Baptists in Early North America Volume 3 - Newport, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptists

I read Janet Thorngate’s book in one day and thoroughly enjoyed it - and the escape from the 21st Century. If you have an interest in the denomination or the period, you’ll find it a delightful and very informative journey.

Having come across them first over 35 years ago, the Seventh Day Baptists are like old friends - who I didn’t know as well as I should have. The opportunity to exchange a few thoughts with Dr Thorngate was a great opportunity and is reflected below in this response to the book. 

Baptists in Early North America—Newport, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptists is volume 3 of a series about Baptist history in early North America. The Seventh Day Baptists are a unique identity within the Baptist world and they are the least well-known grouping. This book will help dispell that relative invisibility by illustrating their historical credentials.

The series itself provides a significant contribution to religious and Baptist scholarship, recovering never-before-published original records and manuscripts for students, scholars, and genealogists.

The story of the Newport Seventh Day Baptists begins in 1664 when some members of Newport’s first Baptist church began meeting for worship on the seventh-day Sabbath (Saturday). The documents which are the core of the book follow them through the first 137 years of their life as the Newport Seventh Day Baptist (SDB) Church.

The transcriptions of the church’s first three record books (1692–1808) are preceded by extensive excerpts from the manuscripts and letters of Samuel Hubbard, one of the founding members. These document the origins in John Clarke’s Newport Baptist church and the influences from Sabbath keeping Baptists in mid-seventeenth century England (also old friends).

The record follows the covenant community, nurtured in colonial Rhode Island’s unique religious freedom, from Newport’s pioneer period through its Golden Age as a major colonial seaport and its devastation during the Revolutionary War.

Scattered membership could be found east and south into Plymouth Colony and Martha’s Vineyard and west to Westerly and Hopkinton, Rhode Island, and New London, Connecticut. The members were a surprisingly diverse group from Native Americans, African-American ‘servants’ to Rhode Island Governors and wealthy merchants.

Governor Samuel Ward (1725-1776),
image cropped from Rootsweb via Wikipedia.

Although I have some ancestors who were in the region at the time none that I know of where members of the congregation. I was entertained to discover, however, that I am a 14^th cousin of Governor Samuel Ward (1725-1776) who was a member of the church. Our common ancestor is further back in time.

The congregation had involvement with other Baptists in founding Rhode Island College (now Brown University). and through the Second Great Awakening, then joined with other congregations to form the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference in 1802.

I was particularly interested in the reference to the English Sabbatarians in the detailed historical introduction and got a much better sense of the cross Atlantic support which the Newport seventh day Baptists and their English cousins gave each other.

Dr Peter Chamberlen was one of many who offered support. He was a prominent and often provocative character who was ‘protected’ from imprisonment in England because he was regarded by the Royals as an excellent doctor. Like other Sabbath-keeping churches of the period (including the Rhode Island churches), his congregation did not produce a written statement of beliefs; they were aiming to ‘grow in grace and knowledge’ and didn’t wish to assume that they ‘had it all’. However, he did promote the ‘formula’ of ‘keeping the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus’. These two concepts are exemplified by Sabbath keeping and believer’s baptism - the hallmarks of SDBs. 

The record books provide some compelling insights into the lives of the New England Sabbatarians and their times and illustrate the changes in congregational preoccupations over the period.

Thorngate’s thorough work identifies the individuals in the original documents spelling out their relationships to paint pictures which help us see the real people.

There is obviously still a rich vein of original material from this period on either side of the Atlantic to be mined. 

Although not a focus of the book, the formation of the SDB denomination is something accomplished immediately after the period that this book covers. It was the process whereby different church groups considered joining and some chose not to. I’m intrigued by the possibility that the times may have produced independent Sabbatarian groups as well.

In England, there never really was an SDB denomination formed and at this stage, there is no evidence that any separatists became independent Sabbatarian groups in America after the Rogerenes. This group broke from the SDBs in Connecticut in the 1680s, lasting into the 19th century but they ceased to be Sabbatarian by about 1700 (see Thorngate’s introduction page lxxii-lxxiii).

However, the earliest Pennsylvania and New Jersey SDB churches were not ‘daughter churches’ of the Rhode Island bodies (having totally separate origins) but early on sought fellowship with each other, somewhat formalized through their many loosely organized yearly meetings.

When the conference was forming, the main issues discouraging union were, as is often the case, governance issues, not theological questions, but the churches which ultimately chose not to join were all short-lived. For the next 200 years, churches formed that called themselves Seventh Day Baptist (some independently, some 'daughters') and there are lists of them identifying which joined and which didn’t join the General Conference (for example in Seventh Day Baptists in Europe and America, volume 2) but none became independent Sabbatarian groups.

The later 19th century origins of Seventh-day Adventists and Church of God Seventh-Day groups have separate histories. It seems that no-one yet has carefully researched the relationships between SDBs and the emerging 19th century Sabbath-keeping Church of God groups. There may have been an SDB ‘association of churches’ in the American Midwest in areas which some participating churches were or eventually became ‘Church of God’ congregations. Many American churches took part in a regional association but never joined the SDB Conference. Internationally there has often been cross-fertilisation of Sabbatarian groups - often described differently by believers and historians.

But to return to the book and its direct concerns...

Ronald Angelo Johnson, PhD, of the Department of History at Texas State University, is better placed to judge the work academically. His review in Baptist History and Heritage, Summer 2018, shows he was clearly impressed: ‘The study exhibits an incomparable grasp of denominational historiography…’. His conclusion?

‘The distinctive life of the Seventh Day Baptist Church, the volume’s diverse collection of records, and Thorngate’s impressively details footnotes will inform future histories of the church and the city…’

A powerful recommendation.

Baptists in Early North America Volume 3 - Newport, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptists is published by Mercer University Press.

Janet Thorngate

Janet Thorngate author of
Baptists in Early North America Volume 3 -
Newport, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptists.

Janet Thorngate is chairman of the Seventh Day Baptist Council on History (formerly the Seventh Day Baptist Historical Society) and former librarian of the Seventh Day Baptist Historical Library and Archives.

She has degrees in English and History from Salem College and West Virginia University (MA) and has taught Church History at the Seventh Day Baptist School of Ministry and English at Salem International University and West Virginia University.