A Great Awakening Conversion: The Relation of Samuel Belcher

Abstract

M ANY New England churches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries required applicants for full membership to deliver a short narrative or of their experience of converting grace. A number of such relations have been published, and the genre has received some monographic attention.' These documents provide insight into congregational practices and cast light on the broad spectrum of lay religiosity. The relation printed here is unusual in that it comes not from the seventeenth century, as most do, but from the eighteenth-from the period of the Great Awakening. The speaker was Samuel Belcher, born in I703/4, in Dedham, Massachusetts, a son of the Reverend Joseph Belcher.2 We know very little of his life. A saddler by trade, he settled in I730 in the Connecticut town of East Windsor, where, two years later, he married into the prominent Stoughton family.3 His wife belonged to the First Society there, and we find Samuel listed in the account book of its minister, Timothy Edwards, as paying his share of the ministerial rate from I735 to I740, when he was a halfway member.4He died in I756 in the battle of Crown Point during the French and Indian War.5