No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculations
Author(s): John M. Murrin
Source: Reviews in American History, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp. 161-171
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NO AWAKENING, NO REVOLUTION?
MORE COUNTERFACTUALSPECULATIONS
John M. Murrin
At least since Herbert Levi Osgood proclaimed the Great Awakening as the
first truly American event, historians have pondered its impact upon independence. Vernon L. Parrington saw it as a last explosion of clerical fanaticism from which the settlers happily escaped into saner preoccupations, such
as the Revolution. John C. Miller linked it to class resentments surrounding
the Massachussetts Land Bank, presumably another foretaste of 1776. Perry
Miller tried to startle everyone by stressing the utter modernity of Jonathan
Edwards; but his most distinguished student, Edmund S. Morgan, has
emphasized quite a different contrast. He has juxtaposed the religious worldview of colonial spokesmen in 1740 against the astonishingly secular outlook
of the Founding Fathersby 1790 and has tried to suggest how the Awakening
helped to move America from the first position to the second.1
Since the mid-1960s, Alan Heimert has set the terms of debate. He has
divided late eighteenth-centuryAmericans into evangelicals and antievangelicals, linking evangelicals to the Revolution and proclaiming Edwards as the
intellectual progenitor of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. His antievangelicals (or "liberals")either resisted the Revolution or embraced it awkwardly and with reservations. Heimert's claims soon drew heavy and withering fire from Morgan and Sidney Mead, and an ironic appreciation from
William McLoughlin. Reaction since then has slowly grown more favorable.
Richard Bushman, Harry Stout, Gary Nash, and Rhys Isaac have all seen
clear revolutionary potential in the religious upheaval that began in the
1730s. Probably no one would now deny that an extraordinarilyhigh correlation exists between New Lights and patriots. Remarkably few evangelicals in
the Thirteen Colonies (unlike Britain and Nova Scotia) rallied to the crown in
1776.2
The other half of Heimert's equation has not fared well. Many antievangelicals behaved as he described them, but far too potent a group did
not. Indeed, if evangelicals clustered in a very narrow band of the political
spectrum (somewhere to the left of center), antievangelicals can be found at
every point. Among other things, they defined both extremes, providing the
161
162
REVIEWSIN AMERICAN HISTORY / June 1983
most radical patriots (Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Dr. Thomas Young, Samuel
Adams, Ebenezer McIntosh, Ethan Allen), and virtually all of the loyalists.
To put the matter differently, antievangelicals supplied nearly all positions of
leadership, both radical and moderate, within the patriot camp-signers of
the Declaration of Independence, members of Congress and the Philadelphia
Convention of 1787, army commanders, and even the sons of liberty and the
organizers of anti-British mobs. With a few exceptions that will shortly be
noted, evangelicals followed but did not lead. Antievangelicals defined the
terms of resistance to Britain, guided the republic to victory, set most of the
agenda for the "internalrevolution" after 1776, and wrote (and probably led
resistance to) the Constitution of 1787.
A frank class analysis could resolve this enigma if it could demonstrate that
evangelicals clustered among the "meanersort" but used their weight to give
power to those antievangelicals among the elite who shared their social goals.
Nash and Stout flirt with such an interpretationbut do not state it explicitly;
both are doubtless aware of numerous exceptions to any such pattern. As a
result, the debate continues, but increasingly without any sharp focus. It no
longer seems obvious what aspect of the Revolution the Awakening is supposed to explain.
Counterfactual arguments have their terrorsfor historians, especially when
they lack a rigorous statistical base. Yet, as I argued ten years ago in discussing the impact of the Canada cession upon the Revolution, they can also
clarify issues that have become muddied and suggest useful avenues for future
research. The historiography of the Awakening has reached just such an
impasse. One way of realizing where we are is to obliterate the Awakening
and then try to discover what remains in its absence. This exercise, for all the
risk of indiscipline it entails, might at least tell us what we are trying to say.3
Of course in annihilating a major historical event, we should make as few
actual changes in the known record as are needed to procure the result. I propose to remove from the scene, before certain critical points in their careers,
the three men who did most to make the Awakening a North American and
trans-Atlantic event: George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and Gilbert
Tennent. More than any other person, Whitefield drew together into a common experience the separate, local revivals that had agitated parts of the
British world by 1740. In his absence, these local upheavals can continue to
wax and wane much as they had been doing since the 1690s, but they will
never reach the threshold of general awareness of "a great and extraordinary
outpouring of the Spirit."To sustain our enterprise, he must disappear before
1739. Similarly, Edwards not only provided the Awakening with its most
sophisticated theological exposition, but he also created a literary genre of
crucial importance to its success-the published revival narrative, which
MURRIN / No Awakening, No Revolution?
