Summary The Americas 3b
Week 1
Primary sources:
Early Evangelicalism: A reader
Chapter 10: Diary of Doubts – Hannah Heaton
After hearing preachers such as George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent, Hannah
Heaton felt sinful (“Now it cut me to think how I had spent my precious time in
vanity and sin against God.”) and in need of Christ, traveling to New Haven
(Connecticut). She felt Christ welcomed her with open arms, spiritually rebirthing in
the early 1740s (“Me thought I see Jesus with the eyes of my soul stand up in heaven.
A lovely God-man with his arms open ready to receive me.”) but finding assurance of
salvation years later. This was because she believed she had made poor decisions,
such as marrying someone who wasn’t as a devout believer as she. She allied with the
Separatists who shared her conviction that people must seek conversion.
Chapter 11: Racing to Hear Whitefield Preach – Nathan Cole
George Whitefield made a fifteen-month tour of the American colonies, preaching
everywhere he came. Farmer (so a commoner) Nathan Cole writes about he and his
wife raced to hear him preach at Middletown (Connecticut), just as everyone else
seemed to do in the vicinity (the sermons were very popular), after which he was
convicted of sin and entered a lengthy spiritual struggle, ending in his assurance of
salvation: “And I thought God was not Just in so doing, I thought I did not stand on
even Ground with others, if as I thought; I was made to be damned; My heart then
rose against God exceedingly, for his making me for hell; Now this distress lasted
almost two years:—Poor —Me—Miserable me.”
Chapter 31: Report on African American Religion in Virginia – Samuel
Davies
A Presbyterian minister in Virginia, Samuel Davies was a pioneer of religious equality
in the South, teaching Christianity to anyone willing to listen (so also slaves). He
witnessed the religious zeal of the African slave community and complained about the
spiritual neglect of slaves by their masters (“Some of them have the misfortune of
irreligious masters; and hardly any of them are so happy, as to have masters, that
will be at the expence of furnishing them with Bibles, Psalm Books, &c.”). They
should be treated humanely, like children + they had to hear the gospel. He wanted
them to learn how to read religious books. “These poor Africans are the principal
objects of compassion; and, I think, the most proper objects of the SOCIETY’s
Charity.”
,Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God – Jonathan Edwards (1741)
A sermon that Edwards preached to his own congregation in Northampton,
Massachusetts. This sermon was the catalyst for the First Great Awakening, with
combinations of vivid imagery of Hell with observations of the world and citations of
Biblical scripture.
“Their foot shall slide in due time,” meaning the Israelites were always exposed to
sudden, unexpected destruction (vengeance of God), that they will fall by themselves,
not by the hand of others and that their foot has not slid because God’s appointed has
not yet come.
Doctrine
There’s nothing that keeps wicked men [non-religious men] out of hell but the will of
God, proved by the following considerations:
1. God may cast wicked men into Hell at any given moment.
2. The wicked deserve to be cast into Hell. Divine justice does not prevent God
from destroying the wicked at any moment.
3. The wicked, at this moment, already suffer under God's condemnation to Hell.
4. The wicked, on earth—at this very moment—suffer a sample of the torments of
Hell. The wicked must not think, simply because they are not physically in
Hell, that God (in whose hand the wicked now reside) is not—at this very
moment—as angry with them as he is with those he is now tormenting in Hell,
and who—at this very moment—feel and bear the fierceness of his wrath.
5. At any moment God shall permit him, Satan stands ready to fall upon the
wicked and seize them as his own.
6. If it were not for God's restraints, there are, in the souls of wicked men, hellish
principles reigning which, presently, would kindle and flame out into hellfire.
7. Simply because there are not visible means of death before them at any given
moment, the wicked should not feel secure.
8. Simply because it is natural to care for oneself or to think that others may care
for them, men should not think themselves safe from God's wrath.
9. All that wicked men may do to save themselves from Hell's pains shall afford
them nothing if they continue to reject Christ.
10. God has never promised to save mankind from Hell, except for those
contained in Christ through the covenant of Grace. “till he believes in Christ,
God is under no manner of obligation to keep him a moment from eternal
destruction.”
“In short, they [non-believers] have no refuge, nothing to take hold of, all that
preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted
unobliged forbearance of an incensed God.”
,Application
Living a good life is not enough, when you are a non-believers, God can decide at any
time to send you to hell. Everyone that has not been converted are in the hands of an
angry God. Consider that you are in danger of the wrath of GOD, not a man. And he
will not pity you when he torments you. He uses a lot of Biblical and classical
tales/quotes to give his words authority. God will use the punishment to show his
almighty power. And it is also everlasting, not a fleeting moment. “But this is the
dismal case of every soul in this congregation, that has not been born again,
however moral and strict, sober and religious they may otherwise be.” But, there is
the possibility of salvation, to turn to God. “Therefore let everyone that is out of
Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come.”
