“The humble Baptists”

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Baptists in middle colonies like Pennsylvania competed against a staggering variety of religious denominations and sects. Essential for establishing and maintaining their denomination in this context was the founding of the Philadelphia Baptist Association in 1707, the first Baptist institutional structure in America. In addition to tracing his family lineage, this chapter explores the early influences of the Philadelphia Baptist Association on Oliver Hart, along with the Baptist rituals and doctrines he absorbed in the Pennepek Baptist Church. Hart’s exposure to Quaker and Keithian antislavery sentiments in Pennsylvania is also considered.

“Promoting so laudable a Design”

The 1760s were a decade of significant institutional development for America’s Baptists, and Oliver Hart was a key figure in that advance. In the South, Hart led the Charleston Association to adopt the Charleston Confession as its doctrinal statement, setting a course for traditional Calvinism among white Southern Baptists for the next one hundred years or more. He also shaped the church government practices of Baptist churches, coauthoring the Summary of Church Discipline, which outlined the rigorous church order Baptists would become known for well into the nineteenth century. This chapter provides vivid examples of how this congregational government worked itself out in specific Baptist churches of the period. Beyond the South, Hart enthusiastically supported the Philadelphia Association project of founding Rhode Island College (later Brown University), an important signal that Baptists as a whole were becoming respectable in colonial American society. Finally, Hart’s frequent preaching excursions into the Carolina backcountry brought him into contact with the exploding Separate Baptist movement. Though they were far less sophisticated than his Charleston social circles, Hart found much to appreciate in the Separate Baptists and sought opportunities to unite them with his own Regular Baptist tribe.

“Bringing many souls home to Jesus Christ”

As the pastor of the Charleston Baptist Church, Oliver Hart established a pattern of moderate revivalist ministry. His weekly routine of public and private ministry of the Word mirrored that of most ministers in the broadly Reformed tradition. Hart invested a significant portion of each week to preparing and delivering sermons, which he developed according to the classic Puritan method. Outside his own congregation, he partnered with evangelical leaders from a variety of other denominations, including the Anglican evangelist George Whitefield, to spread the revivalism of the Great Awakening. Hart gained a wide acceptance among the residents of Charleston in part because of the respectable social persona he developed, in contrast to the erratic behavior of the Separate Baptists and other radical revivalists. Most significant, Hart adopted the classic moderate evangelical approach to slavery while in Charleston, ministering earnestly to enslaved Africans even as he owned slaves himself. Hart’s respectable, moderate revivalism set the tone for the next century and a half for white Baptists in Charleston and the broader South.

“Every day brings fresh wonders!”

In 1754 Oliver Hart led a revival among the youth of the Charleston Baptist Church which mirrored the awakenings that had been taking place throughout the colonies since the 1730s. Hart kept a careful record of the revival in his personal diary after the pattern of George Whitefield’s Journals, documenting his own revivalist practices, such as preaching in private homes and counseling those who had fallen into sin. The 1754 Charleston revival involved a number of dramatic conversion experiences and exhibited some of the egalitarian tendencies of the Great Awakening, including Hart’s encouragement of public testimony and exhortation of a enslaved black woman to a group of white girls. This revival is also noteworthy for the conversion of Samuel Stillman, who would go on to become the influential pastor of the First Baptist Church of Boston at the time of the American Revolution. The 1754 Charleston revival shows Hart attempting to walk the line of discerning, moderate revivalism in the context of a dynamic awakening. It also demonstrates that a robust revivalism existed among the Regular Baptists of the South before the more famous Separate Baptists arrived in 1755.

“A regular Confederation”

The eighteenth century was an era of religious institution-building, and no figure was more important for the birth of Baptist denominationalism in the South than Oliver Hart. In 1751 Hart drew together the Particular Baptist churches of South Carolina to form the Charleston Association, the second Baptist association in America. Successfully transplanting ideas and models he had witnessed in the Philadelphia Association, Hart led the South’s Baptists to form a minister’s education fund, send missionaries to the western frontier, and formalize the doctrines and church practices that would define the Baptist South for the next 150 years.

