The revival begins: Summer 1800
The Sacrament at Red River
Reconstructed Red River Meeting House, 2014
In June 1800, McGready was joined at Red River by several area Presbyterian ministers, including William Hodge, John Rankin (whom McGready had recently appointed as minister of the Gasper River congregation), and the brothers William and John McGee. The latter was a Methodist minister who, some years later, wrote his account for the Methodist Missionary Magazine.
His narrative vividly described the revival’s beginnings: "All was silent until Monday, the last day of the feast. … While Mr. Hodge was preaching, a woman in the East end got an uncommon blessing, broke through order, and shouted for some time and then sat down in silence."[34] McGee continued, relating that most of the ministers were already gathered outside the meeting house while the people remained seated inside, unwilling to leave, when his brother, William, "felt such a power come on him that he quit his seat and sat down in the floor of the pulpit."[35] John McGee began to tremble as weeping erupted through the congregation. The woman in the east end began to shout again and McGee started toward her just as someone reminded him that his Presbyterian hosts were "much for order” and would not "hear this confusion; go back and be quiet."[36] McGee turned to go back and was "near falling” when he changed his mind and "went through the house shouting and exhorting with all possible ecstasy and energy."[37] Using the term "slain", that came to be associated with the revival phenomenon of collapsing in a state of physical helplessness, McGee continued: "The floor was soon covered with the slain; their screams for mercy pierced the heavens.”[38]
First camp meetings in Kentucky
The religious excitement at Red River inspired what would later become a regular feature of Kentucky revivalism””camping at the site. In July 1800, the first camp meeting of the Second Great Awakening took place near the Gasper River.[39][40] Previous to 1800, long-distance travelers attending the multi-day sacrament observance would make arrangements to stay with neighboring families, but as the news of the revivals spread, the combination of the people’s desire to linger, and the practicalities associated with the needs of large numbers of people from great distances, inspired families to come prepared to camp at the site. McGready realized the potential for the innovation when protracted meetings continued into the night, and one family at Red River came ready to camp for the duration.
He began to publicize the idea of camping on the grounds for the next sacrament observance, to be held the following month at Gasper River.[41] People responded and came on several wagons loaded with provisions and ready to camp for the July observance. By the time the meetings took place at the congregations of Muddy River and at several other congregations in Tennessee and Kentucky in the late summer and fall of 1800, camping had become common. The numbers attending, and those converted, had continued to grow, as did the number of ministers who preached and directed the sacrament observances. John McGee reported that most were Presbyterians and Methodists. Baptists were "generally opposed to the work,” but a few of their pastors also joined the revivals.[42]
The revival expands: McGready’s account
Writing in 1801, McGready characterized the revivals of the previous summer and fall as "the most glorious time that our guilty eyes have ever beheld."[43] Less narrative and descriptive than McGee’s, McGready’s accounts focused on the chronological unfolding of events. McGready’s Calvinist beliefs prevented him from pronouncing with certainty that a person had been converted; he believed that only God knew for sure, but he made attempts, judging by the evidence at hand, to count the conversions that began in the summer sacraments of 1800. The numbers showed an accumulating and broadening effect: In June at Red River, ten were converted; in July at Gasper River, 45, as well as some Tennessee youths who returned home and encouraged the experience of "real religion” among twenty of their friends and neighbors.[44] The Gasper River event hosted people from as distant as one hundred miles away. Thirteen wagons were employed to transport people and supplies, and the excitement was so great that some stayed at the meeting house through the night.[45] In early August, on a Sunday church service at Red River, several black people and children were affected. Later that month, twenty-two wagons arrived at the Muddy River sacrament, and more than fifty persons converted throughout the multi-day observance.[46]
The revival meetings continued throughout the fall with similar and escalating response among the people. Minister and Logan County predecessor, Dr. Thomas Craighead, when the meetings were held at The Ridge, a Tennessee congregation where over fifty were converted, including two of Craighead’s children.[47] Attendance at the various meetings continued to grow, with five thousand reported at Hodge’s Shiloh congregation in Tennessee in September. The pace became demanding as McGready criss-crossed Kentucky and Tennessee, rushing from one sacrament to the other before the onset of winter. McGready exulted in the revival at one community, a hundred miles from Logan County at the Red Banks of the Ohio River (Henderson, Kentucky) where "professed Deists” became "warm and lively Christians."[48] Poor accommodations and wet weather did not slow the pace in October, at Clay Lick, described by McGready as a small congregation with only a small cabin for a meeting house. There "eighty souls brought to Jesus."[49] John Rankin carried the revival into eastern Tennessee and North Carolina in the fall of 1800, as the radius increasingly expanded outward from Logan County.[50] McGready recorded several incidents of people inspiring their friends and neighbors after they had returned home, planting "true religion” in "careless and profane settlements where no professors lived."[51] Although his account was not published until 1803, there is evidence from others, including Francis Asbury, that McGready’s written testimony circulated much earlier.
