9. The Second Great Awakening
9
THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING
The revival began before Fanny left the Institution and grew to tremendous proportions during her stay in Maspeth. There had been two or three previous revivals in American history, starting with the First Great Awakening in the 1740s. Now, on the heels of an economic depression, there was again an intensified interest in religion. A full-scale revival, sometimes called the Second Great Awakening, swept the nation.
Apart from the workings of the Holy Spirit, certain human factors tended to foster the revival. One was the growth of Sunday schools. “Sunday school” originally was the name for the nineteenth-century equivalent of today’s night school, in which working people could pursue a secular education by attending classes on their only day off work. Soon, religious education—especially for the young—became popular on Sunday, too.
A second factor was the growth of mission societies. These were not only for the propagation of religion but also for the abolition of such evils as slavery, liquor, and tobacco and the amelioration of other social ills. During the 1840s and ’50s, there was a great growth in home mission societies dedicated to spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ among the increasingly large numbers of unchurched in the nation’s rapidly growing towns and cities.
The most significant of these groups was the Young Men’s Christian Association. Introduced in England, the YMCA appeared in America in the early 1850s. Its goals were to promote “evangelical religion,” cultivate the living of the Christian life, and improve “the mental and spiritual condition of young men.” The YMCA provided devotional meetings and classes for Bible instruction, as well as mission and Sunday schools. It engaged in social action, organizing community relief activities to help the needy and oppressed. Libraries and reading rooms were set up, and lectures were held “to amuse, interest and instruct.” To spread the Gospel, the YMCA sent young men to preach on street corners and wharves, in fire houses, and sometimes in tents.
It was in this capacity that the career of D. L. Moody, with whom Fanny Crosby’s name would become inextricably linked, had its beginnings, on the north side of Chicago. Moody achieved great success in bringing boys from the slums to participate in the Y’s programs and, through the activities and fellowship provided by that organization, to become successful and respected Christian citizens. In New York, too, the YMCA was active. Here, the guiding light was Dr. Howard Crosby (1824–1891), a distant cousin of Fanny’s. The young pastor of the Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church was a charter member of the New York YMCA and its second president. He considered the YMCA an “extension of the church” and labored to spread its work among New York’s seven hundred thousand inhabitants.
Revivals began to occur in the Great City and other parts of the country in 1857. Prayer meetings sprang up all over the New York area, and conversions were professed daily. So great and widespread were the revivals that newspapers gave them extensive daily coverage. Between 1858 and 1860, it was claimed that fifty thousand conversions occurred each week in the nation, and that each week some ten thousand were united with a church for the first time.
Christians went from door to door, witnessing in dingy attics and squalid cellars as well as in elegant parlors and opulent drawing rooms. They invited their hosts to attend Sunday school and inquirers’ classes. And they came in droves! As many as twelve hundred people a day packed the John Street Methodist Church for noonday prayer meetings.
Fanny’s life was much affected by the revivals. She began attending the John Street church, where she became active in the sewing societies, knitting garments for the poor. She attended prayer meetings there and at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational Church, getting to know the celebrated pulpit orator, whom she soon came to count as a friend.
FANNY’S LIFE WAS MUCH AFFECTED BY THE REVIVALS.
In the midst of the revival, the Civil War broke out. Every man in the Bridgeport area where Fanny’s relatives lived was drafted or enlisted. Byron Athington, her brother-in-law, at twenty-four gave up a promising business to answer his country’s call. Fanny’s “brother,” as she called her mother’s stepson, William Morris, also enlisted.
Fanny was very proud of her relatives. Formerly a Democrat, then a Whig, she now was an ardent Republican and would remain so the rest of her life. Quite a jingoist, she always had carried a miniature silk flag, but now she took to pinning it to her blouse.
Her fanatical ardor for the Union almost led her to fighting. Fanny was eating at a Manhattan restaurant one evening when a southern lady was irritated to the point of hysteria by Fanny’s flaunting of the Union emblem. “Take that dirty thing away!” the woman snapped when she saw the flag.
Fanny, to the astonishment of her companions, flew into a towering rage, sprang from her chair, and rushed in the direction of the voice. “Repeat that remark at your risk!” she threatened.
