The 1857 Hamilton, Ontario Revival

An Exploration of the Origins of the Layman's Revival and the Second Great Awakening

King

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498209458
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Hundreds of people were converted, leading to significant church growth, in an 1857 revival led by Phoebe Palmer in the city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada that contributed to the beginning of the Second Great Awakening. This book explores the 1857 setting in the world and in Hamilton, including the key churches and people involved in the revival. What happened was not typical for revival meetings led by the Palmers, as this account shows. The book continues with a summary of the impact of the Hamilton revival around the globe, linking it to other revivals and the Second Great Awakening as a whole. The account ends with what subsequently unfolded in the Hamilton area and the churches involved. Many of the primary sources are in the Appendix, and the book includes numerous pictures and maps. Scholars, ministers, and lay people alike will appreciate this exploration of a chapter in Canada's spiritual history.

1

1857 Hamilton Revival Historical Sources

I first learned about this revival through a Hamilton pastor, Bruce Woods. He had written a small informal paper on it and circulated it among the area pastors. It was an exciting paper that had a few gaps in it, but the local Christians loved this little piece of history.

Fast forward to 2006, and I was writing for a Christian magazine called the Beacon. The editor had assigned me and another writer to cover the 1857 Revival but from different perspectives. I was specifically assigned to investigate the origins of the original churches involved. This research led me to Paul Fayter who, at the time, was the minister at First-Pilgrim United Church. This church’s heritage comes from one of the original churches in the revival. Fortunately, Paul was also a historian interested especially in Canadian history during that time period. He began to help me piece together a clearer and deeper understanding of this story. As I said in the introduction, my research and magazine article originally concluded that the 1857 Hamilton Revival was a part of the Third Great Awakening, but my later research uncovered stronger evidence that the Hamilton Revival was more likely to have been part of the Second Great Awakening.

After the initial magazine article was published and during subsequent speaking engagements about my findings, I found avid interest and more questions (from myself and others) regarding this aspect of local church history. I had discovered during my initial research that few historians even mentioned the fact that Hamilton had a revival in 1857, and when they did speak of it, they only provided brief overviews, with conflicting opinions as to the facts of the event. So, in light of the local interest shown and a desire for a more comprehensive historical account about the event, I decided to dig deeper and turn my years of research into this book. The goal of this volume is to establish, to the best of my ability, what major events occurring in 1857 affected Hamilton, what churches were involved, the key players, the unique features of the revival, how it unfolded, how it was a significant part of the Second Great Awakening, and, finally, what happened after the revival. Hopefully, I will be able to equip readers with enough historical evidence to provide a good foundation for understanding this amazing move of God.

In order to keep the power of the storyline of the Hamilton revival flowing in the account in the next chapters, I have chosen to discuss some of the differences in historical documentation and interpretations of other authors in this section and in the background sections for the reader to reference.

There is limited primary source documentation crediting Hamilton as the start of this revival or even as being a part of the Great Awakening. However, Phoebe Palmer, an instrumental key leader, wrote about her experiences and reflections during the revival in her journals and other various publications, and her eyewitness account gives legitimacy to the story. The main sources for the account are Phoebe’s writings, articles in the American Methodist paper the Christian Advocate and Journal for 1857 and 1858, and the Canadian Methodist newspaper The Christian Guardian. The two main books containing many of Phoebe’s letters about the revival are Phoebe Palmer’s Promise of the Father and Richard Wheatley’s The Life and Letters of Phoebe Palmer. The latter book was published initially by a family member, and later by others, including Richard Wheatley, who preached with Walter and Phoebe Palmer and with Catherine and William Booth (who co-founded the Salvation Army). Wheatley published Phoebe Palmer’s work and letters in 1867 under the title Annus Mirabilis, which means “year of wonders.”

Notes on Phoebe and Walter Palmer, and some of Phoebe’s letters, are also referenced from Thomas C. Oden’s book Phoebe Palmer: Selected Writings, Harold E. Raser’s book Phoebe Palmer: Her Life and Thought, and Charles White’s The Beauty of Holiness: Phoebe Palmer as Theologian. These books are good resources, but I found that some of their information did not match the primary source documents. In all fairness though, the Hamilton Revival was not their main thrust, and the other information was useful and credible in understanding Phoebe’s life with insights into her friendships, colleagues, and affiliations.

