The Great Awakening at Northampton

Northampton in 1734 was a farming town of about two hundred families on the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts. Its pastor was Jonathan Edwards, thirty years old, who had taken the pulpit in 1729 when his famous grandfather Solomon Stoddard died. Stoddard had led the church for nearly sixty years and had seen five seasons he called harvests. Edwards had grown up hearing that revival was something a town could expect.

By his own description the town had gone cold and quarrelsome. He wrote that the young people were given to night-walking, taverns, and frolics that ran late, and that families in Northampton had been divided into parties for years. He was not describing a wicked town so much as a comfortable one. That is where the story starts.

In the spring of 1734 a young man in the bloom of his youth died of pleurisy in about two days. Then a young married woman died, and before she died she spoke to the young people at her bedside about their souls. Edwards preached on both deaths. The young people agreed to start meeting in small groups in different neighborhoods, and Edwards noticed that they kept it up.

That autumn he preached a series on justification by faith alone, from Romans 4:5, against a teaching then spreading in the valley that a person's own striving contributed something. Some in town were unhappy about it and said so. Then, in December, Edwards wrote, the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in — five or six persons were converted, among them a young woman known as one of the greatest company-keepers in the whole town. Edwards admitted he had feared her conversion would be dismissed as a joke; instead, he said, it was like a flash of lightning on the hearts of the young people.

By the spring of 1735 the town, in his words, seemed to be full of the presence of God. Taverns emptied. People talked of little else in the streets and in their shops, and the meetings could not hold everyone who came. Edwards wrote that there was scarcely a person in the town, old or young, left unconcerned about the great things of eternity — which is his sentence, and a pastor's sentence about his own town, and should be read as such.

What makes Northampton different from most revival stories is that its pastor immediately tried to test it. Edwards took notes. He wrote out two long case studies — Abigail Hutchinson, a frail young woman who was converted and then died, and Phebe Bartlet, who was four years old — and he described their doubts and their odd moments as carefully as their joy. He was aware that excitement can imitate grace, and he wanted the work examined rather than simply admired.

His reckoning, in a town of roughly eleven hundred people, was that more than three hundred souls were savingly brought to Christ in about six months. He was careful to call this his own judgment rather than a count, and he said openly that he could be wrong about individuals. The awakening ran out from Northampton into more than thirty towns along the Connecticut Valley — South Hadley, Suffield, Deerfield, Hatfield, Longmeadow, and on into Connecticut at Windsor, Coventry, Lebanon, and New Haven.

Then it broke. In June 1735 Joseph Hawley II — a respected Northampton merchant, and Edwards's own uncle — sank into despair about his soul and cut his own throat. Afterward, Edwards wrote, other people in the valley began to feel as if something were urging them to do the same, and several attempted it. Edwards did not hide any of this. He put it in the published account, wrote that the Spirit of God seemed gradually to withdraw, and let the reader see the whole thing.

The account itself became the revival's most lasting fruit. Edwards first wrote it as a letter to the Boston minister Benjamin Colman in May 1735, expanded it, and it was published in London in 1737 with a preface by Isaac Watts and John Guyse, then in Boston in 1738. It was read across Britain and the colonies and gave the English-speaking church a shared vocabulary for revival. When the far bigger awakening of 1740 arrived, people already knew how to describe it, because Edwards had shown them how.

One more thing belongs here. Fifteen years after the town was full of the presence of God, the same congregation voted Edwards out — dismissed in 1750 in a bitter fight over who could rightly come to the Lord's Table. He preached his farewell sermon and went to the frontier mission at Stockbridge, where he wrote some of his greatest books. A church can be genuinely visited by God and still, a decade later, do something like that.