ADVANCED PLACEMENT
UNITED STATES HISTORY
The Second Great Awakening
*One of the dominant philosophies of the late 1700s had been that
of the enlightenment, which had emphasised reason over emotion and
which had created America’s government based on laws rather than
the leadership of great men. Likewise, traditional Christian
theology in many parts of America had been austere, focused on
church authority, strict morality, and an angry God. Both of
those traditions encouraged a striving for perfection, even if
Christian leaders knew that struggle could not truly succeed in
this world.
*The First Great Awakening had challenged the stern religious
attitudes of colonial religious leaders, and the growing tide of
romanticism in the late 1700s and the 1800s encouraged people to
experience personal emotions rather than be coldly rational.
In the late 1700s, these trends combined in a desire for a more
personal, emotional relationship with a loving God while retaining
the notion that the world could be improved, and perhaps even
perfected, possibly even in time for a new millennium—the return
of God’s Kingdom. This led to a Second Great Awakening in
America, perhaps starting as early as the late 1780s, expanding in
the early 1800s, and reaching its peak in the 1830s, particularly
(but not only) in frontier areas where established churches had
less influence to begin with.
*Among the first preachers to reach out to the unchurched were the
Methodists. The Methodists were famous even in the 1700s for
their open-air church services and their circuit-riders, preachers
who traveled across the country or around a regular route of local
communities too small to support their own ministers. One of
the first American Methodist Bishops, Francis Asbury, travelled
the length of America many times in the late 1700s (including
visiting what is now Johnson City in 1788). In America,
Presbyterians were also among the leaders of the early frontier
churches.
*On the frontier, particularly in Kentucky, Presbyterian
ministers, assisted by Methodists and Baptists, began to hold camp
meetings, where thousands of worshippers would come for days to
hear a series of sermons and be asked to dedicate or re-dedicate
their lives to God. These were very emotional events, with
people touched by the Holy Spirit spontaneously jerking around,
rolling on the ground, dancing, speaking in tongues, and
shouting. Eventually, some ministers became skeptical of
this ‘acrobatic Christianity,’ especially among the Presbyterian
clergy, although some changed their minds when they got the jerks
themselves.
*This is sometimes called the Revival of 1800, although there were
camp meetings before that, and the largest of these revival
meetings took place in 1801 at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, under the
leadership of Presbyterian minister Barton Stone, who, along with
Alexander Campbell, later left the Presbyterian Church and founded
the Christian Church and the Disciples of Christ.
*Church membership soared in the following decades, especially
among the Methodists and Baptists, who had previously been fairly
small sects but became the two largest Protestant denominations in
America, as well as among new groups that developed in this period
of religious enthusiasm.
*The revival movement continued for decades, reaching its peak in
the 1830s, after Charles Grandison Finney, a former lawyer who
became a great preacher, held revivals in New York City and
Rochester, New York in 1830 and 1831, starting a wave of religious
enthusiasm in the area so great that Upstate New York came to be
called the Burned-Over District for the fiery passion of its
religious revivals.
*This religious revival also sparked a great missionary movement,
with missionaries travelling to Africa, Asia, Hawaii, and the
American Indian tribes of the West. The missionary movement
in China would build a great affection for China in the minds of
many Americans for generations to come, and the descendants of the
missionaries who settled in Hawaii would later play a major role
in its annexation by the United States.
*The Second Great Awakening, even more than the first, emphasised
the individual’s relationship with God, with personal atonement,
salvation, and acting out of one’s beliefs by seeking to improve
oneself and society as a whole, so that it inspired both a sense
of egalitarianism and a desire for social reform.
*The egalitarianism of the Second Great Awakening attracted women,
especially middle-class women, who were often the first to feel
the Holy Spirit move them in revivals and who did the most to
increase Church membership. For many of them, the Church was
one area outside the home where they could participate as
individuals or even equals in society and even have the occasional
leadership role. A very few churches even began to let women
preach.
*The individualistic nature of the Second Great Awakening was also
one reason that congregationally-organised churches like the
Baptists and the Christian Churches flourished: each could
define its own beliefs and practises more or less as its own
members pleased (although the centrally-organised Methodists
certainly grew, too).
*The individualism and openness to changes in religious practise
even led to the development of entire new denominations. One
of the first was the Stone-Campbell, or Restoration, Movement that
created the Christian Churches and Disciples of Christ dating to
1804. Although founded by former Presbyterian ministers, it
was based on an attempt to return to basic Biblical practises, and
rejected many traditions and teachings that had developed over the
centuries. Among its departures from Calvinism was a
rejection of Predestination.
*The African Methodist Episcopal Church was officially formed in
1816 by African-Americans who had sought independence from a white
Methodist church where they were discriminated against, but who
still wanted to maintain the beliefs and structure of
Methodism.
