dickson Sr., in 1946. Neither brother was ever prosecuted, and the younger one was especially socially prominent. The chapter analyses Daniels's portrayal of Turner and Dickson, who remain anonymous in A Southerner Discovers the South. He sought confirmation of Turner's story from white Alabamans, including Birmingham newspaper editor James E. Chappell. Chappell's daughter Mary had taught at the Calhoun Colored School in Lowndes County and seemed to represent a new social consciousness among younger white southerners. However, another journalist's account of the suppression of the black Sharecroppers Union in 1932 reiterated that planter violence was endemic in the Alabama Black Belt.

Chapter 11 outlines Franklin’s return to America in time to offer advice to the new government and plans for a new constitution. He also wrote his Autobiography in instalments over the last fifteen years of his life, which was one part memoir, one part uplift. In some respects, it carried on Puritan conventions of introspection in journals and diaries. At the end of his life, friends and family pressed him to make a Christian profession. His well-lived life, with its work ethic and emphasis on self-help, he believed, was sufficient. The chapter also discusses his anti-slavery views, his friendship with Ezra Stiles, his deathbed scene and the views of his sister, Jane Mecom.

This chapter discusses the emergence of evangelical activism in the generation following the American Revolution. New Yorkers depended on state-sponsored institutions, private associations, and denominational support to care for the destitute immediately after the war. Isabella Marshall Graham, a widow with young daughters, knew firsthand the privations facing the city's most vulnerable. She founded the Ladies' Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, the city's first evangelical benevolent association, to provide temporal and spiritual support to keep these women in their homes. Ezra Stiles Ely recorded scores of encounters with almshouse residents and hospital patients. Through his published Journals, Ely provided a window into popular urban religiosity. His Journals also represent a deliberate effort to transform the responses of his evangelical readers to the city around them. The uncontested star of Ely's account was a young prostitute named Caroline. Together, Graham, Ely, and Caroline transformed how evangelical New Yorkers thought about the women and men outside of their meetinghouses and inspired a rising generation to attempt to convert the city following the War of 1812.

This chapter trace the rise of scholarly misinterpretations of Dighton Rock in the eighteenth century in writings of Cotton Mather and Harvard professors Isaac Greenwood, John Winthrop, and Stephen Sewall. The parallel evolution of human migration theories is traced in the writing of Jean-François Lafitau. Gothicism, a fusion of White race destiny, Noachic lineage, culture, republican liberty, and civilization, is introduced through the works of Olf Rudbeks, Pierre-Henri Mallet, and the Baron de Montesquieu. Ideas about Indigenous origins and human evolution are presented by the Comte de Buffon. Ezra Stiles includes Dighton Rock in his ideas about ancient Hebrew and Phoenician migrants. Phoenicians become the leading candidates for the rock’s markings. Contributions to migration theories are noted by Pehr Kalm and Johann Forster. Linnaeus, a protégé of Rudbeks’ son, develops his human racial scheme with Europeans a superior race, with further refinements by Johann F. Blumenbach and Christoph Meiners. Gothicist Europeans are championed as the superior human form while Indigenous people are thought to have descended from inferior Asian Tartars.

Esotericism enters the Dighton Rock debate through the French mythographer Antoine Court de Gébelin and Monde Primitif (1781), who believes it to be Phoenician. Ezra Stiles also favours the Phoenician interpretation and incorporates it into his Gothicist-tinged Election Sermon (1783) which presents the United States as a place of White destiny. American westward expansion produces encounters with the mysterious earthworks of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and fuels the rise of American archaeology. Thomas Pennant in Arctic Zoology (1784) makes an influential case for the Bering Strait hypothesis of the Indigenous arrival in the Americas. Corneille de Pauw publishes Recherches philosophiques (1768-69) arguing the degenerative effect on all life of the climate of the Americas.The Anglo-Irish antiquarian Charles Vallancey argues Dighton Rock was the work of ancient migrants from Asia who were moved aside by the inferior Tartar ancestors of Native Americans. Vallancey’s theory finds near-simultaneous acceptance in a circle of theorists around Stiles as an explanation for the so-called Mound Builders. The author defines this interpretation of American prehistory as the multiple migration displacement scenario.

