The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1734-c. 1760 · New England
The Evangelical Awakening in New England
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About This Movement
It began in the winter of 1734-35 in Northampton, Massachusetts, where the town's minister, Jonathan Edwards, watched an ordinary Connecticut Valley congregation come apart and remake itself in a wave of conversions. And then did something unusual: he wrote down what had happened, case by case, including a young woman the town had thought beyond hope and a four-year-old girl. When the English preacher George Whitefield toured the colonies from 1739, scattered local revivals became a general one, with itinerants crossing parish lines and crowds gathering in the open air. It split New England's churches: the New Lights defended the awakening, the Old Lights — Charles Chauncy of Boston foremost among them — attacked it as enthusiasm and disorder, and hundreds of Separate congregations broke away, a great many of them becoming Baptist. It also produced the first substantial body of Christian writing by Black and Native people in the colonies.
Sources
- Edwards's corpus: A Faithful Narrative (1737, with the Hutchinson and Bartlet case histories), The Distinguishing Marks (1741), Religious Affections (1746), Life of Brainerd (1749) - Works of Jonathan Edwards (Yale; WJE Online) (primary) — Life of Brainerd belongs to the missionary-biography genre, which shaped how Edwards told the story.
- The conversion-narrative genre: Nathan Cole's Spiritual Travels; Sarah Osborn's diaries and memoir (ed. Brekus, Sarah Osborn's Collected Writings, Yale, 2017); Sarah Edwards's 1742 narrative; The Christian History (1743-45, ed. Prince) (primary) — The revival's serialized self-documentation.
- Black and indigenous voices: Phillis Wheatley (Whitefield elegy 1770; Poems 1773), Jupiter Hammon, Lemuel Haynes (sermons; Liberty Further Extended ms. c. 1776), Samson Occom (Short Narrative of My Life, 1768; hymns); Richard Allen's ministry begins a generation later (primary) — These voices mostly date from the 1760s-70s, a generation after the main revival years, but are carried here as the awakening's direct fruit. Occom's own account describes discrimination within the mission system in the first person.
- The contested revival: Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts (1743); Davenport's Confession and Retractions (1744); Separate congregations' records and Isaac Backus's early diary (primary) — Chauncy writes from inside the opposition — a hostile source, though his dossier is itself full of revival data. Backus's diary marks the point where the Separate movement became Baptist — the same transition covered under the Baptist history.
- Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening (Yale, 2007), with George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale, 2003) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7, 'Evangelical awakenings in the North Atlantic world' (Ward), with 'British and French North America to 1765' (Noll) (reference) — Noll's chapter frames the real question of whether this is one tradition or two.