In November 1739, the English preacher George Whitefield drew crowds of thousands to the Philadelphia courthouse steps. One listener was Benjamin Franklin, a printer who doubted most Christian doctrine. Franklin studied the preacher like an experimenter, once pacing off how far Whitefield's voice carried through the streets, and he also made money printing Whitefield's sermons and journals. Ideas, people and printed paper were moving across the Atlantic in growing volume, and they made colonial culture at once more varied, more connected, and more English.
A pluralist society
The British colonies of the 1700s took in an unusually varied European population. France barred Protestants from settling in New France after 1627, and Spain admitted mainly Catholic subjects of its own crown, but Britain let in foreign Protestants and needed settlers to fill its colonies. Alongside the English came large new groups:
- Germans, many from the Rhineland Palatinate, fleeing war and poverty. Tens of thousands settled in Pennsylvania, where they made up roughly a third of the population by the 1750s, kept their language, newspapers and Lutheran, Reformed, Mennonite and Moravian churches, and farmed some of the richest land in the colonies.
- Scots-Irish, Presbyterians from Ulster in northern Ireland, who arrived in large numbers from about 1718, landed mostly at Philadelphia, and moved down the Great Wagon Road into the backcountry of Virginia and the Carolinas.
- Smaller groups: Dutch families who stayed in New York after 1664, French Protestant Huguenots in South Carolina and New York, Scots, Welsh, and Jewish communities in New York, Newport, Philadelphia and Charleston.
Add Africans, about a fifth of the colonies' population by 1750 (Topic 2.6), and Native peoples on every frontier, and the result was pluralism: many ethnic and religious groups living side by side, none able to impose its ways on all the others.
Religious toleration grew out of this mix and helped cause it. Several colonies were founded by people who needed settlers or had been persecuted themselves. Maryland's 1649 Toleration Act protected all Christians who believed in the Trinity, mainly to shield the colony's Catholic minority. Roger Williams founded Rhode Island in 1636 after Massachusetts banished him for arguing that government had no business enforcing religion. William Penn's 1682 Frame of Government guaranteed freedom of worship to anyone who believed in God, and Pennsylvania's toleration was a major reason German sects chose it. Toleration had limits: Massachusetts and Connecticut kept a tax-supported Congregational church, and Virginia and the southern colonies an Anglican one. But where many churches competed, none could claim to be the only truth, and colonists grew used to arguing about religion, reading one another's books, and choosing their own church.
Pluralism also produced friction. English colonists worried about groups that kept their own language; in a 1751 essay, Franklin complained that German settlers in Pennsylvania would never adopt English language or customs. On the frontier, Scots-Irish settlers clashed with Native peoples and with eastern governments that they felt ignored them.
The Great Awakening
By the 1720s, many ministers worried that colonial religion had grown cold. Church membership in New England had fallen, sermons were learned lectures, and in the scattered settlements of the South and backcountry many people saw a minister rarely. The First Great Awakening was a wave of revivals, from the 1730s into the 1740s, that answered this with emotional preaching aimed at personal conversion: each person had to feel his or her sinfulness and experience a "new birth" through God's grace.
The revivals began in several places. Theodorus Frelinghuysen, a Dutch Reformed minister, led revivals in New Jersey in the 1720s, and the Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent carried them through the middle colonies. In 1734 and 1735 a revival swept Northampton, Massachusetts, under Jonathan Edwards, whose account of it, printed in London and Boston, spread his methods across the Atlantic. Edwards preached in plain, frightening images. His 1741 sermon at Enfield, Connecticut, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, told listeners:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked . . .
The revivals' great organizer was Whitefield, who toured the colonies from Georgia to New England in 1739 and 1740. He was an itinerant: he preached wherever he could gather a crowd, often outdoors when local ministers closed their pulpits to him, and he advertised his coming in newspapers. Whitefield's tours made the Awakening the first event that colonists from Massachusetts to Georgia experienced together and read about in the same newspapers.
The revivals split churches. New Lights supported them; Old Lights, such as Boston's Charles Chauncy, condemned their emotional excess and itinerant preachers who invaded other ministers' parishes. Tennent's 1740 sermon The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry told congregations they could judge whether their own learned minister was truly converted, and leave if he was not. The Presbyterians formally split into Old Side and New Side in 1741.
The effects lasted after the revivals faded:
- Challenges to authority. If ordinary believers could judge a minister's spiritual state, they could judge other authorities too. Women, young people, poor people and enslaved people spoke up in revival meetings.
- New and growing churches. Baptists and Presbyterians grew, especially in the backcountry, at the expense of the established Anglican and Congregational churches.
- New colleges to train New Light ministers: the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1746, and later Brown, Rutgers and Dartmouth.
- Black and Native converts. Evangelical preaching, which stressed spiritual equality and personal experience, drew some enslaved Africans and Native people into Protestant churches for the first time. The Mohegan minister Samson Occom was converted in the 1740s.
