1. Elkanah, and Walker, Mary Collection, Box 7, Washington State University Manuscripts; hereafter referred to as WSU.Google Scholar

2. Ryan, Mary P., Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 83–144;Google ScholarCott, Nancy F., The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere in New England,” 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977), pp. 126–159;Google ScholarSweet, Leonard I., The Minister's Wife: Her Role in Nineteenth-Century American Evangelicalism (Philadelphia, 1983);Google ScholarSizer, Sandra S., Gospel Hymns and Social Religion: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Revivalism (Philadelphia, 1978);Google ScholarBrumberg, Joan Jacobs, Mission for Life (New York, 1980), pp. 79–106;Google ScholarBass, Dorothy C., “‘Their Prodigious Influence’: Women, Religion, and Reform in Antebellum America“ in Ruether, Rosemary Radford and McLaughlin, Eleanor, eds., Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York, 1979), pp. 279–300;Google ScholarSmith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “Women and Religious Revivals: Anti-Ritualism, Liminality, and the Emergence of the American Bourgeoisie” in Sweet, Leonard I., ed., The Evangelical Tradition in America (Macon, Ga., 1984), pp. 199–231;Google Scholar Nancy Hewitt, “The Perimeters of Women's Power in American Religion” in ibid., pp. 233–256.

3. Beginning with the mid-nineteenth century work of Edwards Amasa Park in the Bibliotheca Sacra, the journal of Andover Calvinism, followed by the work of Boardman, George Nye, and Park's student, Frank H.Foster, scholars have tended to trace a systematic and evolutionary development of a supposedly unified New England theology. When this treatment of discrete Calvinist principles includes the writings of Timothy Dwight, Lyman Beecher, and Charles Finney, they are usually given short shrift as derivative and unoriginal. Because the theology of this latter group was more practical than systematic and more women responded to the revivals than men, most scholars have assumed that women had little or no interest in rigorous theological discourse.Google Scholar

4. Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1962), pp. 55–106;Google ScholarWelter, Barbara, “The Feminization of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America” in Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens, Ohio, 1976), pp. 83–102;Google ScholarDouglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977);Google ScholarCott, , Bonds of Womanhood, pp. 126–159.Google ScholarSee also Reynolds, David S., “The Feminization Controversy: Sexual Stereotypes and the Paradoxes of Piety in Nineteenth-Century America,” New England Quarterly 53 (03 1980): 96–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. By orthodoxy I am referring to the Five Points of Calvinism which were defined by the Synod of Don (1618–1619) to oppose the errors of Arminianism. Contained in the Westminster Catechism, which was the credal basis of both Congregational and Presbyterian churches, the points are total depravity, irresistible grace, unconditional election, limited atonement, and the perseverance of the saints.Google Scholar

6. McLoughlin, William G., Jr. in Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York, 1959), pp. 3–165,Google ScholarRevivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago, 1978), pp. 98–129,Google Scholar“Charles Grandison Finney: The Revivalist as Culture Hero,” Journal of American Culture 5 (1982): 80–90,CrossRefGoogle Scholarand “Pietism and the American Character,” American Quarterly 17 (1965): 163–186,CrossRefGoogle Scholarprovides the most extensive treatment of the triumph of Arminianism over Calvinism as the theological side of the sociopolitical movement toward democracy. Others have explained the demise of Calvinism as a consequence of its incompatibility with Enlightenment rationalism, Scottish Common Sense Realism, and the practical concerns of revivalists.Google ScholarSee Mead, Sidney, Nathaniel William Taylor, 1786–1858: A Connecticut Liberal (Chicago, 1942);Google ScholarKuklick, Bruce, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey, (New Haven, 1985), pp. 94–111;Google ScholarAhlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), pp. 418–422;Google ScholarMeyer, Donald H., The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia, 1972), pp. 77–97;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPope, Earl A., “The Rise of the New Haven Theology,” Journal of Presbyterian History 44 (1966): 24–44 and 106–121;Google ScholarOpie, John, “Finney's Failure of Nerve: The Untimely Demise of Evangelical Theology, “Journal of Presbyterian History 51 (1973): 155–173;Google ScholarHaroutunian, Joseph, Piety Versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (New York, 1932);Google Scholarand Guelzo, Allen C., Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Middletown, Conn., 1989).Google ScholarFinney's Arminian influence has been greatly exaggerated by some who have adopted his own distortion of the “hyper-Calvinist” position of New Divinity and Old Calvinist teachings; more credit for Arminianization should go to the Methodists.Google Scholar