163
found numerous imitators once he had invented the model. Edwardsmust go
before completing A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in
1736. Tennent forced the disagreementsin the American PresbyterianChurch
to the point of schism by 1741, and he contributed more than anyone else to
the task of joining local Middle Atlantic revivals to those in New England.
His existence is intolerable, for our purposes, by 1738 or 1739. Finally, some
readers might wish a similar fate upon John Wesley, but his impact upon
America was never large before the Revolution, and I hesitate to adopt a
counterfactual premise that might remove the entire Methodist movement
from Anglo-American history. If he must be neutralized, let us give his
hitherto unrequited romance in Georgia a consummation so blissful that it
sustains him for several more years at his High Church, ritualistic phase. He
does not turn in 1738 to Martin Luther and the Moravian Brethrenfor spiritual rebirth.
As should already be obvious, one of the forbidden delights that such
counterfactual musings can provide to any suitably degenerate mind is the
invention of proper circumstances for dispatching the other three men.
Whitefield crossed the Atlantic in perilous times. On his return from Georgia
in 1738, we can blow him off course and invite his capture by Spanish
Guarda Costa, who take him to Havana and lose him in a dungeon. Instead
of awakening thousands, he can become another minor cause of the War of
Jenkins'Ear. We should detain him in these wretched conditions long enough
to outgrow his angelic youth, and perhaps transform him into a solitary
mystic without an audience by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.
Edwards, sadly, cannot survive even his first Northampton revival of
1734-35. Staring too fervently at the bellrope during one of his most quickening sermons, he suddenly became mesmerized and had to be carried, a
hopeless catatonic, from his pulpit by his weeping congregation. He had not
even started to write A Faithful Narrative.
Tennent, who really was struck by lightning in 1745 while preparinga blast
or two against the Moravians, can perhaps experience this discomfort in a
more fatal way seven or eight years earlier. He never delivered his fiery
manifesto on The Dangers of an Unconverted Ministry, and his aged father
did not force issues to a schism. Thus Tennent never invited JamesDavenport
to supply his vacant pulpit while he toured NewvEngland, nor did Davenport
follow behind him.4
With the Awakening gone, what can we now ask? Basically three questions: 1) Would colonial resistance to British ,measures after 1763 have
reached the point of armed rebellion by 1775? 2) If it had, would the Revolution have turned out differently with no Awakening to draw upon? 3) With
no Awakening, would the republic of 1800 have been significantly different
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REVIEWSIN AMERICAN HISTORY / June 1983
from the one we now love and study? The rest of this essay will suggest that
we already know enough to provide clear answers to the first and third questions. Without the Awakening, colonial resistance would have taken very
much the same forms it did and within the same chronology, but the America
of 1800 would have been an unimaginably different place. Far more difficult
is the second question, to which no unequivocal answer can yet be given.
Resistance to the Stamp Act was so universal and intense that one hardly
needs to invoke the Awakening to explain its success, except in Connecticut.
