Oliver Hart longed to see one more revival in his final years, but he died in 1795, just before the Second Great Awakening. The Baptist movement in America had been dramatically transformed during his lifetime, both in numbers and in cultural respectability. Twenty years after Hart’s death, “all the Baptists on the continent” would unite to support the foreign missionaries Ann and Adoniram Judson, thus birthing the first nationwide Baptist denomination and fulfilling a long-held desire of Hart’s. Fittingly, it was Hart’s successor at Charleston, Richard Furman, who would serve as the new denomination’s first president. Furman would also build on Hart’s lifework by overseeing the expansion of Baptist institutional life in the South during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Ultimately Hart’s dream of a united Baptist America was shattered over the issue of slavery, with the South’s Baptists clinging to his earlier position on slavery, and Northern Baptists following his later position. This chapter closes with a reflection on Hart’s enduring legacy as an early American Baptist and evangelical leader.
