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The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and cultural movement in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason over superstition and science over blind faith. Using the power of the press, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Voltaire questioned accepted knowledge and spread new ideas about openness, investigation, and religious tolerance throughout Europe and the Americas. Many consider the Enlightenment a major turning point in Western civilization, an age of light replacing an age of darkness.

Portrait of John Locke.

Sir Godfrey Kneller, portrait of John Locke, 1697. Image credit:  Wikimedia Commons

Several ideas dominated Enlightenment thought, including rationalism, empiricism, progressivism, and cosmopolitanism.

Rationalism is the idea that humans are capable of using their faculty of reason to gain knowledge. This was a sharp turn away from the prevailing idea that people needed to rely on scripture or church authorities for knowledge.

Empiricism promotes the idea that knowledge comes from experience and observation of the world.

Progressivism is the belief that through their powers of reason and observation, humans can make unlimited, linear progress over time; this belief was especially important as a response to the carnage and upheaval of the English Civil Wars in the 17th century.

Finally, cosmopolitanism reflected Enlightenment thinkers’ view of themselves as actively engaged citizens of the world as opposed to provincial and close-minded individuals. In all, Enlightenment thinkers endeavored to be ruled by reason, not prejudice.

Ben Franklin, symbol of the Enlightenment

The Freemasons were members of a fraternal society that advocated Enlightenment principles of inquiry and tolerance. Freemasonry originated in London coffeehouses in the early 18th century, and Masonic lodges—local units—soon spread throughout Europe and the British colonies. One prominent Freemason, Benjamin Franklin, stands as the embodiment of the Enlightenment in British America.

Born in Boston in 1706 to a large Puritan family, Franklin loved to read, although he found little beyond religious publications in his father’s house. In 1718 he was apprenticed to his brother to work in a print shop, where he learned how to be a good writer by copying the style he found in the Spectator, which his brother printed. At the age of 17, the independent-minded Franklin ran away, eventually ending up in Quaker Philadelphia. There he began publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette in the late 1720s. In 1732 he started his annual publication Poor Richard: An Almanack, in which he gave readers much practical advice, such as “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

In this 1748 portrait by Robert Feke, a 40-year-old Franklin wears a stylish British wig, as befitted a proud and loyal member of the British Empire.

Robert Feke, portrait of Benjamin Franklin, 1748. Image credit: Figure 3 in " Great Awakening and Enlightenment " by OpenStaxCollege,  CC BY 4.0 .

Franklin subscribed to deism, an Enlightenment-era belief in a God who created but has no continuing involvement in the world and the events within it. Deists also advanced the belief that personal morality—an individual’s moral compass, leading to good works and actions—is more important than strict church doctrines. Franklin’s deism guided his many philanthropic projects. In 1731, he established a reading library that became the Library Company of Philadelphia. In 1743, he founded the American Philosophical Society to encourage the spirit of inquiry. In 1749, he provided the foundation for the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1751, he helped found Pennsylvania Hospital.

His career as a printer made Franklin wealthy and well-respected. When he retired in 1748, he devoted himself to politics and scientific experiments. His most famous work, on electricity, exemplified Enlightenment principles. Franklin observed that lightning strikes tended to hit metal objects and reasoned that he could therefore direct lightning through the placement of metal objects during an electrical storm. He used this knowledge to advocate the use of lightning rods: metal poles connected to wires directing lightning’s electrical charge into the ground, thus saving wooden homes in cities like Philadelphia from catastrophic fires. He published his findings in 1751 in Experiments and Observations on Electricity.

Franklin also wrote of his “rags to riches” tale—his Memoir—in the 1770s and 1780s. This story laid the foundation for the American Dream of upward social mobility.

The founding of Georgia

The reach of Enlightenment thought was both broad and deep. In the 1730s, it even prompted the founding of a new colony.

Having witnessed the terrible conditions of debtors’ prison, as well as the results of releasing penniless debtors onto the streets of London, James Oglethorpe—a member of Parliament and advocate of social reform—petitioned King George II for a charter to start a new colony.

George II, understanding the strategic advantage of a British colony standing as a buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida, granted the charter to Oglethorpe and 20 like-minded proprietors in 1732. Oglethorpe led the settlement of the colony, which was called Georgia in honor of the king. In 1733, he and 113 immigrants arrived on the ship Anne. Over the next decade, Parliament funded the migration of 2500 settlers, making Georgia the only government-funded colonial project.

