Dudley Leavitt (1720–1762) was a Congregational minister born in New Hampshire, educated at Harvard College, who led a splinter group from the First Church in Salem, Massachusetts, during a wave of religious ferment nearly a decade before the Great Awakening.

[2] Educated at Harvard College, where he graduated at age 19 in 1739, Dudley Leavitt was first ordained pastor of Exeter's church in 1743, where he served for two years.

Leavitt was caught up in the wave of religious ferment which swept New England, taking the helm of the splinter group founded by Rev.

"Our predecessors who built the former house", recounts the church history, "were thus compelled by a power, equal to that of the bayonet, to leave the place which they greatly loved, and to which they deeply, if not justly, felt that they had all the rights of a majority to retain."

In a letter from 'a gentleman in Salem' to a Boston friend in October 1745, the anonymous author recounted the subsequent dismissal of Fisk by his congregation, and his replacement by the young Leavitt.

[7] Meriting a supplement to the daily newspaper of the state's capital, the episode epitomized the religious debates still raging in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts over a century after its founding as a Puritan refuge.

The observer attributed the disturbance to the fact that the schismatic congregation, still claiming to be the First Church of Salem, had axed the very man who led it out in protest.

After Leavitt's ordination, some of those who had voted a decade earlier to separate from First Church with Fisk instead elected to return to worship with their former enemies.

In 1748, a letter was penned by Leavitt's congregation repenting the "misconduct of their Brethren from whom we had withdrawn communion", according to ecclesiastical authorities in Boston.

Leavitt's church "acknowledging their offense, and asking Forgiveness and reconciliation" was meant to assuage those who were put off by Fisk's ministerial authoritarianism.