“Revive us again, fill each heart with Thy love; may each soul be rekindled with fire from above. Hallelujah! Thine the glory, Hallelujah! Amen; Hallelujah! Thine the glory; Revive us again!”1
Revivals were not an invention of the Antebellum years, but came into being in a rigorous fashion in the mid 1700s. From the 1740s on through to the mid 1850s, the power of revivalism gripped the spiritual souls of Americans. The question of the power in those religious movements across the newly forming nation can quickly be summed in the findings of Eric Foner, a historian. His research shows that approximately two-thirds of those living in the Mid-Atlantic colonial states heard George Whitefield, perhaps the most famous evangelist of the time.2
With the quick-spread of the press, stories of the revivalist culture moved throughout the towns of America. The Athens, Georgia area had not been left out by the religious practice of revivalism. The revivals that came to Athens, like those in the rest of the country, became a chance for communal involvement, and were covered by the local press. Entranced by the dramatic flares of the great evangelists, congregations packed pews in search of religious fervor. Men, women, and children went into the houses of worship together as families. Those spiritual movements amassed audiences that spanned across the spectrum of age, gender, and even race. The question then becomes whether or not the revivals played a great role in the creation of class gatherings and societal involvement, or were they strictly individual experiences of a heavenly nature?
The gathering together of neighbors and families, not to mention the curious from towns of close proximities, created an environment, which bred social interaction of classes and in some instances races. Revivals, sometimes lasting weeks in length, became strong movements for communities and created one of the most prominent social activities of the time. The local newspapers played a large role in preserving the history of these congregational activities for this and other papers on the subject.
The town of Athens along with the state government built the nation’s first land-grant university, and with that honor the town profited from steady growth. As the population grew, a need for churches quickly began. The influx of various people from among the Southeast, especially those with ties to the University, created an instant need for denominational religion. The construction of new facilities generated public interest in the workings of the church and its congregation.
While construction created a place for the pews, revivals became the tool of religious power to fill them. The churches quickly saw need for revival in the spirit, not just for their congregations, but also for their community. Religion had already rooted itself within North Georgia. In 1830, the Presbyterians of Athens joined suit with their sister churches to reach the goal of an “American Bible Society” by placing a Bible in the hands of every family in the twenty-one county region.3 The movement of Bibles into homes across what is now the northern third of the state was nothing more than an impossible task. The “Bible Society” movement, which began at Princeton in 1813, showed a great need for the spreading of the Holy Book to everyone in the nation.4
The spread of the gospel helped to draw attention to the church as a vehicle for community involvement, and as a mobilization to connect the populous. The revivalists used the spectacles as a means to reveal to the average person the need to reform from the corrupt and sinful human nature. That corrupted human nature included such vices as drinking, prostitution, and gambling. The nation slowly treaded towards a resting place in the carnage of sin. Revivals had to be thorough in rejuvenating the soul to keep America from continuing down such a sinful path. Revivals that took place in the Athens area were not limited to the time frames of today’s religious culture. These revivals were lengthy in time, lasting days and even weeks.
The stretch and magnitude of these revivals were not as miniscule as some might think, given the smaller population of the time. Revivals of the past embodied great movements within the local churches, which cannot easily be replicated today. In a revival in the Presbyterian Church of 1831, there were over seventy affirmations of faith. The personal growth from the revivals reached far from the walls of the church and entered the realm of the University, as twenty-four of those receiving salvation were college students.5
The revivals became tools for crossing social class lines, gender gaps, and even racial barriers. Even some slaveholders of the South permitted the formation of church gatherings among the blacks within the confines of the plantation. It would be these church movements that would become strong roots for the African American population in the future years.6 Most of the churches of the day were constructed with a balcony for the free-black population to sit in during services.
The Southern Banner reported that in 1839, Athenian churchgoers sought to reestablish the Bible Society. The group had fallen aside after its tremendous task nearly a decade earlier. Perhaps realizing that a more local approach would be more effective, the new society looked to deal only in the town, and not in the surrounding region of the state. The reorganized group sparked by the need to spread the Bible to a growing audience helped to ignite a flurry of revivals during the next twenty years within the Athens area.7
Revivalism invoked key opportunities within the Methodist and Presbyterian sects of the Athens Christian scene. The Methodist Church of Athens seemed to take advantage of weeks during the spring for its revivals. In the movement of 1840, the church saw a two-week span of meetings. After the evangelist left, and life went back to normal, the church had added twenty-three to the roll, including six blacks. Along with the new memberships, the church boasted of twenty-five professions of faith.8
Spring meetings had all of the ingredients for the making of a spiritual uplifting for the Methodist congregation. According to the diary of William Price Talmage, the Methodist Church’s revival of 1857 was a spectacular event. The entry, written in April of that year, provided the essential details of a revival lasting between four to five weeks in time. The month-long revival added seventy new members to the church registry. While the numbers do not give a class or ethnic breakdown, it is clear that the total magnitude of the event was astonishing.9
As the Methodists firmly planted and harvested the seeds of spirituality in the spring months, the Presbyterians used the late harvest of August as the opportune time to revive the community. The pew-packing antics appeared in the August revival of 1848 in the Presbyterian Church, as the Southern Banner submits that all of the church was full to capacity.10 The article does not give any information as to the concluding results of the revival, but by number, it is the first time that it recalls any church as exceeding far beyond its limits on community attendance.
