If you had to present at a school assembly and tell the gathered high school students what the spiritual significance was of this time period (post–Revolutionary War to the Civil War), what would you say? What would your title be, and what would the main point that you were trying to prove be? What would you want them to know about revivals in America, about religion and the frontier, about religion and the Civil War?

Title: America, the Great Awakening
It would be remiss to talk about American spirituality between post-Revolution and the Civil War without mentioning the First and Second Great Awakenings. Albeit, the First Great Awakening did take place between the 1730’s and 1740’s in Britain and the future-United States; however, this great movement kindled a spiritual fervor in British subjects across both sides of the pond. This helped shape the rest of eighteenth-century Colonial American society, as well as the psyche, leading into the Revolutionary War period, a period in which both British and Colonial troops fought each other.
To see the aftereffects of the Second Great Awakening, one would have to look no further than typical Protestant gatherings that take place in the present day, e.g. Sunday services, Sunday school in various churches, denominational meetings, and, a favorite go-to for many of the devout, tent revivals. While many of these can be considered mere shadows of what took place in yesteryear, tent revivals in particular give modern-day observers a glimpse into the Protestant revival that swept the fledgling nation during the post-Revolutionary period. During this time, many denominations began to take shape.
The Episcopal Church is a prime example of Antebellum change; this church’s change was not so much influenced by the Second Great Awakening as it was with wanting to seem more American—hence why the denomination has its current name and is more democratic than its English counterpart. But when speaking of change in early Protestant America, the Episcopal Church serves as a less than ideal example, because the Second Great Awakening was just that, an awakening. The denominations that began to change, take shape, and in some cases form and break away from existing ecclesiastical structures are probably the best examples of what shaped the Antebellum era. Before where there was probably considered a specific Baptist church, a specific Methodist, a specific Presbyterian, the Second Great Awakening gave rise to many differences in Baptists and Methodists. Those two denominations saw the greatest boom in the number of adherents and the differences in religious expression within each one of those traditions, and to some extent even the Presbyterians.
The Cumberland Presbyterian Church undoubtedly was the branch of Presbyterianism to benefit the most from the Second Great Awakening and many reasons why it did are closely related to the successes achieved by Baptists and Methodists during this period, a spreading out to the frontier. Religious fervor and itinerant preachers moved throughout the nascent United States and the ever-expanding frontier. Because of this, the frontier became a place where the various ideals of the Second Great Awakening flourished. Protestantism was spread far and wide, but all too often it was a bit too far and a bit too wide. Hence, there came the necessity of ordaining more preachers, preachers who were not always educated or who would have met denominational ordination standards prior to 1790. However, these individuals travelled great distances, and were not always meeting in churches. Oft times, these gatherings took place in camp meetings, where some people would travel hours to hear one of these itinerant preachers. The denominations to arise out of this no longer resemble the Baptist or Methodist image that was before, and other movements were birthed out of this, e.g. Adventism and Holiness.
What spread throughout the frontier was not always what represented Protestantism in states on the Eastern Seaboard. That comes full circle back to the main four: Episcopal Church, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist. All three of which have remained as much of a permanent fixture in modern American Protestantism as it did before the Second Great Awakening, despite the changes the Baptist and Methodist traditions underwent. The Episcopal Church stands out amongst all the traditions as being the one with the most episcopacy, but also being a church which strongly resembles its English counterpart, a church which did little about slavery and injustice prior to the twentieth-century, and the least American looking church which gave America more than its fair share of presidents. Methodism, being majorly influenced by the Second Great Awakening, is distinctly American, but its polity is episcopal whereas modern British Methodism’s polity is more democratic. And the Baptist tradition changed drastically, but the changes were not more surprising than those it went through from the Reformation to the Revolution. Yet, going into the Civil War, education and social class were probably the greatest identifying factors as to which Protestant denomination an individual belonged. Episcopalians were the highest standing, followed by Methodists, then Baptists. Of all the Protestant traditions to come out of the antebellum period, those adherents ranked along the lines of the Methodist and Baptists in social standing. The poor, the least of those in American society, the slave, and the freedman were more likely to be associated with a Baptist, Methodist, or another faith tradition to come out of them.
Again, as the children of the First Great Awakening ended up fighting each other during the Revolutionary War, the children of the Second Great Awakening ended up doing exactly the same.

I would title this piece something like "Competing Protestant Churches in the Antebellum Republic."Religion was a powerful determinant of the distinct regional cultures that dominated American life between independence and the Civil War. On the right wing, we find the Anglican Episcopacy favoring a national church, a social and priestly hierarchy, compulsory church taxes, and formal liturgical worship centered on ritual. It dominated Virginia and later found favor with much of the Anglo-American social aristocracy, regardless of regional origin.
Next on the continuum were Presbyterians, who likewise favored a national church, but instead of bishops and priests, the Presbyterian Church was ruled by synods of ministers and elders. Its services centered on preaching and conversion and made much use of outdoor evangelical revival meetings. Presbyterians were strong in the rural south and brought their beliefs with them in their westward expansion.
Near the center of the Christian religious spectrum at this time period in America were the Congregationalists, who considered themselves the "middle way" between high church Arminianism (inclined to rationalism and free will) and low church Antinomianism (domination of the spirit). This group founded Massachusetts and Connecticut and spread westward with the exodus from New England.
Moving farther left, we have the Separatists, who believed in the independence of each congregation and rejected the idea of a national church and elaborate priestly hierarchies. These were the beliefs of the Mayflower pilgrims of Plymouth Colony. The Anabaptists were also Calvinists, like the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Separatists, but they believed baptism should be restricted to those that consciously accepted Christ, which necessarily excluded infants and young children. They emphasized the workings of the spirit and tended to reject state interference in religion. They founded the Rhode Island colony.
At the far left end of the spectrum were the Quakers, who rejected all established churches, ordained clergy, and formal liturgy and focused on the Inner Light of the Holy Spirit, which they believed dwelled in all people. Their meetings were dominated by the movement of the spirit (Antinomianism). Quakers settled heavily in West Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The religious revivals that periodically swept America from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century kept the flames of Protestant Christian faith burning until the great westward expansion carried these various Christian denominations across the plains to California. Religion on the frontier tended necessarily to be less formal, but each Atlantic cultural region faithfully transmitted its own religious culture westward, sometimes resulting in confrontations and clashes. The greatest clash came over whether the southern political economy, of slavery and free trade, or the northern political economy, of high external tariffs, high wages, and industrialization, would expand westward and define America's future. Both northerners and southerners appealed to their Protestant Christian beliefs and their Bibles to justify their conflicting views on slavery, believing that God was firmly on their side.