- The Life and Career of Charles Grandison Finney:
- A brief account of the man.
- "Conversion to Christ" from Memoirs of Reverend Charles G. Finney
- Finney's account, written many years later, of his own remarkable conversion experience.
- "What a Revival of Religion Is"
- Lecture to his congregation, delivered by Charles Grandison Finney in 1834.
Religion
In
America
William Ellery Channing
Tocqueville and Religion
Charles Grandison Finney and the Revival
| "the religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States." |
What Tocqueville sensed was, to a certain degree, the energy of the Second Great Awakening. Begun in 1800, the Second Great Awakening was at its peak in the early 1830's, just when Tocqueville and Beaumont made their famous visit. The form taken by this awakening was a veritable river of revivals, successively washing across the country, cleansing American society of its iniquities. Tocqueville found remarkable the seemingly endless number of sects into which American Christianity was divided. In The Life of the Mind in America, Perry Miller observed that, "in the larger perspective of American thinking, these divisions - though frequently argued with dismaying ferocity - are of little importance before the terrific universality of the Revival." (Miller, 7) The revival did not discriminate; those swept into the current were from all walks of life and religious backgrounds. During the time she lived in America, Mrs. Frances Trollope attended a revival in Cincinnati, which she described in Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in England in 1832. Although Mrs. Trollope labelled it a "detestable exhibition" (click here for Mrs. Trollope's description), her account tells us that the revival was "talked of by every one ... throughout the town" and that "the smartest and most fashionable ladies of the town were there; during the whole revival the churches and meeting-houses were every day crowded with well dressed people." (Trollope, 81)
So regardless of class or denomination, the common ground became the revival. In the early part of the nineteenth century revivals were so frequent in western New York that the area between Troy and Buffalo became known as the "burned-over district." From this area emerged a figure who would become the central figure of the revivalist movement: Charles Grandison Finney.