Second Great Awakening
Taken from Ohio History Central at: on 4/1/13
The Second Great Awakening was a religious revival that occurred in the United States beginning in the late eighteenth century and lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century. While it occurred in all parts of the United States, it was especially strong in the Northeast and the Midwest.
By the late 1700s, many Americans no longer regularly attended church services. This occurred for several reasons. Some people now believed that God did not play an important role in everyday life. God also supposedly was not concerned with a person's church attendance; rather, God would judge the person on how he or she had lived his or her life on Earth. Other people had become too consumed with earning a living to have time to worship God. As a result of declining religious convictions, many religious faiths sponsored religious revivals. These revivals emphasized human beings' dependence upon God.
Most of the religious revivals occurred as camp meetings. Adherents and interested parties would spend several days hearing the word of God from various religious leaders. While these services were very emotional, they did not become hysterical gatherings as many earlier revivals had become. They also served as social gatherings. Many Americans living on the frontier did not have regular contact with their neighbors. The revivals allowed these people an opportunity to hear God's word, but they also provided rural families an opportunity to talk and trade with other people.
Perhaps the most influential evangelist of the Second Great Awakening was Charles Finney. He began to spread his message in western New York during the early 1820s.In 1835, he became a professor of theology at Oberlin College in Ohio. He eventually served as Oberlin College's president. Numerous religious groups benefited from the Second Great Awakening. Baptists and Methodists found the largest number of converts, swelling their numbers across the United States including in Ohio. New religious groups also resulted from the revivals. These groups did not find true happiness with the already established faiths and created their own doctrine.
The revivals encouraged people to return to God. Americans should dedicate their lives to God and to living in a Godly manner. As a result, church attendance increased during the first half of the nineteenth century. A desire to reform America also arose among the people. Attempts to limit alcohol consumption and to abolish slavery came directly out of the Second Great Awakening and its message.
In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1842 lecture "The Transcendentalist":
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own . . .
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882
Taken from U-S History.com at: on 4/1/13
Iconoclast, elitist, revolutionary, scholar, prophet — Emerson was all of these, and more. Among his journals, essays, and poems, Emerson displays his cultured eclecticism on the written page.
Amid discussions of his “Transcendentalism,” Emerson preferred to “disdain the courtly muses of Europe, distrust bookworms, and worship nature as the abiding fount of inspiration,” and yet he was more at home in his study than communing in the woods with Mother Nature.
Emerson was considered to be one of the great orators of his time, a man who could enrapture crowds with his deep voice, enthusiasm, and egalitarian respect for his audience. A common joke heard from his audiences was that they had no idea what he was saying, but that it was beautiful.
The early years
Emerson was born in May 1803, to a Unitarian minister. Unfortunately, he lost his father when he was eight. His mother kept the family together, being blessed by free rectory rent, and gifts of food and money from the parish.
After attending Boston Latin School, Ralph enrolled in Harvard University in 1817 — at the age of 14. He was able to afford his education by being named President’s Freshman, which gave him his room free of charge, and by waiting on tables, winning a small scholarship, and tutoring during the summer.
Following graduation in 1821, Emerson seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps as a Unitarian clergyman. After attending Harvard Divinity School, he emerged as a minister in 1829. However, a dispute with church officials over the administration of the Communion service, and a reticence toward public prayer, led to his resignation in 1832.
In 1832 and 1833, Emerson toured Europe, where he met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, among others. In 1835, he bought a house in Concord, Massachusetts, in the countryside northwest of Boston, and quickly became a leading citizen.
In September of the following year, the Transcendental Club was formed at the home of George Ripley in Boston. They were a group of intellectuals who shared an idealist frustration with the general state of American culture and society of the day.
Among those attending were Emerson Frederick Henry Hedge, Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott, James Freeman Clarke, and Convers Francis. Other regular male members included William Henry Channing, Theodore Parker, Christopher Pearse Cranch, John Sullivan Dwight, Cyrus Bartol, and Caleb Stetson. The group's female members included Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody.
It was there that Emerson and company could discuss the virtues of “new” ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy, as inspired by Immanuel Kant,¹the world-renowned 18th-century German philosopher. Here they embraced Transcendentalism as an alternative to the Lockean “sensualism” of their fathers and of the Unitarian Church, and finding this alternative in “Vedic ²thought, German Idealism, and English Romanticism.”
Nature
Emerson brought Transcendentalism to the fore of the American consciousness that year with his astounding treatise, Nature. He railed against the very principles by which he had been reared, specifically those tenets of the Unitarian Church that were taught at Harvard Divinity School, and the overall state of intellectualism at Harvard.
