The Urban Threshold and the Second Great

Awakening: Revivalism in New York State,

1825–1835

RICHARD LEE ROGERS

Department of Social Sciences
Southern Wesleyan University

Generally regarded as a rural phenomenon, the spread of religious revivalism in the Second Great Awakening
may have also been associated with urbanization and early industrialism. This report of a secondary analysis
of data originally collected by John Hammond (The Politics of Benevolence [1979]) provides support for the
urban argument. Ordinary least-squares and Poisson regression analyses of the incidence of revivalism indicate
that revivalism is associated with population size, township manufacturing, location in agricultural counties, and
proximity to other towns experiencing revivals. Among urban places and manufacturing towns, the highest levels
of revivalism are found in New York’s western region. However, the results also uncover a strand of revivalism in
the rural northern part of the state that cannot be reduced to the principal variables. The significance of these
findings for the study of the Second Great Awakening and American evangelicalism broadly is highlighted.

INTRODUCTION

While the United States has experienced recurring waves of evangelical enthusiasm through-
out its history, the origins of these movements remain a subject of considerable debate. Some
claim that evangelical Protestantism is part of the mainstream of American culture. It influences
the evolution of collective values and the formation of national identity (McLoughlin 1978), the
development of modern-day institutions such as public schools, philanthropic organizations, and
the mass media (Meyer et al. 1979; Primer 1979; Tyack 1966), and the shaping of American
foreign policy (Baumgartner, Francia, and Morris 2008). Others insist that evangelical religiosity
is peripheral to the cultural mainstream. According to this view, religious belief and practice
have declined with modernization and the rise of science since the time of the Enlightenment
(Cox 1965; Neusch [1977] 1982; Bruce 2002). Evangelical religiosity prospers among marginal,
low-status individuals who compensate for their lack of wealth, social standing, and influence
through beliefs in personal salvation and the hereafter (Glock 1964; Holt 1940; Niebuhr 1929;
Pope 1942; Stark and Bainbridge 1985).
In order to understand more thoroughly the factors contributing to the rise of American
evangelicalism, considerable attention has been given to the Early Republic period—the years
between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. During the Second Great Awakening, evangelical
Protestantism grew rapidly. Between 1776 and 1850 the number of adherents to the leading evan-
gelical denominations—Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists—increased
at a rate more than twice the rate of population growth (see Finke and Stark 1989). Revival

Acknowledgements: Paper presented at the Conference on Awakenings and Revivals in American History at Liberty
University, April 16–18, 2009. The data set Revivalism in New York and Ohio, 1825–1835 is distributed by the Inter-
University Consortium for Political and Social Research and was made available to the author while a graduate student
at Princeton University. I am thankful to Robert Wuthnow, John Hammond, and anonymous reviewers of this journal for
comments on earlier versions of this article.
Correspondence should be addressed to Richard Lee Rogers, Associate Professor of Sociology, Southern Wesleyan
University, P.O. Box 1020, 907 Wesleyan Drive, Central, SC 29630. E-mail: rrogers@swu.edu

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2010) 49(4):694–709


C 2010 The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion
REVIVALISM AND THE URBAN THRESHOLD 695

meetings created opportunities for mass conversion (Cross 1950:151–84; Weisberger 1958).
Numerous societies organized on both local and national levels to promote Bible distribution,
church planting, foreign missions, and moral and social reforms such as temperance and abolition
(Dorsey 2002; Foster 1960; Griffin 1960; Nord 1993; Young 2006).
As sociologists and historians have sought to explain these events, considerable disagreement
has emerged regarding the context in which the evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening
flourished. Many contend that rural America, either the frontier or commercial agricultural
areas, was the center of early republican evangelicalism (e.g., Cleveland 1916; Pritchard 1984;
Sweet 1944; Thomas 1988; Tyler 1944). However, an alternative point of view associates the
evangelicalism of the period with urbanization and early industrialism (e.g., Blumin 1976; Cross
1950:75; Johnson 1978; Ryan 1981; Wallace 1978).
This study seeks a resolution of these two competing interpretations through a quantitative
analysis of the social ecology of revivalism in New York State for the years 1825 to 1835. It
demonstrates that the contradictory conclusions about the social context of evangelical success
are reconcilable. The evangelical movement thrived in two different settings—both urbanizing
manufacturing towns and agricultural counties were capable of creating conditions in which
evangelicalism prospered. Urban places and manufacturing towns, places that Blumin (1976) has
called the “urban threshold”—were unusually receptive to the evangelical message. Revivalism
reached its highest level in the western region of the state, but a unique pattern of revivalism also
surfaces in the rural northern part.