With the view of these events in the Athens area, it becomes necessary to look at the scope of these revivalist outbreaks on the national level. The Rev. Chauncey Allen Goodrich, D.D., of Yale College, became a central figure in the New Haven area on the topic of revivals. Goodrich was a leader at the college, but beginning in the year of 1820, he became more than just a member of the faculty. According to the Yale Review, he had not been involved with the revivalist movement until 1820, when, “he entered them with zeal and hopefulness, he longed for them as the harvest times of the church, and ere long became the most efficient laborer in them.” Goodrich declared that revivals were a “peculiar movement to favor the progress of religion, what helps Christian feeling and to earnest prayers.” He saw the revivals more as a tool of reform in the Christian faith than as a social movement.11
The key then, of a great revival, or awakening, as it was commonly referred to in the Northern states during that day, was to have a great evangelist, one taking on the role of the predecessor George Whitefield. The great evangelist must have had a willingness to go into the churches and provide both the church and the pastor a needed shaking up, promoting the return to Godly foundations, and “break in upon the settled order of the gospel, and undertake to alter and improve what God has established.”12 Evangelists focused on the stirring up of emotions and on the making of the masses uncomfortable enough to seek a newer, Godlier way. Sermons by the greatest of the revivalists weren’t always limited to daily occurrences. Daniel Baker of Savannah spoke of preaching up to three times daily during revivals, and each time with a different sermon to different crowds.13
For many cases, these revivals were spectacles of fiery orators and spiritual soul journeys, which brought on-lookers from miles away to see the fuss. The revivals of the north, more commonly known as camp meetings, reveled in the natural environment. Only a few of these meetings were held in doors, and in most cases the structures were used only in the big cities. The religious movements brought hoards of families by wagon, horseback, and foot to the spot of worship. Families camped in circles around the meeting grounds, cooking and eating, sleeping under their wagons, and finally worshiping as a collective body, even though some came from miles away.14
The meetings shared a hodge-podge of visitors for the congregation. Aside from the local families, the meetings hosted travelers from afar, the curious, those seeking to gain elected office, and some ruffians.15 The events of the worship included singing, testimonials, flamboyant sermons, and perhaps most importantly, fellowship. The coming together of complete strangers created a network of sharing that carried the messages of the great revivals back to home communities, to other family members, and across state lines. Revivals took advantage of the free-press word of mouth to encourage growth and expansion.
While the revivals sought to encourage the community involvement and the growth of the church, the spiritual movement truly began in the soul of the individual. All who immersed themselves within the revivalist movement had something to gain, if not simply the spiritual knowledge of salvation, yet for certain sects of the population, the religious reformation had completely different appeals. From the child to the free black, the revival and its components created a unique experience for their individual subset.
The children of the day gained both social interaction and somewhat of an education in the realm of revivalism. As families traveled great distances to attend the revivals, children, who in some cases lived exclusively on their lonely homesteads, obtained an opportunity to interact in society. Revivals became not only a tool to rekindle the souls of the members of the church, but a way to increase the membership to the church. As children started joining, their actions within the within the house of worship would surely have increased, including Sunday school attendance. The revivals that attracted children to the church grounds would help to mold them into adults that would lead a more ideal Christian-oriented lifestyle, allowing them a chance to bypass the sinful path.
Women used the revivals to increase their social interaction and gain a personal sense of independence. In the majority of congregations, women outnumbered men, and in the South, that ratio sometimes appeared two to one.16 Women were offered an opportunity to bond in larger scales thanks to the numbers that revivals brought in. In those large numbers, women would use their strength to form the foundation of their political movements to come. More importantly, in the South, yeomanry wives were afforded the opportunity to feel as an equal to their husbands within the religious scene.17 This equality meant that for at least the length of the service, in the sight of the Almighty, the wife’s soul was not paled in comparison to her husband’s, and this was powerful.
The African-Americans of the time were not as lucky as their white counterparts. While the few free blacks were allowed in some cases to experience the revivalistic awakening, slaves met stiff resistance to the meetings. Some slave owners allowed the slaves to partake in religious practices within the confines of the plantation. The heavy workload, however, did not fair well with the time demand set forth for the revivalist movement. It would be hard for the free slaves to feel as much equality within the house of worship as the females felt, especially from the segregated balcony seats.
