Passing as a Pastor: Clerical Imposture in the Colonial Atlantic World

2004 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
True Value ◽  
Cultural Power

AbstractMany impostors in the eighteenth century tried to pass as pastors in North America's churches. This phenomenon showed how increasing engagement with the broader Atlantic world could carry ominous implications for colonial religious leaders, implications that would become manifest in the itinerancy of the evangelical revivals and, in the early republic, finally crush any hopes of centered American religious authority. Eighteenth-century episodes of clerical imposture help illuminate the increasing loss of cultural mastery faced by religious elites as a result of Atlantic anonymities, itinerant ministries, and democratic sensibilities. This article considers why so many in the eighteenth century attempted to pass as pastors, from British wanderers like the supposed brick-maker Samuel May to notorious criminals like Tom Bell or Stephen Burroughs. Understanding the conditions that led to these cases of clerical imposture leads to greater understanding of the nature of religious and cultural power in colonial North America and in the early American republic. The eighteenth century brought a crisis to America concerning the implications of cultural and demographic fluidity as elites worried more and more about assigning true value and uncovering conspiracy in a world newly dependent on appearances to establish authority. The increasing cosmopolitanism, immigration, and commerce helped make the colonial elites more wealthy and powerful, but they also now had to scramble to resist the potential for deception and imposture that the new engagements created. Such conditions made new room for con men, many of whom posed as pastors to access the power of religious authorities.

Counterfeit States

2018 ◽  
pp. 49-78
Author(s):  
Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Paper Currency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
National Citizenship

This chapter looks to overlapping discussions of American economic health and growth to present a complex story about the circulation of currency as well as the circulation of late-eighteenth century conceptions of American personhood in the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Stephen Burroughs. These imaginative accounts of counterfeiting dramatize the intimate bonds of normative conceptions of citizenship and national currency. This chapter shows how discourses of counterfeiting distinctly frame the social and political geographies of the early American republic. Moreover, the lack of uniform paper currency in the early Republic (which produces social, political, and economic instability) mimics the lack of a uniform understanding of national citizenship in this same period to such a degree that some late eighteenth century authors respond to this dual precarity by proposing that counterfeiting a uniquely American form of self-making, both because the counterfeiting enterprise gives rise to new, albeit economically unstable, homo economici, and because these new economic bodies are themselves forging and/or imitating the dress, behaviors, and codes of propriety in order to capitalize on counterfeit currency. Thus, counterfeiting alleviates some of the anxiety about the lack of uniform national citizenship.

“The pleasure of receiving your favour”

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Valle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Central Concept

The article deals with correspondence in natural history in the eighteenth century between England and North America. The corpus discussed consists of correspondence between John Bartram and Peter Collinson, and between Alexander Garden and John Ellis. The approach used in the study is qualitative and rhetorical; the main point considered is how the letters construct scientific centre and periphery in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. A central concept is the “colonial exchange”, whereby “raw materials” from the colonies — in this case plant and animal specimens, along with proposed identifications and names — are exchanged for “finished products”, in this case codified scientific knowledge contained in publications.

The Early Republic, 1789–1815

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-61
Author(s):  
John L. Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Early Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Past Half

The twenty-five-year political history of the early American republic, covering the period from the first federal election through the War of 1812, critically shaped the terms and path of American politics over the ensuing two centuries. During this time the United States emerged from the volatility of revolutionary politics to establish the bipolar party structure that has dominated the American political landscape ever since. The central ideological debate over the power of the national government was shaped by classical understandings of politics and by powerfully contested interests. This essay begins with a short chronological summary of the politics of the period, and then turns to the five broad frameworks that historians of the politics of the early republic have addressed over the past half-century: party structure, republican ideology, political culture, slavery, and state-formation.

Protestantism Outside Europe

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Häberlein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Head Start ◽  
New England ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
American Thought

The chapter traces the origins and development of Protestantism in the Dutch and British colonial world from the sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. While Catholicism enjoyed a huge head start over Protestantism in missionary endeavors outside Europe, Protestants began to challenge the overseas influence of Catholicism in principle and practice from the late sixteenth century onward. While New England Puritanism arguably made the most distinctive contribution to Protestant theology and the evolution of American thought and institutions, the chapter argues that Protestantism outside Europe was pluralistic. A variety of denominations and religious movements—Dutch Reformed Protestantism, Anglicanism, Quakerism, and continental European pietism—participated in the spread of Protestantism not only in North America, but in other parts of the Atlantic world as well as the Dutch dominions in Asia.

Creating the American Bible Reader, 1777–1816

2018 ◽  
pp. 19-39
Author(s):  
Seth Perry
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Early American

This chapter traces the evolution of early American bibles and bible readers during the period 1777–1816. More specifically, it explains how the imagined American bible reader, both subject to the bearers of religious authority and potentially empowered by those authorities' address, was created out of British print-bible culture. The chapter first considers the use of the English bibles in the fifteenth century in preaching before discussing how a distinctively new imagined English bible reader emerged in the eighteenth century. It then describes the development of American print-bible culture beginning in the 1780s, set by the pedagogical interests of English bibles, and analyzes family bibles in the context of “family prayer” as their imagined site of reading and use. It also looks at the production of American bibles beginning in the 1790s and their nation-building aspirations, as can be seen in the work of the American Bible Society.

The Atlantic World

2019 ◽  
pp. 224-233
Author(s):  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
The Church

This chapter assesses how the Atlantic world of Dutch and British colonies followed the west European pattern of emancipation. Jews were spread across numerous colonies. The thirteen British colonies were not preponderant: each of the communities of “Curaçao, Surinam and Jamaica had more Jews in the mid-eighteenth century than all of the North American colonies combined.” In the British colonies of Canada, Jamaica, and the thirteen colonies, Jews achieved civil rights largely without controversy or conflict. In contrast, Jews organized and campaigned for political rights. In the early American republic, Jews received rights state by state, in Canada colony by colony. In the United States and Canada, political rights were linked to disestablishment of the church and the enactment of religious equality. In Jamaica, it was entwined with race relations.

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