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The Salvation Army marched around the world in the great days of the British Empire, adopting ranks like those of the soldiers of Queen Victoria. Its founders, William and Catherine Booth, came from the heart of middle England. Was this new movement, then, simply a religious by-product of British imperialism?

Clearly there was much more to the Army than that. Its roots ran far back in time—to the Methodists of the eighteenth century and the Quakers of a hundred years before. Early Salvationists, in fact, spoke of Quaker leader “George Fox and his Salvation Army two hundred years ago.”

Those roots ran not only deep but also wide—to the American frontier, where the camp-meeting movement was bringing new life to the faith. But could such methods of “revivalism” work as well in industrialized England?

A series of American evangelists came eastward and profoundly influenced The Salvation Army that was to be. Three in particular affected the Booths.

In the early nineteenth century, a debate raged within Wesleyan Methodism about revivalism. Did the techniques of the American camp meeting—imported in 1807 by Lorenzo Dow—bring heavenly rapture or mass hysteria?

Catherine Mumford and William Booth debated the question in their love letters. “Watch against mere animal excitement in your revival services,” wrote Catherine. “I never did like noise and confusion.”

Her William was a little abrupt in reply: “If you cannot bear the hearty responses and Alleluias of God’s people, then our fellowship will not be in prayer meetings.”

But Catherine knew how to convince her man. “Remember Caughey’s soft silent heavenly carriage,” she wrote. “He did not shout. He had a more potent weapon at his command than noise.”

James Caughey, to whom Catherine referred, was an American Methodist evangelist with a strong track record in revivalism. When he preached in William Booth’s native Nottingham, the local newspaper reported this:

“Every scene he drew was visibly before the eyes of the congregation, and the vacant space in front of the pulpit, which he chose as canvas on which to paint his vivid designs, was no longer a vacancy to his hearers—as was manifest from the fixed stare with which they gazed into it.”

James Caughey was a spellbinder, and he cast his spell on the young William Booth. When general of The Salvation Army, he paid his debt to this “American minister, who was making a tour through the country … filling up his sermons with thrilling anecdotes and vivid illustrations.… For the straightforward declaration of spiritual truths and striking appeals to the conscience, I had up to that time never heard his equal. I do not know that I have since.”

Caughey, a man of culture with a sense of humor, became a celebrity. His letters, published in five volumes, combine travelogue (for example, the battlefield of Waterloo described for American readers) with a defense of his methods. “Some people were offended,” wrote Caughey, “at the tremendous ‘Amens’ and shouts of victory which prevailed on every side.… The noise was sometimes tremendous—but God was in it.”

Some people were indeed offended. In 1849 the English Wesleyan Methodist Conference “affectionately requested” the American bishops “to recall Mr Caughey to his proper work in his own country.”

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