Isaac Backus: A Short Biography

Backus is probably the most important Baptist you don’t know.

Some years ago, William McLoughlin compiled the entirety of known entries by Isaac Backus in his personal journal or diary. In this three-volume set, titled The Diary of Isaac Backus, the reader can truly get to know the man, the pastor, the husband and father, the churchman, and the statesman. McLoughlin provides readers with a helpful introduction and copious footnotes throughout, so that Backus can be understood in his own words.

If this short biography whets your apatite for more, then I highly recommend McLoughlin’s The Diary of Isaac Backus. The citations and content of this article is heavily reliant upon Backus’s diary and McLoughlin’s notes.

Introduction

Backus is a major figure of American history, and especially the history of Baptists in America. Backus was a longtime pastor (for the span of nearly sixty years), first leading a Separatist church which became a Separate-Baptist church, and then some of that congregation came along with Backus in 1756 to form a distinctly Baptist church. Backus was the chairman of the Grievance Committee of the Warren Baptist Association for decades, a committee that informed the public about the persecution of Baptist men and women and also pleaded many cases before the civil authorities. Backus also participated skillfully in the public debate over religious liberty in the new world during a time when it was not at all clear that such a thing would be possible.

There are numerous important events and experiences in Backus’s life. We shall focus this brief biography on four of the most important - Backus’s conversion, his first pastorate in Titicut, the founding of First Baptist Middleborough, and his death.

Pietistic Conversion

Backus was born on January 9, 1724, in Norwich, Connecticut. Like all New Englanders, Backus and his family belonged to a parish that was the jurisdiction of the local Standing or Congregationalist church. For “more than 17 years,” Backus “did never think” that he was “Converted,” but he “flatered my Self with this that I would turn by and by.”[1] Then in August of 1741, Backus believed that God “laid open to me the fountain of Sin that was in my heart that I Saw that all the Sins in the whole world were in me.”[2] It was then that God “opened to my Soul the glorious way of Salvation by Christ and gave my Soul to Close therewith.”[3]

Soon after, Backus desired to join the church, but he also perceived “many Corruptions among them.”[4] Finally, after nearly a year, Backus did join the Standing Church in Norwich. However, about eighteen months later, Backus “withdrew from them,” due to his opinion that “they had a form of Godliness yet they did Deny the Power there-of.”[5] He and nine others, including his mother and brother, soon covenanted together as the Bean Hill Separate Church in Norwich. Within a month or two, Backus believed God had commanded him to preach, so he did for the Bean Hill church from Psalm 53 in the fall of 1746.

Backus’s conversion and calling to a preaching ministry were both according to the pietistic tradition of the mid-eighteenth century. During the time of the First Great Awakening (1740s), New Englanders began commonly testifying to personal and mystical encounters with God and Christ. The intensity of their experiences often recounted a foreboding of God’s judgment and a subsequent peace and joy over God’s freeing grace in Christ. Much of the religious landscape of New England was covered with the duty and ritual of the Congregationalist Church order. Personal conversion became the desire and testimony of pietistic Christians, some of whom were quite radical. Many pietistic Christians, claiming new spiritual life, separated from what they believed were dead Congregationalist churches.

Backus became a Separate, along with many other pietists, when he was seventeen years old.

Separate Church in Titicut

When Backus began preaching and exhorting among the Bean Hill church, he also embarked as a traveling preacher, preaching regularly in the homes of other Separates. In early December of 1747, Joseph Snow, who was the pastor of a Separate church in Providence, Rhode Island, invited Backus to come along with him on a preaching trip. A couple of weeks later, Snow and Backus “Came down to Titicutt.”[6] After dinner at Samuel Aldens’s house, Backus preached from John 4:35-38 (“the fields are white with the harvest”). He believed that his sermon was enabled with divine power, and he also believed that the “harvest field” of his message represented the people of Titicut. Backus wrote, “my hart was so drawn forth towards God, and in love to his People here that I felt willing to Impart not only the gospel to them But my own soul also, because they were made dear unto me; tho’ I knew none of ‘em personally.”[7]

Backus preached several times in various houses within the Titicut precinct over the next week and a half, and before the end of the year Backus committed to preaching regularly in Titicut with or without the approval of the Standing Church committee. It was necessary, under the rules of the Standing Church (i.e., Congregationalist Church), for any new minister to be approved by a committee of existing ministers. Their criteria for evaluating whether a new minister was qualified included education, which meant in practice that only graduates of Congregationalist institutions were approved as ministers.

Backus believed, like most other pietists and Separates, that God was the one who called a man to the ministry of preaching and pastoring, not a committee. Though Backus agonized over his public denouncement of the committee later on, confessing his fear of man, he began his pastoral ministry as an unapologetic Separate (at least in the eyes of those who witnessed it).

On February 16, 1748, ten men and six women signed the “Articles of Faith” and the “Church Covenant” that Backus himself had penned a few days earlier.[8] He wrote that those Christians “gave up themselves to the Lord and to one another by the Will of God… [and] they appeared to rejoice for the oath for they had sworn with all their hearts.”[9]

In pietistic and Separatist style, Backus and sixteen others covenanted together as a new church. Prior to their signing of a confession of faith and a covenant of membership, the would-be church members each told of their “experiences.”[10] In fact, they had taken such time to hear and examine one another that the agreement to join together (demonstrated by signing the church documents) occurred on their third meeting over the course of two weeks for the purpose of the business.

Thus, the Titicut Separate Church was founded upon the shared beliefs and shared commitment of its members, and twenty-four-year-old Isaac Backus was their pastor.

