A Nation Rising Read Online Free PDF

disparate colonies in 1776 and then forming “a more perfect Union” in the summer of 1787, the men called Founding Fathers or Framers were human beings.
    And they were politicians, with all the baggage that the word implies. They were ruled by many of the same forces that rule modern American politics—greed; self-interest; regional and commercial interests. They were quite practiced at the “politics of personal destruction.” And of course, they were capable of grave personal misconduct. They had affairs. They kept slaves. They dissembled and brokered deals. Perhaps these very human failings and contradictions make their achievements all the more remarkable. Some of their names and faces grace America’s currency. Others have fallen into ignominy. And some were turned into villains by historians intent upon fashioning a comfortable American mythology. Deserving or not, Burr made a perfect candidate for villainy. And that is how he has been depicted for much of the past 200 years.
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    B ORN ON F EBRUARY 6, 1756, in Newark, in what was then colonial New Jersey, the man whose behavior would later scandalize New York in the early days of the new nation was welcomed into the world of two of the most influential, important, and conservative ministers in America. In fact, Aaron Burr was supposed to follow in their paths. His father, also named Aaron Burr, was a respected Presbyterian preacher who helped found, and then became the second president of, the College of New Jersey (later renamed Prince ton University). His mother, Esther Edwards Burr, was the daughter of the famous and highly influential American preacher Jonathan Edwards, the noted Calvinist theologian who was among the leaders of the religious movement known as the Great Awakening.
    The first of several waves of fundamental, orthodox Protestantism that periodically swept over America, the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s spread like wildfire from New England into the other colonies. It was largely a response to what colonial American clergymen viewed as a slackening of religious values in the increasingly prosperous young America. As the colonial economies improved, many Calvinist ministers watched with dismay as their congregations, once fully devoted to the Sabbath practices of their Pilgrim and Puritan forebears, turned to such earthly pursuits as real estate speculation, slave trading, the rum business, and otherequally profitable enterprises. This initial Great Awakening also came as Enlightenment ideas about reason and science were shaking the ancient traditions of religious philosophy. A decade later, those Enlightenment ideas would burst through in the form of deism and a new belief in the rights of man, which contributed powerfully to the Revolutionary mood in an America on the road to independence.
    One of the intense sparks behind this dynamic revival of old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone Calvinism was the arrival in America, in 1739, of an Anglican preacher, George Whitefield, whose reputation as an orator brought thousands to his outdoor meetings, large-scale revivals that might be likened to the modern “crusades” of Billy Graham. In Philadelphia, then America’s largest city, Whitefield’s “born again” evangelism drew 6,000 listeners, nearly half the city’s population of about 13,000. In his powerful, emotionally charged sermons, Whitefield chastised his listeners and then offered them the promise of salvation. Surprisingly, Whitefield even won the admiration of Benjamin Franklin, who eventually published forty-five of the sermons in his newspapers, eight of them on the front page of the weekly Gazette .
    For Franklin, himself a deist and Freemason whose appetite for orthodox religion was meager, Whitefield’s appeal lay in his powerful admonitions to do good works. America’s great apostle of philanthropy, Franklin was singularly impressed by the fact that Whitefield raised more