Historians disagree about how unified and how consequential the Awakening was. Jon Butler argued in 1982 that the "Great Awakening" is partly a label historians invented for scattered local revivals, while Thomas Kidd and others answer that contemporaries themselves saw one connected movement. Some historians, beginning with Alan Heimert (1966), linked New Light habits of questioning authority to the Revolution; others see little direct connection.
The Enlightenment
At the same time, educated colonists absorbed the Enlightenment, the European movement that used reason and observation to understand nature, society and government. Isaac Newton's Principia (1687) showed that the motion of planets and falling objects followed the same mathematical laws, which encouraged the belief that natural laws governed society too. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) argued that people have natural rights to life, liberty and property, and that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed.
Franklin was the colonial Enlightenment in one person. He founded a subscription library in Philadelphia (1731) and the American Philosophical Society (1743) for scientific exchange, and his experiments on electricity, published in London in 1751, won him fame in Europe and gave the world the lightning rod. Many educated colonists became deists, who believed a creator made a universe that ran by natural law but doubted miracles and revelation. A 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic shows how the exchange of ideas worked: the Puritan minister Cotton Mather learned of inoculation from Onesimus, a man he enslaved who had been inoculated in West Africa, read reports of the practice in the Royal Society's journal, and persuaded a doctor to try it. The inoculated died at a far lower rate.
The Awakening and the Enlightenment pulled in opposite directions on the role of emotion and revelation, but they shared something. Both taught colonists to trust their own judgment, by inner experience or by reason, over inherited authority.
Becoming more English
You might expect colonies founded by people leaving England to drift away from it over time. In the 1700s the opposite happened. Historians, following John Murrin, call this Anglicization: colonial society grew more like England's as it grew richer and more connected to it.
Politics on English models. Every colony except Georgia had an elected assembly, beginning with Virginia's House of Burgesses (1619); Georgia's trustees ran it without a lawmaking assembly until it became a royal colony in the mid-1750s. Assemblies saw themselves as small Houses of Commons. They used the power of the purse (the right to approve or refuse taxes and spending, including officials' salaries) the way Parliament did, often refusing to pay a royal governor's salary until he agreed to their measures, and they claimed the rights of Englishmen that England's Glorious Revolution of 1688 and Bill of Rights of 1689 had confirmed. Because London enforced its rules loosely through much of the early 1700s (Topic 2.4), assemblies built real autonomy within this English framework, and New England towns governed local matters in town meetings.
Transatlantic print. The Boston News-Letter (1704) was the first colonial newspaper to last, and by the mid-1760s colonists could read about two dozen. Papers reprinted London news and essays, such as Cato's Letters (1720 to 1723), which warned that corrupt ministers threatened English liberty. In 1735, a New York jury acquitted the printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel (publishing criticism that brought the government into contempt, a crime under English law whether or not the criticism was true) for printing attacks on the royal governor, William Cosby, after his lawyer argued that printing the truth could not be a crime. Franklin, as printer, almanac writer (Poor Richard's Almanack, from 1732) and from 1753 a deputy postmaster general for the colonies, tied the network together.
Commerce and consumption. Coastal trade, roads and the post linked colonies to each other, and wealthier colonists bought English goods in rising quantities: tea and teaware, printed cloth, books, furniture in London styles, and brick houses in the Georgian style (symmetrical fronts and classical details, named for Britain's kings George I and George II). Owning English goods marked a colonist as refined and British.
Shared evangelical religion. The revivals themselves ran on the Atlantic network: Whitefield was an Englishman, Edwards's work was printed in London, and colonial and British evangelicals wrote to each other and read the same books.
Anglicization made colonists think of themselves as fully English, entitled to every English right and to self-rule through their own assemblies. When Parliament began taxing them directly after 1763, those English ideas and the intercolonial networks of print and religion became tools for resisting Britain.
Worked examples
Identify one way the Great Awakening challenged established authority in the British colonies, and explain one effect of that challenge.
Show solution
Answer. New Light preachers such as Gilbert Tennent told congregations that they could judge whether their own ministers were truly converted, so ordinary believers began to question learned, established clergy. One effect was division: congregations split between New Lights and Old Lights, the Presbyterians divided in 1741, and Baptist and other evangelical churches grew at the expense of the established Congregational and Anglican churches.
Why this works. The question has two tasks. The first names a specific development (laypeople judging ministers, with a named preacher). The second gives an effect with specific evidence (the 1741 split, growth of Baptists) instead of a general claim like "religion changed."
Explain how the trial of John Peter Zenger in 1735 reflected the growth of colonial print culture and English political ideas.
