The market revolution moved people to new towns and new kinds of work, far from the churches and neighbors they had known. In the same decades a wave of religious revival swept the country. It is called the Second Great Awakening (the first came in the 1730s and 1740s).
Key idea
From about 1800 to the 1840s, revival preachers held camp meetings (one at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801, drew many thousands) and urged people to choose salvation and live better lives. The revival inspired reform movements: temperance (against drinking alcohol), public schools (Horace Mann), better care for the mentally ill (Dorothea Dix), prison reform, utopian communities, and, as the next lessons show, abolition and women's rights.
Why it works
Older Puritan teaching stressed that God had already chosen who would be saved. Revival preachers such as Charles Grandison Finney taught that each person could choose to turn to God and could work to become better. If people could improve themselves, many reasoned, they could improve society too, and they had a duty to try. That belief, joined with new voluntary societies, printing presses and the energy of many women in the churches, powered reform.
Worked example: Connecting a belief to an action
Dorothea Dix visited jails and poorhouses across Massachusetts and in 1843 told the legislature that mentally ill people were kept in cages, stalls and pens. How does her work connect to the Second Great Awakening?
- Dix was a deeply religious teacher, and she saw caring for suffering people as a moral duty.
- The revival taught that people and society could be improved by effort.
- So reformers asked the state to build hospitals where patients could be treated and improve, not just be locked away.
- Massachusetts expanded its state hospital, and Dix went on to press many other states to build them.
Answer: Her belief that people could be helped and society improved led her to demand humane hospitals.
Common mistake
It is easy to treat religion and the reform movements as separate. Many reformers were driven by the revival's belief that people could improve themselves and society, and churches supplied their members, money and meeting places. Not every reformer was religious, and not every church member supported reform. Check: when a reformer explains why, look for words such as duty, sin and redemption.
The revival also gave birth to new churches: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded by Joseph Smith in western New York in 1830, in a region so swept by revivals that it was called the "burned-over district."