The Second Great Awakening

Between the 1790s and the 1830s a nationwide series of religious revivals called the Second Great Awakening established revivalism as a fixture of American religion and became intertwined with the westward expansion of the new nation.

The Awakening began in rural Connecticut and New Hampshire in the late 1790s, becoming an especially powerful force in New England after Yale College students attended revivals in 1801—about a third of the student body converted—and went on as ministers to spread revivalism throughout the region’s Congregational churches over the following two decades. New England revivalism was generally sedate and conservative, producing a host of regional missionary, benevolent, and moral reform associations designed to shore up faltering Congregational establishments and to extend their middle-class values into new Western settlements. Revival-energized Yale and Andover seminary graduates accompanied the westward “Yankee migration” into New York State and Ohio as missionaries and educators, and Congregationalists and Presbyterians pooled their resources in an 1801 “Plan of Union” to facilitate the founding of churches and schools there. As a result, churches of both denominations multiplied from New York and northern Ohio to Wisconsin and Minnesota.

A second and more boisterous phase of the Awakening occurred among the growing number of Americans—particularly Methodists, Baptists, and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from western Virginia and the Carolinas—crossing the Cumberland Gap into trans-Appalachian Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s. Arriving in southwestern Kentucky in 1796, Scotch-Irish Presbyterian James McGready (1758–1817) and some North Carolina Methodists conducted revivals in 1799 and 1800 at his Muddy River, Red River, and Caspar River parishes. With him at Gaspar River was Presbyterian Barton Stone (1772–1844), pastor at western Kentucky’s Concord and Cane Ridge churches, who arranged what became a massive “camp meeting” at Cane Ridge in 1801. The 10,000 people who attended this emotional weeklong “Great Revival” included Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist preachers, who proceeded over the following three years to hold camp meetings across Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Ohio.

A third and final phase was centered in New York, a newly opening and rapidly developing region populated largely by the “Yankee migration.” There, Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) and others conducted revivals through the 1820s and early 1830s, contributing to a culture of evangelicalism, moral reform, and radical social and religious experimentation so intense—and made more so by the powerful economic and social impact of the new Erie Canal (1825)—that western New York came to be called the “burned-over district.” The region gave birth to Mormonism, Spiritualism, and the women’s rights movement, and became a stronghold of Shakerism, abolitionism, and various communitarian movements.

If the revivals subsided, their effects did not. All three phases of the Awakening profoundly and lastingly shaped the religious and cultural life of the young nation.