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Congregationalism

A Pants-Free Preacher Starts a Bonfire of the Vanities in New London

In 1743, religious enthusiasts ignited a bonfire of the vanities on the docks of New London, Conn. Their deranged leader, James Davenport, preached them into a frenzy as they threw their prized possessions into the blazing fire.

The next night, they did it again.

Then the bonfire of the vanities turned into a bonfire of indecency when James Davenport threw his pants onto the pyre.

New London, Conn., in 1813

New London

Many New England towns were caught up in religious fervor called the First Great Awakening during the 1730s and 1740s. A cross-eyed English minister named George Whitefield helped start it all with speaking tours of America. He delivered a fiery blast of Biblical rhetoric with personal philosophy, and he rose to power and influence.

James Davenport and others followed in Whitefield’s footsteps. They preached that people could find salvation through spiritual rebirth – a rebirth that started with public weeping, groaning and howling.

The ecstatic revival meetings alarmed many of the Puritan leaders. The disorderly assemblies threatened their control of their communities.

Worse, religious revivals upended the belief that some people were destined for salvation, while the rest were out of luck. The Puritan ruling class also believed in a worldly difference between the saved and the unsaved. The saved had wealth, the unsaved did not. The pants-free preacher undermined that convenient belief with the message that anyone could get to heaven.

James Davenport

James Davenport, ironically, came from an old and distinguished Puritan family. He was born in 1716 in Stamford, Conn., the great-grandson of the John Davenport who settled New Haven. A bright child, he entered Yale to follow his father and grandfather into the Puritan ministry. He graduated at the age of 17 and was ordained at 21 in the Congregational church in Southold, Long Island.

The Rev. John Davenport

While in college, James Davenport caught a bad case of religious revivalism.

He didn’t deliver prepared sermons from the pulpit. Instead, he screamed, he sang, he rambled, he ranted about damnation and hellfire, and he whipped his listeners into frenzies. The Boston Evening Post commented, “Were you to see him in his most violent agitations, you would be apt to think that he was a madman just broke from his chains.”

One day in Southold he opened his Bible and pointed to a random passage. God, he thought, spoke to him through that passage and told him to go and denounce another Congregational minister 50 miles away. So he left his parish, traveled to another town and burst into a church – uninvited – in the middle of a service. He called the minister a blind guide leading his parish straight to hell. Twenty parishioners agreed with him and left the church to start their own.

Frenzies

James Davenport got more and more outrageous. He once ranted from the pulpit for 24 hours, then collapsed. When he recovered, he demanded his parishioners write down their confessions.

He prayed and fasted for a mentally ill woman who couldn’t speak. He predicted she would be ‘delivered and recover her speech’ on a certain date. But on that day, she died. Davenport claimed he did deliver her – to heaven.

He started to roam around Connecticut. For four years he crashed religious services and attacked ministers as hell-bound wolves in sheep’s clothing. He also preached in the open air, the way George Whitefield did. He paraded through the streets, preaching at the top of his lungs with his head thrown back and eyes closed. People followed him, howling and singing hymns.

George Whitefield, by John Russell.

Other itinerant preachers also stirred up trouble in New England. Connecticut’s General Assembly finally tried to do something about it. In 1742, the assembly passed, “An Act for Regulating Abuses and Correcting Disorders in Ecclesiastical Affairs,” which punished uninvited preaching. It only took a month for Davenport to get arrested.

A revival meeting during the Second Great Awakening.

Trial

James Davenport turned in one of his most bizarre performances during his trial before the General Assembly. A local newspaper reported,

At one point everyone there heard him ‘vehemently crying out, That he saw hell-flames slashing in their faces; and that they were now! now! dropping down to hell.’

When the sheriff tried to take him away, he shouted, “Lord! thou knowest somebody’s got hold of my sleeve, strike them! Lord, strike them—”. His followers attacked the sheriff and his deputies as they dropped James Davenport down to jail.

The general assembly declared him insane and banished him from Connecticut. He returned to his old parish on Long Island. But he ignored orders to stay home and just preach to his congregation.

Davenport went to Boston, where he disrupted services, held all-night revival meetings and paraded through the streets. The Boston Post reported that the street processions were, ‘attended with so much Disorder that they look’d more like a company of Bacchanalians after a mad Frolick than sober Christians who had been worshipping God.’

But worse than annoying were his attacks on Puritan ministers – which proved extremely popular among Boston’s lower classes. Officials arrested him and, once again, James Davenport went to court.

