Members of the idealistic Awakening Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1701 and 1723; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1803.1 The first wave of this generation was born in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, just as the American colonies were beginning to celebrate their membership in an affluent and constitutional British Empire. Their parents were members of either the civic-minded Glorious Generation or the first wave of the adaptive Enlightenment Generation, who nurtured them in a relaxing way.
This generation grew up as increasingly indulged youths during the Age of Enlightenment after the tumultuous secular crisis of the Glorious Revolution, it came of age inspiring a spiritual awakening (the Great Awakening), it fragmented into narcissistic rising adults, it cultivated principle as moralistic midlifers, and finally it emerged as visionary elders guiding the next secular crisis, the American Revolution. The Awakening Generation (of the Prophet archtype in the Revolutionary Saeculum, or Cycle) arrived as the first colonial generation to consist mostly of the offspring of native-born parents and the first to grow up taking peace and prosperity for granted. Coming of age, they attacked their elders' moral complacency in a spiritual firestorm. By the 1750s, after breaking the social order of their parents and rendering the colonies ungovernable, they pushed the colonies toward civic renewal. They became Eighteenth Century America's most eminent generation of educators, philosophers, clergymen, and abolitionists. In old age, they provided the Revolution with its dire sense of moral urgency, dominating the colonial pulpits and governorships until independence was declared.2
Born into secure and slowly loosening families, Awakener children grew up seeking, but not finding, spiritual comfort in the secular world of Glorious midlifers.3 Raised in secure communities and largely spared from war or violence, Americans born after 1700 grew up as the best-fed, best-housed, and best-educated generation of children their elders had ever seen. At home, these kids listened to the happy discipline of A Family Well-Ordered, in which Cotton Mather taught that "our submission to the rules of reason is an obedience to God." In school, their standardized New England Primer drummed the same message with the "Dutiful Child's Prayer."4
Yet soon these children began turning away from their distant, busy fathers--and toward their mothers, whom the Glorious had entrusted with piety and emotion. Many Awakeners later vowed with George Whitefield "to make good my mother's expectations" or chose with Samuel Adams to abandon worldly careers to please their mothers' "religious principles." A striking number (including Benjamin Franklin, Richard Bland, and Roger Sherman) became bookish loners.5 At age 16, Franklin wrote in his diary that he "conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection" and concluded it with the self-aimed injunction to "Imitate Jesus and Socrates."6
Others were hit by dreamlike visions. Young Jonathan Edwards walked off to "solitary places, for meditation" where he could reflect on "the divine glory in almost everything." Young John Woolman imagined "past ages" in which people "walked in uprightness before God in a degree exceeding any that I knew, or heard of, now living."7
By the 1720s and 1730s, teenagers began crowding into colleges seeking spiritual callings or sparking town riots against such perceived agents of immorality as brothels, market houses, smallpox inoculators, and immigrants. The Boston press in 1734 called them "a new sort of reformers, vulgarly called the mob." According to historian Gary Nash, these youths were "antirational, antiscientific . . . and moralistic"--rejecting the secular world their Glorious fathers were about to hand them.8 In the early 1720s, these self-assured teenagers of moral conviction were the most energetic evangelists and antislavery activists of the Eighteenth Century.9
More American colonists graduated from Harvard in the 1730s (nearly all of them twentyish Awakeners) than in any other decade until the 1760s. In colleges, young Awakeners banded together in clubs of "saints"; from pulpits, they fulminated against the "spirit-dead"; in open-air gatherings, they exhorted each other to leave their parents, if necessary, to join Christ.10
Many in the Awakening Generation came of age experiencing an intense spiritual conversion during the spiritual tumult known as the Great Awakening--or the "Great and General Awakening"--(1734-1743) in the American colonies. They discovered spiritual meaning inside themselves. In a burst of passion, these converts to a "religion of the heart" shattered the ossified social discipline of their elders. An upwelling of godly euphoria incited them to rage against their fathers. "Many such instances there were of children condemning their parents" and calling them "old hypocrites," young Charles Chauncy wrote of his twentyish peers in 1743.11
With the Great Awakening, the raging inner life of these indulged young Americans exploded in a spiritual firestorm. In 1734, wrote Edwards, the firestorm first struck his own town like "a flash of lightning upon the hearts of the young people." By the late 1730s and early 1740s, it had spread through most of the colonies.12
"You would be apt to think him a madman just broke from his chains, but especially had you seen him . . . with a large mob at his heels, singing all the way through the streets, he with his hands extended, his head thrown back, and his eyes staring up to heaven," reported the Boston Evening Post in 1741 of James Davenport. During a tour of New England, this 25-year-old messiah was "attended by so much disorder" that his followers "looked more like a company of Bacchanalians after a mad frolic, than sober Christians who had been worshipping God."13