7. Even the supposedly moderate evangelical Calvinist papers that attempted to steer clear of doctrinal controversy incorporated incongruous views about what potential converts could or could not do to hasten their rebirth. See the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine, Quarterly Christian Spectator, Religious Intelligencer, the Panoplist, and the New York Evangelist. The latter was launched and subsidized by Finney supporters.Google Scholar

8. The issue of who was and who was not an Edwardsean became so contested during this time that historians have often become confused or have embraced the polemics, making the categorization of New Divinity, Old or Moderate Calvinist, and Hopkinsian highly arguable. Because Samuel Hopkins became the best known of the Edwardsean inner circle for his radical extensions of Calvinist doctrine, his theology was branded a “new divinity” and his associates “Hopkinsians” or “Hopkintonians.” The latter were usually charged with being “hyper-Calvinists” as opposed to moderate New Divinity men. For a good description of the different theological positions of these groups see Breitenbach, William Kern, “New Divinity Theology and the Idea of Moral Accountability,” Ph.D. diss., Yale, 1978. After the work of Timothy Dwight, Nathaniel Taylor, and Lyman Beecher, and the establishment of Andover Seminary, New Divinity and Old Calvinist positions seem to blend into a form of revivalistic or Edwardsean Old Calvinism which I will simply call “Calvinism” or “orthodoxy,” terms which “Edwardseans” used themselves.Google ScholarSee Noll, Mark A., “The Contested Legacy of Jonathan Edwards in Antebellum Calvinism: Theological Conflict and the Evolution of Thought in America,” Canadian Review of American Studies 19 (1988): 149–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Edwards, Jonathan, The Works of President Edwards: in Four Volumes (New York, 1881; orig. pub. 1843), 3:316.Google Scholar

10. Breitenbach, , “New Divinity Theology,” p. 307.Google Scholar

11. Conforti, Joseph A., Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement (Washington, D.C., 1981), p. 118 describes the New Divinity as “Janus-faced,” trying to revive a strict Reformed view of the covenant as an unconditional promise and yet portraying a liberal concept of a benevolent Deity. See also Haroutunian, Piety versus Moralism;Google ScholarMarsden, George M., The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (New Haven, 1970), pp. 31–58;Google ScholarKuklick, , Churchmen and Philosophers, pp. 43–65, 94–111.Google Scholar

12. In psychological terms, the opposition between free will and free grace created the tension that initiated the paradigmatic morphology of conversion. As David W. Kling points out, New Divinity conversions more or less followed the pattern established in Edwards's Faithful Narrative and stayed remarkably similar over time. See Kling, , A Field of Wonders, The New Divinity and Village Revivals in Northwestern Connecticut, 1792–1822 (University Park, Pa., 1993), pp. 195–200.Google ScholarBy the 1820s, revival handbooks such as Tyler's, Bennet book of conversion narratives, New England Revivals, As They Existed at the Close of the Eighteenth, and the Beginning of the Nineteenth Centuries (Boston, 1846) were written to insure that conversion experiences did not change, although they clearly had.Google ScholarSee also Bradley, Joshua, Accounts of Religious Revivals in Many Parts of the United States from 1815 to 1818 (Albany, 1819);Google ScholarColton, Calvin, History and Character of American Revivals of Religion (London, 1832);Google ScholarSprague, William B., Lectures on Revivals, of Religion (Albany, 1832);Google ScholarPorter, Ebenezer, Letters on the Religious Revivals which Prevailed about the Beginning of the Present Century (Boston, 1858);Google Scholarand Brauer, Jerald C., “Conversion From Puritanism to Revivalism,” Journal of Religion 58 (1978): 227–243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Two schools developed within the New Divinity to explain this conundrum. The “tasters” claimed they followed Edwards in arguing that humans had an inborn propensity or taste for sin. The “exercisers,” who felt this would have been the equivalent of physical inability, insisted that sin consisted in voluntary action or exercises, not in a disposition to it. See Kuklick, , Churchmen and Philosophers, pp. 55–59;Google ScholarBreitenbach, , “New Divinity Theology,” pp. 215–235.Google Scholar

14. For good explanations of Taylor's New Haven theology see Pope, “Rise of the New Haven Theology,” parts 1 and 2, and Guelzo, Edwards on the Will, pp. 240–271.Google Scholar