A jury in Boston declared him insane.

Bonfire of the Vanities

James Davenport then humiliated himself so thoroughly in New London that people still wrote about it hundreds of years later.

After his trial in Massachusetts, he returned to Connecticut. His health had deteriorated, and he had to lean on an assistant to walk. But people in New London had invited him, and he went.

On March 6, 1743, he exhorted his followers to build a bonfire of the vanities. They couldn’t find salvation, he said, unless they burned their idols. And so they burned their books. For hours, a feverish Davenport preached his followers into a frenzy as they threw their books into the fire and danced around it, shrieking. When it finally died out, Davenport announced he would light another bonfire of the vanities the next day.

Unidentified July 3 bonfire, 20th century. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Evil Spirit

And so again he goaded his followers into a state of hysteria. One after the other they threw onto the pyre such finery as silk dresses, petticoats, fans, shoes with red heels, necklaces, wigs and rings.

James Davenport got so caught up in the moment he took off his pants and threw them in the fire.

A woman snatched the pants back and handed them to Davenport. Suddenly the spell that held him for so many years suddenly broke.

The Boston Weekly Post-Boy reported that the person told Davenport he thought the Devil was in him. Davenport said he thought so too. He said God had left him and an evil spirit possessed him.

The crowd melted away from the second bonfire of the vanities.

The next year, he published Mr. James Davenport’s Confessions & Retractions in which he took it all back. He claimed to have an inner peace he’d never before experienced. He got a parish in New Jersey, where he stayed put.

But his health, never good, failed, and he died at the age of 41.

With thanks to David S. New, Christian Fundamentalism in America, A Cultural History. This story was updated in n2021.

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When Calling Someone a New Englander Was an Insult

In November 1852, newspapers in Pennsylvania gave over 650 words to assailing the flaws of the New Englander. In a wide-ranging screed they attacked the region as full of dis-unionists, atheists and abolitionists.

New England, they wrote, “Began its career by burning and hanging Baptists and Quakers, anyone who differed from its Puritanical notions of Religion.”

1860 political cartoon deriding the New Englander, Dividing the National Map (From the Library of Congress).

And it goes downhill from there. The tirade then recounted Massachusetts’ expulsion of Roger Williams and John Adams’ Alien and Sedition acts. It also attacked the region’s opposition to westward expansion and to the War of 1812.

Latest Outrage

In 1852, the region foisted its latest outrage on the new territory of Kansas. New England abolitionists began settling there to create an anti-slavery voting bloc.

Across the country, the expression “New Englandism” gained popularity. Supporters used the term to describe New England’s can-do attitude, its bustling economy and strict religious beliefs. But detractors used it far more often. They said New Englandism meant the anti-slavery sentiments taking root in the Republican Party.

The New Englander, said critics, sought to deprive the nation of slavery. But New England states had, in fact,”‘grown rich by importing slaves from Africa.” Further, they said, the region lives “now in luxury upon the blood and bones of the human beings it thus trafficked in.”

In July of 1858, the Cincinnati Enquirer supported President James Buchanan. The newspaper attacked New England congressmen and senators for voting against Buchanan. This, the newspaper suggested, represented the latest in a long string of New England bad judgment calls.

The region’s flaws included its failure to give even a single electoral vote to Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson when they first ran for president.

In 1859 abolitionist John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry. Newspapers then denounced New England for providing funds for his attack. One southern newspaper noted: “. . . he went back to New England, traveling through its several villages, and collecting money, which was freely contributed.”

By 1863, newspapers in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Indiana lashed out full strength against New England. Through the West and Midwest, newspapers reported, the feeling against New Englandism, “is every day growing more bitter.”

The Entitled New Englander

An Illinois newspaper noted the New Englander from the beginning demanded tribute from the rest of the country. They made others pay homage, “first by commerce, then by protective tariffs, and now, in the abolition of slavery.”

The newspaper then warned New Englanders will try to impose their ‘Unitarianism, Congregationalism, or Independentism,’ as the national religion.

And a newspaper in Indiana applauded the other states considering breaking away from New England. The editors also predicted New England would be left out in the col’ to survive on her “bleak and barren hills.” The region, they said, would be “cast off from the protection and commercial advantages” that it enjoyed from the other U.S. states.

This story about calling someone a New Englander was updated in 2023.

