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126 PERIOD 2 Colonial America amid Global Change: 1607–1754

and Indians by emphasizing communal singing and emotional expressions of the spirit,
which echoed traditional African and Indian practices.
These sample pages are distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
In the North, too, Old Light ministers and local officials began to question New Light
techniques and influences. One of the most radical New Light preachers, James Daven-
port, attracted huge crowds when he preached in Boston in the early 1740s. Drawing
thousands of colonists to Boston Common day after day, Davenport declared that the
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people “should drink rat poison rather than listen to corrupt, unconverted clergy.” Bos-
ton officials finally called a grand jury into session to silence him “on the charge of hav-
ing said that Boston’s ministers were leading the people blindfold to hell.”
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Even some New Light ministers considered Davenport extreme. Yet revivals contin-
ued throughout the 1740s, although they lessened in intensity over time as churches
and parishioners settled back into a more ordered religious life. Moreover, the central
ideas of revivalist preaching — criticism of educated clergy, ministers traveling from
place to place, and the emphasis on giving unscripted preaching — worked against
the movement’s chances of becoming a more permanent institution. The First Great
Awakening continued to echo across the colonies for at least another generation, but its
influence was felt more often in attitudes and practices rather than in institutions.
In various ways, revivalists also highlighted the democratic tendencies in the Bible,
particularly in the New Testament. Even as they proclaimed God’s wrath against sin-
ners, they also preached that a lack of wealth and power did not diminish a person in
God’s eyes. And the style of passionate and popular preaching they brought to the colo-
nies would shape American politics as well as religion for centuries to come. New Light
clergy allowed colonists to view their resistance to traditional authorities as part of their
effort to create a better and more just world. For example, colonists soon mobilized to
resist what they saw as tyrannical actions by the wealthy colonial officials and others in
authority. Thus, the effects of eighteenth-century religious awakenings rippled out from
churches and revivals to influence social and political relations.
At the same time, the environment of the colonies contributed to changes in
their attitudes toward colonial authorities. The settlements of the seventeenth cen-
tury could be regulated with a small number of officials. With eighteenth-century
geographical expansion, population growth, and commercial development, colonial
authorities — whether appointed by the crown or selected by local residents — found
themselves confronted with a more complex, and more contentious, situation.
In New England, most colonies developed participatory town meetings, which
elected members to their colonial legislatures. In the South, wealthy planters exercised
greater authority locally and colony-wide, but they still embraced ideals of self-gover-
nance and political liberty.
Throughout the British American colonies, officials were usually educated men
who held property and had family ties to other colonial elites. Although ultimate polit-
ical authority — or sovereignty — rested with the king and Parliament, many decisions
were made by local officials because English officials were often too distant to have a
hand in daily colonial life.
Another factor that weakened the power of royal officials was the tradition of town
meetings and representative bodies, like the Virginia House of Burgesses, that gave col-
onists a stake in their own governance. Officials in England and the colonies assumed
that most people would defer to those in authority, and they minimized resistance by
holding public elections in which freemen cast ballots by voice vote. Not surprisingly,
those with wealth and power continued to win office.
Still, evidence from throughout the colonial period indicates that deference to
authority was not always enough to maintain order. Roger Williams and Anne Hutchin-
son, Bacon’s Rebellion, the Stono Rebellion, the Salem witchcraft trials, and both New
York class rebellions, one led by Jacob Leisler in 1689 and the other a series of tenant
revolts in the 1740s, all demonstrate the frequency and range of colonial conflict and

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