15. McLoughlin, , Modern Revivalism, p. 67.Google ScholarSee also Sweet, Leonard I., “The View of Man Inherent in New Measures Revivalism,” Church History 45 (1976): 206–221, who disagrees with McLoughlin's view of the optimistic implications of Finney's New Measures revivalism.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Finney, Charles Grandison, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, ed. McLoughlin, William G. (Cambridge, 1960, orig. pub. 1835), p. 18. For other references to the necessity of the Spirit's intervention see pp. 9, 59, 99, 102, 108,280,282,316,317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Hopkins, Samuel, The Works of Samuel Hopkins, DD., First Pastor of the Church of Great Barrington, Mass,…With a Memoir of His Life and Character, 3 vols. (Boston, 1852), 1:533.Google Scholar

18. Beecher, Lyman, The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, ed. Cross, Barbara M., 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1962), 2:141.Google ScholarIn attempting to win back Boston from the Unitarians, Beecher expressed views that his orthodox colleagues found anti-Calvinistic. He denied all charges but was tried for heresy in 1835 and afterwards published his Views of Theology which were strictly Old School. 2:120–141, 2:295.Google Scholar

19. Richardson to ABCFM, 5 Dec. 1836, Walker Collection, Box 2, WSU.Google Scholar

20. Anyone advising converts that they need not doubt the reality of their spiritual transformations was said to be welcoming spurious conversions. See Hotchkin, James H., A History of the Purchase and Settlement of Western New York (New York, 1848), p. 170;Google ScholarSprague, , Lectures on Revivals; pp. 226–230;Google ScholarFinney, , Lectures on Revivals, pp. 277–282.Google Scholar

21. Whitman to Mary Walker, 8 March 1841, Whitman Collection, W-3, Whitman College.Google Scholar

22. New York Evangelist, 11 June 1831.Google Scholar

23. Works of Samuel Hopkins, 1:528.Google Scholar

24. Ibid., 2:186.

25. Dwight, Timothy, Theology; Explained and Defended, in a Series of Sermons, 4 vols. (New York, 1830), 2:493.Google Scholar

26. Finney, , Lectures on Revivals, pp. 403–404.Google Scholar

27. “Ought I to Become a Missionary to the Heathen?” in To Advance the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Rufus Anderson, ed. Beaver, R. Pierce (Grand Rapids, 1967), pp. 175–184.Google Scholar

28. Richardson to ABCFM, 5 Dec. 1836, Walker Collection, Box 2, WSU.Google Scholar

29. Spalding to Lorena Hart, 31 March 1834, Spalding Collection, Box 2, WSU.Google Scholar

30. Walker, Mary Diary, 1 Oct. 1836, Walker Collection, Box 2, WSU. On 27 Nov. 1836 and 1 Jan. 1837 her diary again reveals concern about her motives. Unless otherwise noted, Walker refers to Mary Walker sources.Google Scholar

31. Whitman, to Stephen, and Prentiss, Clarissa, 6 10 1841 in Whitman, Narcissa, The Letters of Narcissa Whitman (Fairfield, Wa., 1986), p. 114.Google Scholar

32. In To Advance the Gospel, pp. 180–181, 178, 176.Google Scholar

33. I have found this advice in orthodox journals, newspapers, revival handbooks, and other literature intended for both a general and clerical readership.Google Scholar

34. Whitman to Stephen Prentiss, 28 Sept. 1838 in Whitman, Letters, p. 67.Google Scholar

35. The association of sensational religious experience with femininity can be traced back much further than Edwards, as Amanda Porterfield argues in chapter one of Feminine Spirituality in America: From Sarah Edwards to Martha Graham (Philadelphia, 1980).Google Scholar

36. Diary, Walker, 20 April 1837, Walker Collection, Box 2, WSU.Google Scholar

37. Whitman, to Stephen, and Prentiss, Clarissa, 6 10 1841 in Whitman, Letters, p. 114.Google Scholar

38. Gray, to Walker, Mary, 12 07 1842, Oregon Mission Correspondence, Mss 503, Coe Collection, Yale University; hereafter referred to as Oregon Mission Correspondence.Google Scholar

39. Diary, Walker, 24 Nov. 1839 in First White Women over the Rockies, ed. Drury, Clifford M., 3 vols. (Glendale, Calif., 1963–1966), 2:179.Google Scholar