Apart from Martin Howard of Rhode Island, the stamp tax had no committed defenders in North America. In fact, a surprising number of people
who would later be unable to repudiate the crown provided the settlers with
their most cogent defense against Parliament-James Otis, Jr., Thomas Fitch,
William Smith, Jr., John Dickinson, and Daniel Dulany. Of course actual
nullification of the measure required forcible intervention by urban mobs,
particularly in Boston, Newport, New York, and Charleston. Boston led all
other cities in popular fervor in both 1740 and 1765, with the Boston Gazette
defending the radical position in each case. But evangelical elation had
declined sharply in 1742, and no one has yet connected the youthful converts
of Whitefield, Tennent, and Davenport to the rioters of 1765. To be the same
men, most would have had to be between 45 and 50 years old by then. To be
younger men but still evangelical, we need to discover a later revival for
Boston. Much the same generational argument applies to the other cities,
with an interesting variation for Philadelphia. That port stood just behind
Boston and ahead of New York and Charleston in the intensity of its excitement over Whitefield. In 1765 it did less than any of the others to resist the
Stamp Act. No doubt evangelicals found the Stamp Act reprehensible, but
there is no reason to believe that they exerted a decisive influence in 1765, or
anything of the kind. Nearly all of their neighbors agreed with them.5
Much the same analysis applies to the Townshend Crisis. Resistance
centered in the ports, where evangelical passion had been declining for a
generation while continuing to erupt sporadically in the countryside. Opposition to Britain spread to the colonial legislatureswhen Lord Hillsborough forbade any assembly to consider the Massachusetts Circular Letter. Everything
the tQwerhouses before 1768 argues for the predictability of
we kwzwaboaut
their response. In any case, resistance achieved only a limited success before it
collapsed in 1770, leaving the colonies badly divided. Here too, no good
evidence has yet been offered for suggesting that the crisis would not have
occurred without the Awakening or that it woiuld have been resolved in any
significantly different way.6
The final imperial crisis from the Tea Act through Lexington can also be
explained quite satisfactorily without invoking the Awakening. The flash
MURRIN / No Awakening, No Revolution?
165
point again occurred in the nonevangelical port cities, Boston above all, and
when Britain responded with the Coercive Acts, the countryside was rapidly
drawn into a movement of massive resistance. Here we should expect to find
a decent share of active evangelicals, but again colonial anger was so deep
and widespread by the autumn of 1774 that we do not need them to account
for what happened. The First Continental Congress developed its program
without seeking guidance from the elect, and the war began shortly before the
Second Congress met. Significantly, the town of Concord, site of the heaviest
fighting on the first morning of the war, had split badly over the Awakening.
It now united behind the Revolution.7
Even without the Awakening, the Revolution would have happened. But
could it have succeeded? Would the colonies have been able to agree upon
independence by July 1776? (Without the barrierof independence, the Howes'
Peace Commission later that summer would have stood a better, though still
not a good chance of restoring the Empire.) Could Americans have won the
war?
On these questions we find, for the first time, that some evangelicals were
strategically located where their political decisions really mattered. The New
Light Susquehannah Company faction had gained control of Connecticut
politics during the Stamp Act Crisis and now guided that province steadily
and exultantly toward independence. In New Jersey, where over a third of the
population became active loyalists while others stood neutral, patriot leadership fell heavily to Presbyteriansfrom the Princeton area, home of the college
that had done more than any other to perpetuate and spread the Awakening.
Quite appropriately, President John Witherspoon led a fresh New Jersey
delegation to Philadelphia just in time to swing the colony's vote in favor of
independence by July 2. Pennsylvania experienced its own internal revolution
in June 1776 when a movement dominated by backcountry Presbyterians
overthrew the moderate, antiindependence, Quaker-Anglican elite that had
controlled provincial politics.8
Elsewhere we can record evangelical support for independence, but its
decisiveness seems highly dubious. Massachusetts Baptists, the most
evangelical group in the province by the 1770s, were caught largely by surprise during the rush of events. So indifferent had many of them been to
imperial issues that their neighbors suspected them of loyalism. They had
played no conspicuous part in the resistance movement, but now at the
culminating stage they climbed aboard. Similarly Virginia Baptists had struggled for a decade against the Anglican gentry who drove the Old Dominion
into independence. They too rallied to a cause that others defined, but they
seem to have provided no decisive impact upon policy until the fight for
Anglican disestablishment in the 1780s.9
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REVIEWSIN AMERICAN HISTORY / June 1983
