It’s a pity, as the Bicentennial year dawns, that we’ve picked the wrong year to celebrate. I agree that it’s too late to call off the nation’s two-hundredth birthday party. After all, the streamers are hung, the table is set, the guests are on their way. Nevertheless, I propose that the date we should be celebrating is not the organizational birth of the nation in 1776 but its organic birth in 1740. What occurred in that year was nothing less than an inner American revolution, a spiritual declaration of independence that made the political reshuffling thirty-six years later an inevitability. The year 1740 was the crest of that wave of spiritual power called the Great Awakening. Let’s look back to this awakening to see what it was and why it deserves credit as the real birth of the American consciousness.
To understand this inner American revolution of 1740 we must take the spotlight off Boston, Lexington, and Concord and shine it on the Raritan Valley of New Jersey, the quiet hills of eastern Pennsylvania, and the trim hamlets nestled in the fertile Connecticut Valley. In 1727 in a small Dutch Reformed church in New Jersey, T. J. Frelinghuysen began stressing in his preaching the need for “heart” religion. This novel emphasis broke through the frozen crust of his congregation’s complacent Calvinism like an ice axe. The Tennent family of the greater Philadelphia area lit a similar fire beneath the chilled Presbyterianism of the middle colonies with the same exciting results—hearts of men and women were set aflame. In the late thirties the tranquil Connecticut Valley shook with the fervor of the renewed Northampton Congregationalists led by their brilliant and godly pastor, Jonathan Edwards. Edwards publicized these dramatic effects in a small book entitled A Narrative of Surprising Conversions, an eyewitness account of spiritual transformations that soon became a best-seller on both sides of the ocean.
All that remained was for these regional revivals to be channeled together to create a mighty movement of spiritual power. The one man who more than any other accomplished this task was the firebrand British evangelist George Whitefield, who was then twenty-five years old. His open-air meetings stirred thousands of colonists throughout the southern and middle colonies. After a successful campaign in Philadelphia, in the waning weeks of 1739 he was led northward to New England. Thereafter New England was flooded with new conversions and renewed commitments. The impact of Whitefield on New England as the Great Awakening reached its crest can best be described in the words of Nathan Cole, a farmer of the Middletown, Connecticut, area, who wrote this eyewitness account:
Then on a sudden, in the morning about 8 or 9 of the clock there came a messenger and said Mr. Whitefield preached at Hartford and Wethersfield yesterday and is to preach at Middletown this morning at ten of the clock. I was in my field at work. I dropped my tool that I had in my hand and ran home to get my wife, telling her to make ready quickly to go and hear Mr. Whitefield preach at Middletown.… And when we came within about half a mile or a mile … I saw before me a cloud of fog rising. I first thought it came from the great river but as I came nearer the road, I heard the noise of horses feet coming down the road, and the cloud was the cloud of dust made by the horses feet.… And as I grew nearer it seemed like a steady stream of horses and their riders … all of a lather and foam with sweat, their breath rolling out of their nostrils with every jump [The Great Awakening, edited by Heimert and Miller, Bobbs-Merrill, 1967, p. 184].
Cole continues the build-up until finally the climax is reached, Whitefield’s appearance before the crowd of thousands:
When I saw Mr. Whitefield come upon the scaffold he looked almost angelical; a young, slim, slender youth, before some thousands of people with a bold undaunted countenance. And my hearing how God was with him everywhere as he came along, it solemnized my mind and put me into a trembling fear before he began to preach; for he looked as if he was clothed with authority from the Great God … and my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound. By God’s blessing, my old foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me [p. 186].
This scene was repeated scores of times in that climactic year of 1740. Dozens of itinerant evangelists took Whitefield’s message to the most remote backwaters of the colonies. An inner revolution had taken place that forged a bond among the colonies and weakened the ties with Europe. What was awakened in 1740 was the spirit of American independence.
