ABSTRACT
Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg’s voyage from Charlestown to Philadelphia was horrible; he became sea-sick. Strong winds and heavy rain forced the ship more under than above the water. “The water reached up to my bed. I was,” so he wrote Gotthilf August Francke, “in bed for the whole eight days and so ill in the heat that words fail me to describe it.”1 The ordeal was over on November 25, 1742, the day he arrived at Philadelphia. Little did he know that worse awaited him in the days and years to come. He faced three problems in particular: the quarrel with the Moravians, the fights with those members of the Lutheran congregations who hailed from Württemberg, and the problems associated with his own concepts of church and pastorate. In this paper I will focus on each in turn and in doing so will sketch out in the briefest details the three Pietisms that clashed in the middle Atlantic colonies.
