A small group of evangelical Anglican laypeople began meeting privately in Hanover County, Virginia, in or about 1740, inspired by the news of George Whitefield’s revivals. The group’s leader, the bricklayer Samuel Morris, often simply read Whitefield’s sermons at these meetings, to great emotional effect. The growing religious awakening attracted the attention of Virginia’s Anglican authorities, who wished to know why Morris and his followers had stopped attending regular Anglican services. Despite growing pressure against them, Morris’s group members continued meeting, and began receiving visits from Presbyterian evangelical preachers from New Jersey and Pennsylvania who carried with them the zeal of the revivals in the northern colonies. By 1745, Virginia lieutenant governor Sir William Gooch had begun to call for the suppression of illicit “ministers under the pretended influence of new light, extraordinary impulse, and such like fanatical and enthusiastic knowledge.