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The tension between local attachments and cosmopolitan convictions presented itself over and over in Fithian's life. After he graduated from Princeton, Fithian's mentors encouraged him to take up the post of plantation tutor in Virginia. He seized the opportunity—and then was wracked by doubts about leaving his apple trees and his friends behind. During his stay in Virginia, Fithian experienced intense homesickness, which in the 18th century was considered a serious pathology; in one medical encyclopedia, a discussion of the causes and symptoms of homesickness was placed between the entries on "nymphomania" and "anorexia."
Fithian's ties to New Jersey were sufficiently strong that although his employers wanted him to stay on in Virginia, he returned north after a year. But the demands of enlightened service and parochial commitments came into conflict again in 1775. Fithian was now an ordained Presbyterian pastor, but there were no vacant pulpits in his presbytery. So the presbytery sent Fithian back south, to make a preaching tour in the Shenandoah. Once again, Fithian's education and course of self-improvement were taking him far from home. And once again, he was homesick: "Much of my Heart teizes me about Home," he wrote. "It hangs steadily there which Way soever I turn, so that my whole Train of thinking leans that Way also." Fithian knew these were not the sentiments of an enlightened, educated pastor, but he couldn't shake them.
Homesickness was not the only pesky passion that afflicted Fithian. He was also lovesick. His friendship with Elizabeth Beatty, whom he eventually married, was tempestuous, and in the grip of romantic longing, Fithian found himself gossiping, saying outlandish things to Betsy, and generally allowing his enlightened detachment to crumble in the face of decidedly particular longings for a sometimes coy and chimerical woman. Fea's re-creation of Fithian and Beatty's on-again, off-again connection will take its place among the finest accounts of early American courtship practices.
Shortly after his tour in the Shenandoah, Fithian died while serving as a Revolutionary War chaplain. Fea cleverly reads in his death—a death in which particular attachments were deployed in the service of universal ideals—a kind of solution to the tension between local and cosmopolitan commitments. Fithian did not die in his beloved Cohansey, but he did die in the wartime service of a Cohansey regiment, with his oldest friends gathered around his deathbed. The ideological commitments that prompted him to serve as a chaplain included both a particular patriotism and a commitment to universal ideals that Fithian believed would help improve the lot of all people.
The Way of Improvement Leads Home, which shows how seismic philosophical upheaval profoundly shaped the life of an ordinary man far from the epicenter, is easily the most important study of early American Presbyterianism since Mark Noll's Princeton and the Republic and Leigh Schmidt's Holy Fairs. Perhaps Fea's signal contribution is his nuanced reading of the relationship between the Enlightenment and Christianity. Fithian's Enlightenment convictions and practices were inseparable from his Presbyterian convictions and practices: a shared commitment to Enlightenment values helped mend the rifts that had formed between Old Side and New Side Presbyterians during the Great Awakening, and by the mid-1760s, "evangelical Presbyterianism and the Enlightenment were hand-in-glove." This embrace of the Enlightenment could be seen in Presbyterians' concern with the moral ordering of the larger world, and their hope that people in the church and in broader society would regulate and temper their passions.
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