*Other groups with more distinctive beliefs also developed or
became more wide-spread.
*The Unitarian Church in America developed in the mid-1700s and
early 1800s (related to a similar movement in England). It
grew out of the Congregationalist Churches of New England,
especially around Harvard University, and taught that there was
one unitary God, not a Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, and so Jesus was not the Son of God, although he was still
a great prophet worthy of emulation, and Unitarians still viewed
themselves as Christian, although as Christians who could not
accept a three-part God in a monotheistic religion. As the
1800s progressed, particularly as the Second Great Awakening grew,
many Congregationalist churches became Unitarian, and the
Unitarians became a generally rationalist, modernist, intellectual
church, although with a strain of individualist mysticism, too,
with the individual seeking unity with God.
*The Shakers had branched off from the Quakers in the 1700s, and
got their name from their enthusiastic shaking during worship
services. The Shakers even made dancing an important part of
their worship. Like the Quakers, but to an even greater
degree, the Shakers encouraged leadership by women (and even
believed that one of their early leaders, Mother Ann Lee, had been
a second coming of Christ in female form). They attracted
many people to their faith during the Second Great Awakening,
despite their habit of living in separate communities dedicated to
simple living, hard work, and celibacy (meaning that their
communities could only grow through conversion or adoption)--
although living in separate communities dedicated to a particular
lifestyle intended to create a perfect society was not unique to
the Shakers, and was quite popular among many groups in the
mid-1800s.
*In 1833, a Baptist preacher in the Burned-Over District of New
York named William Miller announced a revelation he had received
years before that Jesus Christ would return to Earth in the near
future, a date eventually revealed to be 22 October, 1844.
His followers, known at first as Millerites, became more numerous
in the early 1840s as the end of the world approached.
*When the world did not end on 22 October, 1844, it was known as
the Great Disappointment, and the Millerites split into many
different groups, some joining other communities (such as the
Quakers and the Shakers) while some formed what became the
Seventh-Day Adventists under the leadership of Mary Ellen White,
who began to have visions shortly after the Great
Disappointment. Today the Seventh-Day Adventists are one of
the largest Christian denominations in the world, thanks to an
active missionary movement, and one of the healthiest, due to an
insistence on healthy eating (including a strong preference for
vegetarianism, although it is not absolutely required, although
keeping Kosher is; Kellogg's cereals were originally created as an
Adventist health food).
*Around 1820, a farmer in the Burned-Over District named Joseph
Smith had a vision of angels, Jesus, and God. He was told
that all existing religious groups were corrupt, and over the
years, future visions of angels showed him the true message that
he was to preach, particularly after he was guided to a buried set
of Golden Plates, which Smith translated (with divine help), and
published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon, another Testament of
Jesus Christ. It stated that Jesus, after his death in the
Middle East, had appeared to American Indians, but that they had
lost their faith later through infighting and corruption.
*In 1829, Smith and a few others with whom he had shared his
beliefs began baptising their followers as the Church of Jesus
Christ, and later called themselves Latter-Day Saints. In
some of their early meetings, they had spells of shouting,
speaking in tongues, dancing, fainting, and other exuberant
experiences typical of the Second Great Awakening. As their
church grew, Smith was recognised as an Apostle.
*The Mormons' promotion of another testament in the Bible with
many new teachings made people suspicious of them. Their
most notorious departure from traditional Christian custom was
their belief in plural marriage, or polygamy, which was one of the
many reasons they were often driven from their homes. As
they moved west, from New York to Ohio to Illinois to Missouri,
their close-knit communities and successful businesses were also
seen in some places as an economic or political threat to local
leaders, and they often faced violence. In response, they
created their own militia, which only made them seem more
threatening and more alien.
*In 1844, Joseph Smith and his brother were killed by a mob in
Illinois, but another Apostle, Brigham Young, emerged as a new
leader of the church, and in 1846-1847, led his people to Utah
hoping to create a separate community--perhaps even a state or a
fully independent country--known as Deseret based around Salt Lake
City. Despite the harsh climate, their community flourished,
which they attributed to Providence.
*As the 1850s progressed, thousands of Mormons went to Utah,
making Salt Lake City one of the largest cities west of the
Mississippi River. Although Young had been recognised as the
Governor of the Utah Territory, in 1857-1858 the US government
tried to suppress the Mormons by force in the Mormon War, but was
not successful (although Young did resign as governor).
Despite its growing population, Utah did not get to become a state
until 1896, six years after the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-Day Saints officially ceased to permit any future plural
marriages.