The story of the Great Awakening is an exciting one, but is this idea of an inner American revolution necessary to explain the armed rebellion of 1776? Can’t the political issue of taxation without representation sufficiently explain the widespread disaffection of the previously loyal thirteen colonies? There are three reasons for seeing the spirit of ’40 as the essential inner power behind the political eruptions of 1776.
First, the message of personal commitment and individual decision central to the Awakening reached a wider audience than the issue of taxation without representation. The merchant class of the port cities might be inflamed by the irritating tax laws, but how much popular appeal did that issue have? Colonial America was a rural society. One authority states that only one out of twenty Americans lived in the city. While Boston was certainly a powerful radiating center, it could influence only a minority in the northern colonies, and by no means the whole seaboard. To inflame the colonists sufficiently against Great Britain there had to be embers that were rekindled by the taxation issue, not created by it. The spiritual independence fostered by the Great Awakening saturated the colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia, from the Atlantic deep into the Appalachians.
Secondly, as a cause for rebellion the Great Awakening had a deeper appeal than the taxation issue. The spiritual appetite aroused in 1740 created a search for “something more,” a dissatisfaction with the status quo that refused to fade with time. Two centuries before, the Puritans of England had followed religious impulses that led to the beheading of King Charles. Is it any less likely that in 1740 transformed hearts would seek a transformed society and would want to free themselves once again from a monarch’s rule?
An example can be found in the career of the political radical Herman Husband. In 1760 he joined a southern guerrilla force that attempted to overthrow the colony of North Carolina. After failure and expulsion he moved north, where he worked tirelessly for independence from Britain. What was the source of Husband’s radicalism? In an account of his religious conversion under Whitefield and his subsequent spiritual journey, Some Remarks on Religion, written in 1750, he provides an answer. One historian comments about this interesting document that “his longing for a more abrupt and soul-ravishing experience hints at why he, along with other Americans for whom the Great Awakening was still a vivid recollection, responded as they did to the next great ‘crisis’ in the life of their society” (The Great Awakening, p. 637).
Lastly, the Great Awakening had a deeper impact on the political revolution than did the issue of taxation because of longer exposure. By 1776, three and a half decades after the flood of revival, the message of the Great Awakening with its heavy emphasis on individual responsibility had had a chance to soak deeply into the consciousness of the common man. Even granting the activities of the Sons of Liberty, the pamphlet war, and the rabble-rousers’ constant diatribes, to assert that merely thirteen years after the end of the bloody French and Indian wars the colonists would become so deeply embittered with their constant ally, Britain, that they would take up arms against her and seek the embrace of their constant enemy, the French, over a tax problem that had only limited appeal to a limited number over a very limited time—this assertion leaves unanswered questions. There had to be a previous alienation of heart and mind throughout the length and breadth of the Thirteen Colonies. The Great Awakening was the occasion of America’s alienation of heart. For three decades its impulses saturated the colonies with the message of inner freedom.
Admittedly, some of America’s leaders during the Revolution did not come to the Great Awakening type of faith; among these were Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison. But they too were influenced and carried along by its stream. We can therefore say that the Great Awakening, not the trigger issue of taxation, transformed the colonial consciousness to create the American identity through its wider audience, deeper appeal, and longer exposure. In the opinion of the noted church historian Winthrop Hudson:
The Awakening played an important role in forming a national consciousness among people of different colonies whose primary ties were with Europe rather than with one another. As a spontaneous movement which swept across all colonial boundaries, generated a common interest and a common loyalty, bound people together in a common cause and reinforced the common conviction that God had a special destiny for America, the Awakening contributed greatly to the development of a sense of cohesiveness among American people [Religion in America, Scribners, 1965, p. 76].
So enjoy the parades this year. Visit the historic sites. Celebrate the nation’s birthday to your heart’s content. But in the midst of all the talk about the spirit of ‘76, remember too that more important spirit—the spirit of 1740.