For colonial newspapers, the frenzy marked yet one more riotous episode in the Great Awakening. For hundreds of radical preachers like Davenport--and for the young crowds smitten by their prophetic thunder--it was the coming-of-age moment for their generation. The moment brought truth, euphoria, and millennial vision to America. It also brought hysteria, shattered families, and split towns.14
Where the like-aged Glorious had once stressed cheerful teamwork, young Awakeners preached spiritual perfection, demanding "New Light" faith over "Old Light" works, mixing "kisses of charity" with what Charles Chauncy called "a censuring and judging spirit." Denouncing elders who kept "driving, driving to duty, duty!" Gilbert Tennent assaulted "those of another generation" who "imagine happiness is to be had in wealth and riches."15
The Awakener lifecycle reads like a prophecy: at first straining to see God through a glass darkly and at last breaking through to a purifying fire. The Awakeners were very troubling to other generations, whom they showered with scathing scorn. As for the pliable Enlighteners, Samuel Finley roared: "Away with your carnal prudence!" When the enthusiasm faded in the mid-1740s, the orthodoxy mounted a reaction that expelled many students from college and punished with special vengeance Awakener slaves who had staged rebellions during the frenzy.16
Inwardly, however, the young knew their triumph was complete. Americans of all ages would never again preach or pray or feel as they had before. And for most Awakeners themselves, a special memory would linger--of that day or week or season when they had created a spiritual community. Many, like Edwards, declared that America in 1740 was inaugurating the reign of God on earth, a "New Jerusalem . . . begun to come down from heaven."17 Decades later, Franklin would fondly recall Philadelphia in that same year: "It was wonderful to see the change. . . . It seemed as if all the world were growing religious."18
The Great Awakening has been credited with 250 new churches and 200,000 religious conversions, "chiefly" or "especially" (according to contemporary observers) the work of "young people." Among Presbyterians in 1740, "New Light" revivalists averaged 25 years of age; defenders of the "Old Light" orthodoxy averaged 59 years of age. From 1730 to 1745, the average age of joining a New England church plummeted from the late thirties to the mid-twenties, and the share of new church members joining before age thirty rose from one-fifth to two-thirds.19
What did it feel like to be there? Writing in 1742, an elder Salem minister declared: "It is impossible to relate the convulsions into which the country is thrown." Writing in the 1970s, historian Richard Bushman likened the fervor to "the civil rights demonstrations, the campus disturbances, and the urban riots of the 1960s combined . . . a psychological earthquake that reshaped the human landscape."20
The Awakeners were possessed of a unique vision, a transcendent principle, a moral acuity more wondrous and extensive than any other generation in history. They had unyielding opinions about all issues, and they were willing to judge their peers as harshly as they did other generations. The best-known Awakener patriarchs who later stewarded the American Revolution: Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Radical, cerebral. In Boston, the austere Adams, called by his contemporaries "the last of the Puritans," was said by one biographer to "preach hate to a degree without rival" in quest of his "Christian Sparta." In Philadelphia, Franklin believed so fervently in higher causes that he abandoned a prosperous printing business in8) his mid-forties to devote his life to reflection and moral uplift. Careless of orthodox religion, Franklin left his soul to the evangelical prayers of his good friend George Whitefield.21
Like the Puritans before them, the moral prophets, or "sons of thunder," such as Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and William Tennent, tore down the "do-good" orthodoxy of their elders. They refused to compromise over principle or to separate politics from religion. Jonathan Mayhew said he had a duty to "preach politics."22
When the Great Awakening expired in the mid-1740s, rising-adult Awakeners drifted off into quieter avenues of self-perfection and paid little attention to the worldly troubles enveloping the colonies. After their explosion of self-discovery, thirtyish Awakeners entered adulthood with a mixture of outer detachment and inner principle. In Boston, Samuel Adams drifted through menial jobs ("I glory in being what the world calls a poor man"). In New York, William Livingston dabbled in law and wrote best-selling poems such as Philosophic Solitude. In Virginia, Landon Carter saw fit "to cultivate the inward man."23
Meanwhile, young spiritual prophets hit the road--converting Indians, denouncing slavery, gathering separatist churches, and founding communes. Rising Awakeners made poor citizens. Most avoided voting or running for office, and many left home at an early age to join newer, younger towns. In effect, they reversed their parents' lifecylcle: Values first, they insisted, then worldly things. "What can all the world afford us," asked Ebenezer Pemberton, "beyond a competent supply of our bodily wants?"24 Young men understood that born-again innocence (becoming "again like a child," to use Edwards's phrase) meant rejecting their fathers' interest in prestige and power.
