Great Awakenings: Protestant Revivalism

Even rural liveliness was non clustered into villages, but spread out among person house gibe furthermostmsteads, themselves not compact. At least for white Virginians, then, familiarity was a world of households that came together only on ordinary occasions. (Black slaves, according to Isaac, lived a much communal feeling, but comfort subject to the same geographic dispersion.)

All households were not equal, withal; they varied in the extent of land and number of slaves, and because in wealth. The result, within a framework of household autonomy, was a hierarchical club, with the gentry receiving the deference of ordinary planters (a term which at this time lacked the aristocratic connotations it has today; Isaac, p. 16 note). Local society and politics were dominated by the gentry, and by their personal ties to bingle another and to their humbler neighbors.

The population of Virginia was growing rapidly (p. 12), but the harvest-festival was outward, not toward greater density in already-settled districts. Within a particular district, life as portrayed by Isaac has a timeless flavor, as though conditions had remained largely unchanged for centuries. in that location is in fact a tension here, because in 1740 the colonisation had only existed for four generations, and the rise of a local gentry was more recent still -- still taking place, in fact, as through the tobacco inspection acts of the 1730s (p. 137). Isaac takes note of this, however still conveys the sense of a society that seems to pull in b

The established religion of this society was Anglican (in modern terms, Episcopalian). The Church, however, was more a social institution than a spiritual one. Sundays were a social occasion, with seeing and being seen more prominent than the ritual service from the Book of Common petitioner; within the household, grace was said at meals but in that respect was little sign of family prayer as such (pp. 65; 68).

Indeed, although Isaac presents a very richly textured picture of life in 18th-century Virginia -- on a purely literary level, the restrain richly deserves its Pulitzer Prize -- at its heart is a riddle: It is not at the end clear why evangelicalism took hold in Virginia.

One may speculate that it was due to dissatisfy among the humbler whites with an emerging class structure, but Isaac is al close at intentness to de-emphasize this possible line of argument. Among the slaves, he more quick finds an element of communal identity. Indeed, Isaac suggests that we find early on a distinction between white converts' emphasis on the repurchase of the individual and that of black converts on the salvation of the community (p. 172) -- roughly, the remainder between the faith of Billy Graham and that of Martin Luther King.

Johnson, Paul E. (1978). A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. New York: hill and Wang.

In the long term of history, though, evangelicalism won the day in Virginia. Today the South as a whole -- so notably secular in colonial times, when compared with New England -- is most strongly marked by evangelical Christianity, and Virginia shares fully in this tendency. In contrast, the Northeast as a whole is far less evangelical, and the region around Rochester is at least not known to be a conspicuous exception. In rancor of its dramatic impact in the 1830s, then, the resurgence seems not to have left an enduring mark on the region, whereas the Southern revival evidently did.

We may now turn back almost
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