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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
For quite some time Timothy L. Smith and J. Edwin Orr have been nudging other historians to sit up and take notice of a revival that is so haphazardly interpreted that there exists little unanimity on what even to call it.
So began a 1982 essay by Leonard Sweet on the Revival of 1857-58, an event usually remembered for its widely publicized urban prayer meetings. As Sweet alluded, lack of consensus on what to call this revival reflected only the tip of an iceberg of interpretative confusion. In addition to what they should title it, historians have differed over where the revival began, how long it lasted, which regions of the country were involved, its religious and cultural significance, and even whether anything happened that actually had significance worthy of academic investigation.
I wish to thank George M. Marsden for his comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this essay.
1. Sweet, Leonard I., “ ‘A Nation Born Again’: The Union Prayer Meeting Revival and Cultural Revitalization,” in In the Great Tradition: In Honor of Winthrop S. Hudson: Essays on Pluralism, Voluntarism and Revivalism, ed. Ban, Joseph D. and Dekar, Paul R. (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1982), 193–221.Google Scholar I am indebted to Sweet for first calling attention to the confusion of twentieth-century interpreters in contrast to the confident assessments of contemporary observers.
2. These ministers stood within a Calvinist revival tradition that emerged in Britain and the American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Crawford, Michael J., Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England's Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).Google Scholar Crawford's book came to my attention as this article was being revised. His study both Supports and illustrates the arguments in this essay.
3. I use the word “Reformed” throughout in a broad sense to refer to that wing of evangelicalism that has roots in Calvinist theology. The concept of “Reformed interpretative hegemony” has three main elements: (1) historians who belonged to the Reformed wing of evangelicalism; (2) sources dealing with churches and individuals from that broad tradition; and (3) interpretative frameworks developed within the tradition.
4. The phrase is from the title. See Butler, Jon, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” The Journal of American History 69 (September 1982): 305-25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5. “The Revival of 1857-8,” Christian Advocate and Journal September 30, 1858.
6. Prime, Samuel Irenaeus, The Power of Prayer: Illustrated in the Wonderful Displays of Divine Grace at the Fulton Street and Other Meetings in New York and Elsewhere, in 1857 and 1858 (New York: Charles Scribner, 1859)Google Scholar; Chambers, Talbot W., The Noon Prayer Meeting of the North Dutch Church Fulton Street, New York: Its Origins, Character and Progress, with Some of Its Results (New York: Board of Publication, Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, 1858)Google Scholar; Conant, William C., Narratives of Remarkable Conversions and Revival Incidents (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1858)Google Scholar; Alexander, James W., The Revival and Its Lessons: A Collection of Fugitive Papers Having Reference to the Great Awakening, 1858 (New York: American Tract Society, 1858)Google Scholar; and Alexander, James W. and others, The New York Pulpit in the Revival of 1858: A Memorial Volume of Sermons, [ed. Prime, S. I.] (New York: Sheldon, Blakeman and Company, 1858).Google Scholar
7. In neither of these cases was there a formal alliance; rather, my groupings refer to theological and social like-mindedness. For a detailed study of the Old School/New School Presbyterian split and the differences in the two groups, see Marsden, George M., The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).Google Scholar Marsden divides the Old School party into “the moderates of Princeton” and the “strict confessionalists of Philadelphia” (42). The Old Schoolers in New York who “claimed” the revival, such as Prime and Alexander, were Princetonians.
8. Ibid., 155.
9. Prime, Power of Prayer, iv, v, 61.
10. Ibid., 47, 18.
11. In early 1857, the New York City YMCA split over questions of slavery and political partisanship. About 150 prominent, socially conservative young men left the group. See Doggett, L. L., Life of Robert R. McBurney (Cleveland: F. M. Barton, 1902), 40–42.Google Scholar
12. Conant, , Narratives, 359, 394.Google Scholar
13. Ibid., 414.
14. Ibid., 414, 426ff.
15. The definitive Statement of this position did not occur until Charles Finney's Memoirs, which included an account of the revival, were published in 1876. See Rosell, Garth M. and Dupuis, Richard A. G., eds., The Memoirs of Charles G. Finney: The Complete Restored Text (Grand Rapids: Academie Books, 1989), 565.Google Scholar
16. Conant, , Narratives, 415, 416, 359.Google Scholar The differing pictures of the South may also have reflected the Old School Presbyterian strength in that region in contrast to the relative absence of New School Presbyterians and Congregationalists.