*The spiritual movements of the period even included the
philosophical and literary movement known as Transcendentalism, a
belief popularised by the writer and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson,
that the most important experiences transcend the mundane
senses. It was an individualistic movement based on a
rejection of traditions, particularly those of Europe, in favour
of a commitment to self-reliance, self-discipline, and a personal
quest for spiritual fulfillment, which might be found in a church
(especially a Unitarian church), but could as easily be found in
the beauty of nature.
*One of the best-known Transcendentalist writers, Henry David
Thoreau, famously lived in a cabin by Walden Pond near Concord,
Massachusetts supporting himself through his own efforts (and
frequent visits for dinner at the homes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived nearby) and wrote about his
experience in a metaphorical book Walden: Or Life in the
Woods published in 1854.
*In 1841, twenty Unitarians and transcendentalists including
Nathaniel Hawthorne founded Brook Farm near Boston to try to
create a community based on shared values and shared work, with
the profits from the farm going to those who worked on it in a
communitarian model. Men and women were paid equally, and
each person was allowed to work at whatever he or she liked best,
in the hopes of creating a model society. This Utopian
community, like most of them, failed because it was not managed
profitably and its ideals were hard to live up to. It closed
in 1847 after a fire destroyed one of its largest buildings the
previous year.
*This was not the first Utopian community founded in America
(indeed, one could say that, as a Republic in an age of
monarchies, the United States was, itself, a Utopian
Community). In 1825, Robert Owen, a Welsh owner of a
Scottish textile mill, a reformer, and a socialist purchased the
town of New Harmony in Indiana to make into a socialist
Utopia. He settled about a thousand people there, but they
were poorly managed (Owen himself did not stay long), did not have
enough skilled craftsmen to be financially successful, and had too
many people trying to live off the work of others to succeed as a
socialist experiment, and in 1827 the experiment ended.
*In 1825, Fanny Wright founded the Nashoba community in West
Tennessee as an example of how to create a society without
slavery. Thirteen miles north of Memphis, Nashoba was meant
to be a place where freed slaves could be educated in preparation
for making their way in the world. The community also
believed in full racial equality, free love, and atheism, which
won it few friends, and its finances were poorly managed, so that
it collapsed within a few years (and it 31 Black members were sent
to Haiti).
*One religious community founded in the aftermath of the Great
Awakening was the Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey
Noyes. This was a communal experiment, with property held in
common, and its members even holding joint meetings of mutual
criticism to help each other become better people and practising
'complex marriage' that was often described by its detractors as
'free love.' Noyes and other leaders determined which
members of the community would have sexual relations with others,
with older members (especially women past child-bearing age)
serving as mentors to younger members. This was meant to limit
child-bearing (which was exhausting and dangerous) and also to
make sure that those who did have children were the best members
of the community. They were also economically very
successful, producing animal traps, canned goods, silk, and (until
2005) silverware. However, after Noyes's death, the
experiments in free love and in mutual criticism soon came to an
end, and Oneida dissolved as a utopian community in 1881, becoming
a joint-stock company to continue its manufacturing business.
*Many of the churches that grew or were formed during the Second
Great Awakening promoted education in order to have ministers of
their own and so that their church members could read the Bible
and other publications of their faith. An increasing number
of people also believed that there should be free public schools
available to all. The first public universities were founded
in the South: the University of Georgia was the first to be
chartered (1785), then the University of North Carolina (1789),
although the University of North Carolina was the first to
actually graduate students in 1798. The University of
Tennessee was founded in 1794. However, the movement to
create free schools for all ages was strongest in the North.
*The early free schools (free to pupils at least; they were
tax-supported) were very limited, but began to grow as more tax
money was set aside for them and more government attention was
paid to them, particularly by the Whigs. One of the leaders
of this Common School Movement was Horace Mann, who became head of
the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837 and in 1839 helped
found America’s first state-supported normal school.
*Massachusetts in particular, and the Northeast in general, was a
leader in public education, although the Northwest Ordinance's
requirement that land be sold to support public education gave
some help to schools in that region, too. In the South,
where populations were more scattered and education was denied by
custom, and often by law, to slaves, it was harder (and less
popular) to provide public education, although Tennessee provided
more public education than many Southern states thanks to
governors William Carroll and Andrew Johnson.
*A desire to perfect society led to a desire to remove one of its
greatest scourges, alcohol, a waster of money and time, an
encouragement to sloth and violence, and perhaps even a false idol
that a drunk worshipped in place of God. The temperance
movement in America developed out of the Protestant revival of the
Second Great Awakening, as moral reformers sought to limit or
outlaw the sale of alcohol.
*One of its most famous early leaders was Lyman Beecher from
Connecticut. He helped found the American Society for the
Promotion of Temperance in Boston in 1826. Two of his
children (Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe) would
become important leaders in the anti-slavery movement).