Oglethorpe’s vision for Georgia followed the ideals of the Age of Reason. He saw Georgia as a place for England’s “worthy poor” to start anew. To encourage industry, he gave each male immigrant 50 acres of land, tools, and a year’s worth of supplies. In Savannah, the Oglethorpe Plan provided for a utopia: “an agrarian model of sustenance while sustaining egalitarian values holding all men as equal.”

Oglethorpe’s vision called for alcohol and slavery to be banned. However, colonists who relocated from other colonies—especially South Carolina—disregarded these prohibitions. Despite its proprietors’ early vision of a colony guided by Enlightenment ideals and free of slavery, by the 1750s, Georgia was producing quantities of rice grown and harvested by enslaved people.

The First Great Awakening

During the 18th century, the British Atlantic experienced an outburst of Protestant revivalism known as the First Great Awakening (a  Second Great Awakening  took place in the 1800s). During the First Great Awakening, evangelists came from the ranks of several Protestant denominations: Congregationalists, Anglicans—members of the Church of England—and Presbyterians. They rejected what appeared to be sterile, formal modes of worship in favor of a vigorous emotional religiosity.

Whereas  Martin Luther  and  John Calvin  had preached a doctrine of predestination and close reading of scripture, new evangelical ministers spread a message of personal and experiential faith that rose above mere book learning. Individuals could bring about their own salvation by accepting Christ, an especially welcome message for those who had felt excluded by traditional Protestantism: women, the young, and people at the lower end of the social spectrum.

The First Great Awakening caused a split between those who followed the evangelical message—the New Lights—and those who rejected it—the Old Lights. The elite ministers in British America were firmly Old Lights, and they censured the new revivalism as chaos.

One outburst of Protestant revivalism began in New Jersey, led by a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church named Theodorus Frelinghuysen. Frelinghuysen’s example inspired other ministers, including Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian. Tennant helped to spark a Presbyterian revival in the Middle Colonies—Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey—in part by founding a seminary to train other evangelical clergyman. New Lights also founded colleges in Rhode Island and New Hampshire that would later become Brown University and Dartmouth College.

Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield

In Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards led still another explosion of evangelical fervor. Edwards’s best-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, used powerful imagery to describe the terrors of hell and the possibilities of avoiding damnation by personal conversion. One passage reads: “The wrath of God burns against them [sinners], their damnation don’t slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened her mouth under them.” Edwards’s revival spread along the Connecticut River Valley, and news of the event spread rapidly through the frequent reprinting of his famous sermon.

The frontispiece of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8, 1741"

Image credit: Figure 1 in " Great Awakening and Enlightenment " by OpenStaxCollege,  CC BY 4.0 .

The foremost evangelical of the Great Awakening was an Anglican minister named George Whitefield (pronounced "whit-field"). Like many evangelical ministers, Whitefield was itinerant, traveling the countryside instead of having his own church and congregation. Between 1739 and 1740, he electrified colonial listeners with his brilliant oratory.

The Great Awakening saw the rise of several Protestant denominations, including Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists—who emphasized adult baptism of converted Christians rather than infant baptism. These new churches gained converts and competed with older Protestant groups like Anglicans, members of the Church of England; Congregationalists, the heirs of Puritanism in America; and Quakers. The influence of these older Protestant groups, such as the New England Congregationalists, declined because of the Great Awakening. Nonetheless, the Great Awakening touched the lives of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic and provided a shared experience in the 18th-century British Empire.

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Slavery in the Colonies

An empire of slavery

Slavery formed a cornerstone of the British Empire in the 18th century. Every colony had enslaved people, from the southern rice plantations in Charles Town, South Carolina, to the northern wharves of Boston.

Slavery was more than a labor system; it also influenced every aspect of colonial thought and culture. The uneven relationship it engendered gave white colonists an exaggerated sense of their own status. English liberty gained greater meaning and coherence for white people when they contrasted their status to that of the unfree class of enslaved black people in British America.

African slavery provided white colonists with a shared racial bond and identity.

Slavery and the British Empire

The transport of enslaved people to the American colonies accelerated in the second half of the 17th century. In 1660, English monarch Charles II created the Royal African Company to trade in enslaved people and African goods. His brother, James II, led the company before ascending the throne.

