The Second Great Awakening

The secularism of the Revolutionary era and other non-theological ten­dencies and conditions brought a falling-off of religious concern in Con­necticut and elsewhere. A new revival began in New Haven in the 1790s, however, and brought about a Second Great Awakening. That phenome­non has been well studied and described in Charles Roy Roller’s The Sec­ond Great Awakening in Connecticut (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942; reprinted by Archon in 1970), based on his doctoral dissertation (Yale, 1934). No less important than the original Great Awakening, says Keller, the second one laid the basis for the great reform movements of the antebellum era. It gave great impetus to the missionary, temperence, and other philanthropic movements, brought women into public life, and developed important money-raising techniques. But most of all, it brought the triumph of fidelity, not only to Connecticut, but to the rest of the nation as well. Excellent bibliography. An important work. Other works on the Second Great Awakening:

Birdsall, Richard D. “Ezra Stiles versus the New Divinity Men.” American Quarterly 17(1965)2:248-58. Birdsall casts the New Divinity men in a favorable light, in particular by demonstrating the loss of esteem which the old Congregational clergy had suffered by the 1790s because of theological sterility, dull preach­ing, and internecine squabbles. Birdsall has been contradicted on several points by Stephen Berk in the Dwight biography (p. 213, n. 4) cited below.

Cherry, Conrad.  Nature and Religion: Imagination from Edwards to Bushnell. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. “Cherry describes two basic patterns of ap­prehending nature: a didactic approach that treats nature as a source of moral precepts, and a symbolic approach in which the regenerated imagination per­ceives natural images as symbols or metaphors that do not merely point to but participate in the spiritual truth they reveal. The book recounts the conflict in New England theology between the two approaches.” (William Breitenbach in. the William and Mary Quarterly, July, 1981, p. 525)

—“Nature and the Republic: The New Haven Theology.” New England Quarterly 51(December, 1978)4:509-26. Cherry discusses the efforts of Timothy Dwight, Nathaniel William Taylor, and Lyman Beecher to make Calvinism consistent with Newtonian physics.

Fraser, James W. Pedagogue For God's Kingdom: Lyman Beecher and the Second Great Awakening. New York, University Press of America, 1985.

Mead, Sidney Earl. Nathaniel William Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942; repr. Hamden, Ct.: Archon, 1962. Based on a Chicago dissertation under William Warren Sweet, this is “a study of the birth and growth of Taylorism, an offspring of the forced marriage of New England Calvinism with revivalism ... through the life of Nathaniel W. Taylor.” (p. vii) “Taylor’s work cleared the way for Horace Bushnell and those who formed the foun-tainhead of the stream of progressive orthodoxy and liberalism in America.” (p. viii) This is an important work.

Morgan, Edmund S. “Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight.” Proceedings of the Mas­sachusetts Historical Society 72(1963): 101-17. Morgan, author of a splendid biography of Stiles, argues that Dwight’s leadership of the Second Great Awak­ening has been exaggerated.

Shiels, Richard Douglas. “The Connecticut Clergy in the Second Great Awaken­ing.” Doctoral dissertation, Boston University, 1976. This dissertation sharply challenges all previous writing on the phenomena under study. Shiels sees nothing new in the movement, but merely another turn in the unending cycle of declension and revival. The ministers usually credited with creating the Awakening did not: they merely perceived and rode the cyclical wave of en­thusiasm. This is an important study, one which radically revises Keller. Shiels has published a summary of his conclusions in “The Second Great Awakening in Connecticut: A Critique of the Traditional Interpretation,” Church History 49(December, 1980)4:401-15.

Also on the Second Great Awakening, see in the “Biographies” section at the end of this Bibliography the following: Lyman Beecher, Horace Bushnell, Timothy Dwight, Ezra Stiles, Benjamin Trumbull.

One aspect of the revivalism of the turn of the century was, as Shiels points out, an interest in missionary work. Oliver Wendell Elsbree, in “The Rise of the Missionary Spirit in New England, 1790-1815,” New Eng­land Quarterly l(July, 1928)3:295-322, focuses on Biblical exhortations to proselytize, and it gives their share of attention to Connecticut preachers Timothy Dwight and Samuel Nott. The story is told most fully in a Uni­versity of California, Riverside doctoral dissertation (1975) by Ronald Harold Noricks, “To Turn Them From Darkness: The Missionary Society of Connecticut on the Early Frontier, 1798-1814.” The society was established to proselytize among the Indians—to bring them Calvinist-based religion and stave off Catholicism. Baptists and Methodists were more successful among white frontier families, and Catholics prevailed among Indians.