A History of the American People

massive, busy Long Wharf' which ran out to sea for half a mile and where the world's biggest ships could safely berth in any tide, the accumulation of wealth was everywhere visible. True, the skyline was dotted with eleven church spires. But not all those slender fingers pointing to God betokened the old Puritan spirit. In 1699 the Brattle Street Church had been founded by rich merchants, who observed a form of religion which was increasingly non-doctrinaire, was comfortably moral rather than pious, and struck the old-guard Puritans as disgustingly secular. A place like Philadelphia was even more attached to the things of this world. It had been founded and shaped by Quakers. But the Quakers themselves had become rich. A tax-list of 1769 shows that they were only one in seven of the town's inhabitants but they made up half of those who paid over £100 in taxes. Of the town's seventeen richest men, twelve were Quakers. The truth is, wherever the hard-working, intelligent Quakers went, they bred material prosperity which raised up others as well as themselves. The German immigrants, hard-working themselves but from a poor country still only slowly recovering from the devastation of the Thirty Years War, were amazed at the opportunities the Quaker colony presented to them. One German observer, Gottlieb Mittelberger, summed it up neatly in 1754:Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers,
paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers. Philadelphia may have already acquired
twelve churches by 1752. But it had fourteen rum distilleries.
However, though Puritanism was in decline in 18th-century America, and the power of the old
Calvinist dogmas-and the controversies they bred-were declining, religion as a whole was not a
spent force in the America of the Enlightenment. Quite the contrary. In fact American religious
characteristics were just beginning to mature and define themselves. It could be argued that it
was in the 18th century that the specifically American form of Christianity-undogmatic,
moralistic rather than credal, tolerant but strong, and all-pervasive of society-was born, and that
the Great Awakening was its midwife. What was the Great Awakening? It was, is, hard to define,
being one of those popular movements which have no obvious beginning or end, no pitched
battles or legal victories with specific dates, no constitutions or formal leaders, no easily
quantifiable statistics and no formal set of beliefs. While it was taking place it had no name.
Oddly enough, in the first major history of America, produced in the middle decades of the 19th
century, George Bancroft's History o f the United States (1834-74), the term Great Awakening is
never used at all. One or two modern historians argued that the phrase, and to some extent the
concept behind it, was actually invented as late as 1842, by Joseph Tracey's bestselling book,
The Great Awakening: a History of the Revival of Religion in the Times of Edwards and White
field.
Whatever we call it, however, there was a spiritual event in the first half of the 18th century in
America, and it proved to be of vast significance, both in religion and in politics. It was indeed
one of the key events in American history. It seems to have begun among the German
immigrants, reflecting a spirit of thankfulness for their delivery from European poverty and their
happy coming into the Promised Land. In 1719, the German pastor of the Dutch Reformed
Church, Theodore Frelinghuysen, led a series of revival meetings in the Raritan Valley.
`Pietism,' the emphasis on leading a holy life without troubling too much about the doctrinal
disputes which racked the 17th century, was a German concept, and this is the first time we find
non-English-speaking immigrants bringing with them ideas which influenced American
intellectual life. It is also important to note that this Protestant revival, unlike any of the previous
incarnations of the Reformed Religion, began not in city centers, but in the countryside. Boston
and Philadelphia had nothing to do with it. Indeed to some extent it was a protest against the
religious leadership of the well-fed, self-righteous congregations of the long-established towns. It