Under both these kings, the Royal African Company enjoyed a monopoly to transport enslaved people to the English colonies. Between 1672 and 1713, the company bought 125,000 captives on the African coast, losing 20 percent of them to death on the Middle Passage—the journey from the African coast to the Americas.

The front and back of an English guinea are shown. The front of the coin shows a bust of King James II with an elephant and castle logo beneath.

The 1686 English guinea shows the logo of the Royal African Company—an elephant and castle—beneath a bust of King James II. Image credit:  OpenStax

The Royal African Company’s monopoly ended in 1689. After that date, many more English merchants engaged in the slave trade, greatly increasing the number of enslaved people being transported. Africans who survived the brutal Middle Passage usually arrived in the West Indies, often in Barbados. From there, they were transported to the mainland English colonies on company ships.

While merchants in London, Bristol, and Liverpool lined their pockets, Africans trafficked by the company endured a nightmare of misery, privation, and dislocation.

Enslaved people strove to adapt to their new lives by forming new communities among themselves, often adhering to traditional African customs and healing techniques. The development of families and communities was an important response to the trauma of being enslaved. Other enslaved people dealt with the trauma of their situation by actively resisting their condition—whether by defying their owners or running away.

People who escaped enslavement formed what were called maroon communities; these communities successfully resisted recapture and formed their own autonomous groups. The most prominent maroon communities controlled an interior area of Jamaica, keeping the British away.

The Stono Rebellion

Enslaved people everywhere resisted their exploitation and attempted to gain freedom. They fully understood that rebellions would bring about massive retaliation from white people and therefore had little chance of success. Even so, rebellions occurred frequently.

One notable uprising that became known as the Stono Rebellion took place in South Carolina in September 1739. A literate enslaved man named Jemmy led a large group of enslaved people in an armed insurrection against white colonists, killing several before militia stopped them. The militia suppressed the rebellion after a battle in which both enslaved people and militiamen were killed; the remaining enslaved people were executed or sold to the West Indies.

Print depicting the Stono Rebellion, with enslaved Africans brandishing weapons at whites.

Print depicting the Stono Rebellion. Image credit:  Blackpast.org

Jemmy is believed to have been taken from the Kingdom of Kongo, an area where the Portuguese had introduced Catholicism. Other enslaved people in South Carolina may have had a similar background. If so, this common background may have made it easier for Jemmy to communicate with the other enslaved people, enabling them to work together to resist their enslavement even though slaveholders labored to keep enslaved people from forging such communities.

In the wake of the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina passed a new slave code in 1740 called An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Other Slaves in the Province, also known as the Negro Act of 1740. This law imposed new limits on enslaved people’s behavior, prohibiting them from assembling, growing their own food, learning to write, and traveling freely.

The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741

Eighteenth-century New York City contained many different ethnic groups, and conflicts among them created strain. In addition, one in five New Yorkers was enslaved, and tensions ran high between enslaved people and the free population, especially in the aftermath of the Stono Rebellion. These tensions burst forth in 1741.

That year, thirteen fires broke out in the city, one of which reduced the colony’s Fort George to ashes. Ever fearful of an uprising among enslaved New Yorkers, the city’s white population spread rumors that the fires were part of a massive slave revolt in which enslaved people would murder white people, burn the city, and take over the colony.

The Stono Rebellion was only a few years in the past, and throughout British America, fears of similar incidents were still fresh. Searching for solutions, and convinced enslaved people were the principal danger, nervous British authorities interrogated almost 200 enslaved people and accused them of conspiracy. Rumors that Roman Catholics had joined the suspected conspiracy and planned to murder Protestant inhabitants of the city only added to the general hysteria. Very quickly, 200 were arrested, including a large number of the city’s enslaved population.

After a quick series of trials at City Hall, known as the New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741, the government executed seventeen New Yorkers. Thirteen black men were publicly burned at the stake, while the others—including four whites—were hanged. Seventy enslaved people were sold to the West Indies.

Little evidence exists to prove that any conspiracy actually existed.

An illustration shows a black man tied to a stake with kindling aflame at his feet; white soldiers holding guns push back a watching crowd.

Image credit:  OpenStax

The events of 1741 in New York City illustrate the racial divide in British America, where panic among white colonists spurred great violence against and repression of the feared enslaved population.

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