Young women likewise understood that they need not become one of Mather's "hidden ones." Awakener women assumed positions of visibility unprecedented in colonial society: religious leaders (such as Sarah Osborn in Rhode Island), Indian missionaries (such as the Moravian "single sisters" in Pennsylvania), and planters (such as Eliza Pinckney, who ran three plantations in South Carolina and became the first American to cultivate indigo).25
Although Awakeners recognized America's growing military and economic problems, they were obsessed primarily with moral dramas. Frontier preachers such as Samuel Finley saw the French and Indian War as a replay of Armageddon, Virginia reformers such as Richard Bland attacked "the least flaw" in colonial rights, and rising Pennsylvania Quakers resigned en masse from public office in the late 1750s rather than compromise their pacifism by fighting Indians. "If the potsherds of the earth clash together," said Samuel Fothergill on behalf of his scrupulous peers, "let them clash."26
The children of the Awakeners, nurtured in a tightening way, were the reactive, nomadic Liberty Generation--roundly condemned for their vices--and the first wave of the civic-minded, heroic Republican Generation--generally cherished.
The Awakeners entered their moralistic midlife (ages 44-65) during the French and Indian War, and they exhibited a growing pessimism about world affairs. The colonists published more books on the Antichrist and Last Judgment during the 1750s (written mostly by Awakeners entering midlife) than in any other decade before the Revolution.27
They continued in their zeal. Missionary educators such as Eleazar Wheelock, John Witherspoon, and Anthony Benezet (who, according to one observer, "carried his love of humanity to the point of madness"). Radical slavery abolitionists such as "Visions of Hell" Jacob Green and John Woolman clad themselves in white as Jesus Christ. The Awakeners were aware that their generation had a capacity for great wisdom, terrible tragedy, and even insufferable pomposity.28
"Let sin be slain!" boomed theologian Joseph Bellamy in 1762 as he addressed his late-fortyish peers in the Connecticut assembly while decrying the "luxury, idleness, debauchery" of the rising generation. Entering midlife, Awakeners at last began turning their principles toward the outer world. In the early 1760s, far from delighting in the victorious end of the French and Indian War, they expressed horror over America's growing moral decadence, especially the "gangrene" and "vice" of the young Liberty Generation.29
Worrying about the dissolute younger Liberty children, midlife Awakeners found a substitute for the old order they had wrecked. Theirs was an entirely new vision--of an America destined by Providence to play a millennial role in the salvation of the world. It would be a land where all souls stood on an equal footing, where social union depended on principle rather than convenience, where education aimed at virtue rather than utility, where grace and union took precedence over laws and rights. The Awakeners championed this spiritual agenda so persuasively that on the threshold of old age, they presided over a society of patriots ready to die for independence.30
Historians agree that the spiritual fury of the Great Awakening fed directly, decades later, into the political fury of the American Revolution. According to Nathan Hatch, "few would doubt that the piety of the Awakening was the main source of the civil millennialism of the Revolutionary period." "What the colonists awakened to in 1740," agrees Alan Heimert, "was none other than independence and rebellion."31
In 1765, the Awakeners responded to Britain's Stamp Act by organizing popular crusades of economic austerity and breast-beating virtue. As assembly leaders, they founded Committees of Correspondence to bind America into what Mayhew termed a "communion of colonies." As town leaders and educators, they sparked what historian Michael Kammen calls "an awakening of civic consciousness"--a new passion for public-spirited clubs and colleges. As printers, they used Franklin's "Join or Die" slogan to roar out the rhetoric of unity. As popular leaders, they led the Boston Massacre (Crispus Attucks) and the Boston Tea Party (Samuel Adams, William Molineux). Watching colonial resistance to Britain quicken toward the point of no return, Awakeners never lost sight of the moral issue. Flinty rationalists such as Jonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncy had insisted from their pulpits that death was preferable to the "slavery" and "corruption" of England. John Witherspoon, president of New Jersey (Princeton) College, vowed "to prefer war with all its horrors, and even extermination, to slavery." Clergyman Jonathan Parsons promised that if the British did not relent, "the spirit of Christian benevolence would animate us to fill our streets with blood." In 1774, to the thunderous applause of the First Continental Congress, Joseph Hawley proclaimed, "It is evil against right."32
The Awakeners entered their visionary elderhood (ages 66-87), providing principled guidance and inspiration during the American Revolution and exerting then their most decisive influence on history. Half the delegates to the First Continental Congress were Awakeners. Awakeners entering elderhood were America's leaders of choice at the outset of the American Revolution. From 1774 to 1776, the average age of officeholding in New England towns rose from the low forties to the low fifties. In 1776, eleven of the thirteen new "states" were in effect led by Awakeners. In five colonies, the Revolution threw out younger (Liberty) Tories and replaced them with elder (Awakener) Patriots. Awakeners made up half the delegates to the First Continental Congress, and Peyton Randolph and Henry Middleton were the first two presidents of the Second Continental Congress.33