The Social Context of 19th-Century Evangelicalism

During the first half of the 19th century, New York State grew rapidly due to the movement of
the population into its frontier regions. An important catalyst to this growth was the Erie Canal—
its completion in 1825 made possible the movement of people and goods into the western and
interior parts of the state faster and more cheaply than had been possible with overland routes alone
(Bernstein 2005). During the decade of the 1820s the population of the five western counties
along the canal grew by 135 percent, and at the east end of the water route Albany grew by
96 percent (Cross 1950:56).
Economic expansion accompanied the growth of the population. The fertile lands of the
western part of the state provided an ideal setting for farming, turning the Genesee River Valley into
a major producer of wheat and flour (McNall 1952; Parkerson 1995). Manufacturing communities
emerged to process agricultural products and make textiles (Cochrane 1981:53–69). Traffic
passing through the canal to New York City propelled the Port of New York past its competitors
in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston (Albion 1939).
In conjunction with these changes, urbanization proceeded faster in New York State than the
country as a whole. Nationally, urban residents grew from 5.1 percent of the population in 1790
to 15.4 percent by 1860 (U.S. Census Bureau 1993). The concentration of the urban population
was especially high in New York State: the state had nearly one of every five of the nation’s urban
inhabitants in 1790 and by 1830 more than one of every four (Figure 1). Particularly important
to this growth was the urbanization of communities outside New York City—these communities
accounted for 5 percent of the nation’s urban inhabitations by 1820 and over 10 percent by
1850. These numbers understate the rapidity of urbanization in New York—many large villages
remained unincorporated after reaching the urban threshold because of the use of the township
system across the state (U.S. Census Bureau 1993).
Religious enthusiasm flourished in the context of this rapid demographic and economic
growth. Western New York, in particular, has been nicknamed the “burned-over district” because
of recurring waves of revivals sweeping the area like wild fires (Cross 1950:3–13; Hammond
1979:36–37). These revivals varied in style based on whether they appeared in formalist or anti-
formalist settings (Johnson 1993; Perciaccante 2003). Formalists, composed of elite Presbyterians,
696 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

Figure 1
New York urban populations as percent of U.S. urban population.

Source: Derived from U.S. Census Bureau (1993); Gibson (1998).

Reformed Dutch, and Congregationalists—the latter often operating as Presbyterians in New York
State under the cooperative arrangement known as the Plan of Union—emphasized the orderliness
of religious experience. They expected religious emotions to conform to norms of public decorum
and revival preaching to fall under the supervision of established religious authorities such
as settled ministers, invited preachers from nearby churches, and domestic missionaries under
appointment (Hotchkin 1848; Kling 1993:62–74). Consistent with the Calvinist worldview of
these denominations, revivals were seen as unpredictable showers of blessing granted solely at
the discretion of God without any human intervention. Anti-formalism, originally developed by
the New Lights of the First Great Awakening (Hall 1994; Kidd 2007) and continued by early
19th-century Methodists (Finke and Stark 1992; Wigger 1998), provided a framework for early
republican religious populism (Hatch 1989). Its spread was dependent on clergy lacking formal
theological training, lay preachers, traveling itinerants, and circuit riders—all who felt free to
challenge existing authority, preach using concepts and images acceptable to common people,

Figure 2
Townships with revival by year
REVIVALISM AND THE URBAN THRESHOLD 697

and accept as legitimate many expressions of religious ecstasy exceeding the boundaries of proper
behavior.
The state’s most noted evangelist of this period, Presbyterian Charles Grandison Finney,
bridged these two traditions (Cross 1950:151–84; Hardman 1987; Hambrick-Stowe 1996; Per-
ciaccante 2003; Weisberger 1958:87–126). Raised in the rural areas of northwestern New York,
Finney began promoting revivals in 1824 in Jefferson and St. Lawrence counties while he was
under an appointment from the Female Missionary Society of the Western District of New York,
and revivals spread to central New York when Finney accepted an invitation to preach at the town
of Western in October 1825. After several years of itinerancy, a major wave of revivalism flared
again in 1830–1831 when Finney preached at Rochester, where his meetings reportedly yielded
over 1,000 converts.
Finney repackaged the popular religiosity of northern New York, especially that of the
Methodists, in a form acceptable to the state’s rising urban middle class (Perciaccante 2003). He
challenged evangelical Calvinism with his belief in Arminianism and claimed to have discovered
scientific principles by which revivals could be induced, including the use of an “anxious seat,”
protracted meetings, prayer vigils that included the public prayers of women in mixed-gender
services, and the identification of sinners by name (see Finney [1835] 1960). Opposition to
Finney’s techniques, however, did not mean opposition to revival. For example, the Geneva
Presbytery, claiming to have added over 2,000 members in 1830 and 1831, published an account
of revivals in its churches that emphasized its adherence to Calvinism, the accomplishments of
its settled ministry and infrequent use of itinerants, the limited effectiveness of the “anxious
seat,” the control of excessive emotions, and the absence of the “audible praying of females in
promiscuous assemblies” (Geneva Presbytery 1832:27–30).
The prosperity of evangelical revivalism in the context of rapid socioeconomic development
makes New York evangelicalism an important case in the study of religion and modernization.
Reflecting on his visit to the United States in the 1820s and 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was
one of the first to recognize the implications of what was happening in early republican America
for post-Enlightenment social theory:

