American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
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    • The Congregationalists >
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    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
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    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

DAVENPORT, JAMES

(1716, Stamford, CT-I0 November 1757, near Pennington, New Jersey). Education: B.A., Yale College, 1732; studied theology in New Haven, CT, 1732-35. Career: Minister, Southold, NY, 1738-44; minister, several churches in NJ, 1744-57.

William B. Sprague called him, "the celebrated James Davenport, of fanatical memory." Davenport is rightly known as the most radical of the Congregational ministers of the Great Awakening era. He actually anticipated the Awakening, preaching revivalistic sermons in his Southold, Long Island, church in 1739 before the revival swept New England. His extravagance was apparent at that time when he preached a twenty-four-hour sermon to his congregation. He is said to have needed several days of rest after this exercise, and one hopes his parishioners were given the same consideration.

Davenport then began preaching as an itinerant in various parts of New England. He argued that a personal spiritual experience is the essence of all religion and that only ministers who have had such experiences are qualified to preach. Moreover, he claimed that he had the insight to determine just who had received this saving grace-and who had not. He told his audiences he would rather that they drank poison than that they listened to the preaching of an unconverted minister. Often he made these statements after having "invaded" the parish of a minister who had not agreed to let him speak.

Anne Hutchinson* had been equally self-assured a century before, and like Hutchinson, Davenport discovered that ministers disliked the claim that they were unconverted. George Whitefield* had said that he knew no one who "kept so close a walk with God" as Davenport. But many ministers reckoned he walked closer to the devil. With clerical support in 1742, Connecticut passed an Act for Regulating Abuses and Correcting Disorders in Ecclesiastical Affairs. The act outlawed the kind of free-lance itinerant preaching Davenport and others had been practicing. Davenport was tried by courts in Connecticut and
Massachusetts and found insane, but he managed to avoid confinement, and in 1743 in the most famous act of his ministry, he presided over a great bonfIre in New Haven, into which he and his followers threw ornaments, clothes, and books.

While others concluded that they had seen too much of Davenport, his parishioners in Southold complained that they had seen too little of their wandering parson and voted to censure him. Whether from exhaustion or enlightenment, Davenport recanted his behavior in 1744 and published Confessions and Retractions. He lived the remainder of his life in obscurity, with a series of appointments to parishes in the Puritan hinterland of New Jersey.
In retrospect Davenport seems an eccentric, a "loose cannon" in Congregational history. But it is better to think of him as a man who carried to an extreme a belief that was common among early Congregationalists-that the essence of religion is heartfelt communion with God.

Bibliography
A: A Song of Praise for Joy in the Holy Ghost (Boston, 1742); The Reverend Mr. James Davenport's Confessions and Retractions (Boston, 1744).
B: AAP 3, 80-92; DAB 5, 84-85; DARB, 121-22.