[Manuscript Circular Letter ca. 1803 from Congregationalist minister Rev. Ammi R. Robins to former members of his Connecticut congregation, then residing at New Connecticut, in the Western Reserve of Ohio].

Evangelical work on the Ohio frontier in the early years of the nineteenth century

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Congregationalist minister Rev. Ammi Ruhamah Robbins (1740–1813) of Norfolk, Connecticut is firmly associated with the generation of preachers following the First or Great Awakening led by Rev. Jonathan Edwards.

Robins was a student of theologian and Congregationalist pastor, Joseph Bellamy, himself a student of Edwards. The present circular letter or religious epistle, ca. 1803, is addressed to Robbins’ former congregants who had removed to New Connecticut in the Western Reserve of Ohio, where an earlier congregation had been established at Austinburgh in 1801. 

Robbins, who here signs his name Robins, graduated from Yale College in 1760. The following year he was ordained pastor of a congregation at Norfolk. During the American Revolution he served in the military as an American chaplain for a 1776 campaign into Canada. His ministerial career included the offering of instruction to many young men preparing for Yale and to other ministers.

(One of his students was his own son, Thomas Robbins, who graduated from Yale in 1796. In November 1803, Thomas Robbins, who had been ordained as a missionary for the Connecticut Home Missionary Society, arrived at New Connecticut in the Western Reserve of Ohio. He served there, mainly in Trumbull County, until 1806. We speculate that Ammi Robbin’s circular letter, which bears no date or postal markings, may have been hand delivered by Thomas Robbins during the latter’s sojourn in the Ohio territory.)

Ammi Robbin’s circular letter to his former flock was written with great pastoral and practical concern in the form of a scriptural epistle. Its beginning is reminiscent of a New Testament epistle of St. Paul: 

To my Brethren and Sisters in Christ Jesus at New Connecticut & all those who removed there who were under my pastoral care & charge – Your friend & formerly your pastor wisheth grace mercy & peace my be multiplyed to you abundantly thro[ugh] Jesus Christ our Lord.

Arranged in nine discrete sections, the manuscript epistle exhorts his former charges to such actions as prayer, keeping the sabbath, “social worship,” and instructing their children in religion. Concerning the latter point, Robbins specifically refers the congregation at New Connecticut to a proposed plan of education laid out in the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine, a magazine to which Robbins was a frequent contributor. 

An interesting manuscript circular letter or epistle linking the eighteenth century’s Great Awakening to new evangelical work on the Ohio frontier in the early years of the nineteenth century.

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