ABSTRACT
The Awakening began in rural Connecticut and New Hampshire in the late 1790s, becoming an especially powerful force in New England after Yale College students attended revivals in 1801-about a third of the student body converted-and went on as ministers to spread revivalism throughout the region’s Congregational churches over the following two decades. New England revivalism was generally sedate and conservative, producing a host of regional missionary, benevolent, and moral reform associations designed to shore up faltering Congregational establishments and to extend their middleclass values into new Western settlements. Revival-energized Yale and Andover seminary graduates accompanied the westward “Yankee migration” into New York State and Ohio as missionaries and educators, and Congregationalists and Presbyterians pooled their resources in an 1801 “Plan of Union” to facili tate the founding of churches and schools there. As a result, churches of both denominations multiplied from New York and northern Ohio to Wisconsin and Minnesota.
