Engines of Abolition: The Second Great Awakening, Higher Education, and Slavery in the American Northwest.

Abstract

The essay “Engines of Abolition: The Second Great Awakening, Higher Education, and Slavery in the American Northwest” analyzes the link between religious revivalism, higher education, and abolitionist tendencies in the states of the former Northwest Territory. It will argue that fired with the moral mandates of the Second Great Awakening, institutions of higher learning founded by evangelical abolitionists often became centers of anti-slavery sentiment. In the years prior to the American Civil War, universities, colleges, and seminaries founded during the Second Great Awakening developed a number of characteristics that profoundly influenced the course of the abolitionist movement. This essay relies on newspaper articles, university-sponsored histories, writings by Southern intellectuals, sermons from revivalist ministers, lectures from university professors, and autobiographies from prominent participants in the Second Great Awakening.