Author: George Whitefield

George Whitefield preached to crowds no building could hold, crossed the Atlantic thirteen times, and did more than anyone to make the revival of the 1730s and 1740s a transatlantic event; Benjamin Franklin, who printed him and did not share his religion, measured how far the voice carried. He founded the Bethesda orphanage in Georgia in 1740, at a point when the colony still banned slavery. From 1747 he lobbied to have that ban lifted, arguing that the orphanage and the colony alike needed the labour. Georgia legalised slavery in 1751, in no small part because of him, and he then bought enslaved Africans to work at Bethesda and on the plantation he ran beside it. An open letter of 1740 had rebuked slaveholders for cruelty without ever objecting to the institution itself. He died at Newburyport in Massachusetts in September 1770 and was buried beneath the pulpit there. The journals and the sermons are the record of the preaching; the plantation is the record of the rest.