A History of the American People

joined forces with Gilbert Tennent, and an angry critic described how people wallowed in snow, night and day, for the benefit of their beastly brayings.' When Whitefield left, others arose toblow up the Divine Fire lately kindled.' John Davenport
(1716-57), a Yale man from Long Island, was perhaps the first of the new-style American
personal evangelists. At public, open-air meetings in Connecticut he called for rings, cloaks,
wigs, and other vain personal adornments to be thrown on the bonfire, together with religious
books he denounced as wicked. He thus fell foul of the colony's laws against itinerant preaching,
was arrested, tried by the General Assembly, judged to be mentally disturbed, and deported to
Long Island. That did not stop him, or anyone else. Denied churches, the new evangelists
preached in the open, often round camp-fires. Indeed they soon began to organize the camp-
meetings which for two centuries were to be a salient part of American frontier religion. But
many clergy welcomed these wild and earnest men. Even Anglican Virginia-its piedmont
anyway-joined in the revival. People went to revival meetings, then started attending regularly
in their own parish church, if there was one. If not, they clubbed together to set one up.
Whitefield attracted enormous crowds-10,000 was not uncommon for him. It may be, as critics
claimed, that only one in a hundred of his converts' stayed zealous. But he returned again and again to the attack-seven continental tours in the thirty years from 1740-and all churches benefited from his efforts, though the greatest gainers were the Baptists and the stranger sects on the Protestant fringes. The curious thing about the Great Awakening is that it moved, simultaneously, in two different directions which were in appearance contradictory. In some ways it was an expression of the Enlightenment. One of the most important of the Anglican Awakeners, Samuel Johnson (1693-1772), who had been with Edwards at Yale-was his tutor in fact-was a typical Enlightenment clergyman. He said that reading Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning left himlike one at once emerging out of the twilight into the full sunshine of open day.' The
experience, he said, freed him from what he called the curious cobweb of distributions and definition'-17th-century Calvinist theology-and from Bacon he went on to the idealism of the great Anglo-Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley, who taught him that morality wasthe same
thing as the religion of Nature,' not indeed discoverable without Relevation but `founded on the
first principles of reason and nature.' Johnson became the first president of King's College. The
Awakening indeed had a dramatic impact on education at all levels. The Congregationalist
minister Eleazar Wheelock (1711-79), one of the New England Awakeners, went on to operate a
highly successful school for Indians, and this in turn developed into Dartmouth College (1769),
which specialized in the classics. Charles Chauncy (1705-87), pastor of the First Church in
Boston, originally opposed Edwards and his missions, setting out his views in Thoughts on the
State of Religion in New England (1743) and other pamphlets. But the Awakening had its effect
on him nonetheless, turning him away from the traditional structures of Christianity to what
became Unitarianism. He lived just long enough to see the Anglicans of King's Chapel, Boston,
adopt a non-trinitarian theology in 1785 and so become America's first Unitarian church.
Ebenezer Gay (1696-1787), of Dedham, followed a similar trajectory. And in America, as in
England, Unitarianism was, for countless intellectuals, a halfway house on the long road to
agnosticism. Paradoxically, as a result of the Awakening, splits arose in many churches between
those who endorsed it enthusiastically and those who repudiated its emotionalism, and the
second group captured many pulpits and laid the foundations of American religious liberalism.
But if the Awakening, in itself and in the cross-currents it stirred up, was a movement towards
a rational view of life, it was also a highly emotional experience for most of those who