Even when a correlation exists, how much can we make of it? Connecticut,
for example, appears beguilingly simple and obvious until we ponder the
alternatives. A New Light party did lead the colony to independence. But had
the Old Lights retained power past 1766, would they have behaved much differently? Governor Fitch, had he remained in office past 1766 and lived past
1774, might indeed have gone loyalist. He showed every sign of such
behavior. Yet he probably would have been no more difficult a problem for
patriots than loyalist governor Joseph Wanton in neighboring Rhode Island,
who was jettisoned in the final crisis. When the crunch came, Connecticut
Old Lights rallied overwhelmingly to the Revolution, as did Old Light Congregational clergy throughout New England. The only sizable pocket of
loyalism in the state was Anglican, a faith that had grown rapidly in reaction
against the Awakening. The argument would be more perverse than any I
care to defend, but a case could be made that the net effect of the Awakening
was to increase loyalism more than patriotism. More probably, it increased
both the number of Anglican loyalists and the intensity of patriot resistance.10
In Pennsylvania, by contrast, the Revolution often seemed to be almost a
civil war between Presbyterians and Quakers. This evaluation, however,
does not place the province in the Awakening camp. As with Congregationalists, few prominent Presbyterians, New Side or Old, went loyalist, and
the proportion was probably no higher among the inconspicuous and inarticulate. We can, of course, trace the revolutionary activities of such New
Side Presbyteriansas the Reverend George Duffield of Philadelphia. Even so,
the decisive event in Pennsylvania was the rising of backcountry Scots-Irish,
many of them without resident clergymen, yet strongly rooted in Ulster traditions of Presbyterianism. Radical as they were (and they soon helped to
launch the most daring constitutional experiment of the period), they
remained in all likelihood an antievangelical, Old-Side band of patriots. That
leaves New Jersey as a fairly unequivocal case of New Lights dragging their
fellows into independence and a bracing republican vision of the future. Only
months later would the Princeton radicals begin to discover what could happen if they gave a revolution in New Jersey-and nobody came but the
British."1
Without an Awakening, one might argue, continuing opposition to independence in New Jersey might have stiffened the resistance of like-minded
men throughout the Middle Atlantic region as a whole and thus postponed or
even prevented the Declaration. New York, after all, abstained even in July
1776. But any such argument is tenuous and must rely upon an escalating succession of imponderables. Had the war continued, the logic for independence
would almost certainly have prevailed eventually, as it soon did in antievangelical New York. To the war itself we must now turn.
MURRIN / No Awakening, No Revolution?
167
Could the military conflict have been won without an Awakening? Here
we approach the most difficult and fascinating problem of all. The war, we
now realize, was an extremely brutal and draining experience. It stands just
behind the Civil War as the most destructive conflict in our history. Did
evangelicals somehow provide the resiliency and stamina to endure a struggle
that the less righteous would have abandoned? 12
Possibly so. The argument deserves serious consideration and can sustain
far more researchthan it has yet received. Some hasty answers to the problem
are clearly inadequate. Perry Miller, for example, has insisted that, while
secular leaders spoke their lofty eighteenth-century language of natural
rights, ordinary soldiers responded far more warmly to appeals based on
biblical covenants. Perhaps. Leaving aside the realization that both Old and
New Lights could endorse covenant and even millennial rhetoric, this contention lacks specificity. Does it apply chiefly to the Continental Army, which
probably did have a disproportionate share of New Light chaplains? Two
strong arguments suggest otherwise. First, the Continentals did not behave
that way. They were no reincarnation of Oliver Cromwell's Ironsides from
the previous century. Their outlook and grievances were far more secular.
They did not defend themselves as the elect of God nor charge into battle
chanting Psalms. Some of their chaplains undoubtedly hoped to make things
otherwise, which may explain the intense mortification of the Reverend
Samuel Spring, a committed evangelical. He learned that during his brief
furlough from the Army, his men had rejoiced heartily to be rid of him. Second, most Continentals were the wrong age and probably from the wrong
social class to match the profile that has been emerging of who got converted
in eighteenth-century revivals. Most of them were too young, and their family and communal roots were too weak.13
On the other hand, as John Shy and others have contended, maybe the
Continentals were not the decisive weapon after all. Maybe the militia really
did tip the balance, politicizing the neutral at heart, holding loyal to the
patriot cause every area not under British military occupation, and providing
logistical support to George Washington and Nathanial Greene, or even
desperately needed reinforcements at several critical phases of the contest.