The philosophers of the eighteenth century explained in a very simple manner the gradual decay of religious
faith. Religious zeal, said they, must necessarily fail the more generally liberty is established and knowledge is
diffused. Unfortunately, the facts by no means accord with their theory. There are certain populations in Europe
whose unbelief is only equaled by their ignorance and debasement; while in America, one of the freest and most
enlightened nations of the world, the people fulfill with fervor all the outward duties of religion. (Tocqueville
[1836] 1945, I, 319)

Tocqueville’s observation received little attention. Early 20th-century scholarship, combining

crowd psychology (LeBon [1895] 1896) and Turner’s frontier thesis ([1893] 1920), associated
early republican revivalism with marginal populations isolated at the periphery of American
society (Cleveland 1916; Davenport 1917; Mode 1923; Sweet 1944; Tyler 1944). The literature
depicted frontier settlers as poor, illiterate, lazy, and uncivilized; harsh living conditions and
freedom from the normative constraints of the settled communities in the East engendered rugged
individualism. These conditions, it was argued, created people responsive to evangelicalism’s
emphasis on personal salvation. Church services and rural camp meetings fostered conditions
of mass suggestibility under which charismatic evangelists sparked spontaneous, emotional, and
highly irrational behaviors like crying, groaning, and bodily convulsions. Everett Martin, trying
to revise LeBon’s ideas in light of psychoanalytic theory, claimed that the religious revival was so
extreme an example of the formation of the crowd mentality that there exists in it “an easy naiveté
which is probably found nowhere else, not even in the psychiatric clinic” (Martin 1920:76).
The Burned-Over District, Whitney Cross’s (1950) now classic analysis of 19th-century
religion in western New York, was the first major study to question the frontier thesis. Cross
698 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

followed his predecessors in drawing connections between evangelical enthusiasm and rurality,
but he differed from most previous scholarship in at least two significant points. First, he did
not regard the region’s settlers as lazy or uncivilized—the population affected by evangelical
religion was industrious, educated, and desirous of self-improvement. Second, he did not limit
evangelical revivalism to geographically isolated regions: its centers were manufacturing towns
serving a surrounding agricultural area, places like Utica and Rochester.
In spite of the implications of the research offered by Cross, a full assault on the frontier thesis
did not begin until the mid-1970s with the emergence of the “new social history” (e.g., Blumin
1976; Faler 1981; Hendricks 1983; Hewitt 1984; Hackett 1991; Johnson 1978; Laurie 1980; Ryan
1981; Wallace 1978). These studies placed evangelicalism at the center of 19th-century American
society, not at the fringe, with the assertion that rapidly urbanizing communities and manufac-
turing towns were the centers of revivalism and moral reform. According to these arguments,
urbanization, early industrialism, and the expansion of commerce segmented social life: the rise
of distinct working-class and middle-class subcultures destroyed community homogeneity, and
the growth of small-scale manufacturing undermined the familial character of the preindustrial
workplace. As textile mills replaced the need for the home manufacturing of cloth, middle-class
women used their newly found free time to support churches and moral reform societies, and
these women played a key role in influencing the subsequent conversions of their husbands and
sons.
This urban brand of evangelicalism, it is further argued, aided the transition to a market
economy. Evangelicals promoted trustworthiness, industriousness, punctuality, and sobriety—
personal traits consistent with the demands of early industrial capitalism (see Thompson 1967).
Church participation in manufacturing communities supplied a network of potential business
partners outside the extended family more than it did in rural areas (Roth 1987). Laborers found
in evangelicalism themes of social equality and mutual obligation useful in the formation of a
working-class ideology (Murphy 1992; Sutton 1998).
This collection of studies often has been criticized for its emphasis on social class and urban
location. The use of class as an explanatory concept has been labeled the social control thesis and
derided as a form of Marxist or materialist reductionism (e.g., Noll 2002:188; Hackett et al. 2005).
The designation of antebellum evangelicalism as a form of social control antedates the “new social
history” and has its origins in claims that Federalist elites developed evangelical benevolent
societies to defend the standing order from threats caused by urbanization, immigration, and
westward settlement (Foster 1960; Griffin 1960; see also Banner 1973). The social control thesis
gains a Marxist cast after the publication of Paul Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium (1978),
where he argued that a rising class of small manufacturers promoted evangelical religiosity in
an effort to control community affairs with the demise of the household model of workplace
management.
While the “new social history” certainly owes its origin to Marxist scholarship on the histor-
ical dynamics of class (Denning 1986; Eley 2005; Griffen 1986), this criticism of the evangelical
community studies overlooks the variety of behaviors and approaches highlighted in the litera-
ture. Women’s efforts to convert their husbands and sons (Hewitt 1984; Ryan 1981), the use of
evangelicalism by laborers in social protest (Murphy 1992; Sutton 1998), and the morphing of
free black mutual aid societies into independent churches (George 1973; Andrews 1984; Gravely
1984; Nash 1986) can be interpreted as actions contrary to the interest of capitalist manufacturers
and merchants. Theoretically, the criticism ignores the incorporation of functionalist conceptions
of social order and social change (Johnson 1978:8–14; Wallace 1978:477–85).
A more substantive problem has been the identification of the centers of evangelical re-
vivalism with urbanization or manufacturing. County-level quantitative research suggested that
commercial agriculture, not urbanization or early industrialism, was the context in which early
republican evangelicalism flourished (Hammond 1979:50–51; Pritchard 1984; Thomas 1988).
Questions surfaced about whether the communities selected for study by social historians were
REVIVALISM AND THE URBAN THRESHOLD 699

