A voice for thirty thousand

What happened

George Whitefield landed in Philadelphia on a Friday night in early November 1739 and began preaching in the church. On Thursday, 8 November, he took to the open air and climbed onto the gallery of the Court House in the middle of Market Street and spoke at six in the evening, as the Pennsylvania Gazette reported, to near 6000 people who stood in the street in an awful silence. He came back every night until Sunday and set out for New York on Monday. Among the listeners was Benjamin Franklin, a printer of thirty-three, who had come as a skeptic. Franklin wrote that he walked back down Market Street until the noise from Front Street drowned the voice, then worked out that thirty thousand people could hear a man speaking in the open air. Rothbard has little use for the movement. He calls it a reactionary appeal to the masses against the liberalism and sobriety of the day, and he notes that even the cynical Franklin was greatly impressed. He also notes how hard the revival split the churches. Whitefield, who had been ordained by the Church of England, left them all arguing, and Franklin went on to print his sermons and journals.