Anticipating the Brethren: The Reverend Charles Nisbet Critiques the French Revolution
Charles Nisbet, the Scots-Presbyterian minister who came to America in 1785 to become principal of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, abhorred the French Revolution from the moment he learned of it in 1789. Nearly fifty when he immigrated, Nisbet had for twenty years been pastor in the Church of Scotland at Montrose on the northeast coast. Although he was a conservative in religious matters, he had while in Scotland been an advocate of political reform and a supporter of the American Revolution. But he did not countenance the French upris ing. In private letters and occasional public pronouncements he criticized the French popular movement so thoroughly that, by early 1793, fully two years before his fellow American clergy began to speak out against it, he had an ticipated virtually every argument they would make. Charles Nisbet's antipathy toward the French Revolution would prove prophetic. After 1795 many other American ministers deplored the anarchy, the destruction, the fiscal, social, and diplomatic damage that the Revolution