representative of the main cultural currents in American society and adequately considered rural
religiosity:

Clearly Rochester elites did not create revivalism; Finney himself had been leading successful revivals since
1825. In many ways his Rochester revival was unique. First of all, Rochester was an urban center relative to
western towns, and Hammond (1979) has shown evidence that revivals were to some degree located in areas low
in population density (Thomas 1988:86).
Perhaps one of the worst errors that scholars can make is to interpret the Second Great Awakening solely on
the basis of urban revivals . . . Generalizations from these investigations do not apply to a rural setting. Paul
Johnson’s class analysis cannot be employed to explain Cortland County’s revivals of the 1830s because factories
and industrial wage labor did not arrive in significant numbers until the 1850s. Likewise, it is difficult to transfer
Mary Ryan’s analysis of Utica to Cortland County. Women were as important to Cortland revivals as they were
to those in Oneida County, but Cortland women were not shocked into action by hordes of directionless young
people flooding into the county’s largest villages, nor did they express their religious concerns primarily through
female voluntarist organizations. (Johnson 1989:166–67)

Unfortunately, research on this question stalled as the conceptualization of social and religious
movements changed. The “new social history” declined in favor of “cultural history” (Eley 2005).
Social movement theorists abandoned the identification of the structural antecedents of collective
behavior for studies in resource mobilization and frame analysis (Jenkins 1983; Young 2006:15–
29). Sociologists of religion redefined historical changes in religious identification as a form of
market competition (Finke and Stark 1992). As a result, the fundamental questions about where
antebellum evangelical revivalism was strongest remain unanswered.
This study reopens the longstanding debate over the origins of early 19th-century evan-
gelicalism through an ecological analysis of New York revivalism. An important change from
previous research is a shift in the unit of analysis from counties to townships (towns), the principal
subdivision of New York counties. The author alleges that the reliance of previous research on
county-level data masks large variations in the social conditions of places within the county:
inasmuch as agricultural development and manufacturing flourished side by side at this point in
history, finer geographic distinctions must be made to capture the differing effects than have been
used previously.
This article explores three hypotheses. First, the frequency of revivalism should increase as
the town’s population size becomes larger. Second, the frequency of revivalism is associated with
the level of manufacturing, not agriculture. Finally, the manufacturing towns likely to harbor
revivalism were most likely located where the surrounding area was agricultural.
There are three reasons why these hypotheses are considered. First, religious revivals require
a critical mass of people, which is more attainable in urban areas than rural ones because the
large numbers of people in urban communities facilitate the development of unique subcultures
committed to the support of specific activities (Fischer 1982). While it can be argued that
Yankee farmers living in homogeneous rural areas have the strongest individual commitments
to evangelical ideas (see Cross 1950; Hammond 1979), this heightened sense of religiosity
is associated with personal beliefs and practices more than it is with collective gatherings.
Revivals are events, not beliefs—protracted meetings and other special activities accompanying
revivals require numbers of people with sufficient free time to attend meetings and enough
capital to support the pastors and evangelists who promote revivals. For example, during the
1820s and 1830s, the women of the nascent urban middle class, freed from the constraints of the
domestic production of cloth, committed their surplus time to support religious causes (Hewitt
1984; Ryan 1981), and capitalist business owners had wealth to support the construction of new
congregations and benevolent causes (Johnson 1978; Wyatt-Brown 1969). Rural communities
were unlikely to sustain frequent revivals: the small churches in these areas frequently were not
large enough to support financially a settled minister and might even rely on external sources
to pay for short-term missionaries or supply circuit riders (Barclay 1949:257–79; Goodykoontz
700 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

