Benjamin Colman (1673–1747) is best remembered as the minister of Boston's Brattle Street Church. In the historiography of New England, the church's 1698 founding signaled a change in colonial Congregationalism. Under Massachusetts's new charter (1691), religious alternatives to the traditional church establishment gained protections, and the church's organizers took the opportunity to establish Brattle Street along slightly different lines. While it aligned with many congregational practices, it also embraced broader access to baptism and omitted the requirement that prospective members relate (and be judged for) their conversion experiences. The church was also determined not to hold itself aloof from other Protestants with broadly similar beliefs, supporting a more tolerant approach to religious difference. These attributes made Brattle Street attractive to Bostonians who wanted to have their children readily baptized, to avoid publicly recounting their personal faith experiences, and to interact with those of other Protestant orientations on an equal footing. Benjamin Colman, a Boston-born and Harvard-trained clergyman, returned from his post in Bath, Somerset (England) to lead the church. The values Colman expressed by accepting the position as Brattle Street's minister also shaped his decades’ long correspondence—an epistolary record that stands at the center of William R. Smith's book.
Colman embodied, in Smith's estimation, a new sensibility among Protestant leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. Having traveled to England as a young man, master's degree in hand, Colman was exposed to the culture of Dissent then emerging in England after the Glorious Revolution. Dissent was a new legal category created out of the revolutionary settlement, in which Protestants outside of the Church of England were tolerated within England; the settlement further endorsed the idea of multiple establishments within the empire, each with local authority. One tie that bound all Protestants in Britain and the empire was their shared hostility to Catholicism. This loosening of the restrictions on nonconformity prompted dissenters of various stripes (especially Presbyterians and Congregationalists, known in England as Independents) to work closely together. Colman wholeheartedly supported this change, and indeed found friendships among his Presbyterian colleagues. He returned to Boston in 1699 with numerous contacts in England and Scotland with whom he would correspond until his death in 1747. Smith uses this correspondence to chart out a dissenting network and to uncover the Protestant and imperialist goals of this group.
The Dissenting Interest aimed to promote its own position and Christianity more generally within the empire. Participants in the Interest wrote histories that established a dissenting identity, and for this discussion Smith focuses in particular on Daniel Neal's History of New England (1720) and Robert Wodrow's The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, 2 vols. (1721–1722). The two locations under study in these works each had a historic religious establishment distinct from England's official church, and the two histories shared approval of toleration and advocacy for dissent. In addition to these histories, dissenters worked to make books widely available, envisioning Protestant libraries scattered throughout the British Atlantic. Creation and support of libraries was part of a larger missionary effort (both Anglican and Dissenting), one that stretched through the British Isles, the colonies, and into native communities. Interestingly the Dissenting Interest did not care to reprint the Indian-language bible that had been the central accomplishment of mid-seventeenth-century missionary efforts, since they wanted to promote not simply understanding of the Christian message but literacy in English in support of the British imperial agenda.
A drawn-out property dispute over land provided to support a mission in Rhode Island became another of Colman's concerns, as men on both sides of the Atlantic watched the many twists in a case that finally rewarded Dissenter over the Church of England claims to the land. The case ultimately hinged on definitions of orthodoxy and the legitimacy of local religious establishments. The outcome in favor of the Dissenters’ claim affirmed the interpretation—a religious version of legal pluralism—that local church authority exercised equal power within a multifaith empire.
For Colman, as for many other clergymen in New England, midcentury revivals seemed a literal godsend that would revitalize religion but became a source of conflict and disappointment. The account makes clear how letters sent through the networks that Colman had long cultivated could be used to unintended ends. That Colman played a role in bringing Jonathan Edwards’ A Faithful Narrative (famously recounting events in Northampton) to public notice without his permission was telling, given that Colman's own letters would sometimes be used for purposes other than his own. Smith charts Colman's shifting relationship with George Whitefield and the grand itinerate’s own relationship to empire. By this period, in the 1740s, Colman was aging and losing many of his correspondents to death. His epistolary world was contracting, but it was also changing: the hope for Protestant dissent to play a leading role in empire was fading—a point he makes by contrasting Samuel Davies's mid-1750s visit to Britain with the one that Colman had made more than half a century before.
Smith's book uses Colman's network to uncover the major concerns of the early-eighteenth-century Protestant leaders outside the Church of England in New England (and to a lesser extent England and Scotland). The letters themselves are not Smith's focus, and in that regard this work is not occupied with the writing or sending of these many missives. He quotes comparatively little from the correspondence, further suggesting that the politics of Dissenting Interest is his main emphasis. Letters as objects are rather more assumed than studied, valued for their content in limning out issues and connections. Benjamin Colman's Epistolary World aims at and largely delivers a solid discussion of transatlantic religious politics in the late Stuart and early Hanoverian eras.
