The Second Great Awakening in two minutes
- By 1800 the first Great Awakening had cooled, as Enlightenment rationalism spread and frontier churches ran short. Jefferson, a rationalist, later edited the Gospels to cut the miracles.
- In August 1801 Barton Stone hosted the Cane Ridge camp meeting in Kentucky, where witnesses estimated 20,000 attended. Methodists and Baptists spread revivals fastest, preaching free will and salvation for all.
- Charles Grandison Finney, a former lawyer, led revivals in western New York in the 1820s and 1830s. His new measures, nightly meetings and the anxious bench, urged sinners to choose salvation.
- Revivals thrived where the Erie Canal and the market revolution had loosened old ties. Western New York, scorched by repeated revivals, became known as the burned-over district.
- Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830, and Brigham Young led the Latter-day Saints to the Great Salt Lake in 1847. Shakers and other utopian communities sought perfection.
- Revivalism opened roles for women and Black Christians, such as Jarena Lee and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and its belief in perfectibility pushed converts to reform society.
- On the exam: expect causation (why revivals spread and what they produced) and links to the market revolution, democracy and reform, sometimes compared with the first Great Awakening.
Topic 4.10 key terms
- Seneca Falls Convention (1848)
The first women's rights convention in the United States, held July 19–20, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott helped organize it, and about 300 people came.
- Declaration of Sentiments (1848)
The founding document of the Seneca Falls Convention. Stanton modeled it on the Declaration of Independence and added women, arguing that women were denied the rights the Declaration promised.
- Burned-over district
The nickname for western and central New York, where revivals and new movements kept catching fire from the 1820s to the 1840s. It began as Charles Finney's phrase for a district already scorched by earlier revivals.
- Rationalism
The belief that reason, not miracles or emotion, is the surest guide to religious truth. Deists like Jefferson and Boston's Unitarians held it. Many Americans wanted a warmer, more personal faith instead, and that reaction helped cause the Second Great Awakening.
- Geographic mobility
Americans moving in large numbers to new places, especially west after 1790, often far from any established church. Camp meetings and traveling preachers brought religion to them, which helped cause the Second Great Awakening.
- Second Great Awakening
A wave of Protestant revivals that began around 1800 and ran through the 1840s. Camp meetings and traveling preachers taught that any person could choose salvation. It fed the reform movements of the 1830s and 1840s.
- Free will
The belief that each person can choose to accept salvation, unlike the older Calvinist idea, predestination, that God had already chosen who would be saved.
- African Methodist Episcopal Church
The first independent Black denomination in the United States. Richard Allen founded it in Philadelphia in 1816 after Black worshippers faced discrimination in white Methodist churches.
- Market revolution
The early-1800s shift from mostly self-sufficient farms to an economy of factories, wages and distant markets, driven by canals, roads, steamboats and new machines. It pulled many families away from home, and some feared it was pulling them away from God.
- Revivalism
Emotional evangelical preaching meant to bring a whole community to a personal conversion. Finney's methods (nightly meetings, the anxious bench, plain speech) made revivals something a minister could plan.
- Moral agency
The capacity to make free moral choices and be responsible for them. Finney taught that every sinner could choose conversion. Traditional Calvinists held that God alone chose who would be saved.
- Millennialism
The belief that Christ will return after (or before) a thousand years of peace. In this era many Protestants thought people should help bring that age on, which pushed them toward reform.
- Latter-day Saints
Members of the church Joseph Smith organized in 1830, now the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They accept the Book of Mormon as scripture alongside the Bible.
- perfectionism
The belief that people can become free of sin in this life. Noyes built the Oneida Community on it.
- utopian communities
Experimental settlements that tried to build a perfect society through shared property and shared beliefs. Most lasted only a few years.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The Locked Door
July 19, 1848
Key terms: Seneca Falls Convention (1848), Declaration of Sentiments (1848), Burned-over district
July 19, 1848 Wednesday morning
A small-town paper announced the first women's rights convention about a week ahead. About three hundred people came anyway.
But the chapel door was locked.
Somebody lifted Elizabeth Cady Stanton's eleven-year-old nephew through an open window to unbar it. The movement's own history called him “an embryo Professor of Yale College.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal;
Forty-seven years earlier and about five hundred miles away, thousands of Americans gathered in a Kentucky forest. Hundreds fell to the ground.
How did a revival about saving your soul become a crusade to remake the country, and who got left outside?
Fire in the Woods
1790s–1819
Key terms: Rationalism, Geographic mobility, Second Great Awakening, Free will, African Methodist Episcopal Church
The first Great Awakening lit America in the 1740s. By 1800, it had cooled.
Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the Gospels. He kept Jesus's teachings and cut the miracles.
