Portland Bound!

Tomorrow I head to Portland, Oregon for the Spring conference of the American Society of Church History (ASCH). On Saturday afternoon, I will be giving a paper at one of the sessions entitled, "A Pelican in the Wilderness: Charles Nisbet on Pennsylvania Frontier Life." If you attend the conference, please say hello.

In the Middle Ages, the pelican was a common Christian image used to symbolize Christ, who suffered on behalf of humanity. Taken from Psalm 102:6, the medieval pelican was depicted as piercing its own breast in order to feed its young. I argue that in the same way as the symbolic pelican who suffered for the sake of its young, Charles Nisbet positioned himself as a Christian martyr who endured the hardships of frontier life in Pennsylvania in order to educate the students at Dickinson College.

Below is the abstract for my presentation.

This paper is based on original research and analysis of over 150 manuscript letters written by the Scottish minister Charles Nisbet (1736–1804) who emigrated to America. In 1785 Nisbet traveled to Carlisle, Pennsylvania to become the first principal of Dickinson College, one of the nation’s earliest institutions. As an outspoken advocate for the American cause during the War of Independence, and a friend and colleague of John Witherspoon, Nisbet was the favorite choice for Benjamin Rush and the other trustees at Dickinson College. Rush had helped secure Witherspoon as the president of the College of New Jersey in 1768, and wanted to invite another orthodox Scottish Presbyterian minister to head this new educational venture at Carlisle. But unlike Witherspoon, Nisbet failed to appreciate America. Soon after his arrival in Pennsylvania, Nisbet’s relationship with Rush and the other trustees deteriorated. The new principal resented the absolute control of the trustees over the college, and quarreled with them for years about the late payments of his salary. Nisbet found America to be an overall distasteful place to live, especially for a man of letters living on the Pennsylvania frontier. The sweltering heat of the summers, the unmotivated students, and the uncultured atmosphere of Carlisle with its Francophile residents all contributed to his general contempt for a nation that he once admired. Ignored by the trustees and feeling like an exile (he referred to himself as a “pelican in the wilderness”), Nisbet used his letters to lash out at the sources of his frustrations. This alleviated some of the tensions of living in America while also irritating the trustees at Dickinson College. 

Spring ASCH Conference in Portland, OR

A draft of the spring conference of the American Society of Church History in Portland, Oregon, April 4-7 is now available to download on the ASCH website. I haven't been back to the Pacific Northwest since my graduate school days at Regent College in Vancouver. It will be fun to visit with some of my friends who now live in the Portland area.

I am putting the finishing touches on my paper, which will be in Session V, from 1:45pm-3:30pm on Saturday, April 6:

Revivalism and Religious Change

Chair: Dale E. Soden, Whitworth University

David M. Powers, Independent Scholar

Preaching on the “Western” Frontier: What the People of Springfield, Massachusetts Heard in the 1640s

Keith Lyon, University of Tennessee

Sacredness and Sociability in God’s Brush Arbor: Camp Meeting Culture, 1800-1860

Jonathan Yeager, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

A Pelican in the Wilderness: Charles Nisbet on Pennsylvania Frontier Life

Keith E. Beebe, Whitworth University

Setting the Record Straight: Evangelical Redactions of Religious Experience in Scotland’s First Oral History Project

Respondent: Dale E. Soden, Whitworth University

After researching for my book on John Erskine, and putting together the excerpts for Early Evangelicalism: Reader, I continue to be intrigued with Charles Nisbet, a Scottish minister who emigrated to Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the mid-1780s to become the first principal of Dickinson College (For information on Nisbet's emigration, including Erskine's and Benjamin Rush's role, see my book, Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine, chapter 7, "The Friend to America") .

Unlike his friend and older colleague John Witherspoon, Nisbet's experience in America was anything but enjoyable. I have read nearly all Nisbet's one hundred plus extant letters, and I would conservatively estimate that he complains in about 90% of these, with caustic references pertaining to American politicians, the economy, the trustees of Dickinson College, the students, his family (his son became an alcoholic in the years following his emigration to Pennsylvania), the food, the weather, and the intellectual culture. I can't think of any subject related to America that Nisbet holds back from criticizing.

The irony is that while living in Scotland Nisbet was an outspoken supporter of the colonists during the American Revolution. At one time during the conflict, he supposedly delivered a sermon from Daniel chapter 5 in which Nisbet compared the divine message of judgment to the Babylonian ruler Belshazzar, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin," with Britain's oppressive government. In my paper, I intend to offer a reason for why Nisbet changed his opinion about America, and further why he chose to use the medium of letters to vent his frustrations. We'll see how it goes. I'm currently finishing up some background reading on Scottish emigration to America in the eighteenth century. I intend to draft a longer version of my paper into a journal article that is suitable for submission.