"O may our camp be free from every accursed thing! May our land be purged from all its sins! May we be truly a holy people, and all our towns cities of righteousness!" Thus did the gray-haired president of Harvard Samuel Langdon lead 1,200 soldiers in twilight prayer on the Cambridge Common. For his Awakening Generation, then age 52 to 74, the Battle of Bunker Hill tested a vision that had first inspired them decades before as coming-of-age youngsters.34 Hebrew scholar and Patriot Governor Jonathan Trumbell sprinkled his war correspondence with the phrase "The Lord Reigneth."35
In exile, Loyalist Peter Oliver blamed the Revolution on what he called America's "black regiment." By that he meant old Awakeners preaching upheaval in their churches--ministers such as 72-year-old Samuel Dunbar, who read the entire Declaration of Independence from his pulpit.36
The ideals of the generation had matured into stern principles of civic virtue, which leading Awakeners--from Sam Adams to Benjamin Franklin--preached entirely to their juniors. It was time for the old to think and the young to act. "Love itself is a consuming fire with respect to sin," Joseph Bellamy told the Connecticut volunteers who came to Boston. Joseph Hawley likewise inspired the Minutemen by reminding them of their Puritan ancestors: "You will show by your future conduct whether you are worthy to be called offspring of such men." The elder Awakeners had raised these "republican" youth for worldly valor--and praised them warmly when they displayed it against General Howe.37
"We shall succeed if we are virtuous," Samuel Adams insisted. "I am infinitely more apprehensive of the contagion of vice than the power of all other enemies." As generals or administrators, aging Awakeners had little talent. But as inner-driven chieftains of virtue and wisdom ("Let us act like . . . wise men," said Adams in 1772), Americans of all ages preferred them to younger men during the moment of trial. Their moralistic leadership dominated the initial revolutionary movement. In the Continental Congress, old Awakeners enacted blue laws to make "true religion and good morals" the national credo. In local Patriot committees, they led the ideological radicals--insisting on unanimous votes, requiring Tories to "confess" to their conversion, or invoking (like sixtyish Bellamy) the "Curse of Meroz" against cowardice.38
During the war, Awakeners relinquished political power to make room for the much-younger Republicans whom they trusted and loved. But even in the 1780s and 1790s, elderly Awakeners retained a voice of authority, a voice the young took seriously. Many of their political leaders favored a new Constitution that would empower the rising Republican elite, and many of their clergymen continued to agitate against the "sin of slavery," forcing the legal or de facto emancipation of northern slaves by the end of the century.39 Awakener clergyman John Witherspoon, president of New Jersey (Princeton) College, was the beloved schoolmaster to an entire generation of rational Republican statesmen (including Madison, Burr, Marshall, ten future cabinet leaders, and sixty future members of Congress).40
Facing death, the Awakener instinct was not to reach back for the world, but to transcend it--writing about the Last Judgment (Sherman), philosophizing in salons (Franklin), or requesting no show of mourning at their funerals (Samuel Mather, Cotton's son). Samuel Adams, still penniless in his eighties, insisted that a man certain of his own virtue always dies "with dignity." Claimed the elderly Landon Carter ("King" Carter's son) just before his death, "In spite of my merits, I have only inward satisfaction."41
No historian has left us with a clear picture of the single peer group whose adult lives bridged both the Great Awakening and the American Revolution. Above all, this was a generation of crusaders: the first young zealots since the Puritans (the Righteous Generation) to rebel against their fathers; and the last elder moralists until the Transcendental Generation to urge political independence and demand freedom for slaves. Shortly before his death in 1790, 84-year-old Benjamin Franklin signed a memorial to Congress for the abolition of slavery. Three years earlier, he had been one of four Awakeners to sign the Constitution. Fourteen years earlier, he had been one of eleven Awakeners to sign the Declaration of Independence. A half century earlier, Jonathan Edwards (born only three years before Franklin) had predicted that the millennium would begin in America and make the world "a kingdom of holiness, purity, love, peace, and happiness to mankind." Although Edwards never lived to see the Revolution, Franklin had their common generation in mind when he was asked what image should adorn the national seal of the United States. With little hesitation, he answered: the fatherly image of Moses, hands extended to heaven, parting the waters for his people.42
Birthyears for the Awakening Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
See the next generation
See the previous generation
Notes:
1. The information on this page has been adapted with permission from William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991). [Back to your place on this page.]