Thomas Jefferson
…as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.
Out west, Kentucky's population tripled in the 1790s. It had few churches and fewer ministers.
In spring 1801, Barton Stone went to a camp meeting in Logan County.
Barton W. Stone
The scene to me was new, and passing strange. It baffled description.
That August, Stone hosted his own, at Cane Ridge. Witnesses guessed twenty thousand people. Lexington, Kentucky's biggest town, had 1,795.
Peter Cartwright
Thousands heard of the mighty work, and came on foot, on horseback, in carriages and wagons.
Peter Cartwright
Hundreds fell prostrate under the mighty power of God, as men slain in battle.
People sang, wept, shouted and fell. Critics called it disorder. Believers called it the Holy Spirit. Either way, it spread.
Methodists and Baptists spread it fastest.
Peter Cartwright
…instead of hunting up a college or Biblical institute, hunted up a hardy pony of a horse…
Their message was democratic. God offered salvation to everyone, and anyone could choose to accept it.
In 1776, about one American church member in forty was a Methodist. By 1850, one in three was.
The pulpit opened a crack. About 1811, Jarena Lee asked Richard Allen for permission to preach. He said no.
Jarena Lee
If the man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also.
In 1819, a preacher at Bethel lost his place. Lee stood up and preached on his text. Allen said she was called.
Enslaved people heard the same promise, and many made it their own, often in secret.
A Burnt District
1821–1835
Key terms: Market revolution, Revivalism, Moral agency, Millennialism
In 1825 the Erie Canal opened, and western New York filled with strangers. Rochester grew about sixfold in ten years.
Canal towns had mills, wages, taverns, and nobody's grandparents. Families feared this market revolution was pulling people loose from God.
Charles Grandison Finney, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer in Adams, New York, went into the woods to pray. He came out converted.
The next morning, a client stopped by about his case.
Charles Grandison Finney
I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and I cannot plead yours.
Finney preached like a trial lawyer to a jury of sinners. He wanted a verdict that night.
His new measures: meetings every night, and an anxious bench for the nearly convinced. Women prayed aloud in mixed company, which shocked many ministers.
Two sermon titles, ninety-three years apart. In 1741, sinners dangle in the hands of an angry God. In 1834, sinners are bound to change their own hearts.
Old Calvinism taught that God had already chosen who would be saved. Finney said every sinner has the powers of moral agency. The choice is yours.
Charles Grandison Finney
It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means.
In the age of the canal lock, he engineered salvation.
In Rochester, his converts were shopkeepers, mill owners, and their wives. Then they went to work on everyone else.
In 1824 Finney called one town, Evans' Mills, a burnt district. A wild revival had scorched it, and people had hardened against religion. He preached anyway. It caught again.
Later writers stretched his phrase over all of western New York: the burned-over district. It never stopped catching fire.
Many believed Christ would return after a thousand years of godliness on earth. So Christians had better start building it.
If you could change your own heart, you could change your neighbor's. Then your town. Then the country.
Heaven on Earth
1826–1848
Key terms: Latter-day Saints, millennialism, perfectionism, utopian communities
New faiths took root all along the canal.
Joseph Smith
some crying, 'lo, here,' and some 'lo, there;' some were contending for the Methodist faith, some for the Presbyterian, and some for the Baptists.
Joseph Smith grew up near Palmyra. In 1830 he published the Book of Mormon and organized a church.
Neighbors feared their numbers and beliefs. Mobs drove them out of Ohio and Missouri. They built Nauvoo, Illinois, one of the state's biggest towns.
Smith had also begun teaching plural marriage, which outraged critics. On June 27, 1844, a mob stormed the Carthage jail and shot him dead.
Brigham Young led the Saints west. In 1847 they reached the Great Salt Lake.
William Miller, a Baptist farmer, worked out from the Bible that Christ would return in 1844. Tens of thousands believed. They settled on October 22.
Hiram Edson
We wept, and wept, till the day dawn.
Some had given away their farms. Out of that grief grew the Adventists.
Others tried building heaven on earth. The Shakers shared property and kept men and women apart.
They did not marry. Converts and orphans filled their villages, about six thousand by the 1840s.
At Brook Farm, near Boston, writers split their days between thinking and farming. Hawthorne lasted about seven months. He called the manure pile 'that abominable gold mine!'
Robert Owen's New Harmony, in Indiana, tried socialism without religion. It lasted about two years.
At Oneida, John Humphrey Noyes taught that people could live without sin. Members shared property and rejected ordinary marriage.
The perfect society paid its bills with steel animal traps. Later, silverware.
More than a hundred experiments began. Most failed within a few years. Reformers outside them learned how to organize.