First Great Awakening

Fervent open-air preaching, mass conversions and bitter church quarrels marked Protestant life on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1730s and 1740s. Known in America as the Great Awakening and in Britain as the Evangelical Revival, it was led by preachers including John Wesley, George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, who stressed a personal, felt experience of conversion. It shaped the evangelical movement that still runs across many Protestant denominations, gave rise to Methodism, and split several established churches.

The revival drew on Puritan and Presbyterian traditions and on Pietism, a current within continental European Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism that valued heartfelt faith over dry doctrinal argument. In 1722 the Saxon nobleman Nicolaus Zinzendorf allowed refugees of the Moravian Church to settle on his estates at Herrnhut, where a revival took place. Moravian societies later helped foster the revival in England.

In Britain the movement first broke out in Wales, where Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland began preaching to large crowds after their conversions in 1735. In England its leaders were three Anglican clergymen: the brothers John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, who had belonged to a devout circle at Oxford whose members were nicknamed "Methodists". Whitefield became a celebrated preacher in Bristol and London from 1736. John Wesley, after an unhappy mission to Georgia and contact with the Moravians, described a conversion experience at a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, in May 1738, during a reading from Martin Luther.

When churches near Bristol closed their pulpits to him in February 1739, Whitefield began preaching in the open air to miners at Kingswood, soon drawing crowds of many thousands. Wesley, at first uneasy, followed his example from April 1739. The two men appointed lay preachers and organised converts into societies and small "classes", the basis of what became Methodism. When Wesley died in 1791, Methodists were estimated to number 71,668 in England and 43,265 in America.

In the American colonies local revivals had grown more frequent in the 1710s and 1720s, and evangelical Presbyterians led by William Tennent and his son Gilbert were active in the Middle Colonies. The most influential early revival took place in 1734–1735 at Northampton, Massachusetts, under the Congregational minister Jonathan Edwards, whose published account became a model for later revivals.

Whitefield's tours turned these local movements into a shared, intercolonial event. Arriving again in late 1739, he preached in Philadelphia, New York and the South, and in 1740 toured New England, where he is reported to have addressed about 30,000 people in Boston in October. Gilbert Tennent and the more erratic James Davenport followed. New England experienced its most intense period of revival between 1740 and 1743, with an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 new members joining its Congregational churches. By 1745 the movement was fading, though revivals spread into the southern backcountry in the following decades.

The revivals divided congregations between supporters, called "New Lights", and opponents, called "Old Lights", who disliked emotional preaching and travelling ministers. Presbyterians split into "Old Side" and "New Side" in 1741 before reuniting by 1758. Baptist churches gained most, growing strongly in the second half of the century. Revivalists also founded colleges that later became Princeton University (1746) and Dartmouth College (1754).

Preachers urged conversion regardless of race or status, and many enslaved and free Black people in the colonies became Christians in this period, some taking roles as exhorters and deacons. The message of spiritual equality did not, however, mean freedom: Whitefield himself lobbied for slavery to be allowed in Georgia and became a slaveholder. Black congregations soon followed, and the earliest Black Baptist churches in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia predate the American Revolution.

Some historians, notably Jon Butler, argue that the "Great Awakening" was a regional set of events whose importance has been exaggerated. Historians also disagree on how far it influenced the Revolution; most see only a limited effect.

Our 1715 and 1783 maps show the British Empire before and after the revival, including the colonies that would become the United States.