17. Prime, , Power of Prayer, 38, 39.Google Scholar
18. Ibid., 106.
19. Conant, Narratives, title page. See, too, the cyclical context set by Alexander, Revival and Its Lessons, 14.
20. Jonathan Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, ed. Wilson, John F., Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 9 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 143 Google Scholar; cf. 457, 460. Other eighteenth-century Calvinists who articulated the same idea included William Cooper in New England and John Gillies in Scotland. See Crawford, , Seasons of Grace, 223-26, 248.Google Scholar
21. Sprague, William B., Lectures on Revivals of Religion (Albany, N.Y.: Webster and Skinners, 1832), 4.Google Scholar
22. Ibid., 3, and passim; note especially remarks by Princetonians Archibald Alexander, appendix, 4, and Samuel Miller, appendix, 24-44.
23. For other references during this period to ebbs and flows of revivalism, see Fish, Henry C., Primitive Piety Revived, or, The Aggressive Power of the Christian Church (Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1855), 236-40Google Scholar; and Tracy, Joseph, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (Boston: Tappan and Dennet, 1842)Google Scholar, chap. 1. Three survey works that employed some form of cyclical revivalism as an interpretative device were all published in Britain, a further indication of the caution of American Calvinists. See Colton, Calvin, History and Character of American Revivals of Religion (London: Westley and Davis, 1832)Google Scholar; MacFarlan, Duncan, The Revivals of the Eighteenth Century, Particularly at Cambuslang (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, [1847]), 9–13 Google Scholar; and Milner, Joseph, History of the Church of Christ, 5 vols. (Cambridge: J. Burges, 1795-1809).Google Scholar
24. Archibald Alexander, “Letter I,” in Sprague, Lectures, appendix, 4, 5.
25. Humphrey, Heman, Revival Sketches and Manual (New York: American Tract Society, 1859), 206.Google Scholar
26. Ibid., 118-205. Humphrey did mention western revivalism, though only briefly. He noted the extensive revivals in central and western New York and devoted a few pages to “some things to be regretted,” but he did not name Finney (263ff.).
27. A Critical Bibliography of Religion in America noted that comprehensive histories of revivalism have followed “the pattern set by one of the first remarkable efforts to create an analytical historiography of revivals: A. p. Marvin, Three Eras',” See Burr, Nelson R., A Critical Bibliography of Religion in America, vol. 4 of Religion in American Life, ed. Smith, James Ward and Jamison, A. Leland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 181, 182.Google Scholar
28. Marvin, A. P., “Three Eras of Revival in the United States,” Bibliotheca Sacra 16 (April 1859): 279, 298, 284.Google Scholar
29. Ibid., 279. See also Conant, Narratives, title page; and Humphrey, Revival Sketches, 3.
30. Marvin, “Three Eras of Revival,” 291. Obviously, 1857-58 was the backdrop for the entire article. See, for example, Marvin's comparison of responses to the “Awakening of 1740” and “the present Special religious interest.” Ibid., 282.
31. Ibid., 291, 293, 299.
32. Methodists, as I have indicated, did cover the revival extensively in their periodicals. Noted here is the lack of books on the subject.
