Sunday Schools.

The religious revivals sweeping the nation from 1800 through 1860, which historians have labeled the Second Great Awakening, had a direct and lasting impact on education in the West. In the great revival at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801, as many as twelve to twenty-five thousand settlers flocked to hear itinerant ministers. Converted in the revival, sixteenyear- old Peter Cartwright began his long career preaching on the Methodist circuit, culminating in the vigorous camp meetings he led in the new state of Illinois in the 1820s. Yet lay leaders of the Protestant Crusade in the East were fearful that rapid westward movement created a vacuum in civic order and moral restraint. One of the new national voluntary associations of the 1820s, the American Sunday School Union, gathered enough strength by 1830 to plan an operation in the Mississippi River valley, determined to plant a Sabbath school...