1939); rural women were less free to engage in activities outside their homes than the middle-class
women who supported the evangelical revivals in manufacturing towns (Osterud 1991; Parkerson
1995; Riley 1988:6–7). Even the stereotypical camp meeting revival often relied on large numbers
of participants from urban areas for its success (Bilhartz 1986:87).
Second, the disruption of longstanding models of home and work was greatest in urban
centers and manufacturing communities. It is not necessary to adhere to the social control thesis
to support this opinion: all social groups felt the impact of social and economic transformation
(Bilhartz 1986), and in this literature social class should be regarded as a heuristic mechanism
for describing the lived experiences of groups of individuals much in the same way cultural
historians use the concept of race or gender (McCloud 2007). Although Thomas (1988) presents
an argument that the effects of modernization for early industrial and commercial agriculture
are similar due to commercial farmers’ adaptation to the demands and price fluctuations of a
market economy, subsequent research raises questions about the applicability of this thesis to
all agricultural areas of rural New York prior to 1850. Only a little more than half of farmers in
western New York achieved a surplus above the needs of their households by 1855—20 years
after the end of the revivals considered in this study—and many of those farms with surpluses
were semi-subsistent rather than oriented toward profit (Parkerson 1995).
Although the aforementioned argument undermines some of the previous reasoning about
the effects of agricultural development during this time period, there nevertheless is an association
on the county level between revivalism and agriculture (Hammond 1979:50–51; Pritchard 1984;
Thomas 1988). Aspects of this relationship may be cultural rather than economic: many of
the agricultural regions of western New York were destinations for large numbers of Yankee
migrants from New England, who carried with them a heritage of evangelical religiosity (Cross
1950; Hammond 1979). While they were not in a position to support high levels of revivalism
in rural churches, many retained their religious understandings of the world as they moved into
larger communities or their communities grew in size (e.g., Wyatt-Brown 1969). Once critical
mass was achieved and longstanding models of social relationships collapsed, these individuals
drew on their preexisting repertoire of religious beliefs and practices in their support of religious
revivals.

METHODOLOGY

The township is the basic unit of analysis with a total of 515 townships available for study.
Township boundaries for 1820 are used in order to hold land area constant over time with
boundaries identified using 19th-century gazetteers (French 1860; Gordon 1836; Spafford 1824).
In places where the formation of a township after 1820 includes area from more than one of the
townships existing in 1820, the original townships are aggregated into a single unit. Because of
the inability to locate revivals by ward, only city-wide totals are utilized in cities with multiple
wards. The number of townships does not include Caldwell township in Warren County and all
townships in Cattaraugus and Queens counties, which are removed from the study due to missing
data.

Measures of Revivalism

The locations of religious revivals in New York State from 1825 to 1835 were determined
using information collected by John L. Hammond (1980) from religious periodicals in his analysis
of the influence of evangelicalism on political ideology in the book The Politics of Benevolence:
Revival Religion and American Voting Behavior (Hammond 1979). The use of published accounts
to establish the place of events is an accepted methodology among historical sociologists in the
analysis of collective behavior and social movements, such as mob violence in France and the
REVIVALISM AND THE URBAN THRESHOLD 701

lynching of blacks in the United States (e.g., Beck and Tolnay 1990; Inverarity 1976; Snyder and
Tilly 1972).
The use of periodicals to report the incidence of revivalism was especially important to evan-
gelicals in America and Great Britain during the 18th and early 19th-centuries (e.g., Hamilton
1964; Lambert 1999). Beginning with Jonathan Edwards’s account of a revival among his congre-
gants in Northampton, Massachusetts, the publication of revival narratives became an important
component of the reporting and promotion of revivals among the trans-Atlantic evangelical com-
munity in the 1730s and 1740s, a time known as the First Great Awakening in America. The
Connecticut Evangelical Herald became the primary publication introducing early 19th-century
American audiences to revivals in Connecticut and Kentucky, and its letters provided the source
for later compendiums about New England revivals (Bradley 1819; Tyler 1846).
Religious newspapers also monitored the progress of the revivals sweeping New York State
during the 1820s and 1830s. The Hammond data were taken from 10 periodicals: Home Mission-
ary and American Pastor’s Journal (New York, 1828–1831), Methodist Magazine (New York,
1825–1828), New York Observer (1825–1835), New York Evangelist (1832–1834), Rochester Ob-
server (1827–1832), Western Recorder (Utica, 1825–1826), Utica Christian Repository (1833),
The Christian Advocate (New York, 1826–1835), The Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advo-
cate (Utica, 1830–1831), and The Visitant (Utica, 1825–1827). While these sources show some
bias toward Presbyterian and Methodist influences, they offer much greater detail about the spread
of revivals than the mapping of Whitney Cross (1950:157), the next most ambitious attempt to
identify the geography of New York revivalism. The data set includes 1,949 accounts of religious
revivals in the state from 1825 through 1835. Approximately two-thirds of the accounts also
contained the number of conversions, but after reviewing some of these accounts, this author
concluded that many numbers were simply rough estimates or impressions and decided not to use
this component of the Hammond data. Hammond’s own analysis of the data on the county level is
consistent with the commercial agricultural thesis, though it should be noted that his conclusion
is intended to be descriptive of the context of the revivals and is not the principal purpose of his
project, unlike other macro-level studies on this topic.
Using the Hammond data, a Revival Index is constructed to measure the frequency of
revivalism in each township. Each location is coded for each year with a dichotomous variable
on whether or not a revival report was published in that year—zero if no report was published,
and one if one or more reports were published with the Index being the sum of the dichotomous
variables. The minimum possible score on the Index is zero and the maximum is 11, though the
actual range of Index scores is from zero to nine (Table 1). A high score on the Index means that
revivals were frequently recurring events in a community, and a low score means that revivals were