First Baptist Middleborough

Eight years after the Titicut Separate Church was established, Backus led them to dissolve. Backus and several church members had been wrestling over the practice of baptism and its relationship to the Lord’s Supper. For a long while, The Titicut Separate Church, like many other Separate churches, practiced open communion. But this was no longer possible.

Some of those who separated from paedobaptist Congregationalist churches further developed in their theology toward the embrace of believer’s only baptism (or simply, believer’s baptism). During the early months and years of their establishment, Separate churches often practiced both paedobaptism and believer’s baptism (or credobaptism). But the churches often faced a good deal of infighting between their paedobaptist members and those who refused to commune with their unbaptized brethren. Those who embraced believer’s baptism often considered paedobaptism as no baptism at all, and sometimes they condemned it as sin.

At the end of 1755, Backus’s Separate church had come to their final conclusion on the debate over baptism. They would no longer admit church members (i.e., admit them to the Lord’s Supper) apart from believer’s baptism. Backus himself “had a weighty sense of the greatness of the affairs before us, and of the infinite importance of carefully keeping the rules of Christs house both in addmitting members, and also in after dealings with ‘em.”[11] Many of the Titicut Separate Church’s members did not stay with Backus in his move toward becoming a strictly Baptist church, but five of them did, including his wife.

The First Baptist Church of Middleborough (as it was named by 1760) began with six members on January 16, 1756, when Backus “read the Articles and Covenant which I had drawn, and then proceeded solemnly in the presence of God and his people to sign ‘em.”[12] Isaac Backus was thirty-two years old.

Running and Finishing the Race

Not quite a week after Backus covenanted together for the first time with his small Baptist congregation, he visited another church in a town nearby where there was yet another Separate church wrestling over the question of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. At a meeting with that church and several others who had been called upon for their counsel, Backus was a lone and “trying” voice. He advised the church “that as we all hold baptism to be the first ordinance before the supper, so that in ordinary cases none ought to be admitted to the later till they had (according to Christs command) submitted to the former.”[13] Thus began Backus’s long and helpful career of playing the role of both local church pastor and wise churchman at large.

For fifty years, Backus pastored the First Baptist Church of Middleborough. During that same time, he traveled to preach in homes and meeting houses, he served as the chairman of the Grievance Committee for the Warren Baptist Association (which he helped for form in 1767), and he advised Separate and Baptist churches, sometimes helping them to ordain their pastors. Additionally, Backus was a notable representative for Baptists in the public effort to attain religious liberty in New England, especially in Massachusetts.

On February 11, 1798 (shortly after his seventy-fourth birthday), Backus noted that his “old disorder” (probably some issue with his prostate) was “so great today that I did not preach.”[14] This was the first of two times he noted “bodily illness” or “lameness” as having prevented him from preaching that year.[15] For nearly two more years, Backus made no more mention of illness keeping him from his pastoral duties, but he did begin to slow down his travel and wind down his earthly affairs.

On September 2, 1799, he resigned his position at the Rhode Island College, and at the close of the year 1800, Backus recorded travel of only 121 miles having preached 113 sermons. This was a considerable reduction from his normal record, which he noted at the end of every year. In 1787, he traveled (by horseback and occasionally on foot) 1,328 miles and preached 158 sermons. In 1788, the count was 1,369 miles and 148 sermons. In 1789, Backus had made a special trip to North Carolina and Virginia during the early months of the year, and he recorded 1,895 miles by land and 1,280 by water, having preached 190 sermons. But by the turn of the nineteenth century, Backus was slowing significantly.

In 1801, he recorded only 50 miles and 103 sermons, and in 1802, it was 20 miles and 28 sermons. Even Backus’s entries were slowing and reducing in size over the last few years of his life, and he was frequently noting the death of church members, pastor friends, and family members. Susanna Backus (his wife) died on November 24, 1800, and one of his daughters (also named Susanna) died on September 19, 1805. Backus was deeply saddened by each loss.

Right through to the end, Backus was spending time in the study of and meditation upon Scripture. He reaffirmed his convictions about only admitting baptized believers to the Lord’s Supper, and he was even threatened with a legal suit from a previous church member who was angry that he had been excommunicated from the First Baptists Church of Middleborough. Backus lamented many times that he had not been as diligent as he thought he should in leading his church in the practice of church discipline, but he did not neglect it completely, even in his old age.

It was as though God granted Backus relatively good health in the months leading up to the beginning of his demise. The church was regularly meeting at his house, and Backus noted particular “freedom” and “liberty” in his preaching on Lord’s days in January, February, and March of 1806.[16]

Backus suffered two strokes in the spring of 1806, the first only “slight,” but the second “more severe.”[17] Backus recovered enough to maintain his mind and basic functions for several months, but he preached his last sermon on April 3. On November 20, 1806, Isaac Backus died, having pastored the same church for more than fifty years.

His is a profound legacy as a pastor, a Baptist churchman, a public theologian, and an advocate for religious freedom in colonial and early America. Students of Baptist history in America and American history in general would do well to become acquainted with this fascinating and compelling character.

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[1] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 3.

[2] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 3.

[3] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 3.

[4] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 3.

[5] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 3.

[6] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 12.

[7] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 12.

[8] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 31.

[9] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 31-32.

[10] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 32.

[11] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 401.

[12] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 401.

[13] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 402.

[14] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 3, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 1427.

[15] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 3, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 1427, 1436.

[16] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 3, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 1519-1520.

[17] Isaac Backus, The Diary of Isaac Backus, ed. William McLoughlin, vol. 3, 3 vols. (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1979). 1520.