2. William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (New York: Broadway Books [Bantam-Doubleday-Dell], 1997), p. 131. [Back to your place on this page.]
3. Strauss and Howe (1991), p. 156. [Back to your place on this page.]
4. Ibid., p. 160, citing Cotton Mather, A Family Well-Ordered (1699). [Back to your place on this page.]
5. Ibid., citing Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (1977), part 2 and p. 24 (Whitefield); Adams, in Charles Scribner's Sons, Dictionary of American Biography (1930); Ralph Volney Harlow, Samuel Adams, Promoter of the American Revolution: A Study in Psychology and Politics (1975). [Back to your place on this page.]
6. Ibid., p. 157, citing Franklin, Autobiography (1790). [Back to your place on this page.]
7. Ibid., p. 160, citing Richard L. Bushman, "Jonathan Edwards as Great Man," in Robert J. Brugger (ed.), Our Selves/Our Past: Psychological Approaches to History (1981); Edward H. Cady, John Woolman (1965), p. 27. [Back to your place on this page.]
8. Ibid., citing Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness (1968), pp. 388-89; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979), p. 133. [Back to your place on this page.]
9. Ibid., pp. 10, 54. [Back to your place on this page.]
10. Ibid., pp. 159-160, citing Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley's Harvard Graduates (1958). [Back to your place on this page.]
11. Ibid., pp. 39, 94, 152, 156, citing Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743). [Back to your place on this page.]
12. Ibid., p. 160, citing Jonathan Edwards, Faithful Narrative (1737). [Back to your place on this page.]
13. Ibid., p. 156, citing thePost on Davenport, cited in Nash (1979), p. 210. [Back to your place on this page.]
14. Ibid. [Back to your place on this page.]
15. Ibid., p. 160, citing Chauncy (1743); and Gilbert Tennent, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry (1740). [Back to your place on this page.]
16. Ibid., pp. 156, 160, 161, citing Samuel Finley, in Greven (1977), pp. 116-17. [Back to your place on this page.]
17. Ibid., p. 161, citing Edwards, in Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966), p. 30. [Back to your place on this page.]
18. Ibid., citing Franklin, in Nash (1979), p. 220. [Back to your place on this page.]
19. Ibid., p. 159, citing Cedric B. Cowing, The Great Awakening and the American Revolution (1971), p. 1; J. M. Bumsted and John E. Van de Wetering, What Must I Do to Be Saved?: The Great Awakening in Coloinial America (1976), ch. 7; James Walsh, "The Great Awakening in the First Congregational Church of Woodbury, Connecticut," (William and Mary Quarterly October 1971); and Cushing Strout, The New Heavens and New Earth: Political Religion in America (1973), p. 41; "Age of Presbyterians: Research of William H. Kenney," in Strout (1973). [Back to your place on this page.]
20. Ibid., p. 156, citing the Salem minister in Nash (1979), p. 212; Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (1970), p. 187, and (ed.) The Great Awakening (1970), p. xi. [Back to your place on this page.]
21. Ibid., pp. 11, 157, 163, citing "Samuel Adams," in Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley's Harvard Graduates (1958), vol, X, Class of 1740, and Edward Everett (1835) on Adams in Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries (1980), p. 47; Franklin, entry for ca. 1721 in Autobiography (1790). [Back to your place on this page.]
