"Persecution from the establishment - which ran from fines in New England and physical assault in the South, especially Virginia - was a steady fact of Baptist life into the 1770s. But for the opening geography of the colonies as well as for a society with opening ideology, the self-starting, lay-oriented, Bible-centered and thoroughly active work of the evangelical Baptists made them the mainland's most dynamic religious movement between the revivals of the 1740s and the Revolution of the 1770s. They were the primary beneficiaries of the Great Awakening. In the colonies of North America there were less than one hundred Baptist churches in 1740, but almost five hundred by the outbreak of the war with Britain in 1776."
--Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism