wake of the success of the Revolution and the establishment of what was by and large a stable constitutional government. What has been called the Second Great Awakening, a widespread religious revivalist sentiment that looked backward to the mid-18th century's Great Awakening. The earlier event, also marked by intense and widespread religious feeling, devolved in a way that created an irrevocable schism between the established church and state guarantees of secular freedom and that sowed the seeds of American secular nationalism that drove the American Revolution.
The Second Great Awakening in its earliest incarnation appears to have sought to reclaim for popular culture a religious sensibility that had, since the Revolution and Constitutional Convention, been formally excluded from US governance. As Bailyn, et al., suggest, the big picture of the Second Great Awakening was one of religious-secular and status quo-reformist schism. The Andover Theological Seminary in rural Massachusetts, founded in 1809, emphasized an evangelical approach to the ministry as against a more rationalistic trend that the Harvard school of theology, informed by the Enlightenment, was taking (Bailyn, et al., 1977, p. 544). It was from evangelical Protestant sects that had been moved to religious fervor in the first Great Awakening that the impetus for zealous social reform, particularly among the middle classes, sprang in the second, eventually chiefly aimed at temperance and abolition. Accompanying the reformist impulse was an impulse toward religious revivalism, which reached its peak in the 1820s, with the general attitude among participants being that of being one's brother's keeper, dedicated to raising his fellow man to the level of morality he had attained.
By 1831, both Jacksonian Democracy and abolition had entered popular consciousness, though sectional interests had the country sharply divided. By 1833 some 6,000 local temperance leagues exist...