teach and to seduce the servants of the Lord’, the Baptists responded that Howell only witnessed to her own experiences and faith, and that she did not preach or teach. Susan Juster has observed that by the end of the eighteenth

Wood has argued, the American Revolution transformed the ideological framework within which individuals were judged and the boundaries around which their relationships were formed.28

In the Revolutionary world framed by the Enlightenment any assumption that some were born to join the elite while others remained fixed among the masses was no longer uncontested. The phrase ‘all men are created equal’ was not mere rhetoric but the expression of a commitment to a basic equality of nature before circumstances interfered. Physician Benjamin Rush noted that,

Human nature is the same in all ages and countries, and all the differences we perceive . . . in respect to virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, may be accounted for from climate, country, degrees of civilization, forms of government, or accidental causes.29