Even more than its predecessor of several decades earlier, the Second Great Awakening stressed the right of private judgment in spiritual matters and the possibility of universal salvation through faith and good works. Every person, Finney insisted, was a “moral free agent”—that is, a person free to choose between a Christian life and sin. Sinners could experience a “change of heart” and embrace spiritual freedom, defined, in the words of evangelical minister Jonathan Blanchard, as “Christ ruling in and over rational creatures who are obeying him freely and from choice.”
Official Seal of Arkansas and Title Page of Walden. These images offer two responses to the market revolution. The official seal of Arkansas (1836) juxtaposes a woman holding a cap of liberty with symbols of technological progress (an iron plow and a steamboat) and material prosperity (horns of plenty). The sketch of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond illustrates his belief that Americans could enjoy what he called “absolute freedom” by rejecting market society and retreating into the wilderness. Only in this way, he insisted, could they preserve both individual independence and the natural environment.
QUESTIONS
1. What does each vision of freedom offer that the other lacks?
2. Why do you think that the seal of Arkansas, a slave state, includes no image of slavery?
Revivalist ministers seized the opportunities offered by the market revolution to spread their message. They raised funds, embarked on lengthy preaching tours by canal, steamboat, and railroad, and flooded the country with mass-produced, inexpensive religious tracts. The revivals’ opening of religion to mass participation and their message that ordinary Americans could shape their own spiritual destinies resonated with the spread of market values.
To be sure, evangelical preachers can hardly be described as cheerleaders for a market society. They regularly railed against greed and indifference to the welfare of others as sins. Finney called selfishness—an extreme form of individualism encouraged by the scramble for wealth produced by the market revolution—“the law of Satan’s empire,” not God’s. Yet the revivals thrived in areas caught up in the rapid expansion of the market economy, such as the region of upstate New York along the path of the Erie Canal. Most of Finney’s converts here came from the commercial and professional classes. Evangelical ministers promoted what might be called a controlled individualism as the essence of freedom. In stressing the importance of industry, sobriety, and self-discipline as examples of freely chosen moral behavior, evangelical preachers promoted the very qualities necessary for success in a market culture.