Among Nature's core beliefs was “an ideal spiritual state that ‘transcends’ the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.” Emerson wrote:
"We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
Henry David Thoreau
1817-1862
Taken from U-S History.com at: on 4/1/13
He had a raptorian nose, a scruffy beard — a face only a mother could love. Henry David Thoreau (pronounced THOR-eau) entered the Halls of the Immortals with his timeless Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), the product of a two-year stay in a handmade cabin on the shore of Walden Pond just outside of rural Concord, Massachusetts. He compressed his memories and observations in the mid 1840s, into a book a single calendar year long.
Though the book initially inspired little fanfare, critics of a different era regard the work as a classic. In the work, Thoreau uses the four seasons to symbolize human development, and to explore Nature’s simplicity, beauty, and harmony as models for social and cultural justice.
The feisty Thoreau also penned On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849), after a night in the local pokey, in which he criticized centralized government and argued that the individual should resist the state if it required him to “be an agent of injustice to another [human being].” Thoreau had been arrested for his refusal to pay a poll tax to support the Mexican-American War.
On a golden pond
As Thoreau matured, his philosophy of Nature engaged his full attention. He concluded that the best way to focus on what secrets Nature would give up, would be to spend time alone, sequestered in a cabin, in a rustic setting. His quest got off on the right foot when Emerson allowed him to build a cabin at the edge of Walden Pond on the former’s property.
Beginning July 4, 1845, Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days in relative isolation, broken only by trips to the cabin by Emerson to provide daily necessities.
Mormons
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Taken from U-S History.com at: on 4/1/13
In the early 19th century, Joseph Smith, a New England farmer's son, experienced a succession of supernatural visions. Smith's narrative of these events reports that God and Jesus Christ appeared to him in 1820 outside of Palmyra, New York. They told him to be ready for a significant project. Smith further reported that, three years later, he encountered an angel named Moroni who revealed to him the existence of buried golden plates that bore engravings, in an archaic tongue, of the history of early peoples of North America. Smith discovered them in 1827 on Cumorah's Hill, near Palmyra. His English rendering of the history, titled The Book of Mormon, was issued in 1830.
A new church
On April 6, 1830, Smith and some like-minded colleagues established the Church of Christ, soon to be known by today's title, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The church expanded quickly, and by the first year boasted some 1,000 adherents.
The 1830s was a decade of expansion, but also significant difficulties cropped up in those years. The 1837 insolvency of a Mormon bank, squabbles among some church members, and strife with non-church neighbors, scattered the Kirtland faithful. Smith and his most loyal believers moved to Missouri in 1838, to regroup with other Mormons. However, distress rose again.
The Missouri Mormons had settled in a town called Far West in the northern part of the state, following their expulsion from Independence in 1834. Mobs assaulted the Mormons at several of their communities in the fall of 1838. Twenty Mormons, including several children, were slain in the "Massacre at Haun's Mill."
Expulsion from Missouri
Expelled from Missouri the same year, nearly 15,000 Mormons retreated to Illinois. A few months later, Smith eluded prison guards and rejoined his followers there, settling on the banks of the Mississippi River at the town of Commerce, which they renamed Nauvoo. Nauvoo rapidly became the state's biggest city. Its swift expansion to more than 12,000 by 1845, and the impact of Mormons on state politics, induced non-Mormons to be wary and antagonistic again. Such antagonism towards Mormons appears to have been spurred in part by economic rivalry and a distaste for the Mormon tendency to vote en bloc. In addition, by the early 1840s, the resentment was exacerbated by Smith’s king-like aspirations and by rumors that Mormons were starting to practice polygamy, the condition of having more than one spouse.
One element founded a newspaper to castigate Smith, who had become a presidential contender. The paper was demolished, and Smith caught the blame. He, his brother Hyrum, and other church leaders were arrested and incarcerated. Members of a mob fatally shot Smith and his brother in an assault on the lockup on June 27, 1844.
Utah Territory
Mobs pushed the Mormons out of Illinois in 1846. Joseph Smith had planned to relocate his followers to the Great Basin in the Rocky Mountains. This scheme was now implemented by one Brigham Young, who had become the new head of the church.
Young led an intrepid party of immigrants into the Great Salt Lake valley in 1847. The population grew rapidly, and by 1849, the Mormons had forged a civil government. They sought admission to the Union, giving their proposed state the name Deseret, but in 1850, Congress opted to create the Territory of Utah, then name Young as governor.