40. Diary, Eliza Spalding, Spalding Collection, Box 2, WSU. In insisting on human free agency, Taylor claimed that sin was neither inherent nor necessary but, nonetheless, certain. See Guelzo, Edwards on the Will, pp. 240–271.Google Scholar

41. Annual Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston, 1842), p. 51;Google ScholarBrumberg, Joan Jacobs, Mission for Life (New York, 1980), pp. 68–70.Google Scholar

42. Edwards, Jonathan, The Life of David Brainerd, ed. Pettit, Norman (New Haven, 1985). Brainerd's diary became Edwards's most reproduced work and the prototype for the missionary memoir.Google Scholar

43. According to Joseph A. Conforti, missionaries inspired by the book came to view their own work as a personal test of commitment to disinterested benevolence.Google ScholarSee “Jonathan Edward's Most Popular Work: ‘The Life of David Brainerd’ and Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Culture,” Church History (1985) 54: 188–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. Newell's, Harriet life is mentioned almost as frequently as Brainerd's as the source of “deep interest” in missions in Loomis, Elias, ed., Memoirs of American Missionaries (Boston, 1833), a compilation of spiritual biographies of the first generation of ABCFM missionaries.Google Scholar

45. The Life and Writings of Harriet Newell (Boston, n.d.), p. 152.Google Scholar

46. Drury, Clifford M., Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, 2 vols. (Seattle, 1986), 1:104.Google Scholar

47. Greene to Whitman, Marcus, 14 April 1845 in Marcus Whitman, Crusader, eds., Archer, B. and Hulbert, Dorothy P., 3 vols. (Colorado Springs, Colo., 1936–1941), 3:137.Google Scholar

48. Anderson, , “The Theory of Missions to the Heathen” in To Advance the Gospel, p. 83.Google Scholar

49. Tucker, Mark, “Means of a Revival of Religion,” The American National Preacher 7 (02, 1833): 133. The National Preacher was one of the publications the Oregon missionaries asked the board to send them.Google Scholar

50. “The Theory of Missions” in To Advance the Gospel, p. 85 (italics added).Google Scholar

51. Walker to Greene, David, 12 Sept. 1839, Walker Collection, Box 2, WSU.Google Scholar

52. Greene to Eells, Cushing, 12 April 1846, ABC 1.3.2, vol. 8, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University; hereafter referred to as ABC.Google Scholar

53. Whitman, to Prentiss, Stephen, 10 Oct. 1840 in Whitman, Letters, 101.Google Scholar

54. Spalding to Mrs. Allen, C., 29 July 1843, Spalding Collection, S-202, Whitman College.Google Scholar

55. “Manuscript of an Address to Students,” n.d., American Board Archives Personal Papers of Rufus Anderson, quoted in To Advance the Gospel, p. 22;Google Scholar and “The Theory of Missions to the Heathen,” ibid., p. 85.

56. Greene, to Walker, Elkanah and Eells, Cushing, 25 03 1839, and Greene to Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding, 21 March 1839, ABC 1.3.2, vol. 4, ABC;Google ScholarGreene, to Whitman, Marcus, 16 04 1846, ABC 1.3.2, vol. 9;Google ScholarGreene, to Spalding, Henry, 4 11 1837, ABC 1.3.2., vol. 3;Google ScholarGreene, to Whitman, Marcus, 21 03 1839, 2:138Google Scholarand Greene, to Whitman, Marcus, 14 03 1845, in Hulbert, , eds., Marcus Whitman, Crusader, 3:137.Google Scholar

57. The ABCFM regularly published edited portions of missionaries' correspondence in its Missionary Herald so that readers could follow each mission's progress. In this way the organization attracted candidates and, more importantly, raised contributions to fund its operations.Google Scholar

58. In a letter of 11 Nov. 1841 to the board Whitman describes how a young brave pulled his ear. “When he let go I turned the other to him & he pulled that & in that way I let him pull first one & then the other untill he gave over & took off my hat & threw it into the mud.” The same routine was repeated several times with the hat which Whitman kept putting back on although it was dripping with mud. Whitman Collection, W-l, Whitman College.Google Scholar

