Colonial Presbyterianism
Presbyterianism is a hierarchically and geographically arranged denomination in which congregational representatives in a given locale form governing presbyteries.
These combine into broader regional synods and, at the national level, a General Assembly. Presbyterianism was organized by Scottish Calvinists in the 16th century, many of whom, facing royal disfavor, later migrated to Ireland and then, as “Scotch-Irish,” to the English colonies. There, Presbyterianism grew from small beginnings in the 17th century to become large and powerful—if volatile—by the time of the Revolution.Presbyterians worshiped by 1611 in Jamestown and by the 1630s in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where they associated comfortably with the doctrinally identical Congregationalists. But they concentrated early in the middle colonies. In Long Island and New Jersey, Puritan migrants from New England founded several churches between 1640 and 1700. In Maryland, Scotch-Irish missionary Francis Makemie (1658–1708), who arrived in 1683, founded churches and evangelized along the coast. In 1706, his and six other churches formed a Presbytery of Philadelphia that brought Scotch-Irish, Scots, English, and Welsh Calvinists into tense fellowship. This and presbyteries founded over the following decade at Newcastle, Delaware, and on Long Island formed the Synod of Philadelphia in 1717.
The denomination’s geographic, ethnic, and doctrinal balance shifted during the half century after 1714, when the policies of England’s new Hanover monarchy drove about 200,000 Scotch-Irish and about 50,000 Scottish Presbyterians to the colonies. Most arrived in Philadelphia, moving into western Pennsylvania and then southward through the Shenandoah Valley into western Virginia and the Carolinas.
Conflict ensued between the Scotch-Irish and Scottish of the middle colonies, who emphasized doctrinal correctness, and the English of New York and New England, who emphasized personal experience over doctrinal formulas. The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s intensified this conflict. Now Scotch-Irish immigrant William Tennent Sr. (1673?—1746) and his sons embraced revivalism, preached across the Delaware Valley, formed a prorevival Scotch-Irish group that aligned with the English party, attracted followers to their “New Side” Presbyterianism throughout the middle colonies, founded a “Log College” in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, to train revival preachers, and gathered sympathetic congregations into a New Brunswick (New Jersey) presbytery. In 1741, the antirevival (“Old Side”) Synod of Philadelphia ejected New Brunswick, which joined with like-minded presbyteries to form the Synod of New York in 1745.
New Side Presbyterianism flourished, attracting more and more ministers and spreading into western Pennsylvania and the Southern backcountry. It provided the major impulse behind the 1746 founding of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), whose graduates opened “log colleges” in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and, later, the trans-Appalachian West. In the decades that followed, New Side itinerant revivalists sparked denominational growth among the Scotch-Irish and others settling the Virginia and Carolina back-country. In 1758—by which time the New Side dominated outside the Philadelphia area’s Old Side Scotch-Irish enclave—Old Side leaders rejoined them in the Synod of New York and Philadelphia.
By the eve of the American Revolution, Presbyterians were outnumbered only by Congregationalists. They were a particularly strong force in the back-country South, figuring prominently in the 1780s drive to disestablish Anglicanism. Having used revivalism to reach an expanding frontier population, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, which convened its first General Assembly in 1788, was well prepared for the competitive and pluralistic religious environment of the new nation.