The restaurant manager, attracted by the shrill cries, came onto the scene just in time to prevent blows.
Back in Bridgeport, Fanny’s sister Carrie wed a man named Lee Barnum, and Mercy went to live with the newlyweds in an apartment on Grand Street. The war was not kind to the Morris clan. William contracted tuberculosis. It did not kill him for nearly two decades, but upon his return, he passed it on to his son Walter. Athington was severely wounded in Virginia in 1863 and would never fully recover.
These events intensified Fanny’s patriotism. During the war, she wrote patriotic songs that were set to music by Dan Emmett and other musicians. They are of blood-curdling bellicosity. In “Union Song,” she wrote:
Death to those whose impious hands
Burst our Union’s sacred bands,
Vengeance thunders, right demands—
Justice for the brave.
In “Song to Jeff Davis,” she urged menacingly:
Come, thou vaunting boaster,
Jeff Davis and thy clan,
Our northern troops are waiting,
Now, show thyself a man.
Advance with all thy forces,
We dare thy traitor band,
We’ll blow thy ranks to atoms!
We’ll fight them hand to hand!
Now, Jeff, when thou art needy,
Lead on thy rebel crew,
We’ll give them all a welcome—
With balls and powder too!
We spurn thy constitution!
We spurn thy southern laws!
Our stars and stripes are waving,
And Heav’n will speed our cause.
The song ends with a threat to decapitate the southern leader.
These lines are truly remarkable, coming from the pen of a woman whose work is distinguished by sentiment and sensitivity—even saccharine sweetness. Most of the popular songs of that period were distinguished for their emotional intensity and sentimental nature, relating the war to a personal situation. Fanny’s Civil War songs were savage rallying cries, devoid of warmth or human interest.
When the war was not on her mind, however, she retained her touch. And in the midst of the war she was given the opportunity to use her gift of writing verse in a way that would bring far more recognition than her secular poetry, her musicianship, or her work as a teacher had ever accomplished.
She always had been eclectic in her church going, and at forty-three she was not a member of any church. Partial for years to Methodism, she frequently attended the John Street church. In addition, she often went to the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn to hear her friend Beecher, who was her favorite preacher; the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, whose pastor was Dr. John Hall; the Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church of her cousin Howard Crosby; and Trinity Episcopal Church.
She also attended the Dutch Reformed Church on Twentythird Street. The pastor, Rev. Peter Stryker, was delighted to make the acquaintance of “the Blind Poetess” and thrilled when she responded to his request to write a New Year’s Eve hymn. Knowing of her depression at the loss of her child, Stryker told her his friend William Bradbury needed someone to provide lyrics for his melodies. He recommended that she see Bradbury at once, and Fanny agreed to go.
The Second Great Awakening brought about great changes in American hymnody. The need was felt for a type of hymn that would match the new approach in presenting Christian doctrine. Lowell Mason, considered the father of American church music, long before had set forth his “canons,” and these instructions on the aim and nature of hymnody, published in his widely circulated Church Psalmody in 1831, were still definitive for American hymn writing. “The sentiments and imagery,” he wrote, “should be grave, dignified.” Also, “Whatever is unscriptural, groveling…light, [or] fanciful…should be avoided,” because it tended to “check the flow of the soul.” Moreover, “familiar and fondling epithets or forms of expression, applied to either person of the Godhead, should be avoided, as bringing with them associations highly unfavorable to pure devotional feeling.”
THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING BROUGHT ABOUT GREAT CHANGES IN AMERICAN HYMNODY.
Mason called for heavy emphasis on sin and hell. He disparaged any hymn that tended to make the worshippers “feel good,” for all emphasis should be on the sinner’s need for repentance.
These stern hymns now were falling out of favor. The “revived” of the 1850s and ’60s wanted hymns that were personal, light, and informal. A few of those written in the past fit this description and were well used, such as “My Faith Looks Up to Thee” by Ray Palmer; “Nearer, My God, to Thee” by Sarah Flower Adams; “Just as I Am, Without One Plea” by Charlotte Elliott; “Abide with Me” by Rev. Francis Lyte; Charles Wesley’s “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”; and A.M. Toplady’s “Rock of Ages.”