59. Writing his sister to encourage her interest in the mission, an ABCFM missionary stationed at the Sandwich Islands noted that her “ ‘sex in general [was] much more forward in the pious work of diffusing spiritual knowledge among the heathen than the male.’” Quoted in Wagner, Sandra E., “Sojourners Among Strangers: The First Two Companies of Missionaries to the Sandwich Islands,” Ph.D. diss., University of Hawaii, 1986, p. 164. In 1848 Secretary Anderson wrote the South African mission that he was surprised missionaries were currently having trouble finding wives, considering “how much stronger the missionary spirit is in the female sex, than in the male.”Google ScholarQuoted in Phillips, Clifton J., Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 310.Google Scholar

60. Welter, Barbara, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens, Ohio, 1976), p. 73.Google Scholar

61. Sweet, Leonard I., “The Female Seminary Movement and Woman's Mission in Antebellum America,” Church History 54 (1985): 41–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarThe evangelical concept of usefulness was one of the factors that contributed to the more progressive notion of women's intellectual capacities, Sweet argues. See also Conforti, Joseph A., “Mary Lyon, the Founding of Mount Holyoke College, and the Cultural Revival of Jonathan Edwards,” Religion and American Culture 3 (1993): 69–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62. Nine Years with the Spokane Indians: The Diary, 1838–1848, of Elkanah Walker, ed. Drury, Clifford M. (Glendale, CA, 1976), p. 31.Google Scholar

63. Diary, Walker, 21 04 1839 in Drury, , ed., First White Women, 2:153.Google Scholar

64. Journal, Sarah Smith, 13 06 1838 in Drury, , ed., First White Women, 3:87.Google Scholar

65. Grimshaw, Patricia, “‘;Christian Woman, Pious Wife, Faithful Mother, Devoted Missionary’: Conflicts in Roles of American Missionary Women in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii,” Feminist Studies 9 (1983): 489–521;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPhillips, , Protestant America and the Pagan World, pp. 307–312;Google Scholarand Wagner, , “Sojourners among Strangers,” p. 165.Google Scholar

66. Perkins, to Walker, Mary, 03 1842, Mss 503, Oregon Mission Correspondence.Google Scholar

67. “The Marriage of Missionaries” in To Advance the Gospel, pp. 210–217.Google Scholar

68. Diary, Mary Gray, 30 06 1842, William and Mary Gray Papers, Mss 1202, Oregon Historical Society.Google Scholar

69. Diary, Walker, 5 01 1840 in Drury, , ed., First White Women, 2:183.Google Scholar

70. Whitman, to Walker, Mary, 21 01 1841, Whitman Collection, Mss 1203, Oregon Historical Society.Google Scholar

71. Diary, Smith, 7 01 1839, in Drury, , ed., First White Women, 3:117Google Scholar

72. Finney, , Lectures on Revivals, pp. 58, 99;Google ScholarMassachusetts Missionary Magazine (01. 1804), pp. 342–345;Google ScholarPanoplist (Oct. 1805), pp. 196–199;Google Scholar04 1831, New York Evangelist; Mother's Magazine (Feb. 1834), pp. 24–25,Google Scholaribid. (April 1834), pp. 533–557, ibid. (Sept. 1835), pp. 129–134.

73. Finney, , Lectures on Revivals, p. 59.Google Scholar

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75. Diary, Spalding, 19 03 1838, Spalding Collection, Box 2, WSU.Google Scholar

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77. Whitman to Jane Prentiss, 2 Feb. 1842, ibid., p. 109.

78. Spalding Diary, 8 06 1840, Spalding Collection, Box 2, WSU.Google Scholar

79. Diary, Walker, 5 01 1840, in Drury, , ed., First White Women, 2:183.Google Scholar

80. Walker, Elkanah to Greene, David, 3 10 1842, Walker Collection, Box 2, WSU.Google ScholarSee also Diary, Elkanah Walker, 26 02 1843, in Drury, , ed., Nine Years with the Spokane Indians, p. 232.Google Scholar

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82. Spalding to Mrs. Allen, Dudley, 31 03 1846, Spalding Collection, S-202, Whitman College.Google Scholar

83. Walker, Elkanah Diary, 14 02 1846, in Drury, , ed., Nine Years with the Spokane Indians, p. 342.Google Scholar

84. New School Presbyterians, the Spaldings, and Whitmans made twenty-two converts. The New Divinity Congregationalist Walkers, Eells, and Smiths made none.Google Scholar

85. Whitman, Narcissa to Mrs. Brewer, 7 12 1846, Whitman Collection, W-3, Whitman College.Google Scholar

86. To Mrs. Allen, , 29 07 1843, Spalding Collection, S-202, Whitman College.Google Scholar