Here, if anywhere, we should look for a direct impact of evangelicals upon
the military struggle. Did they serve disproportionately in the tiring services
required of the militia? This question can be researched but so far has not
been. From everything we know about both evangelicals and the militia, we
ought to expect richer results here than with the Continental Army.
Evangelical conversions occurred most often within established families of
church members, and the militia was a communal, family-based institution.
For whatever reason, evangelical ministers (unlike Old Lights, who far more
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REVIEWSIN AMERICAN HISTORY / June 1983
often had clerical forebears) were disproportionately descended from militia
officers. If the militia really accomplished all that Shy claims, perhaps
evangelicals contributed more to the militia than to any other patriot institution. Here above all, a counterfactual question can give us a specific and
important problem to investigate.14
Less concretely, the kind of emphasis stressed recently by Stout and Isaac
also seems more appropriate to the war years, or at least to the period from
1774 on, than to earlier crises. Both men emphasize the sharp difference
between the evangelicals, with their oral, face-to-face culture and emotional
sermons, and the older colonial elite, with its polite, urbane, genteel, literary
culture. Patrick Henry derived much of his influence, Isaac thoughtfully suggests, from his special talent for bridging the two worlds. Without in any way
underplaying the importance of this insight or even trying to suggest that a
counterfactual hypothesis can begin to measure its significance, we might still
argue that the evangelical style of exhortation found its truest role in winning
the war, not bringing it on. Baptists were by far the most vigorous evangelical
group in America by the 1770s, but apart from a few individuals such as Elder
John Allen of Boston (whose heterodoxy prevented him from winning a
pulpit), they have not yet been detected provoking the imperial crisis. They
responded to what others created.15
We might also discover that evangelicals contributed significantly to the
internal revolution of the 1770s and 1780s. The role of Presbyterians in
Virginia and Baptists everywhere in the fight for ecclesiastical disestablishment is too well known to discuss here. But we still do not understand where
evangelicals stood on other urgent, nonreligious, social questions. How large
a presence were they in the reformed state legislatures of the era? If they
appeared in significant numbers, did they cluster with Jackson Turner Main's
localists or cosmopolitans? Or did Baptists perhaps behave differently from
New Side Presbyterians and New Light Congregationalists in this respect? In
New England, for example, Congregational New Lights eventually emerged
as Federalistswhile Baptists went Jeffersonian.If such a split was general, can
we speak meaningfully of an evangelical alignment or party in the very early
republic? Only when we have mapped the boundaries of the evangelical
social vision through rollcall votes and local records can we properly grasp its
meaning and impact.16
The internal revolution leads naturally to our final question, which need
not detain us long. Everything we have learned recently about American
political culture in the nineteenth century underscores the importance of the
evangelical upheaval. In the early eighteenth century, the denominations bidding for hegemony in North America were Congregational, Quaker, and
Anglican. As the two Great Awakenings did their work, the lead shifted
MURRIN / No Awakening, No Revolution?
169
decisively to Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, all major beneficiaries
of the revivals. Without their contribution, the American republic after 1800
would have been an utterly different place from what we know. Speculation
about its behavior would be quite pointless.
Nevertheless, partly because colonialists and early national specialists often
seem to communicate as poorly with each other as New Lights did with Old
Lights, some points of confusion remain that deserve short notice. Above all,
JonathanEdwardscan in no sense be regardedas the intellectual progenitor of
Jeffersonand Jackson. The very notion would have startled and dismayed all
three gentlemen. Although the Democratic party could and did attract Baptist support, it remained overwhelmingly a pluralistic and antievangelical
coalition down to the Civil War and beyond. New Divinity men lopsidedly
supported the other side -the Federalist,Antimasonic, Whig, Know-Nothing
and Republican parties. So powerful is this correlation that, if we are determined to attribute a major political and military upheaval to revival fervor,
we would do far better to choose the Civil War, not the Revolution. The
Union Army, not the Continentals, sometimes marched to combat singing
The Battle Hymn of the Republic, whose millennial tone has no counterpart
among either Confederate or Revolutionary War songs.17
The Awakening did not create the Revolution. It surely contributed to its
success, but how decisively we still do not know. More important, the
Revolution liberated the spirit of the Awakening, which had grown tepid and
largely ineffective among all but Baptists by the 1770s, when church membership and attendance may have been approaching an all-time low. The success
of the Revolution, and the exhilarating prospects that it aroused, inspired a
new generation of respectable evangelicals to reshape the social landscape of
the United States. Farmore dramatically than their predecessors of 1740, they
imposed their social vision upon their fellow citizens until their reformist
ardor drove an angry South to secession. Without the Great Awakening and
its successors, there would have been a revolution in 1775, but in all probability, no Civil War in 1861.18
John M. Murrin, Department of History, Princeton University, is the author
of "Magistrates, Sinners, and a Precarious Liberty: Trial by Jury in
Seventeenth-Century New England,"in David D. Hall, John M. Murrin, and
Thad W. Tate, eds., Saints and Revoluticnaries: Essays in Early American
History (1983).
