Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England

The question of how religious and political languages interacted in the pulpit of the American Revolution has engaged scholars in literature, religion, intellectual history, symbolic anthropology, and American studies for over a generation. Drawing on recent work in ritual studies and the history of the sermon in colonial America, Weber enters the debate over the contexts of the mobilizing agency of revolutionary discourse through analysis of manuscript sermons, diaries, and letters of both evangelical and rationalist orators. By recreating the mental worlds of five individual ministers, this book dramatizes the rhetorical struggle of the clergy to make narrative sense out of the social and political upheaval around them and describes how patriot ministers eased their congregations through the bewildering passage from dependence to independence. In the process, it highlights the continuities in preaching modes from Awakening to Revolution as it reveals how the changing forms of ministerial discourse anticipate the eventual displacement of the evangelical clergy to the margins of social and communicative power by the end of the century.