THE GREAT AWAKENING IN THE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND LITERATURE IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY CHARLES HARTSHORN MAXSON THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 1920 PREFACE Centennial celebrations of what Jonathan Edwards called the "Revival of Religion in New England in 1740," suggested to Joseph Tracy the preparation of a history of that revival. His design was admirably executed. Subordinate attention was given by him to the progress of the revival in other sections of the country and in Great Britain, but in the main his Great Awakening is an exhaustive history of the revival proper in New England. It gives extended quotations from the personal narratives of many promoters of the revival which were written in 1743 and 1744 for Prince's Christian History. Approaching my task almost three-fourths of a century after Tracy, I find myself more in sympathy than was common in Tracy's day with the catholicity of Whitefield and with the democratic tendencies of the f revival which were so largely responsible for the destruction of the ecclesiastical system of New England. Tracy wrote with the purpose of encouraging a similar quickening in his own time but wished to avoid resort to measures which he imagined to be harmful. I find my purpose not in the advocacy of a program but in the attempt to demonstrate that the religious energies liberated by the Great Awakening were transformed into forces, social, humanitarian, educational, and political, which have been of almost incalculable importance in the making of the American people. This study, much briefer than Tracy's, will make only such reference to the revival in New England as is demanded for understanding the movement in the Middle Colonies. The statement of the relation of the revival in the Middle Colonies to its extension southward will not be so abbreviated, because that relation was very close, and because there is no account of the revival in the South like that of Tracy for New England. I made a journey from Boston, Massachusetts, to Charleston, South Carolina, visiting most of the libraries which possess important collections of colonial newspapers. I gathered a mass of material on the moral and religious conditions of the colonies and the progress of the Great Awakening. Though everywhere courteously received, I feel myself under special obligation to the gentlemen in charge of the splendid collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In the notes a number of references to the newspapers, a neglected source material, will be found. I have also visited libraries at New York, New Brunswick, Princeton, Trenton, and Philadelphia. Special mention must be made of some among the many visited. At the library of Union Theological Seminary I was given kindly assistance and access to rare books of the eighteenth century. At the Sage Library, New Brunswick, I found useful material on the relation of the Dutch church to the revival. At the Princeton Theological Library I was given access to the incomparable Sprague Collection. At Trenton the permanent clerk of the presbytery of New Brunswick, Rev. George H. Ingram, permitted me to inspect the manuscript records of that body and kindly presented me with a typewritten copy of the first record book. He was then writing a history of the presbytery of New Brunswick for the Presbyterian Historical Review. At Philadelphia my indebtedness among a number of libraries is greatest to that of the Presbyterian Historical Society. Here the extensive collection of Tennent papers, mostly manuscript sermons of Gilbert Tennent, was put at my disposal, as were also the records of the Second Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia and many old books and pamphlets not found elsewhere. Source materials other than those mentioned in the statement of my obligations are the journals of Whitefield and Brainerd, Prince's Christian History, the Records of the Presybterian Church, and many excerpts from eighteenth-century documents which are incorporated in the histories of churches, presbyteries, and denominations and in the biographies of men who were concerned in the movement. The Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York are a mine of information upon the progress of revivalism in New York and New Jersey and to some extent in Pennsylvania. The story of Pietism in Pennsylvania is based principally upon the extensive researches of Sachse and serves as an introduction to the more important phases of the revival, the story of which follows. Chapters ii to viii and the greater part of chapter ix are based on original material. So far as chapter ix deals with denominations other than the Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed it is based for the most part on denominational histories, secondary sources, though Edwards' Material may very properly be regarded as original. This part of chapter ix simply fills out the story and shows the remarkable parallelism in the results of the Great Awakening in the various denominations. The final chapter sums up a number of the distinguishing marks of the evangelical revival. |