50 Fun Facts About Second Great Awakening

Which future president beat frontier Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright in an 1846 race for Congress?

Abraham Lincoln won the Illinois race partly because some voters disliked Cartwright mixing religion with politics. Others were put off by the preacher's vehemence against alcohol.

Which snack is named for an 1830s Presbyterian minister who preached temperance, vegetarianism and whole-grain bread?

Graham cracker recalls Sylvester Graham, often called the Father of Vegetarianism in America. Followers and entrepreneurs sold flour, bread and crackers inspired by his teachings.

In 1806, Williams College students began America's foreign missions movement while sheltering from a storm under what?

A haystack sheltered the five students, who had met to discuss the spiritual welfare of the people of Asia. Within four years, some of them had set up a national board to send missionaries overseas.

Which 1801 revival led by Barton W. Stone drew as many as 20,000 settlers to rural Bourbon County?

Cane Ridge may have drawn nearly a tenth of the state's recorded 1800 population over one week. Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist ministers all took part in the services.

Western New York saw so many waves of revival in the early 1800s that it earned which lasting nickname?

Burned-over district implied a region set ablaze with spiritual fervor. A revivalist's 1876 memoir called it a 'burnt district', and a 1950 history of the region fixed the longer name.

Which young man from Palmyra, New York said an angel led him to golden plates, founding the Latter Day Saint movement?

Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830, describing it as an English translation of those plates. He spent the following decade sending out missionaries.

Which lawyer-turned-evangelist led the 1830–31 Rochester revival that inspired others across the Second Great Awakening?

Charles Finney apprenticed as a lawyer before he turned to preaching. His innovations included having women pray aloud in mixed gatherings of men and women.

Which celibate sect, led to America by 'Mother Ann', thrived on revival fervor and became famous for its furniture?

Shakers were first called Shaking Quakers for their ecstatic worship. In the wake of the frontier revivals, their missionaries went west and founded new villages there from 1805.

Which hymn by former slave trader John Newton spread across America during the Second Great Awakening's revivals?

Amazing Grace had settled into relative obscurity in England before American revivalists embraced it. In 1835 it was joined to New Britain, the tune it is most often sung to today.

Which New England island's colorful gingerbread cottages grew from a Methodist summer revival ground founded in 1835?

Martha's Vineyard worshippers began with nine tents at Wesleyan Grove. In the 1860s and 1870s, families rapidly replaced the canvas with permanent wooden cottages.

The Second Great Awakening's frontier phase ignited at the Revival of 1800 in Logan County, in which state?

Kentucky's revival began at the Red River Meeting House, a Presbyterian congregation of about twenty-five members led by James McGready.

What name was given to the multi-day outdoor revivals where thousands of frontier settlers gathered to hear preaching?

Camp meetings often gave settlers their first encounter with organized religion. They also served as major social venues in thinly populated country.

Which War of 1812 veteran from Low Hampton, New York convinced thousands that Christ would return by 1844?

William Miller rested his forecast on a 2,300-day prophecy in the Book of Daniel. He set it out in a series of sixteen newspaper articles in 1832.

Second Great Awakening leader Timothy Dwight was a grandson of which fiery preacher of the First Great Awakening?

Jonathan Edwards preached the 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. His daughter Mary was Dwight's mother, so the two awakenings ran in one family.

Which enslaved Virginia preacher, guided by religious visions and a solar eclipse, led a four-day rebellion in 1831?

Nat Turner's uprising led state legislatures to require a white man's presence at Black worship services. The laws were a blow to independent congregations born of the revivals.

Which formerly enslaved New Yorker took a new name in 1843, convinced God had called her to testify in the countryside?

Sojourner Truth became a Christian in 1827 and helped found the Methodist church in Kingston, New York. Her famous speech at an Ohio women's convention came in 1851.

Which antebellum reformer toured hundreds of jails and almshouses, then lobbied legislatures to build mental asylums?

Dorothea Dix covered more than 10,000 miles by stagecoach in three years of inspections. During the Civil War she served as the Union's Superintendent of Army Nurses.

Missionaries fired by the Second Great Awakening sailed to which Pacific islands, where they created a written language?

Hawaii was known to the missionaries as the Sandwich Islands. They adapted the English alphabet to Hawaiian so that they could print a Bible in the islanders' own language.

Which revivalist, famed for six 1826 sermons against drunkenness, was the father of the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin?

Lyman Beecher raised a remarkable family: over half of his children became writers or ministers. Among them was the minister Henry Ward Beecher.

What name do historians give October 22, 1844, the day thousands of American believers expected Christ to return?

The Great Disappointment split the movement. One group decided the date had marked not Christ's return but the start of his final work of atonement in heaven.

Which church, co-founded by visionary Ellen G. White, grew from a movement that expected Christ's return in 1844?

Seventh-day Adventists formally organized in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1863, almost two decades after the date their forerunners had awaited.

Which Ohio college, a stronghold of revivalism and abolition, is the oldest coeducational college in the United States?

Oberlin began admitting Black students in 1835 and women in 1837. Students and townspeople also made it a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Which Philadelphia preacher, born into slavery, became the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church?

Richard Allen's Mother Bethel church stands on the oldest parcel of real estate in the United States continuously owned by African Americans.

Which English-born Methodist bishop rode about 6,000 miles a year to reach settlers on the American frontier?

Francis Asbury spent 45 years in America, preaching virtually every day. He also ordained the first Black Methodist minister.

Which town in revival-swept upstate New York hosted America's first women's rights convention in 1848?

Seneca Falls was home to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who organized the meeting with local Quaker women. She read its Declaration of Sentiments aloud in full.