Table 1: Frequency distribution of revival index

Revival Index Number Percent Cumulative Percent

0 135 26.2% 26.2%
1 109 21.2% 47.4%
2 81 15.7% 63.1%
3 68 13.2% 76.3%
4 52 10.1% 86.4%
5 32 6.2% 92.6%
6 22 4.3% 96.9%
7 9 1.8% 98.6%
8 5 1.0% 99.6%
9 2 .4% 100.0%
Total: 515 100.0%
702 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

Table 2: Descriptive statistics

Variable Mean Std. Dev. Median IQR

Revival Variables
Revival Index 2.1 2.0 2.0 3.0
Diffusion Index 2.2 1.1 2.0 1.5
Township Variables
Population 1820 2,638 5,755 1,949 1,520
Log of population 1820 3.3 .3 3.3 .3
Population 1840 4,584 12,170 2,829 2,435
Population change 1820–40 1,957 8,742 749 1,566
% manufacturing 1820 15.2 10.9 13.2 11.4
% manufacturing 1840 19.6 12.2 23.7 11.5
% manufacturing change 1820–40 1.3 4.5 .6 2.6
County Variables
% co. agriculture 1820 83.3 8.0 83.3 6.9
% co. agriculture 1840 77.4 8.4 79.4 10.7
% co. agriculture change 1820–40 −5.9 6.6 −5.0 8.8
Regions
Eastern .3 .5
Northern .1 .3
Western .2 .4
Southern .2 .4
Interior .2 .4

rare events, if they happened at all. This Index is similar to Hammond’s measure of the occurrence
of revivalism and has face validity in that the peak years of the Index roughly correspond with
the periods of religious fervor sparked by Finney’s activities (Figure 2).
Because the occurrence of revivalism was often a consequence of exposure to other nearby
revivals rather than endogenous community conditions (see Hammond 1979:47; Oneida Pres-
bytery 1826), an additional variable—the Diffusion Index—controls for the effects of revivalism’s
diffusion from one community to the next. The Diffusion Index for any particular location is the
mean of the Revival Index scores for every contiguous township. The mean Diffusion Index
across all townships is 2.2 with a standard deviation of 1.1. Descriptive statistics for this and
other independent variables can be found in Table 2.

Township-Level Data

Population size, which measures critical mass, is taken from the U.S. censuses of 1820 and
1840 (U.S. Census Office 1821, 1841) and is logged in multivariate analysis due to its skewed
distribution. A change in critical mass is simply the difference in population size from 1820 to
1840.
The level of manufacturing is measured as a percent of the overall labor force. The labor force
for both 1820 and 1840 is defined as the number of people in agriculture and manufacturing—these
two occupational categories account for most of the working population in the state. Commerce,
though included in both censuses, is not included in this analysis because of ambiguities in
its definition. Also not included in the definition of the labor force are occupations listed only
in the 1840 census—mining, learned professions, engineers, and prisoners (Fabricant 1949:29–
33; U.S. Census Office 1841). The change in the percent manufacturing is determined simply by
subtracting the percent manufacturing in 1820 from the comparable percent for 1840. The percent
REVIVALISM AND THE URBAN THRESHOLD 703

of the township labor force in agriculture is not included in the analysis because of collinearity
with percent manufacturing.
In one aspect of this analysis, a typology of community types is used to discern general
patterns of revivalism. Communities were identified as urban places by comparing township
population totals with state and county percentages of the urban population reported by the
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1993) and the National Historic Geographic Information System
(Minnesota Population Center 2004). In these sources, urban is defined as incorporated places
with at least 2,500 people. Ten townships met this definition by 1840: Albany, Auburn, Brooklyn,
Buffalo, Hudson, New York City, Rochester, Schenectady, Troy, and Utica. Manufacturing towns
refer to nonurban townships having at least 2,500 people and 20 percent of their workforce in
manufacturing. Some of these towns have villages that would have been classified as urban had
they been incorporated. Large rural towns were nonurban and nonmanufacturing towns with at
least 2,500 people. Other places are listed as other rural towns. This typology creates a de facto
hierarchy: the effects of urbanization and early industrialism should be greatest in urban places,
followed by manufacturing towns, large rural towns, and lastly other rural towns.

