Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T16:59:26.351Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Richard D. Birdsall
Richard D. Birdsall
Affiliation:
Mr. Birdsall is professor of history inConnecticut College, New London, Connecticut. He would like to thank theFrank L. Weil Institute for Studies in Religion and the Humanitiesfor a fellowship enabling him to do the research for this article
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“Only the shell of orthodoxy was left.” Such was the considered judgment of Henry Adams on the condition of the inherited socioreligious order of New England by the year 1800.1 The image of the shell of a gourd with loose seeds rattling within is a good one to convey the dissociation between the purposes of the society and the real beliefs of individuals that had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century. And it presents a notable contrast to the close congruence of individual belief and the social aims of the first generation of New England Puritans.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , September 1970 , pp. 345 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1970

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Adams, Henry, History of the United States of America during the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 4 vols. (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1930; first edition, 1889), I, 90.Google Scholar

2. New England orthodoxy can not be rigidly defined but it included both the concept of individual liberty and the idea of a church responsible for all citizens in a given geographical area—the ideal of a Christian Commonwealth—even though only a minority of the town might actually be church members. By the late eighteenth century with the increase of secular interests and more important the large increase of dissenters (non-Congregationalists) some of the leaders of orthodoxy felt embattled and were inclined to use institutional power in rather naked form to effect their ends. Needless to say, liberty suffered. Cf. Strong, Caleb, Patriotism and Piety (Newburyport: Edward M. Blunt, 1808)Google Scholar for speeches by the governor of Massachusetts; Morse, Jedidiah, Sermon on the National Fast, May 9, 1798 (Boston: S. Hall, 1798)Google Scholar. Wild, John, Human Freedom and Social Order (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1959), p. 56.Google Scholar

3. Dwight, Timothy, Travels in New England …, 4 vols. (London: W. Baynes and Son, 1823), IV, 346Google Scholar. Beyond this the dislocations of the revolution had led to a total cessation of church services in many towns. In Hampshire and Berkshire Counties in Massachusetts thirty-nine of sixty-eight towns had no ministers during the revolution. Meyer, Jacob, Church and State in Massachusetts (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1930), p. 127 n.Google Scholar

4. Dwight, T., Travels, II, 440.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., II, 44–5.

6. T. Dwight to Jonathan Ingersoll, June 24, 1795, quoted in Cunningham, Charles E., Timothy Dwight (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 166.Google Scholar

7. Dwight, T., A Statistical Account of the City of New Haven (New Haven: Walter and Steele, 1811), p. 72.Google Scholar

8. This statement should be partly qualified by remarking that as Dwight became aware of the inadequacies of the New Divinity in promoting social order he swung more to the Old Calvinist views. Cf. Mead, Sidney, Nathaniel William Taylor (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1967; first edition Chicago, 1942), pp. 99–111Google Scholar. Mead makes the claim that because of his emphasis on “means” in conversion, Dwight was always an Old Calvinist.

9. An election sermon by the Rev. Jonathan Lee quoted in Bushman, Richard L., From Puritan to Yankee (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 279.Google Scholar

10. Belknap, Jeremy, Sermon Preached at the Installation of the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, Charlestown, Massachusetts, April 30, 1789 (Boston: S. Hall, 1789), p. 7.Google Scholar

11. Morse, James K., Jedidiah Morse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 51–8.Google Scholar

12. Wright, Conrad, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Starr King Press, 1955), pp. 249–54Google Scholar. Birdsall, Richard D., “The Reverend Thomas Allen: Jeffersonian Calvinist,” New England Quarterly, 30 (06, 1957), 147–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed. Franklin B. Dexter, 3 vols. (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1901), III, 473.Google Scholar

14. Sinnott, Edmund, Meeting House and Church in Early New England (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp. 90–142Google Scholar. Smith, Joseph E. A., History of Pittsfield, 2 vols. (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1869–1876), I, 454–62.Google Scholar

15. Ludwig, Allen, Graven Images (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966), pp. 316–340Google Scholar. Daniel, Ralph T., “The Anthem in Nw England before 1800” (Harvard Ph.D. Dissertation, 1955)Google Scholar. Criticizing the more vigorous church music of William Billings, Oliver Holden wrote, “The author wishes the time in general might be slow and the strains soft.”

