Great Awakenings in Virginia & Rochester

American religious history has been marked by recurrent episodes of Protestant revivalism, some local, some widespread. Two of the later, in the first halves of the 18th and 19th centuries respectively, were so widespread as to have been given historical names, the First and Second Great Awakenings. (Some present-day evangelicals speak of a Third Great Awakening in recent times.) The social conditions surrounding the spread of the first two Great Awakenings varied widely from region to region. This essay concerns the circumstances of the first in Virginia and the second in Rochester, New York; it will be found that the wave of revivalism in Virginia is more difficult to explain, even though it seems to have had a more durable result, at least in the religious beliefs of the region involved.

Colonial Virginia, as presented by Rhys Isaac in The Transformation of Virginia, was an almost purely rural society, and remained such throughout the late colonial period that is the focus of his study. Even though its economy was closely bound up with commerce, specifically the tobacco trade, the geography lent itself to easy water transport. Tobacco could be shipped directly from plantations, so there was little growth of towns as transshipment points.

County courthouses and parish churches figured prominently in social life, but they were not surrounded by towns, and might be nearly deserted when court was not in session, or b

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master shoemaker, say, lived adjacent to his shop. His workers, journeymen and apprentices, lived there as well, and were regarded as part of the household, with the master exercising a paternal authority over them. All this was changing about 1830, toward an arrangement more familiar to us. Proprietors and workers increasingly did not live where they worked, but "went to work" in the morning and back home at the end of work hours. Working conditions on the job came to be much more regimented in the new system, but the other side of the coin was that workers' lives were no longer exposed to the owner's supervision outside of work hours (pp. 43-48). Rich and poor began to live in different neighborhoods. It is notable that the modern word, "boss," was just coming into use for an employer, supplanting the older "master" with its overtones of personal rank subordination (p. 42). This breakdown of traditional hierarchy relationships seems closely bound to the abrupt emergence of "temperance" as a public-morality issue in the late 1820s, with liquor blamed for all the social ills linked in modern times with drugs. As Johnson notes, "These sentiments were new in the late 1820s. Whiskey was not, and we must ask how liquor b
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Approximate Word count = 1686
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)