33. G. A. Reeder, “The Cleveland Revival,” Western Christian Advocate, April 28, 1858.
34. Nathan, Bangs, A History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 4 vols. (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1838-41), 1:362, 363.Google Scholar
35. For the “revival narrative” as a product of New England and British Calvinism, see Crawford, , Seasons of Grace, 183-90, 242, 243Google Scholar; for Methodist Communications patterns, see Richey, Russell E., Early American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 93.Google Scholar
36. I am indebted to Russell E. Richey of the Divinity School, Duke University, for this insight.
37. Bangs, History, 2:116.
38. Smith, John Abernathy, “How Methodism Became a National Church,” Methodist History 20 (October 1981): 15 Google Scholar, citing Lee, Jesse, A Short History of the Methodists, in the United States of America: Beginning in 1766, and Continued till 1809 (Baltimore: Magill and Clime, 1810)Google Scholar; cf. Bangs, History, 1:89-97.
39. Bangs, History, 1:244, 273, 358ff.
40. Dorchester, Daniel, Christianity in the United States from the First Settlement Down to the Present Time (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1889), 694.Google Scholar
41. In addition to Dorchester's work, the outstanding general history was Bacon, Leonard Woolsey, A History of American Christianity, American Church History Series, vol. 13 (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1897 Google Scholar; repr., New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925). Books on revivalism included Fish, Henry Clay, Handbook of Revivals: For the Use of Winners of Souls (Boston: James H. Earle, 1879)Google Scholar; and Kirk, Edward Norris, Lectures on Revivals, ed. Mears, David O. (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1875).Google Scholar Among the many biographies and memoirs were Finney's Memoirs and Wheatley, Richard, The Life and Letters of Mrs. Phoebe Palmer (New York: W. C. Palmer, Jr., 1881; repr., New York: Garland, 1984).Google Scholar
42. Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 9.Google Scholar
43. Dorchester, , Christianity, 372.Google Scholar Dorchester went on to comment, “The Methodist and Baptist churches, if their record could be fully sketched, would show still more numerous and powerful revivals and greater accessions” (373).
44. Ibid., 694.
45. Bacon, , History of American Christianity, 230.Google Scholar Bacon's was the first general history of American Christianity to class what were seen as mid-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century revival periods as first and second “Awakenings.”
46. Ibid., 344.
47. Denominational historians during this period were preoccupied with other issues. Of the twelve volumes of denominational histories in the American Church History Series, only Walker, Williston, A History ofthe Congregational Churches in the United States (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1894)Google Scholar, mentioned the 1857-58 Revival.
48. Bowden, Henry Warner, “The Historiography of American Religion,” in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience: Studies of Traditions and Movements, 3 vols., ed. Lippy, Charles H. and Williams, Peter W. (New York: Scribner's, 1988), 1:5.Google Scholar
49. Bacon, , History of American Christianity, 1.Google Scholar
50. Sweet, William Warren, The Story of Religion in America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930; repr., 1939), chap. 1, passim.Google Scholar
51. Ibid., 2, 6, 8, 327-34, 412-47.
52. Seldes, Gilbert, The Stammering Century (New York: John Day Company, 1928), 140-41.Google Scholar
53. Sweet, William Warren, Revivalism in America: Its Origin, Growth and Decline (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945), xi.Google Scholar
54. They included Whitney Cross, R., The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1950)Google Scholar; McLoughlin, William G., Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1959)Google Scholar; Smith, Timothy L., Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1957)Google Scholar; and Weisberger, Bernard A., They Gathered at the River: The Story of Great Revivalists and Their Impact Upon Religion in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958).Google Scholar
55. The essays were published in Mead, Sidney E., The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1963; repr., 1976).Google Scholar
56. Among them were Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform; Carwardine, Richard, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790-1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Leonard Sweet, “A Nation ‘Born Again’.”
57. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, 79.
58. Ibid., 60, 62. Looking back a quarter of a Century later, Smith explicitly affirmed that intention. See Smith, Timothy L., “Response of Professor Smith on Cycles of National Awakenings,” Sociological Analysis 44, no. 2 (1983): 121.Google Scholar
59. Smith, , Revivalism and Social Reform, 92.Google Scholar Smith devoted chap. 4 of the book, “Annus Mirabilis—1858,” to the revival.