Observations concerning the increase of mankind, 1751 – Benjamin
Franklin
Probably the immediate occasion for writing this essay was the British Iron Act
(1750), wherein colonial growth was curbed by prohibiting the erection of addition
industrial devices in the American colonies. Franklin’s ideas on the growth of
population entered the current of English economic thought influence on Thomas
Malthus. He states that because land is more plenty in America, and because it’s more
cheap (so available for more people), people can more easily subsist a family
marriages are more general in America. He suspects the American doubling every 20
years. It will, however, take a very long to fully populate it. Because of social mobility
(labourer plantation holder), no one is a labourer for a long time, so even though
there’s labour immigration, the wages will still be high (because there’s more demand
than supply). A big demand is growing for British Manufactures, even beyond the
power of supplying. This is why Britain should trade with her colonies and not
restrain manufacturers in her colonies (lecture 1).
He states that slave labour is not cheaper than normal labour, but people in the
Americas keep using it because slaves can’t leave while labourers can. The following
things lead to a diminishing of a nation: being conquered, loss of territory, loss of
trade, loss of food, bad government and insecure property & the introduction of
slaves. Generative laws: preventing importations and promoting exportation of
manufactures by increasing subsistence they encourage marriage.
He estimates that there are now 1 million Englishmen in North-America: “This
Million doubling, suppose but once in 25 Years, will in another Century be more
than the People of England, and the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this
Side the Water.” He is against the import of so many not-Englishmen, like Germans.
He wants to keep America White and Red, he doesn’t understand why they import
peoples who are not purely white.
From A Short Narrative of My Life (1768) – Samson Occom
A native American (Mohegan nation) that became a Presbyterian cleric. A heathen
until his 16th or 17th year, until then little contact with the English or Christianity.
, When he was 16 he heard rumours of extraordinary itinerant preachers and a strange
concern among the whites (The Great Awakening). A short time later, ministers
started to visit the Indians and preach the word of God. Occom was impressed with
what he heard and he and some Indians started to frequent meetings and churches.
After conversion he started to learn reading English. When he was 17, he had “a
Discovery of the way of Salvation through Jesus Christ”. Distress and burdens were
replaced with serenity and pleasure by serving God. He spend 4 years with Mr.
Wheelock, a minister, where he continued his studies. Because he strained his eyes he
had to quit his studies, so he tried to find employment among the Indians. He started
a school on Long Island for Indians. At school, the students prayed, besides learning
to read and spell. He writes about a “remarkable revival of religion among these
Indians and many were hopefully converted to the Saving knowledge of God in
Jesus.” While teaching he lived in a wigwam and cultivated his own plants and stuff.
He did what ever he could to feed his family. He lived in great poverty while
missionaries were paid a lot. This he criticized and he pondered on what could be the
reason. Probably because he’s a “poor Indian”, he concludes.
Secondary source:
Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as
Interpretative Fiction – Jon Butler (1982)
The Great Awakening has been used to explain the social and political evolution of
pre-revolutionary American society, with various historians arguing that the
Awakening severed intellectual and philosophical connections between America and
Europe, that is was a major vehicle of early lower-class protests, that it was a means
by which New England Puritans became Yankees, that it was the first ‘intercolonial
movement’ to stir the people of several colonies on a matter of common emotional
concern, or that it involved a rebirth of the localistic impulse. American historians
have also increasingly linked the Awakening directly to the Revolution. They describe
the weakened position of the clergy, produced by the Awakening, as symptomatic of
growing disrespect for all forms of authority in the colonies, and as an important
catalyst/cause of the American Revolution. Butler, however, thinks the Great
Awakening lacks sustained, comprehensive study, just as the relationship between
the Revolution and the Awakening. There exists a gap between the enthusiasm of
historians for the socio-political significance of the Great Awakening, and its slim,
peculiar historiography, which raises two issues: (1) contemporaries never
homogenized the 18th-century colonial religious revivals by labelling them ‘the Great
Awakening’ (term from the last half of the 19 th century); (2) this particular label
should be viewed with suspicion, because it distorts the extent, nature, and cohesion
of the revivals that did exist in the 18th century colonies, encourages unwarranted
claims for their effects on colonial society, and exaggerates their influence on the
coming and character of the American Revolution.
Historians describe the Great Awakening as (1) a Calvinist religious revival wherein
converts acknowledged their sinfulness without expecting salvation, (2) emphasizing
the breadth and suddenness of the Awakening (hurricane metaphors), (3) arguing
