A QUALIFIED FEDERATION

 

As a last word or two about the First Great Awakening, this posting offers a short review of how it affected women and African Americans.  The overall effect was to enhance the status of women and to a limited degree, it allowed an inclusion of blacks into white society.  While in no way should this be seen as liberating the status of these people, one can ascribe a first step quality of sorts, in that direction.

          One can detect the Awakening played a significant role in changing the lives of many women.  Through the enthusiasm that the Awakening stirred in their lives, they began taking a more robust sense of the importance of those lives.  They took a newfound motivation to look introspectively as to who they were, what they were about, and how they affected others. 

This led to an outpouring of written accounts from many women of that time.  Those accounts, many surviving to this day, reflected women analyzing their feelings.  They could, by these recorded efforts, often daily diary entries, share those feelings with other women and reflect a more independent spirit in controlling more aspects of their lives.  For example, one can detect more independence in the choosing of a marriage partner. 

While the Awakening led to this surge of limited independence, they were not invited to take on leadership roles within the church.  Despite that, many of these written accounts are available today such as those of Hannah Heaton, Phillis Wheatley, and Sarah Osborn.

 

·       Hannah Heaton efforts give one an insightful view of farm life as it was in Connecticut in the 1700s.[1] 

·       Phillis Wheatley, an African born black poet, shares an account of her trip to America and how her exposure to Christian preaching delivered her from the “pagan” influences of her native land.[2]

·       Sarah Osborn produced a memoir and, anonymously, a collection of her letters, entitled The Nature, Certainty, and Evidence of True Christianity.[3]

 

As for African Americans, there was a limited advancement in several areas within the colonies.  That included “[George] Whitefield[4] preached to common people, slaves and Native Americans.  No one was out of reach.”[5] Thomas Kidd reports that in various pockets, awakened preachers strove to convert black people.  This included the Tidewater and Low Country and northern Baptists and Methodists.[6]  He, Kidd, goes on to describe these conversions as initial socializing across racial boundaries and the assigning of church roles to these converts.  Some, a very limited number, were recruited to preach.

Part of the awakened messaging was the claim of spiritual equality.  These early days saw the first significant numbers of African Americans joining the Christian ranks and would lead to a very powerful role in the history of that racial group in America.  Also, in the South, part of the religious sermons was the encouragement to white slaveholders to educate their slaves to read so that they, the slaves, could then read the Bible.[7]

Whitefield, while a supporter of slavery, did preach an egalitarian message that ascribed a spiritual equality to African Americans.  It should be mentioned that he eventually owned slaves.  There were others who preached to slaves in the South, but as to their effects, other than converting slaves, one cannot detect large changes in how slaves were treated. 

If anything, the Christian message, this writer fears, was, to an extent, allowed to spread among slaves because it was perceived as messaging that instilled among slaves, the slaveholders’ version of morality.  That would emphasize compliance of slaves to those in charge.  Unfortunately, organized religion has played, among some believers, that role throughout history.

Overall, the Awakening strengthened congregational views of social arrangements.  This promotes federation among the people, but at the same time it undermined people being able to overcome preconceived notions of unfounded biases.  Many of those biases held that people of other races or nationalities did not share the same level of human worth as they did.  As has been stated in this blog, this strengthened the notions of a parochial/traditional federalism view and stood in the way of true inclusion among the populous. 

The next posting will look more directly at how tolerance – both religious and political forms – evolved in the 1700s.  While this overlaps with the Awakening and its general tensions with Enlightened ideas on social attitudes, it can be analyzed on its own merits.  Of course, these particular attitudes and even values will spur Americans toward entertaining and then acting upon their wishes to become independent from the British.

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[1] See Barbara E. Lacy, The World of Hannah Heaton:  The Autobiography of an Eighteenth-Century Connecticut Farm Woman (n.d.), accessed May 24, 2021, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1922328?seq=1 .

[2] For a sample of Wheatley’s poems, see “Poems by Phillis Wheatley” (n.d.), accessed May 24, 2021, Poems of Phillis Wheatley (vcu.edu) .

[3] “Five:  The Nature, Certainty, and Evidence of True Christianity, 1755,” Sarah Osborn’s Collected Writings (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2017), accessed May 24, 2021, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.12987/9780300188318-008/html .

[4] George Whitefield was introduced in the last posting.

[5] “Great Awakening,” History Channel (September 20, 2019/March 7, 2018), accessed May 24, 2021, Great Awakening - HISTORY .

[6] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening:  The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2007).

[7] Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried:  The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” Journal of American History, 69, 2 (September 1982), 305-325.  Access through https://www.jstor.org/stable/1893821?refreqid=excelsior%3Ad6f8696e1d7edb9f1c17ff76d5aea940&seq=1 and the facility of a subscribing library or school.