County-Level Data

The percent of the county labor force in agriculture is used as the measure of the agricultural
activity of the area surrounding each town. In order to maximize the number of counties, 1840
county boundaries are used. A change variable is also constructed by subtracting the 1820 value
from its 1840 counterpart.
All counties with high levels of agricultural development were not the same. In certain
counties of western New York, the level of commercial agriculture was higher than other parts
of the state due to the combination of highly fertile soil, easy access to the Erie Canal, and
the region’s economic potential (McNall 1952; Parkerson 1995). On the other hand, the soil
of other counties was poor or depleted—in these counties out-migration could be considerable
(e.g., Barron 1984, 1985). The variations in geology were further complicated by the presence of
mountains running through the state, which inhibited settlement and transportation.
Thus, county-level indicators were used to divide the state into five regions—(1) Eastern,
(2) Interior, (3) Northern, (4) Western, and (5) Southern. The Eastern Region refers to the area of
most colonial settlements—counties along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, Staten Island, and
Long Island. This definition includes the counties of Albany, Dutchess, Hudson, Kings, New
York, Orange, Putnam, Queens, Rensselaer, Richmond, Saratoga, Schenectady, Suffolk, Ulster,
and Westchester. Northern counties are the state’s North Country—Clinton, Essex, Franklin,
Jefferson, Lewis, and St. Lawrence counties. The Western Region, also called the Heartland
(Thompson 1966), is an area of highly fertile soil along the route of the Erie Canal. It includes the
counties of Cayuga, Erie, Genesee, Livingston, Monroe, Niagara, Oneida, Onondaga, Ontario,
Seneca, Wayne, and Yates. The Southern Region contains the counties of the Southern Tier and
the southwestern corner of the state—Alleghany, Broome, Cattaraugus, Chautauque, Chenango,
Delaware, Otsego, Steuben, Tioga, and Tompkins. The remaining counties are classified as
Interior Counties and include large tracts of the rugged terrain associated with the Adirondack
Mountains.

ANALYSIS

Stata 10.0 is used for statistical analysis. The analysis includes both tabular and linear
representations of tendencies in the data. The tabular analysis (Table 3) presents the mean Revival
Index by region and community type. Two forms of regression analysis are used—ordinary
least-squares (OLS) and Poisson (Table 4). OLS regression assesses the explanatory power of
704 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

Table 3: Revival index by community type and region

Community Type
Urban Manufacturing Large Rural Other Rural
Places Towns Towns Towns All Places
Region N Mean N Mean N Mean N Mean N Mean
Eastern 6 6.2 42 2.5 32 1.6 66 .9 146 1.7
Western 0 – 10 3.4 20 3.5 26 1.7 56 2.6
Northern 4 7.5 39 3.9 47 2.6 31 1.6 121 2.9
Southern 0 – 18 2.9 36 2.5 44 1.0 98 1.9
Interior 0 – 24 2.9 10 1.5 51 1.1 94 1.6
Total 10 6.7 133 3.1 154 2.3 218 1.2 515 2.1

Table 4: Regression models for revival index

OLS (Logged) Poisson

β SS β SS
∗∗∗ ∗∗∗
Diffusion Index 4.55 10,733 .14 1.15∗∗∗
Log of population 1820 38.59∗∗∗ 54,443 1.35∗∗∗ 3.87∗∗∗
Population change 1820–40 .00 740 .00 1.00
% manufacturing 1820 .59∗∗∗ 15,339 .02∗∗∗ 1.02∗∗∗
% manufacturing chg. 1820–40 .35 1,100 .01 1.01
% co. agriculture 1820 .92∗∗∗ 10,612 .04∗∗∗ 1.04∗∗∗
% co. agriculture chg. 1820–40 −.13 236 .00 1.00
Region (ref = Eastern)
Northern 19.02∗∗∗ 9,958 .55∗∗∗ 1.73∗∗∗
Western 10.30∗∗ 4,519 .31∗∗ 1.36∗∗
Southern 4.85 931 .14 1.15
Interior 2.46 259 .08 1.08
Constant −195.47∗∗∗ −7.58∗∗∗
Total Sums of Squares 436,162
Adj. R-Squared .30∗∗∗
Pseudo R-Squared .18∗∗∗
∗p < .05; ∗∗ p < .01; ∗∗∗ p < .001.

each variable as a function of the sums of squares. The Revival Index is logged in OLS regression
analysis because of its skewed distribution, and the logged Revival Index is multiplied by 100
to get greater specificity in the beta coefficients. Because the Revival Index is a distribution of
counts, Poisson regression analysis is also used.

RESULTS

Table 3 presents the mean Revival Index by combinations of community type and region. The
highest level of revivalism is found in urban places within the Western region, where the mean
Revival Index of 7.5 is more than three-and-a-half times the state average of 2.1. On a statewide
level, the intensity of revivalism clearly varies by position in the community hierarchy. The level
REVIVALISM AND THE URBAN THRESHOLD 705