J. Edwin Orr’s extensive writings about this period were an invaluable resource. Mr. Orr (1912–84) was born in Ireland and worked as a Chaplain in the US Air Force. His mother, as well, grew up in Ireland, near where the first Irish revivals took place. She was touched by the stories of this revival (or Awakening) and led Edwin to Christ. Inspired by this, Orr did research on this Awakening, which included the Hamilton Revival, and wrote a popular book titled The Second Evangelical Awakening, and an academic book, The Event of the Century: The 1857–1859 Awakening. Although some of his information is not accurate (some errors may be due to the latter book being a posthumous publication), it was a solid guide and overview.

Peter George Bush wrote a Master’s thesis on the Hamilton Revival at Queen’s University in 1985. I mainly concentrated on chapters 1 and 2, and read parts of chapters 3, 5, and 6. Bush’s thesis was mainly to demonstrate that, despite some people’s opinion, revivals still occurred in the 1850s. Bush outlined the travels of James Caughey and the Palmers. He provided some solid research into the Hamilton Revival, but missed some of Phoebe Palmer’s important letters, and had a few minor errors in his research, most likely due to how he read and handled the material (similarly to Orr). An example is the following quotation: “Dr. Palmer went to see if he and his wife could make connections for New York City that night and discovered that they could not. He checked their baggage through to Albany on the morning train; then he and his wife took their overnight bags and headed for the house of a friend near the Hamilton train station.”1 My research shows that the Palmers arrived by train in Hamilton, and were for some reason unable to check their baggage to board the boat to Albany New York, thus creating a delay. A minor adjustment is needed to see the real picture as to what happened that night. A reading of Phoebe Palmer’s writings will demonstrate this. I believe that in some matters, such as in this account, the author was reading between the lines, using his own interpretation as to what may have occurred. Since this event was not the key focus of Bush’s writing, some speculative interpretation is understandable, whereas my book specifically delves deeper into the details of the revival, and therefore requires a deeper level of accuracy on the finer points. However, a majority of Bush’s and my research overlapped and aligned. This was especially confirming since Bush’s thesis was a late discovery, after a major part of my work had been completed.

Timothy Smith’s book Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America has a section that reports the occurrence of the Hamilton Revival in 1857 and gives a broad overview, but it is not totally accurate regarding the number of new coverts. I believe he read some of Phoebe’s letters, but did not realize that the numbers increased as more reports came in. In her October 14th letter to her sister Sarah Lankford, Phoebe mentioned that ten days into the revival there were 400 saved, but at the end she stated that she had just been informed that the true number was 500.2 I also believed he missed Samuel Rice’s letters that document 600 converts in Hamilton as more came to Christ after the Palmers left. Smith does, however, recognize the Hamilton Revival as a significant contribution to the beginning of the larger 1857–58 Great Awakening. He explains how the Hamilton Revival fits into the movement, its uniqueness because it was not just that individuals were converted but that the churches began to become spiritually alive again, as well as this revival’s significance for the beginning of the Great Awakening.

Nor were protracted meetings in rural and small-town churches unimportant. William C. Conant’s compilation reveals that 88 towns in Maine, 40 in New Hampshire, 39 in Vermont and 147 in Massachusetts experienced unusual awakenings. Some of these, to be sure, may have been quite ordinary meetings which persons caught up in the universal excitement glowingly reported. But other evidence abounds. Methodists Walter and Phoebe Palmer wrote of conversions by the hundreds and crowds of 5,000–6,000 at obs...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: 1857 Hamilton Revival Historical Sources
• Chapter 2: Setting the Stage: 1857
• Chapter 3: Methodist Revivals and the Uniqueness of the Hamilton Revival
• Chapter 4: Hamilton Churches and Pastors in 1857
• Chapter 5: The Palmers
• Chapter 6: The Humble Origins of a Great Awakening
• Chapter 7: The Momentum around the World
• Chapter 8: What Happened Next in Hamilton?
• Chapter 9: Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography