George Whitefield is remembered as one of the most influential preachers of the 18th century. A co-founder of Methodism alongside John and Charles Wesley and a major force in the First Great Awakening, Whitefield’s legacy is often told as one of religious revival and passion. But behind his celebrated sermons lies a lesser-known and disturbing truth: he used slave labor to fund his charitable endeavors and campaigned for the legalization of slavery in Georgia.
Whitefield was born in 1714 in Gloucester, England, to a struggling innkeeper’s family. He rose from humble beginnings, eventually enrolling at Oxford University, where he joined the “Holy Club” alongside John and Charles Wesley. In time he broke off from the holy club to become a leading voice in the evangelical movement.
By the time he arrived in the American colonies, Whitefield was already a religious celebrity. His sermons were dramatic, emotional, and unlike anything people had heard before.
Yet as passionate as he was about winning souls for his God, Whitefield was equally practical when it came to funding his ministry. His most ambitious project was Bethesda Orphanage, founded near Savannah, Georgia, in 1740. It was a noble vision: to care for orphaned boys, educate them, and raise them within a Christian environment. But noble intentions did not exempt him from moral compromise.
At the time Whitefield began building Bethesda, slavery was banned in Georgia. The colony’s trustees had hoped to create a society without the moral and social pitfalls they associated with slavery. But to Whitefield, this prohibition was a financial burden. He believed the orphanage couldn’t be sustained without enslaved African labour. So, in the late 1740s, Whitefield became one of the most vocal advocates for legalizing slavery in the colony.
His reasoning was blunt: “Had Negroes been allowed, I should now have had a sufficiency to support a great many orphans without expending above half the sum that has been laid out,” he wrote. He lobbied the Georgia trustees relentlessly and eventually got his wish. Slavery was legalized in 1751, due in no small part to Whitefield’s pressure.
Soon after, he began purchasing enslaved Africans to work at both the orphanage and his adjoining Providence Plantation. These enslaved Africans not only toiled in the fields but also supported the financial stability of Bethesda. Whitefield’s desire to keep the orphanage running, noble on its surface, became entangled with one of the most brutal institutions of his time. When he died in 1770, he left behind not only the land and buildings of Bethesda but also 49 enslaved Africans, whom he willed to his patron, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon.
The Christian Case for Slavery?
Whitefield, like many other religious leaders of his time, offered biblical justifications for slavery. Verses like Ephesians 6:5; “Slaves, obey your earthly masters”, were frequently used to defend the institution.
Whitefield’s stance on slavery was not without contradictions. At one point, he condemned Southern slaveholders for their harsh treatment of enslaved people, expressing outrage that dogs were often treated with more kindness than the humans held in bondage. But even as he criticized the abuses of slavery, he never condemned the system itself. He viewed it instead as a necessary institution. For Whitefield, the enslavement of Africans was regrettable but justifiable, especially if it served the dual purpose of spreading Christianity and funding the care of orphans.
Whitefield’s support for slavery was very different from the views of his fellow Methodist founder, John Wesley, who condemned slavery in the strongest terms, calling it “the sum of all villainies.” Wesley wrote passionately about the horrors of slavery and urged Christians to renounce it.
Wesley saw slavery as incompatible with the Gospel. Whitefield, by contrast, believed that enslaved Africans could be both productive labourers and faithful Christians, so long as they were treated “humanely.” Yet even this notion was flawed. There is no humane way to commodify and exploit another human being for profit.
This divide played out not only in print and pulpit but also in public memory. In 2020, during the George Floyd protests, activists called out monuments that celebrated figures with slaveholding pasts. A statue of Whitefield on the University of Pennsylvania campus was quietly removed, its ties to slavery too glaring to ignore. Wesley’s name, by contrast, has been far less controversial among Methodists, even as the denomination wrestles with its own history.
Whitefield’s defenders sometimes point to his efforts to treat enslaved Africans “kindly” or to educate black children at Bethesda. These details, however, do not erase the fact that he was a slaveholder who campaigned for the legalization of slavery and used the profits of forced labour to sustain his charitable work.
His orphanage, Bethesda, still exists today as Bethesda Academy, a private boys’ school in Savannah. It no longer bears the burden of enslaved labor, but it stands as a living legacy of Whitefield’s controversial vision, an institution built on Christian ideals, but funded through human bondage.
Sources:
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/george-whitefield-1714-1770/
https://www.thedp.com/article/2020/07/penn-whitefield-statue-removal