of revivalism is highest in urban places (mean = 6.7) with manufacturing towns (mean = 3.1)
and large rural towns (mean = 2.3) also experiencing levels of revivalism above the state average.
In terms of region, the highest levels of revivalism occur in the Western part of the state
(mean = 2.9) followed by the Northern (mean = 2.6) while the other regions have levels below
average. However, the rank order of community type in each region changes from one region to
the next. It is especially noteworthy that among rural places (large rural and other rural towns)
the Northern region has a higher mean Index (mean = 3.5 and 1.7, respectively) than Western
townships (mean = 2.6 and 1.6).
Table 4 presents regression models. Several factors associated with the Revival Index are
found to be consistent across both OLS and Poisson models: the Diffusion Index, population
size (log of population 1820), percent township manufacturing 1820, percent county agriculture
1820, and location in the Northern and Western regions of New York State. The partial sum of
squares in OLS regression indicates the population size easily has the most explanatory power
in the model with township manufacturing ranking second in influence. Change variables are
not statistically significant, which suggests that the trajectory of communities was already set
by 1820, even if these communities had not yet attained urban status. Interaction terms between
township manufacturing and county agriculture are not significant when added to the models (not
shown).
The coefficients for the Northern and Western regions deserve further discussion. These
parameters should not be interpreted to say that revivalism is most intense in the Northern region
followed by the West. As Table 3 clearly indicates, revivalism reaches its apex in the Western
region, especially in urban places and manufacturing towns. Instead, these coefficients suggest
that the levels of revivalism in both North and West are higher than can be explained by the
main effects of diffusion, population, township manufacturing, and county agriculture alone. The
departure from the main-effects model is highest in the Northern region, but when both main
effects and regional effects are considered together, townships in the Western region score higher
on average.

DISCUSSION

The results are consistent with the three hypotheses. First, revivalism is associated with
population size, the most influential factor identified in this study. Second, it is associated with
manufacturing on a township level. Third, it is associated with agriculture on the county level
with a heightened level of revivalism especially present in the counties of western New York.
Collectively, these findings make urban centers and manufacturing towns in agricultural areas the
locations with the highest levels of revivalism.
These results can be understood on two levels. First, the study presents the only ecological
affirmation of arguments about the geographic distribution of revivals initially proposed by
Whitney Cross and expanded in the community studies. However, relative to the metropolitan
centers of today, the urban places and manufacturing towns of the Early Republic were quite
small. Thus, rather than calling these locations “cities” in the contemporary sense of the term, it
is useful to follow Blumin (1976) in saying that these were communities that had just crossed the
threshold into urbanism.
A possible exception to the pattern is identified. Townships in the Northern region also exhibit
high levels of revivalism not reducible to the effects of diffusion, population, manufacturing, and
county agriculture. Rural Northern communities, in particular, have higher levels of revivalism
than comparable communities in other parts of the state. These are locations where revivalism
flourished before its repackaging by Finney for the audiences of the urban threshold (Perciaccante
2003), and the place of this religious enthusiasm within the region’s culture may account for its
uniqueness.
706 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

One major gap in this analysis is the inability to test directly the influence of ethnic migration.
The reason for this omission is the absence of data: Census data on this aspect of the New York
population do not appear until the U.S. census of 1850 and then only on the county level. Although
Hammond (1979) projects backward in time with his county-level analysis, the matter becomes
more complicated on a township level because of the effect of Irish and German immigrations
after 1840 on specific communities. Urban centers and manufacturing towns were the primary
residential locations for foreign-born individuals (Blumin 1976; Dolan 1975; Johnson 1978:20–
21; Laurie 1980:28–29; Wallace 1978:37); this analysis shows that even without statistical controls
for ethnicity there are higher levels of religious revivalism in these places. However, the absence
of data on ethnicity does affect our understanding of the dynamics of antebellum evangelicalism in
other ways: the presence of Reformed Dutch, some of whom embraced the revivals of the era with
great reluctance, may account for the depressed rate of revivalism in the Eastern region (Fabend
2000), and identification of the locations of Yankee settlers should improve our understanding of
the relationship between town and county.
Second, this finding raises questions about the relationship of evangelicalism and mod-
ernization in a broad sense. Theoretically, strong arguments have been presented to state that
religious participation and diversity have prospered generally in the highly competitive cultural
climate of the American cities (Christiano 1987; Finke and Stark 1988). Whether this thesis can
apply to conservative Protestant groups is worth more investigation. Certainly, there is evidence
of an urban brand of religiosity contradicting stereotypes of the rurality of conservative reli-
gion: the interdenominational prayer-meeting revival of 1858 started in New York and spread
to other Northern cities (Smith [1957] 1980), the leadership of early fundamentalism was based
in metropolitan areas (Sandeen 1967), and modern Pentecostalism traces its origin through the
Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles and its subsequent spread to Indianapolis, Akron, Winnepeg,
Dallas, Cleveland, San Francisco, and suburban New York City (Hardman 1994:243). However,
the urban foundations of New York evangelicalism have been more difficult to establish: while
there is evidence that urbanization promoted religious development generally across the state
during the 19th century (Finke, Guest, and Stark 1996), previous research indicates that this
thesis might not apply to evangelical groups (Hammond 1979:50–51; Pritchard 1984; Thomas
1988). This study highlights the need to reopen this debate.

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