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chapter two The Early Years of Evangelical Institution Building, 1858–1883 “Good! You’ve Got the Fire in You” In order to set the context of evangelical beginnings in social reform it is necessary to go back twenty years prior to the 1877 Moody revival, to a time immediately preceding the Civil War when postmillennial optimism coursed through the veins of New England evangelicals still fired with the enthusiasm of abolition. When the slaves were emancipated and the Civil War was won, evangelicals turned to other social evils to destroy as the holiness movement itself was revived. The arrival of large numbers of Irish immigrants on the Boston streets in the 1840s and their accompanying poverty were a serious challenge to everyone in the city. Evangelicals’ uncouth social reform and revivalism efforts were ways they addressed the challenge of urban poverty. The vigor of evangelical institution building was impressive immediately prior to the Civil War. The contributions of Henry Morgan, Eben Tourjée, and Charles Cullis in addition to the Methodist founders of Boston University and the mostly Baptist origins of the orphanage Home for Little Wanderers powerfully illustrate the “age of energy” for organizing new institutions.1 Morgan, Tourjée, and Cullis approached revivalism and social reform differently from one another, but they were all enthusiastic followers and promoters of the holiness movement in the three different denominations they represented—the Independent Methodists, the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Episcopal Church. henry morgan Colorful, charismatic, and complex characters dominated the Boston religious scene in the years prior to the Moody revival. Many of them, of course, were not evangelicals. William Ellery Channing (d. 1842), Ralph Waldo Emerson (d. 1865), Edward Everett (d. 1865), and many other famous Bostonians set a high standard for oratory and poetry. But Unitarian and Transcendentalist leaders were not the only speakers to whom Bostonians flocked in the middle of the nineteenth century. There were many evangelical preachers, relatively unknown today, who carved out a new space for themselves in Boston and departed from Unitarian patterns of speech and thought. Bostonians 34 · Evangelicals at a Crossroads became eager listeners of these new revivalist preachers, who also introduced brazen efforts in social reform that failed to satisfy the tastes of more elite Bostonians. Henry Morgan was the most colorful evangelical preacher of mid – to latenineteenth -century Boston. Born in 1825 and thus twelve years older than Moody, Henry Morgan had first visited Boston in the early 1850s—a few years before the still-Unitarian Moody. He did not stay, but he was inspired enough to soon return. During his first visit, Morgan stayed at a North End sailors’ boardinghouse and met the old Methodist sea captain turned evangelist “Father” Edward Taylor. Scholars believe that Taylor was the real-life counterpart of Father Mapple in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.2 Taylor had a rapid-fire preaching style and passion for saving the lost souls of sailors who came to his Seamen’s Bethel in Boston’s North End. Taylor had also participated in the camp meeting revivals Methodists sponsored on Cape Cod in the 1850s.3 Morgan preached at Father Taylor’s Seamen’s Bethel and fondly recalled receiving a pat on the shoulder from the seaman preacher, who told him “Good! You’ve got the fire in you!” Father Taylor and Morgan had similar personalities: both were gruff yet passionate. Since Morgan had lost his father at a young age, he may have found Taylor’s fatherly encouragement especially significant. Morgan did not remain in Boston at this time but rather continued on his independent preaching/lecturing travels “among the poor and prisoners in various states” from Vermont to Virginia in the years immediately preceding the onset of the Civil War.4 Throughout his journeys, Morgan proudly carried the unique title “P.M.P” after his name. “Poor Man’s Preacher” was his badge of honor as a Methodist preacher, yet he was finding himself strangely unwelcome as that denomination increased in its respectability and distance from the poor. But Morgan loved Methodism; his failed attempts to be ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church would be one of the biggest disappointments of his life. During one visit back home in Connecticut, while recuperating from one of his frequent illnesses, Morgan sought official denominational confirmation of his well-tested vocation as a preacher. A Methodist Quarterly Conference consisting of nine persons voted by a slim majority not to allow Morgan to move forward to ordination in...

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