The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

other Evangelists to fill their pews.

In 1831 alone, church membership

grew by 100,000, an increase,

according to a New England minis-

ter, “unparalleled in the history of

the church.” The success of the

Evangelists of the Second Great

Awakening stemmed from the time-

liness of their assault on Calvinist

doctrine and even more from their

methods. Finney, for example, con-

sciously set out to be entertaining

as well as edifying. The singing of

hymns and the solicitation of per-

sonal testimonies provided his

meetings with emotional release

and human interest. Prominent

among his innovations was the

“anxious bench,” where leading

members of the community awaited

the final prompting from within

before coming forward to declare

themselves saved.

Economic changes and their

impact on family life also con-

tributed to the Second Awakening.

The growth of industry and com-

merce that followed the completion

of the Erie Canal in 1825, along

with the disappearance of undevel-

oped farmland, led hundreds of

young men to leave family farms to

seek their fortunes in Utica and

other towns along the canal. There,

uprooted, uncertain, and buffeted

between ambition, hope, and anxi-

ety, they found it hard to resist the

comfort promised by the revivalists to those who

were saved.

Women, and especially the wives of the business

leaders of the community, felt particularly responsible

for the Christian education of their children, which

fell within their separate sphere. Many women had

servants and thus had time and energy to devote to

their own and their offsprings’ salvation.

Paradoxically, this caused many of them to ven-

ture out of that sphere and in doing so they moved

further out of the shadow of their husbands. They

founded the Oneida County Female Missionary

Society, an association that did most of the organizing

and a good deal of the financing of the climactic years

of the Second Awakening. The Female Missionary

Society raised more than $1,000 a year (no small sum

at that time) to support the revival in Utica, in its

The Second Great Awakening 275

Lily Spenser Martin’s painting, Domestic Happiness(1844), reflects the change in attitudes
toward infants. Parents such as these could not believe that God had consigned their angelic
babies to eternal damnation.
Source: Photograph © 1993 The Detroit Institute of Arts/The Bridgeman Art Library, NY.

lawyer and became an itinerant preacher. His most
spectacular successes occurred during a series of
revivals conducted in towns along the Erie Canal, a
region Finney called “the burned-over district”
because it had been the site of so many revivals
before his own. From Utica, where his revival began
in 1826, to Rochester, where it climaxed in 1831, he
exhorted his listeners to take their salvation into their
own hands. He insisted that people could control
their own fate. He dismissed Calvinism as a “theo-
logical fiction.” Salvation was available to anyone.
But the day of judgment was just around the corner;
there was little time to waste.
During and after Finney’s efforts in Utica, con-
versions increased sharply. In Rochester, church
membership doubled in six months. Elsewhere in
the country, churches capitalized on the efforts of