While the revivals clearly concluded on the assumption that the growing population needed a religious rekindling, the methods used to accomplish the goal had very different appearances from region to region. The Southern states saw most revivals in the form of in-house meetings, consisting of regular congregations reaching out for membership in their localities, as was the case in Athens. The Mid-Atlantic states typically saw a combination of in-house meetings and camp meetings, with the latter almost exclusively occurring in the rural areas. The camp meetings produced a more estranged following, and generally promoted itself to a larger area, thus producing a larger congregation, sometimes numbering in the thousands.18 The Northern states saw more of the in-house style of revivalism, with a focus on missionary work to relieve the stresses of the impoverished, and societal engagements to maintain the dignity of the wealthy.19
No matter the shape of the vehicle, Revivalism clearly meant more than mere movement of the individual within the heavenly realm. At the time, a man observed that the revival had been a mode of taking a man, showing him his corrupted lifestyle, humiliating him, at least in his own eyes, producing a better way, and praying to correct the situation.20 While this might have been the intention of the great revivalists of the day, to reproduce this process time and time again, it can clearly be seen in hindsight as a mere piece of the puzzle. The revivals did as much for the community as they did for the lone soul. Athens experienced social growth, as revivals within the Methodist and Presbyterian sects showed little favoritism to class or race.
At the time, revivals and religion appeared to be the only playing field leveled for almost all components of society with the exception of slaves under strict rule. Churches, judging by the presswork of the time, thrived on the showing of increased numerical gains during the revivalistic phases of the year. During the Antebellum period, the churches of Athens seemed to focus on not only the souls of the middle to upper class whites, but searched for any soul within the community that could be added to the count. The churches reached into the University for some of the more intellectuals for a part in the meetings. Blacks were invited in, even though segregated, to join in the fiery meetings with the Lord.
Revivals sparked community interaction, as no other events could. Politicians, who saw the popularity of the meetings as a chance to meet the masses, “electioneered.”21 Fiery evangelists, who were some of the most persuasive orators of the day, converted dozens to hundreds with a single sermon. The newspapers made revivals and their outcomes a fixture within their columns. Churches used the revivals to speak out against what it felt were social taboos, and eventually started the grassroots efforts that led to prohibition and women’s suffrage.
The argument must be revisited. One could not possibly conclude that the revivals of the day strictly based themselves on either the community or the individual. The act of getting masses to attend were perhaps some of the greatest marketing techniques ever used. Once inside the doors of the church, or under the stars at the camp meeting, the sermons issued the platforms of the Christian faith, stepping on toes and hammering home the old values. Even as the means to get one there worked on the communal side of the scale, the outcome to the event relied on the soul-searching of the individual. Revivals, given their sizeable impact, played an important role in the growth of Athens, and for that case, the rest of America.
1. Mackay, William P. “Revive Us Again.” Hymns of Faith, (1980), p.44.
2. Foner, Eric. “Tom Paine’s Republic: Radical Ideology and Social Change.” The American Revolution (1976), p.203.
3. “American Bible Society.” Athenian, (6/1/1830), p.2. col.2.
4. Mintz, Steven. Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil War Reformers, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. p.54
5. “Revival of Religion.” Athenian, (5/31/1831), p.2, col.1
6. Gallay, Allan. “The Origins of Slaveholder’s Paternalism: George Whitefield, the Bryan Family, and the Great Awakening in the South.” The Journal of Southern History, vol.58, no.4, (Aug. 1987), pp.369-394.
7. “Bible Society Meeting.” Southern Banner, (6/28/1839), p.2, col.4
8. “Religious Revival.” Southern Banner, (4/24/1840), p.3, col.1
9. MS 603, William Price Talmage Diary, 1847-1877. p.34, (4/25/1857 entry).
10. “Religious Revival.” Southern Banner, (8/31/1848), p.2, col.6
11. Kingsley, W.L. “Discourse Commemorative of Rev. C.A. Goodrich, D.D.” New Englander & Yale Review, vol.18, no. 70, (May 1860), pp.328-352
12. Kingsley, W.L. “Evangelists.” New Englander & Yale Review, (April 1844), pp.297-304.
13. McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, & the Political Culture of the South Carolina Low Country, Oxford University Press, 1995, p.151
14. Larkin, Jack. The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840, Harper Perennial, 1989, p.278
19. “Anna Green Winslow, a Schoolgirl, Learns About Growing Up in Boston, 1771.” As found in Diary of Anna Green Winslow: A Boston School Girl of 1771, ed. Alice Morse Earle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), p.56