The New England Contribution to Colonial American Presbyterianism

Abstract

The contributions made to American Presbyterianism during the colonial period by those of its members who were of New England stock have never been adequately recognized. For various reasons this contribution was so greatly minimized during the nineteenth century that even today an essentially false picture of the origins of American Presbyterianism has become currently accepted. Typical of the nineteenth-century propaganda which was later to be accepted as fact, was the attitude of Samuel Miller, the first professor of Church History at Princeton Seminary. In 1833, Miller wrote a series of open letters to Presbyterians as part of the Old School party's polemic against the New England element in the Church.