1. Herbert Levi Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3 (1924),
pp. 409-10; Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 1 (1926), pp.
148-63; John C. Miller, "Religion, Finance, and Democracy in Massachusetts," New England
Quarterly 6 (1933): 29-58; Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (1949); Edmund S. Morgan, "The
170
REVIEWSIN AMERICAN HISTORY / June 1983
American Revolution Considered as an Intellectual Movement," in Paths of American
Thought, eds. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Morton White (1963), pp. 11-33.
2. Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966): Edmund S. Morgan, review of Heimert in William and Mary Quarterly 3rd. ser.,
24 (1967): 454-59; Sidney Mead, review of Heimert in Journal of Religion 48 (1968): 274-88;
William McLoughlin, review of Heimert in New England Quarterly 40 (1967): 99-110. See
also, Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (1967); Harry Stout, "Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins
of the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 34 (1977): 519-41; Gary
Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the
American Revolution (1979), ch. 9; Rhys Isaac, "Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists' Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia, 1765-1775, " William and Mary Quarterly
3rd ser., 31 (1974): 345-68; J. M. Bumsted, Henry Alline, 1748-1784 (1971), on Nova Scotia.
3. John M. Murrin, "The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the
Counterfactual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy," Reviews in
American History 1 (1973): 307-18.
4. For the importance of Edwards's Faithful Narrative in its trans-Atlantic setting, see
Michael J. Crawford, "The Invention of the American Revival: The Beginnings of AngloAmerican Religious Revivalism, 1690-1750" (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1978). For
Tennent the best study is Milton J Coalter, Jr., "The Life of Gilbert Tennent: A Case Study of
Continental Pietism's Influence on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies" (Ph.D.
diss., Princeton University, 1982); for the lightning incident, see pp. 282-84.
5. Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (1953);
Benjamin H. Newcomb, "Effectsof the Stamp Act on Colonial Pennsylvania Politics," William
and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 23 (1966): 257-72. The sharp decline in conversions in Boston
can be plotted in John W. Raimo, "Spiritual Harvest: The Anglo-American Revival in Boston,
Massachusetts, and Bristol, England, 1739-1742" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974),
pp. 244-46.
6. The best account of the Townshend Crisis is Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A
History of the American Revolution, 1763-1776 (1968), chs. 7-14.
7. David Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of
1774 (1974); Robert L. Gross, The Minutemen and their World (1976).
8. Oscar Zeichner, Connecticut's Years of Controversy, 1750-1776 (1949); Alison B. Olson,
"The Founding of Princeton University: Religion and Politics in Eighteenth-Century New
Jersey," New Jersey History 87 (1969): 133-50; Larry R. Gerlach and Sheldon S. Cohen,
"Princeton in the Coming of the American Revolution," New Jersey History 92 (1974): 69-92;
Paul H. Smith, "New Jersey Loyalists and the British 'Provincial' Corps in the War for Independence," New Jersey History 87 (1969): 69-78.
9. William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630-1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, vol. 1 (1971), ch. 31; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia,
1740-1790 (1982), part 2. In the Middle Colonies, some Baptists, led by Morgan Edwards, did
go loyalist, but their theological position would have to be investigated carefully before
deciding whether they were New Lights. Edwards, for example, was flirting with Universalism
by the 1780s.