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Stratford Knockings Brought Throngs of Spiritualists to Connecticut

In 1850, the Rev. Eliakim Phelps and his family returned to their home one day –the scene of what was known as the Stratford Knockings – to discover their house draped in black funeral crepe. It hung on the door and over the mirrors, traditionally a sign that someone had recently died.

On one of the beds, they discovered Mrs. Phelps’ nightgown laid out with the arms of her garments folded over the chest, as if worn by a body that was laid to rest in a coffin. While many might have taken this as a threatening sign to move along, for Phelps and his family it was just a fairly routine day in their house.

The Phelps mansion, as everyone at the time knew, was haunted. Two kinds of spirits inhabited it. There were evil ones who broke windows, pricked people with pins and committed other threatening acts like knocking people around. Then there were the helpful spirits who communicated with raps and knocking and brought people lost objects.

Welcome to the age of spiritualism. Spiritualism, within Christian circles, exploded in popularity in 1848 in New York when three young women – the Fox sisters – became celebrities claiming they were communicating with a spirit of a dead person in their home. At that point, the dead began to speak up in a number of places.

Stratford Knockings

On March 10, 1850, the phenomenon moved to Stratford, Conn. Eliakim Phelps, a Congregational minister, told of his shock the first time he discovered his house inhabited by spirits. It happened after church one day, when the family returned home to find the house invaded. Someone or something had thrown around clothes, opened drawers and strewn belongings about.

Suspecting burglary, Phelps took a quick inventory. While the family silver was plain to see, along with money and other valuables, nothing was missing. Puzzled, he assumed that perhaps the burglars had fled upon the family’s return, or had simply lost their nerve.

Illustration from an article about the Stratford knockings in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine

Phelps had owned the mansion for two years. Matthias Nicoll built the house for his daughter Elizah and her husband Captain George Dowdall in 1826. Dowdall made his living in the China trade, and the second floor of the house looked like the upper deck of a sailing vessel. Dowdall died in China several years after he built the house. He never used it as he intended — as a retirement home, as he intended.

Phelps acquired it and used it seasonally, also spending time in Philadelphia with his blended family. Both he and his wife had lost their spouses and both brought children to the marriage. They had a three-year-old together.

Potatoes and Books

In the days ahead, more strange things began occurring. Books, fireplace tools, a potato began appearing in odd locations. Things fell from the shelves and objects disappeared from locked containers. Windows were smashed.

Phelps began consulting others, including ministers and spiritual investigators, to figure out what was going on.

The newspapers, meanwhile, heard of the Stratford Knockings and began publishing accounts of the strange happenings. Since everyone loves a good haunting or curse, curious strangers began stopping by, hoping to glimpse an unusual event or witness the Stratford knockings first hand. The events were well documented in popular books about spiritualism, including Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms, Its Consistencies and Contradictions, published in 1855. Phelps spent a good deal of time explaining and defending the stories about the house.

Spiritualism, meanwhile, was exploding in popularity, with both defenders and detractors drawing crowds to debate its merits.

Harry Phelps

In the Phelps home, 11-year-old Harry seemed to receive the most visits by the spirits, and people declared him a medium. Séances were held, and the spirits tapped out answers to questions, explaining at one point that they were smashing windows and disrupting the house purely for the fun of it.

In the fall, the family left for Philadelphia. Phelps sent the rest of the family along ahead of him, curious to find out if the “happenings” would continue. They diminished, but he still observed the odd item falling to the floor. Or else he found it in the wrong place.

When the family returned in 1851, the strange occurrences restarted, with objects going missing. Conversations with ghosts via rapping on the table continued. Friendly spirits would help the family locate lost objects. But evil ones set fire to Phelps’ papers.

All the while, newspapers, ministers, spiritualists and skeptics had a field day arguing over the merits of the Stratford Knockings story. The Phelps family left Stratford in 1852 and sold the house to the publisher of the New York Sun, Moses Beach, in 1859. Beach’s paper, like many other publications, made hay with the Phelps story.

Witchcraft?

Over the years, the hauntings were legendary in town. Some speculated that they had a connection to the death of Goody Bassett, a woman hanged near the house in 1651 for witchcraft.

Most, however, believed Phelps’ bored, much-younger wife and his stepchildren created the story to liven up their sleepy lives in Stratford. Given that events largely started and stopped whenever Harry left or rejoined the household, most of the blame has focused on him. It’s unclear if Phelps had joined the conspiracy or if his family duped him.

The house itself has long since been demolished, and the Stratford Knockings haven’t been reported in many years.

This story about the Stratford Knockings was updated in 2022.

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