Which waterway, completed in 1825, brought the boom that left western New York's frontier ripe for revival preachers?

Erie Canal country was still a frontier where established clergy were scarce, so traveling evangelists won many converts among its self-taught settlers.

Which utopian commune, notorious for its 'complex marriage', grew into one of the world's largest silverware makers?

Oneida was founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes and long lived on animal traps, silk and canned goods. Its silverware manufacturing only began in 1877.

Second Great Awakening revivalists preached that anyone could choose salvation, breaking with which Calvinist doctrine?

Predestination, as set out in the Westminster Confession, held that people could not save themselves and were saved only if God had elected them.

Which movement began in 1848 when New York's Fox sisters claimed mysterious rapping noises were messages from the dead?

Spiritualism spread nationwide before Margaretta Fox said in 1888 that the raps were a hoax made by cracking her joints. She later retracted the confession.

Which state, in 1851, became the first to ban the sale and production of alcohol, a triumph for temperance crusaders?

Maine's ban was copied so widely that by 1855 twelve more states had passed prohibition laws of their own.

Missionary Samuel Worcester was jailed by Georgia for living among which Native nation, then won at the Supreme Court?

Cherokee editor Elias Boudinot worked with Worcester to launch the Cherokee Phoenix, the first newspaper published by a Native American nation.

Revivalist Timothy Dwight, who warned students against 'infidel philosophy', led which college as president from 1795?

Yale later named a residential college for Timothy Dwight and for his grandson and namesake, who led the school from 1886 to 1899.

The Second Great Awakening followed a surge of which Enlightenment creed, argued in Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason?

Deism enjoyed an American upsurge after Paine's best-seller challenged institutional religion and the legitimacy of the Bible. The revivals began almost immediately afterwards.

Followers of Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell united in 1832 under which banner, parent of the Churches of Christ?

The Restoration Movement's two branches joined in fellowship with a handshake. The formal merger came on January 1, 1832.

In 1830s revivals, what was the place at the front called where people considering conversion sat to receive prayer?

The anxious seat was one of the era's contested 'new measures'. In the 1840s the theologian John Williamson Nevin attacked the methods and the theology behind them.

Which party, formed to oppose Andrew Jackson, carried the Second Great Awakening's evangelical zeal into politics?

Whigs drew their base from evangelical Protestants, professionals and the urban middle class. Their thinkers held that moral progress and material progress needed each other.

Missionary Adoniram Judson, sent abroad amid Second Great Awakening zeal, spent almost 40 years in which Asian country?

Burma jailed Judson for 17 months during its war with Britain. He still went on to compile the first Burmese-English dictionary.

What nickname do historians give the web of Protestant reform societies active in America from 1815 to 1861?

The Benevolent Empire was inspired by Second Great Awakening revivalism. Its societies took up causes ranging from temperance to abolition.

Which educator, who preached revivals to her own students, founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837?

Mary Lyon turned her seminary into a nursery of missionaries. By 1887 its alumnae made up one-fifth of the American women sent abroad by the leading mission board.

At early 1800s frontier revivals, what nickname was given to the involuntary convulsions that seized many worshippers?

The jerks were among the most controversial of the revivals' bodily exercises. Leaping and dancing were sometimes counted under the same name, since all were thought involuntary.

Which eccentric traveling evangelist was so admired that many frontier parents named their sons after him?

Lorenzo Dow's two names were shared by 220 men and boys in the 1850 census, which counted more than 1,500 others as Lorenzo D.

Which missionary, caught up in the Second Great Awakening, was among the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains?

Narcissa Whitman made the crossing in 1836 on her way to found a mission with her husband Marcus near modern-day Walla Walla, Washington.

Which New Jersey-born evangelist was the first woman preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church?

Jarena Lee traveled thousands of miles on foot as a minister. In 1836 she became the first African American woman to publish an autobiography.

Which formerly enslaved Methodist preacher, unable to read, did Benjamin Rush call the greatest orator in America?

Harry Hosier memorized long passages of scripture read aloud to him on the road. His 1784 sermon in Delaware was the first by a Black preacher directly to a white congregation.

The 'Lane Rebels', seminary students who quit in 1834 over a ban on slavery debates, studied in which Ohio River city?

Cincinnati's seminary hosted 18 evenings of debate in February 1834. After the walkout, only 8 of its 103 students remained at the start of the next term.

Phoebe Palmer's Tuesday gatherings in her New York home helped found which Methodist-rooted revival tradition?

The Holiness movement grew from sessions that Palmer refused to hold anywhere but in a home. Her house had to be enlarged to fit them, and the movement came to stress entire sanctification.

Which music-reading system, first printed in 1801's The Easy Instructor, helped untrained revival singers find pitches?

Shape notes printed each scale syllable with a differently shaped notehead. Singers could then find pitches without decoding key signatures.

In the late 1820s, Sabbath-minded petitioners pressed Congress to halt which federal service on Sundays?

Mail delivery continued after Senator Richard Mentor Johnson, a practicing Baptist, answered with a report hailed as an elegant defense of the separation of church and state.

Which revival-trained abolitionist co-wrote American Slavery as It Is, an 1839 source for Uncle Tom's Cabin?

Theodore Weld's compendium, subtitled Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, is ranked second only to that novel in its influence on the antislavery movement.

Which revival-raised lecturer became the first woman ordained as a mainstream Protestant minister in the United States?

Antoinette Brown was ordained while serving a Congregationalist church in South Butler, New York. The minister who ordained her was a vocal advocate of women's right to theological education.