Show solution
Answer. Zenger's New-York Weekly Journal printed attacks on Governor William Cosby, showing that colonial newspapers had become a place for political argument, not only shipping news. His lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, argued that printing the truth could not be libel, appealing to English ideas that free men could criticize abuses of power, the same ideas spread in essays like Cato's Letters. The jury's acquittal showed colonists applying English liberties to their own government. It did not change the law of libel, but it encouraged colonial printers to criticize officials.
Why this works. The answer connects one specific case to two broad developments and explains the link for each. The last sentence keeps the claim accurate: the verdict was a jury's decision, not a new legal rule.
The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous, and it was matter of speculation to me, who was one of the number, to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers, and how much they admir'd and respected him, notwithstanding his common abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally half beasts and half devils. It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants.
Benjamin Franklin, describing George Whitefield's preaching in Philadelphia in 1739, in his Autobiography, written 1771 to 1790
a. Briefly describe Franklin's point of view toward Whitefield's preaching as expressed in the excerpt.
b. Briefly explain how ONE development in the period 1730 to 1750 contributed to the events described in the excerpt.
c. Briefly explain ONE way the developments described in the excerpt affected colonial society in the period 1740 to 1770.
Show solution
a. Franklin writes as a curious but detached observer. He is impressed by Whitefield's influence and by the change in Philadelphians' behavior, but he treats the revival as a subject for study ("matter of speculation") and notes with some irony that crowds admired a preacher who called them "half beasts and half devils." That distance fits Franklin's deism and his Enlightenment habit of observing.
b. The growth of colonial print culture made Whitefield's crowds possible. Newspapers advertised his arrival and reported his sermons, and printers such as Franklin published his sermons and journals, so people of "all sects and denominations" knew of him before he arrived and came to hear him.
c. The revivals divided churches into New Lights and Old Lights and led evangelicals to found new colleges such as the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1746 to train ministers who shared the revival's emphasis on personal conversion.
Why these earn the points. Part (a) describes point of view, so it uses words from the excerpt as evidence and ties Franklin's stance to who he was. Part (b) names a specific development and connects it to a detail in the source ("all sects and denominations"). Part (c) gives a concrete effect inside the time frame. A sourcing note worth knowing: Franklin wrote this decades later and profited from printing Whitefield's work, which may help explain his favorable memory of a man whose theology he rejected.
Where students lose points
On the exam
Questions on this topic can use a sermon, a newspaper item, or a memoir like Franklin's and ask you to identify the development it shows (revival, Enlightenment thought, print culture) or to explain its causes and effects. In essays about the origins of the Revolution, the Great Awakening, Enlightenment ideas and Anglicization are strong evidence for continuity and for context, as long as you explain how each one shaped colonists' ideas about authority and rights.
Check yourself
Question 1
Which colony's founding most directly made it a destination for German Mennonites, Moravians and other religious minorities in the 1700s?
- A
Massachusetts, because its charter required toleration of all Protestants
- B
Pennsylvania, because its proprietor guaranteed freedom of worship to all who believed in God
- C
Virginia, because the Anglican Church welcomed dissenting sects
- D
Georgia, because its trustees recruited only non-English settlers
Show answer
B
William Penn's Quaker colony promised liberty of conscience and actively recruited settlers in the German states. Massachusetts (A) and Virginia (C) kept tax-supported established churches and often penalized dissenters.
- A
Question 2
An Old Light minister in 1742 would most likely have objected to which of the following?
- A
The founding of Yale College to train ministers
- B
Itinerant preachers who held emotional meetings in other ministers' parishes
- C
Maryland's protection of Catholic worship
- D
Newton's explanation of planetary motion
Show answer
B
Old Lights such as Charles Chauncy opposed the revivals' emotional excess and itinerants who drew congregations away from settled clergy. Yale (A) was founded in 1701 by orthodox Congregationalists, long before the split, and Newtonian science (D) was widely accepted by educated ministers of both sides.
- A
Question 3
Explain why historians describe the British colonies of the early 1700s as becoming more English rather than less, giving one specific piece of evidence.
Show answer
As the colonies grew richer and more connected to Britain, their institutions and culture copied English models instead of drifting away. For example, colonial assemblies acted like small Houses of Commons, using control over taxes and the royal governor's salary to claim the same rights Parliament had won in England.
Other valid evidence includes newspapers modeled on London papers and reprinting English essays, the rising purchase of English consumer goods such as tea, teaware and London-style furniture, and transatlantic evangelical networks. The point is that the trend before 1763 was toward closer imitation of England.
Question 4
Identify one similarity between the effects of the Great Awakening and of the Enlightenment in the colonies.
Show answer
Both encouraged colonists to rely on their own judgment over inherited authority: the Awakening through personal religious experience that let laypeople judge their ministers, the Enlightenment through reason and natural law.
The two movements disagreed about emotion and revelation, so the similarity lies in their effect on authority, not in their content. Naming a shared idea such as 'both were about science' would be wrong.