10. Glenn Weaver, "Anglican-Congregationalist Tensions in Pre-Revolutionary Connecticut," Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 26 (1957): 269-85, esp. the list
of Anglican churches by date of founding on p. 278; John W. Tyler, Connecticut Loyalists: An
Analysis of Loyalist Land Confiscations in Greenwich, Stanford [sic] and Norwalk (1977);
David S. Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, 1760-1776 (1958), pp.
182-84. For Fitch, see Dictionary of American Biography.
11. Richard A. Ryerson, The Revolution is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of
Philadelphia, 1765-1776 (1978); "Republican Theory and Partisan Reality in Revolutionary
Pennsylvania: Toward a New View of the Constitutionalist Party," in Peter Albert and Ronald
Hoffman, eds., Sovereign States in an Age of Uncertainty (1982). Leonard J. Trinterud, The
Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-examination of Colonial Presbyterianism (1949), ch.
MURRIN / No Awakening, No Revolution?
171
14; James McLachlan, Princetonians, 1748-1768: A Biographical Dictionary (1976), on Duffield, see pp. 51-53; Elizabeth I. Nybakken, "New Light on the Old Side: Irish Influences on
Colonial Presbyterianism," Journal of American History 68 (1981-82): 813-32; John M.
Murrin, "Princeton and the American Revolution," Princeton University Library Chronicle 38
(1976-77): 1-10; Adrian C. Leiby, The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley: The
Jersey Dutch and the Neutral Ground (1962).
12. Howard H. Peckham, ed., The Toll of Independence: Engagements & Battle Casualties
of the American Revolution (1974), pp. 131-34; Richard Buel, Jr., Dear Liberty: Connecticut's
Mobilization for the Revolutionary War (1980).
13. Perry Miller, "From the Covenant to the Revival" (1961), reprinted in his Nature's
Nation (1967), pp. 90-120; Edward C. Papenfuse and Gregory A. Stiverson, "General
Smallwood's Recruits: The Peacetime Career of the Revolutionary War Private," William and
Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 30 (1973): 117-32; John R. Sellers, "The Common Soldier in the
American Revolution," in Military History of the American Revolution: Proceedings of the
Sixth Military History Symposium, USAF Academy, 1974, ed. Stanley J. Underdal (1976), pp.
151-61; Mark E. Lender, The New Jersey Soldier, New Jersey's Revolutionary Experience, No.
5 (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1975). Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (1979), pp. 373-78,
modifies the above studies but not in a way that changes expectations about the evangelical
composition of the Army. On Spring, see Richard A. Harrison, Princetonians, 1769-1775: A
Biographical Dictionary (1980), pp. 166-71 at p. 168.
14. John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for
American Independence (1976), esp. chs. 7, 9; Harry S. Stout, "The Great Awakening in New
England Reconsidered: The New England Clergy," Journal of Social History 8 (Fall 1974):
21-47; James Walsh, "The Great Awakening in the First Congregational Church of Woodbury,
Connecticut," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 28 (1971): 543-62.
15. In addition to material already cited, see Rhys Isaac, "Preachers and Patriots: Popular
Culture and the Revolution in Virginia," in The American Revolution: Explorations in the
History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (1976), pp. 125-56.
16. Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties before the Constitution (1973). For linkages to
Federalists and Jeffersonians after 1790, see John Brooke, "A Society, Revolution, and the
Symbolic Uses of the Dead: An Historical Ethnography of the Massachusetts Near Frontier,
1730-1820" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1982).
17. Nathan 0. Hatch's The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (1977) shows that both Old and New Light Congregational clergy overwhelmingly supported the Revolution and, later, the Federalist party.
Among the extensive literature on nineteenth-century political culture, perhaps the best introductions are Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case
(1961); Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century (1979);
and Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New
York, 1815-1837 (1978).
18. Nathan 0. Hatch, in "The Christian Movement and the Demand for a Theology of the
People," Journal of American History 67 (1980-81): 545-67, demonstrates the liberating
impact of the Revolution upon religion. See also, Patricia U. Bonomi and Peter R. Eisenstadt,
"ChurchAdherence in the Eighteenth-Century British American Colonies," William and Mary
Quarterly 3rd ser., 39 (1982): 245-86, esp. p. 274.