Some musicians were answering the call. George Root had turned to Sunday school music. Another composer of Sunday school hymns was the Baptist minister Robert Lowry, who in 1864 wrote the all-time hit “Shall We Gather at the River?” The most important and prolific hymn writer of the period was Bradbury, who had collaborated with Root and Fanny in the cantata “Daniel.” Born in Maine in 1816, Bradbury had studied music under Lowell Mason. Early in his career, he helped introduce the organ to American churchgoers.
While a young man, Bradbury was appointed organist at New York’s Baptist Tabernacle and started singing classes there. For many years at the tabernacle he held an annual Juvenile Musical Festival—one of the biggest musical events in the city. At thirty, Bradbury had gone to England and Germany to study composition. Returning to New York, he began to manufacture Brad-bury pianos and compose songs and other musical works. Like Root’s, his melodies applied much of the European masters’ style to American music and often were adaptations of melodies by Beethoven, Handel, and other major composers. Bradbury’s songs were distinguished by their “easy, natural flow,” his harmonies by their simplicity.
Some complained Bradbury was neither performer nor composer. Others claimed he was ruining American music with his melodies imitating European composers. But he endeared himself to many of the faithful with his musical settings of “Just as I Am,” “He Leadeth Me,” “Saviour, Like a Shepherd, Lead Us” and “On Christ, the Solid Rock, I Stand.” The tunes may have been sneered at by highbrow critics, but they were loved by the masses.
Not only did Bradbury want to provide light, melodic settings for existing hymns, he also wanted to set newly written poems to music. He was dissatisfied with the quality of verse submitted to him. So he was overjoyed when Stryker informed him, in January 1864, that he shortly would be meeting a lady who probably would be the answer to his problems.
Fanny, too, was enthusiastic. She felt God had given her a new reason for existing; she was convinced He wanted to use her talents in writing hymns.
FANNY FELT GOD WANTED TO USE HER TALENTS IN WRITING HYMNS.
Fanny met Bradbury February 2 at the Ponton Hotel on Broome Street. He was a very thin man with a pinched face, framed by a lionlike mane of thick, bushy dark hair and a gigantic beard. Fanny could not see his face, but she could perceive his character. Not only was she subject to visions and trances; she also had that strange faculty of reading a person’s character from the emanating “overtones.” She liked Bradbury even as he liked her, and he immediately put their relationship on a first-name basis.
“Fanny,” he said, “I thank God that we have at last met, for I think you can write hymns, and I have wished for a long time to have a talk with you.”
Bradbury introduced Fanny to his assistant, her old friend from Ridgefield, Sylvester Main. Sylvester had come to New York many years before to open a music school. He was now a pillar of the Norfolk Street Methodist Church and a well-known soloist in New York churches.
Fanny agreed to return within a week with a hymn by which Bradbury could sample her abilities. “It now seemed to me that the great work of my life had really begun.” Three days later, she was back with a three-stanza poem that began:
We are going, we are going
To a home beyond the skies,
Where the fields are robed in beauty
And the sunlight never dies.
Where the fount of joy is flowing
In the valley green and fair,
We shall dwell in love together,
There shall be no parting there.
The hymn was everything Bradbury had been looking for. Light and informal in verse, it was reasonably good poetry and contained great warmth and emotional power. He decided to use “We Are Going” in the hymnal he was preparing.
The next week, Bradbury sent for Fanny in haste, saying he needed a war song (he also published secular music). He suggested, as the first line, “There’s a sound among the mulberry trees.” Fanny changed it to “There’s a sound among the forest trees.” Bradbury then played the melody for which she was to write the words. It was difficult, but after hearing it two or three times, she was able to count the measure and find suitable words.
Bradbury was incredulous. He had given her a cruelly difficult melody to test her, never imagining she could put words to the music. But she had passed the test with flying colors!
“Fanny,” he said, “I’m surprised! And while I have a publishing house, you will always have work.”
“FANNY, WHILE I HAVE A PUBLISHING HOUSE, YOU WILL ALWAYS HAVE WORK.”
And so Fanny went to work for the firm of William B. Bradbury and Company.