The Second Great Awakening was a wave of Protestant revival that spread across the United States from the 1790s until the middle of the nineteenth century. Beginning on the Kentucky and Tennessee frontier, it carried emotional, mass preaching to people far beyond the settled churches, created new denominations, and powered the great reform movements of the decades before the Civil War. It is one of the waves known collectively as the Great Awakenings.
Background
The revival is named in relation to the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and after. In the years following the American Revolution, many evangelicals reacted against the scepticism, deism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. Where the first awakening had chiefly renewed existing church members, the second set out to reach the unchurched, many of them settlers on a rapidly moving frontier.
Camp meetings on the frontier
The movement took shape in Logan County, Kentucky, in 1800, when people began camping out at the Red River Meeting House during services led by the Presbyterian minister James McGready. In August 1801 a far larger gathering at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, led by Barton W. Stone with Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist preachers, lasted six days and drew perhaps as many as 20,000 people, though no exact count was kept. Such camp meetings, with their singing, shouting and calls to repentance, spread through Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana and southern Ohio and into Canada. Methodist circuit riders, travelling preachers drawn from ordinary families, carried the message to isolated homesteads, and Baptist and Methodist membership grew rapidly at the expense of the older colonial churches.
New churches
The ferment produced a remarkable range of religious bodies. Revival-minded Presbyterians formed the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Tennessee in 1810. Stone, together with Thomas and Alexander Campbell, led the Restoration Movement, which sought to return to the simple Christianity of the New Testament and gave rise to the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ. From the 1820s western New York saw so many revivals that it was later dubbed the "burned-over district", a name taken from the 1876 memoirs of the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney. The Latter Day Saint movement emerged in this period, and in the 1830s and 1840s William Miller's predictions of Christ's imminent return launched the Adventist movement.
Black churches and women
In the South, Baptist and Methodist preachers reached enslaved and free African Americans as well as white slaveholders. Discrimination in white congregations pushed Black believers to form their own. Richard Allen, ordained by the Methodists in 1799, led his Philadelphia congregation out of a white church, and in 1816 several congregations formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the country's first independent African-American denomination. Revival meetings could also inspire resistance: Gabriel Prosser's planned slave rising in Virginia in 1800 grew out of them before it was discovered and crushed. Women made up roughly two-thirds of converts and became the backbone of missionary, Bible and moral reform societies.
Reform and politics
Many converts believed that saving souls meant purifying society as well. Organisations such as the American Bible Society, founded in 1816, spread literature and schooling across the West, and evangelicals filled the ranks of the temperance movement, the campaign to abolish slavery, prison reform, better care for the mentally ill, and the early women's rights movement. Religious enthusiasm spilled into the expanding party politics of the period, especially through the Whig party. Revivals kept growing, especially in the cities, from 1840 until the end of the Civil War, and the reforming impulse outlived the awakening itself.
On our maps
Our 1800 and 1815 maps show the young United States as revival spread across its western frontier, and the 1878 map shows the reunited country after the Civil War.