22. Ibid., p. 157, citing Heimert (1966); Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (1750). [Back to your place on this page.]
23. Ibid., pp. 156, 161, citing Adams, in Maier (1980), p. 34; Livingston, Philosophic Solitude (1747); Carter, in "Introduction" to Jack P. Greene (ed.), The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter (1965). [Back to your place on this page.]
24. Ibid., p. 161, citing Pemberton, in Heimert (1966), p. 30. [Back to your place on this page.]
25. Ibid., p. 159, citing Rosemary R. Ruether and Rosemary S. Keller, Women and Religion in America, Vol. 2; and The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods (1981). [Back to your place on this page.]
26. Ibid., p. 161, citing Bland, A Modest and True State of the Case (1753); Fothergill, in Peter Block, Pioneers of the Peaceable Kingdom (1968), p. 128. [Back to your place on this page.]
27. Ibid., p. 159, citing Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and Millennium in Revolutionary New England (1977), p. 39; and Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought,1756-1800 (1985), p. 22. [Back to your place on this page.]
28. Ibid., pp. 11, 157, citing French diplomat Barbe Marbois on Benezet during the Revolution, in Greenwood Press, American Writers Before 1800: A Biographical and Critical Dictionary (1983). [Back to your place on this page.]
29. Ibid., pp. 161-62, citing Bellamy, in Heimert (1966), pp. 344-45. [Back to your place on this page.]
30. Ibid., pp. 156-57. [Back to your place on this page.]
31. Ibid., p. 163, citing Nathan Hatch, "The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly (July 1974); Heimert (1966), p. 12. [Back to your place on this page.]
32. Ibid., pp. 157, 162. Analogy between "Committees" and "communion of colonies" made by Mayhew in 1766; see Strout (1973), pp. 70-71. On "college enthusiasm," see Beverly McAnear, "College Founding in the American Colonies, 1745-1775," Mississippi Valley Historical Review (1955); on "civic enthusiasm," see Max Savelle, Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind (1948), and Richard L. Merritt, Symbols of American Community, 1735-1775 (1966); Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (1750); Witherspoon, in John F. Roche, The Colonial Colleges in the War for American Independence (1986), p. 29; Parsons, in Heimert (1966), p. 421; Hawley, in ibid., p. 472. [Back to your place on this page.]
33. Ibid., pp. 11, 54, 159, citing Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (1976), pp. 185-86; and Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (1976), pp. 62-63. [Back to your place on this page.]
34. Ibid., pp. 151-52, citing Langdon, Government Corrupted by Vice, and Recovered by Righteousness (delivered in Watertown, MA, May 31, 1775). The exact text of Langdon's sermon in Cambridge sixteen days later has not survived, but we can safely assume it was (if possible) even more vehement; the next day, Langdon visited and prayed with the wounded. [Back to your place on this page.]
35. Ibid., p. 157, citing Trumbell, in Charles Scribner's Sons, Dictionary of American Biography (1930). [Back to your place on this page.]
36. Ibid., citing Oliver, esp. in Origin and Progress of the American Revolution: A Tory View (unpublished until 1961). [Back to your place on this page.]
37. Ibid., p. 152, citing Bellamy, in Heimert (1966), p. 471; Hawley, in ibid., p. 470. [Back to your place on this page.]
38. Ibid., p. 162, citing Adams, in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the Amercan Republic, 1776-1787 (1972), pp. 123-24; Adams, in Maier (1980); on Calvinistic piety in the Continental Congress, see Strout (1973), pp. 67-68; Bellamy, in Heimert (1966), p. 471. [Back to your place on this page.]
39. Ibid., p. 162, citing Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (1967). [Back to your place on this page.]
40. Ibid., p. 159, citing Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (1970), p. 301. [Back to your place on this page.]
41. Ibid., p. 162, citing Sherman, A Short Sermon on the Duty of Self-Examination (1789); Adams, in Maier (1980); Carter, in Greene (1965). See David Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (1977). [Back to your place on this page.]
42. Ibid., p. 163. On the Awakener role in the slavery question, see Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (1967). Edwards, in Heimert (1966), p. 59; Franklin on the seal: see John F. Berens, Providence and Patriotism in Early America, 1640-1815 (1978), p. 107. [Back to your place on this page.]
Other sources
Back to the top
Close this window