*The first state to completely ban alcohol production and sale was
Maine in 1851, and a few other Northern states followed its
example, although some of these laws were overturned and they were
not often widely enforced. Overall, there was probably a
decline in alcohol consumption over the course of the 1800s,
starting from a point at which the average American consumed more
than twice the volume of alcohol that he drinks today.
*There was also a prison reform movement in America that dated to
the mid-1700s, when states had begun reducing the number of crimes
that earned the death penalty and in a few places even trying to
rehabilitate prisoners. For the most part this was
ineffective, and jails were overcrowded, often easy to escape
from, and barely controlled in large common rooms.
*In the 1820s, starting in New York, reformers began separating
prisoners into cells and prohibiting them from talking at almost
all times. Their days were carefully regimented into times
of work (which was viewed as a way to build self-discipline and
moral character, and also produce goods to sell to fund the
prison), for eating, and for sleeping. Uniforms were
provided for prisoners to wear. This was viewed as a model
that was copied in many parts of America and even in other
countries. Over time, whipping, branding, and other forms of
extreme punishment were banned (in 1829 in Tennessee), and
imprisonment for debt was outlawed. Although prisons
remained harsh places, in theory at least, and occasionally in
practise, they became places to help criminals reform their lives
and become productive members of society, with many prisons also
providing standardised times for education and for prayer,
alongside prisoners' other activities.
*The mentally ill were often treated even worse than prisoners,
locked into attics or basements by relatives who did not know how
to care for them, confined to poor houses, or chained in prisons,
sometimes in conditions so filthy that the stench could drive away
visitors. In this age of Christian reform, however, the
mentally ill came to be seen as victims rather than as beasts, and
some people sought to improve their treatment. Dorothea Dix
was one of the most active and famous reformers of both prisons
and insane asylums, traveling the entire country to investigate
and report on the terrible conditions in which the insane
languished and to demand change, which often was brought about.
*Many reformers, particularly in the temperance movement, were
women. In part this was due to women's growing role in
churches which gave them some practise at leadership; that growing
religious role also created a growing sense that women were the
more moral sex and in some ways ought to be moral leaders (while
men could concentrate on being political and business
leaders). This became part of a growing 'cult of
domesticity' that encouraged women to be good housewives and
mothers, building a nurturing home life for their families and
serving as the conscience of their families, their communities,
and perhaps even the nation—an updated version of the idea of
Republican Motherhood, that good mothers should raise good
citizens.
*Women also had more opportunities for education, as women's
colleges were founded in America. Emma Willard founded the
Troy Female Seminary as the first women's college in America in
Troy, New York in 1814, although the first classes did not begin
until 1821. It is now named Emma Willard School in her
honour. Other women's schools began to open over time,
particularly in New England, and in 1837, Oberlin College in Ohio,
under the presidency of the Great Awakening preacher Charles
Finney, began to admit female students alongside male ones
(including Black students who had first been admitted in
1835).
*This cult of domesticity and female education were partly
possible because a middle class was growing in America that could
afford for its women not to work for profit--indeed, not having to
have the woman of the family work was one of the most basic
elements of being middle-class. Of course, this also gave
educated, financially secure middle-class women the time and the
ability to demand reform in schools, temperance, prisons, insane
asylums, and even for their own rights.
*Many of these early crusaders for women's rights were Quakers,
who were already accustomed to equality between the sexes in their
own families and meetinghouses. One of the first prominent
women's rights activists was Lucretia Mott, who had been inspired
by the role women were playing in the anti-slavery movement in
Britain, and who began to work in America with Elizabeth Cady
Stanton.
*Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a mother of seven who had insisted
that the word 'obey' be removed from her wedding vows.
Stanton went so far as to insist on women's suffrage at a time
when even many women did not consider asking for that. In
this she was joined by the Quaker Susan B. Anthony, who became the
most visible supporter of women's suffrage of all (so that the XIX
Amendment was sometimes called the Susan B. Anthony amendment).
*In 1848, supporters of the women's movement met in New York for
the Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. There they
issued a 'Declaration of Rights and Sentiments' based on the
Declaration of Independence, declaring, among other things, to
'hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are
created equal.' They declared they should not offer
allegiance to the United States government until that government
represented them by recognising their right to vote and their
equality in all ways under the law. Although little came of
this Declaration of Sentiments at the time, it is often viewed as
the beginning of the women's rights movement.
*The women's movement did not accomplish a great deal in the first
two thirds of the Nineteenth Century, however, because many of the
women involved in it and in other reform movements of the time
felt that there was one group with needs even greater than theirs,
and therefore many reformers put their greatest efforts into the
anti-Slavery movement.
This page last updated 29 August, 2018.