60. In later years, Smith softened this stance, finding common ground for nineteenth-century evangelicals in their biblicism rather than their affirmation of a particular theological framework. See Smith, Timothy L., “History, Social Theory, and the Vision of the American Religious Past, 1955-1980,” which is the afterword to his Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Nashville: Abingdon, 1957 Google Scholar; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 259.
61. Smith incorporated the contributions of Methodist Holiness revivalists Walter and Phoebe Palmer, but fewer than ten of his fifty-four heavily loaded footnotes for the chapter contained references to Methodist sources. His primary source of periodical information was the Baptist Watchman and Reflector.
62. These included such people as Phoebe Palmer, Boston Unitarian Frederic Dan Huntington, and New York abolitionist George Cheever, none of whom were favorites of socially conservative Calvinists. Smith, , Revivalism and Social Reform, 65, 68, 70.Google Scholar
63. In his follow-up chapter on the revival, “The Fruits of Fervor,” for instance, Smith wrote of an interdenominational meeting of laymen and ministers to discuss continuing means of promoting the revival as an example of “the absence of sectarian bigotry” and concern for the poor. Yet, there is no evidence that anything came of the meeting. He also spoke of the “businessmen's noonday prayer meetings” being “thrown open to the ladies,” an exaggeration at best. Smith, , Revivalism and Social Reform, 82, 84, 85.Google Scholar
64. McLoughlin, however, did not share Smith's Arminian triumphalism. He connected evangelicalism with a shift toward Arminianism and with the “death of Calvinism,” but he focused on evangelicalism as a pragmatic American faith. See McLoughlin, , Modern Revivalism, 66, 67, 76, 122.Google Scholar
65. Ibid., 3.
66. Ibid., 164.
67. Smith also echoed Bangs in identifying revivalism as a Methodist lifestyle. There were few professional revivalists among antebellum Methodists, he wrote, because “every bishop, College president, presiding eider, and circuit rider was expected to be a constant winner of souls.” Smith, , Revivalism and Social Reform, 46.Google Scholar
68. McLoughlin identified four “great awakenings”: 1725-50; 1795-1835; 1875-1915; and 1945 to perhaps 1970. McLoughlin, , Modern Revivalism, 8.Google Scholar
69. Others were Fay Mills, Reuben A. Torrey, and J. Wilbur Chapman. The one Methodist who received extended treatment was Sam P. Jones.
70. Neither Humphrey, Revival Sketches, nor A. P. Marvin, “Three Eras of Revival,” mentioned Finney.
71. See Kirk, , Lectures on Revivals, 56, 57, 142Google Scholar; and Fish, , Handbook of Revivals, 160, 245, 292Google Scholar. Finney also benefited from his association with the frontier. A selection from the Memoirs on “The Revival of 1856-58” was included in Mode, Peter G., Source Book and Bibliographical Guide for American Church History (Menasha, Wis.: Banta, 1921)Google Scholar, chap. 21, “The Extension of the Church into the Middle and Farther West.”
72. See Carwardine, Richard, “The Second Great Awakening in Urban Centers: An Examination of Methodism and the ‘New Measures,’ ” Journal of American History 59, no. 2 (1972): 327-40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
73. Miller, Perry, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965), 6, 7, 87ff.Google Scholar
74. May, Henry, “Perry Miller's Parrington,” review of The Life of the Mind in America, by Miller, Perry, The American Scholar 35 (Summer 1966): 568.Google Scholar
75. Henry Warner Bowden identified this as the most recent period of synthesis in the history of American religion, with six such general works. Examples would be Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People; and Marty, Martin E., Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970).Google Scholar See Bowden, “The Death and Rebirth of Denominational History” (paper presented at the Conference on Scholarly Writing of Denominational History, October 10-12, 1991, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina), 12, 13, and n. 23.
76. Orr, J. Edwin, The Fervent Prayer: The Worldwide Impact of the Great Awakening of 1858 (Chicago: Moody Press, 1974).Google Scholar Orr also had stressed the 1857-58 Revival in The Light of the Nations: Evangelical Renewal and Advance in the Nineteenth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965).