16. Dwight, T., Greenfield Hill: a Poem in Seven Parts (New York: Childs and Swaine, 1794), p. 182 n.Google Scholar

17. Erikson, Kai T., Wayward Puritans: A study in the Socioiogy of Deviance (New York: J. Wiley, 1966), p. 12Google Scholar. Erikson goes on to note that, “Deviancy is an important condition for preserving the stability of social life. Deviant forms of behavior, by working the outer edges of group life, give the inner structure its special character and thus supply the framework within which the people of the group develop an orderly sense of their own cultural identity.” (p. 13) And yet one could argue that a vital society would depend more on positive beliefs than on punishments; as Edmund Burke noted, the test of succssful power is the rarity of its overt use.

18. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford, 10 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1892–1899), VIII, 48.Google Scholar

19. The Works of John Leland, ed. L. F. Greene (New York: Harpers, 1854), p. 420.Google Scholar

20. Tyler, Bennet, New England Revivals (Boston: Woodford and Co., 1846), pp. 18–270.Google Scholar

21. David Morrill, manuscript autobiography in Morrill Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, N.H.

22. Bushnell, Horace, Work and Play (New York: C. Scribncr, 1864), p. 393.Google Scholar

23. Parsons, Francis, “Ezra Stiles of Yale,” New England Quarterly, 9 (06, 1936), 287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Yinger, J. Milton, Religion, Society, and the Individual: an Introduction to the Sociology of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 146.Google Scholar

25. Cf. Trilling, Lionel, Freud and the Crisis of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)Google Scholar, John Wild, op. cit.; Nisbet, Robert A., The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford Press, 1953).Google Scholar

26. Jung, C. G., The Integration Personality (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939), pp. 161–63.Google Scholar

27. James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library, 1958; first edition, 1902), pp. 140–76.Google Scholar

28. Meerloo, Joost, That Difficult Peace (Great Neck, N.Y.: Channel Press, 1961), p. 16.Google Scholar

29. Smith, Elias, The Life, Conversion, Preaching, Travels, and Sufferings of Elias Smith (Portsmouth, N.H.: Beck and Foster, 1816), p. 283Google Scholar. Dwight, T., Travels, II, 462.Google Scholar

30. Dewey, Chester, A Sernwn Occasioned by the Present Religious Attention in Williams College, Preached 12, 1813 (Stockbridge: H. Willard, 1812), p. 12.Google Scholar

31. T. Jefferson to Salma Hales, July 26, 1798, Hales Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, N.H.

32. Sidney Mead, op. cit., pp. 111–72.

33. Schneider, Herbert W., The Puritan Mind (New York: Holt, 1930), p. 264Google Scholar. A similarly ironic view of the reformers is seen in Thoreau's view that they would not feel the need to reform others if they had given proper attention to self reformation.

34. Heimert, Alan, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 342–6.Google Scholar

35. Griffin, Clifford S., “Religious Benevolence as Social Control,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 44. (12., 1957), 423–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Foster, Charles I., An Errand of Mercy: the Evangelical United Front (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), pp. 121, 144, 210Google Scholar. Foster notes that the U.S. Government had spent $3,585,534 on internal improvements from 1789 to 1828 and that the thirteen main benevolent societies had collected in the same period $2,813,550. In Massachusetts the per capita contributions from farming areas was only 44% of that of industrial towns in gifts for the support of missions. Hawthorne, Bruce, “Industrialism and the Support of Missions in Massachusetts” (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1956)Google Scholar

36. Keller, Charles R., The Second Great Awakening in Connecticut (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), pp. 70–108Google Scholar. Birdsall, Richard D., Berkshire County: a Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 63–72.Google Scholar

37. Dewey, Orville, Autobiography (Boston: Roberts, 1883), p. 12.Google Scholar

38. Dwight, T., Sermons, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Waugh and limes, 1828), I, 234–42.Google Scholar

39. Beecher, Lyman, Works, 2 vols. (Boston: J. P. Jewett, 1852), I, 345–48Google Scholar. Pease, J. C. and Niles, J. M., A Gazeteer of the States of Connecticut and Rhode Island (Hartford: William S. Marsh, 1819), p. 13.Google Scholar

40. Quoted in Power, Richard L., “A Crusade to Extend Yankee Culture, 1820–1865,” New England Quarterly, 13 (12., 1940), 638.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. It is interesting to note how closely the new religious life in New England resembled what Ernst Troeltsch has described as the continental Pietism in Europe: “… it accepted the existing social order of the State: the idea of Christianizing the social order did not occur to it. On the contrary Pietism liked to be connected with the ruling class and the aristocracy; it aimed solely at Christianizing the hearts of men. It carried on Home Mission work, and healed social ills by a new kind of charity, which depended on free group initiative; nowhere did it touch the fundamental facts of existing conditions.” Troeltsch, E., The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1960; first German ed., 1911), II, 718.Google Scholar