“The Baptist Interest”

Oliver Hart faced a crisis of decision when the Charleston Baptist Church extended an invitation for him to return as pastor there in 1783. Hart repeatedly equivocated in his correspondence with them, but ultimately blessed the appointment of his young friend Richard Furman to the post, thus sealing the union of Regular and Separate Baptists in the South. In Hopewell, Hart continued to lament the absence of revival in his apathetic congregation, as well as his own physical decline and old age. He found his greatest encouragement during these years in the “rising glory” of the young American republic, which he believed to be uniquely blessed by God. He celebrated the federal Constitution and urged his skeptical Baptist colleagues to support its ratification. This chapter also explores Hart’s change of perspective on the issue of slavery.

“Comforts and mercies, losses and crosses”

The first half of the 1770s was a major transitional period for Oliver Hart. Many of the most important figures in his life, including his hero, George Whitefield, and his wife, Sarah, died. (Sarah’s death provides an opportunity to reflect on the role of women in the colonial Baptist South and on the attraction they found to the Baptist faith.) At the same time, important new figures were assuming a larger role in his life, including his understudy Edmund Botsford and the promising young Separate Baptist preacher Richard Furman. Hart struggled in the domestic sphere during the period of his widowhood, contending especially with his unruly son, John, away at Rhode Island College. He was relieved to find a new wife in Anne Marie Sealy Grimball, a member of the Charleston Baptist Church in whose conversion Hart had been instrumental some years before.

“Seals of my ministry”

Before Oliver Hart’s arrival in Charleston, the Southern colonies had produced none of their own indigenous ministers, having always looked to the Northern colonies or to Great Britain to supply their pulpits. One of Hart’s most significant contributions was to address this need. He personally trained in his home many young Baptist men called to gospel ministry and led the Charleston Association to found the minister’s education fund, the first cooperative education effort by Baptists in America. Hart actively recruited young ministers from other regions to fill the empty pulpits of the South and counseled other novice pastors on a variety of issues in his extensive correspondence. This chapter uncovers the greatest crisis of Hart’s pastoral career, the near-usurpation of the Charleston Baptist pulpit by one of his own trainees, Nicholas Bedgegood. It also recounts the story of the conversion and ministerial call of one of Hart’s most significant protégés, Edmund Botsford.

“The power of religion greatly displayed”

Oliver Hart experienced evangelical conversion at the peak of a dynamic series of revivals known as the Great Awakening. His childhood pastor, Jenkin Jones, publicly supported the evangelist George Whitefield and did all that he could to promote revivalism in Hart’s Particular Baptist congregation. Along with Hart’s personal story, this chapter recounts the Baptist reception of the Great Awakening throughout colonial America, including in New England and in the South. It corrects the common misperception that most Particular Baptists stood aloof from the Great Awakening, and introduces the emergence of the Separate Baptist movement.

“All the Baptists on the Continent”

Oliver Hart longed to see one more revival in his final years, but he died in 1795, just before the Second Great Awakening. The Baptist movement in America had been dramatically transformed during his lifetime, both in numbers and in cultural respectability. Twenty years after Hart’s death, “all the Baptists on the continent” would unite to support the foreign missionaries Ann and Adoniram Judson, thus birthing the first nationwide Baptist denomination and fulfilling a long-held desire of Hart’s. Fittingly, it was Hart’s successor at Charleston, Richard Furman, who would serve as the new denomination’s first president. Furman would also build on Hart’s lifework by overseeing the expansion of Baptist institutional life in the South during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Ultimately Hart’s dream of a united Baptist America was shattered over the issue of slavery, with the South’s Baptists clinging to his earlier position on slavery, and Northern Baptists following his later position. This chapter closes with a reflection on Hart’s enduring legacy as an early American Baptist and evangelical leader.