77. J. Edwin Orr, “The Millionfold Awakening in America, 1857-58” (Th.D. diss., Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1943), published posthumously as The Event of the Century: The 1857-1858 Awakening (Wheaton, Ill.: International Awakening Press, 1989); The Second Evangelical Awakening in Britain (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1949) was the published edition of Orr's D.Phil, dissertation at Oxford.
78. In addition to Orr, examples include Cairns, Earle E., An Endless Line of Splendor: Revivals and Their Leaders from the Great Awakening to the Present (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, 1986)Google Scholar; Hardman, Keith J., The Spiritual Awakeners: American Revivalists from Solomon Stoddard to D. L. Moody (Chicago: Moody Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Hannah, John D., “The Layman's Prayer Revival of 1858,” Bibliotheca Sacra 134 (January-March 1977): 59–73 Google Scholar; and Christian History 8, no. 3, issue 23 (1989), the whole issue of which is devoted to the theme “Awakenings in America Up to the Civil War.”
79. Among them, Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism; McLoughlin, William G., Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Frankiel, Sandra Sizer, Gospel Hymns and Social Religion: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Revivalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
80. Carwardine, , Transatlantic Revivalism, 198–200.Google Scholar
81. In Modern Revivalism, McLoughlin had suggested a period for the second awakening roughly from 1795-1835. In Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, he posited 1800-1830 as an awakening period. Carwardine, however, pointed out that Methodists experienced “in absolute terms the most dramatic increase during the first half of the Century” during the Millerite excitement of the winters of 1842-43 and 1843-44. See Transatlantic Revivalism, 52.
82. Carwardine, , Transatlantic Revivalism, 60, 167, 169ff.Google Scholar
83. Examples include McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism and Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, in his understanding of revivalism as a mechanism of theological, ethical, and institutional adjustment of Protestantism to American culture; Miller, Life of the Mind; and Marsden, The Evangelical Mind.
84. The New York Tribune noted female participation in the revival. See “The Religious Revival,” March 2, 1858; and “The Union Meeting in Ninth Street,” March 13, 1858. Scholarly focus on primary sources from the Reformed side of evangelicalism also may have contributed to the neglect of Methodist Phoebe Palmer as an important figure in American revivalism.
85. Frankiel used Wesley, John, A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (London: J. Paramore, 1780)Google Scholar, and Watts, Isaac, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (London, 1707-9)Google Scholar, as “benchmarks” for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She then traced rhetorical shifts as reflected in Leavitt, Joshua, The Christian Lyre (New York, 1831)Google Scholar; Hastings, Thomas and Mason, Lowell, Spiritual Songs for Social Worship (Utica, N.Y.: Hastings and T. and W. Williams, 1832)Google Scholar; and Sankey, Ira D., McGranahan, James, and Stebbins, George C., Gospel Hymns Nos. 1 to 6 Complete (Cincinnati: John Church Co., 1895).Google Scholar See Frankiel, , Gospel Hymns, xi Google Scholar, and chap. 2 passim.
86. For example, McLoughlin described “evangelicalism” as “the generic term for the Arminianized Calvinism that constituted the new ideological consensus [for the nation] after 1830.” See McLoughlin, , Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, 138.Google Scholar
87. Smith, Timothy L., Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Nashville: Abingdon, 1957; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 250, 251, 256 (quote).Google Scholar
88. Articles from the Symposium were printed in Sociological Analysis 44, no. 2 (1983):81-122; McLoughlin, William G., “Timepieces and Butterflies,” Sociological Analysis 44, no. 2 (1983): 104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
89. Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried,” 322.
90. The comment was an obvious reference to the Butler article. McLoughlin, “Timepieces and Butterflies,” 103.
91. Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried,” 308, 309, 322.
92. Carwardine, , Transatlantic Revivalism, 49.Google Scholar
93. Finke, Roger and Stark, Rodney, “How the Upstart Sects Won America: 1776-1850,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 28 (March 1989): 31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Finke and Stark include Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics in their statistics.
94. McLoughlin, “Timepieces and Butterflies,” 108; Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 221.Google Scholar