In the eighteenth century Christian higher education faced several new challenges. Most notable is the Enlightenment. American schools generally incorporated moderate Enlightenment ideas into their teaching, especially the new moral philosophy growing out of the tradition of John Locke and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy. The religious dimensions of higher education were intensified by the Great Awakening and the associated New Light Movement. Yale College, founded in 1701, became by mid-century a leading New Light school. So was the College of New Jersey (Princeton), founded in 1746. A number of other new colleges had New Light connections. Thomas Clap at Yale, Jonathan Edwards, and Ezra Stiles each illustrate efforts to relate the new thought of the era to Christian teachings. The era of the American Revolution brought a new synthesis of Christian concerns and concerns for the right ordering of society, as best illustrated by the work of President John Witherspoon at Princeton.

This chapter details Thomas Jefferson’s dealings with Ezra Stiles, President of Yale and New England’s leading intellectual. Stiles became Jefferson’s confidant in 1786. Meeting only a month before Jefferson embarked overseas from Boston on July 5, 1784, the two men enjoyed an immediate connection, despite their divergent roles and regions. A master of many disciplines, Stiles was most distinguished by a single interest in particular: his facility with Middle Eastern languages. Jefferson shared anxieties with Stiles concerning Muslim captivity—captivity not of a single person, however, but of an entire nation, sharply criticizing Ottoman occupation of Greece. Anticipating future experiences of his new friend and a later U.S. President, Stiles also gained access to manuscripts arising from Muslim captivity and Arabic documents written by African slaves.

This chapter details the events surrounding Ezra Stiles’ receipt of a letter on March 18, 1788 from Abiel Holmes, a young minister whom Stiles had sent south seven months before. From Georgia, Holmes describes in his letter a celestial figure he met in the flesh—a “great literary curiosity,” whose presence is likened to “a visit” from an ancient Greek Muse, compared to “Clio or Urania,” sister goddesses of history and astronomy. This figure turned out to be an African man—and a slave. Recently “brought” to “this country,” Holmes’ starry Muse is chained solidly to the Georgia soil. Begun with divine labels—“Clio or Urania”—only the last word of Holmes’ introduction reveals a human identity for this supernatural stranger. Supplying not merely a slave handle, Holmes instead offers this figure’s authentic name, which is neither Greek nor pagan, but instead Arabic and Islamic.

The effort to ground American legal principles on the Bible, which was often taken for granted as an ideal goal in early national history, also soon floundered. The research of legal scholar Steven Green has shown that declarations about Scripture as the foundation of the common law gradually faded as more state courts began to apply constitutional principles of religious freedom. Belief in the natural affinity between Scripture and American legal tradition survived into the twentieth century, but with more and more exceptions and increasing imprecision as the decades rolled by. The efforts by custodial Protestants to create a voluntary Bible civilization also met resistance from sectarian Protestants (and a few secular Americans) who used legal principles of religious freedom to thwart those aspirations.

Ezra Stiles, early American diarist and president of Yale during the Revolution, was a foundational figure in U.S. education and historiography. His public profile and patriotism, however, shields Stiles’ private devotion to Islamic learning and Arabic literacy, striving to read the language of the Qur’ān even while recording his nation’s struggles for independence. Uncovering informal marginalia inscribed in volumes at the Redwood Athenaeum, as well as Yale University manuscripts never before published, this chapter reveals surprising overlaps between Stiles’ Islamic interests and his American identity, tracing revolutions of both country and creed embedded in his receptions of Muslim sources.

This edition offers 217 letters to and from Catharine Macaulay’s correspondents. Each correspondent is given a brief biographical introduction, including a short account of Macaulay’s relationship with the correspondent, and the historical circumstances of the epistolary exchange. The letters provide a unique snapshot of the personal relationships and wider friendships of a woman who was at the center of radical London society during the second half of the eighteenth century. Her correspondents extend from London to America and France and reveal how, for a period of nearly thirty years, Macaulay was recognized as one of the foremost advocates of the universal rights of mankind and as an irrepressible voice defending the political liberties that the American and French revolutions attempted to secure.