Although a majority of the settlers were of English, Scotch, or Scots-Irish descent, and their interests generally coincided with those of their cousins in the mother country, people in the colonies were beginning to recognize their common interests and character. Their loyalties were still predominantly local, but by 1750 the word American, used to describe something characteristic of all the British possessions in North America, had entered the language. Events in one part of America were beginning to have direct effects on other regions. One of the first of these developments was the so-called Great Awakening.
By the early eighteenth century, religious fervor had slackened in all the colonies. Prosperity turned
In this painting evangelist George Whitefield appears to be crosseyed. This is no fault of John Wollaston, the painter. Whitefield had eye problems; his detractors called him ”Dr. Squintum.” The woman's rapturous gaze is unaffected by Whitefield's own curious visage.
Many colonists away from their ancestors’ preoccupation with the rewards of the next world to the more tangible ones of this one. John Winthrop invested his faith in God and his own efforts in the task of creating a spiritual community; his grandsons invested in Connecticut real estate.
The proliferation of religious denominations made it impracticable to enforce laws requiring regular religious observances. Even in South Carolina, the colony that came closest to having an “Anglican Establishment,” only a minority were churchgoers. Settlers in frontier districts lived beyond the reach of church or clergy. The result was a large and growing number of “persons careless of all religion.”
This state of affairs came to an abrupt end with the Great Awakening of the 1740s. The Awakening began in the Middle Colonies as the result of religious developments that originated in Europe. In the late 1720s two newly arrived ministers, Theodore Frelinghuysen, a Calvinist from Westphalia, and William Tennent, an Irish-born Presbyterian, sought to instill in their sleepy Pennsylvania and New Jersey congregations the evangelical zeal and spiritual enthusiasm they had witnessed among the Pietists in Germany and the Methodist followers of John Wesley in England. Their example inspired other clergymen, including Tennent’s two sons.
A more significant surge of religious enthusiasm followed the arrival in 1738 in Georgia of the Reverend George Whitefield, a young Oxford-trained Anglican minister. Whitefield was a marvelous pulpit orator and no mean actor. He played on the feelings of his audience the way a conductor directs a symphony. Whitefield undertook a series of fund-raising tours throughout the colonies. The most successful began in Philadelphia in 1739. Benjamin Franklin, not a very religious person and not easily moved by emotional appeals, heard one of these sermons. “I silently resolved he should get nothing from me,” he later recalled.
I had in my Pocket a Handful of Copper Money, three or four silver Dollars, and five Pistoles in Gold. As he proceeded I began to soften and concluded to give the Coppers. Another Stroke of his Oratory. . . determin’d me to give the Silver; and he finish’d so admirably that I empty’d my Pocket wholly into the Collector’s Dish.
Whitefield’s visit changed the “manners of our inhabitants,” Franklin added.
Wherever Whitefield went he filled the churches. If no local clergyman offered his pulpit, Whitefield attracted thousands to meetings out of doors. During a three-day visit to Boston, 19,000 people (more than the population of the town) thronged to hear him. His oratorical brilliance aside, Whitefield succeeded in releasing an epidemic of religious emotionalism because his message was so well-suited to American ears. By preaching a theology that one critic said was “scaled down to the comprehension of twelve-year-olds,” he spared his audiences the rigors of hard thought. Though he usually began by chastising his listeners as sinners, “half animals and half devils,” he invariably took care to leave them with the hope that eternal salvation could be theirs. While not denying the doctrine of predestination, he preached a God responsive to good intentions. He disregarded sectarian differences and encouraged his listeners to do the same. “God help us to forget party names and become Christians in deed and truth,” he prayed.
Of course not everyone found the Whitefield style edifying. Some churches split into factions. Those who supported the incumbent minister were called among Congregationalists, “Old Lights,” and among Presbyterians, “Old Sides,” while those who favored revivalism were known as “New Lights” and “New Sides.” These splits often ran along class lines. The richer, better-educated members of the church tended to stay with the traditional arrangements.
But many were deeply moved by the new ideas. Persons chafing under the restraints of puritan authoritarianism, or feeling guilty over their preoccupation with material goods, now found release in religious ferment. For some the release was more than spiritual; Timothy Cutler, a conservative Anglican clergyman, complained that as a result of the Awakening “our presses are forever teeming with books and our women with bastards.” Whether or not Cutler was correct, the Great Awakening helped some people to rid themselves of the idea that disobedience to authority entailed damnation. Anything that God justified, human law could not condemn. The Great Awakening did not entail opposition to British tax policies, but it did undermine traditional conceptions of authority.
Other institutions besides the churches were affected by the Great Awakening. In 1741 the president of Yale College criticized the theology of itinerant ministers who imitated Whitefield. One of these promptly retorted that a Yale faculty member had no more divine grace than a chair! Other revivalists called on the New Light churches of Connecticut to withdraw their support from Yale and endow a college of their own. The result was the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), founded in 1746 by New Side Presbyterians. Three other educational by-products of the Great Awakening followed: the College of Rhode Island (Brown), founded by Baptists in 1765; Queen’s College (Rutgers), founded by Dutch Reformers in 1766; and Dartmouth, founded by New Light Congregationalists in 1769.
These institutions promptly set about to refute the charge that the evangelical temperament was hostile to learning.
•••-[Read the Document Franklin on George Whitefield (1771) at myhistorylab. com
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