1801: other accounts
Francis Asbury
By January 1801, Asbury was reading the accounts of the Logan County and Cumberland area revivals to Methodist congregations on his circuit, and writing about them to Stith Meade, a fellow Methodist itinerant presiding over the Georgia[52] district. As he rode through North and South Carolina, Asbury relayed McGready’s account of the revivals, kindling the hope among his fellow Methodists that similar outpourings might occur among them. Asbury had encountered the Cumberland area revivals in October 1800. Battling discouragement because of the lethargy of religious interest he had seen, he was traveling westward through Kentucky from the Bluegrass area. He turned south before reaching Logan County and headed toward Nashville; his journal reflected his mood on Thursday, Oct. 16, 1800: "In travelling nearly six hundred measured miles, we have had only six appointments; and at these but small congregations: we have wearied ourselves in vain!."[53]
By Sunday, after he had reached Tennessee, his mood had changed. He spent the day among many of the revival ministers””Hodge, Rankin, the McGee brothers and Thomas Craighead””as well as a thousand worshippers, many camping on the grounds of the meeting house. By Tuesday, his journal reflected the scene in pastoral language, noting that a stand had been erected, "embosomed in a wood of lofty beech trees. The ministers of God, Methodists and Presbyterians, united their labors and mingled with the childlike simplicity of primitive times.”[54] Asbury echoed McGready’s account of the meetings and activities extending into the night as he wrote of "fires blazing here and there [that] dispelled the darkness” as "the shouts of the redeemed captives, and the cries of the precious souls struggling into life broke the silence of midnight."[55]
As they moved about the country, Asbury and his fellow Methodists employed many of the innovations which he had seen in the Cumberland area revivals. In March 1802, a camp meeting was organized in Mecklenburg, North Carolina, with about five thousand in attendance. The now familiar scenes of the Kentucky and Tennessee revivals were repeated here" "on Saturday and Sunday several hundred in the congregation fell to the ground and felt they had received pardon."[56] By May 1802, a revival officiated by three Methodists, four Baptists, and eleven Presbyterians was held in the Waxhaw region of South Carolina, where thousands attended.[57] The revivals continued through the Carolinas and by January 1803, Asbury had recorded 3,371 people added to the Methodist rolls.[58]
Peter Cartwright
Peter Cartwright’s family had moved to Logan County in 1793, when he was eight years old. In his autobiography, first published in 1856, he famously described Logan County as "Rogue’s Harbor,” a haven for criminals who had fled to the frontier to escape justice in the East.[59] At fifteen, Cartwright, who characterized himself as a "wild and wicked boy” fond of horseracing, gambling, and dancing, attended a sacrament occasion in May 1801 and experienced conversion.[60] His family’s home in present-day Adairville, Kentucky, was three miles south of McGready’s Red River Meeting House. Cartwright’s Methodist family had come to hear a popular Methodist preacher, one of the ministers assisting McGready. Cartwright's description of the events indicate that the nascent camp meeting begun there the year before had evolved to a large, organized event: "The officers of the church erected a stand in a contiguous shady grove and prepared seats for a large congregation. The people crowded to this meeting from far and near. They came in their large wagons with victuals mostly prepared."[61] The so-called, "falling" behavior had come to characterize the revivals, as Cartwright reported that "Scores of sinners fell ...like men slain in mighty battle; Christians shouted for joy."[62]
Barton Stone and Cane Ridge
By the winter of 1800, sporadic revivals had begun to erupt in the Bluegrass region, near Lexington, even among the Baptists who could boast neither large meetings, nor extreme "bodily exercises"””the variety of seemingly uncontrollable outbursts and physical movements that increasingly accompanied the revivals. Barton Stone, who had been ministering, since 1796, at two Presbyterian congregations in the Bluegrass””Cane Ridge and Concord””traveled to Logan County in the spring of 1801 to see the revivals he had heard about. When Stone returned from the May 1801 Gasper River sacrament, he discovered that even telling the story of the Logan County revivals elicited some of the bodily exercises he had seen there. People wept and swooned in the church services and a leader in the Cane Ridge community was converted in a home where Stone reported the events of the revival.[63]
The Cane Ridge congregation urged Stone to organize a similar event there and in August 1801 the observance there dwarfed those of Logan County, with as many as 20,000 in attendance.[64] Similar observances in the area also sprang up, attracting large crowds, to bring the total number of revival attendees to 100,000 by the end of the year.[65] The instances of so-called "bodily exercises” became more widespread and dramatic. Among the other manifestations of revival fervor, people increasingly exhibited "the jerks”””convulsive or rhythmical motions of the body that continued involuntarily despite attempts to calm them. The noise of the revival could be heard for miles, with many among the throng coming as observers of the spectacle rather than as participants. Because of its size, religious enthusiasm, and widespread national reporting, Cane Ridge came to epitomize the way people understood the Kentucky revivals. But the revivals also continued in the Cumberland region in 1801, increasing in both number and fervor.[66]
Distinguishing characteristics of the revivals
The phenomenon of bodily exercises
At the same time, ministers at Cane Ridge and others began to express significant reservations skeptical of the scope and prevalence of the bodily exercises, especially in regard to the suspicion that some of the ministers encouraged them, or declared people converted because of them. Presbyterian Richard McNemar was especially indicted as encouraging physical enthusiasm, but Stone was also criticized for making no effort to bring order to the increasingly wild behavior of both worshippers and ministers.[67] Similar criticisms had arisen in Logan County the year before, but the growing success of the revivals had served to drown them out. By 1801, the critics were growing louder again, led by James Balch and Thomas Craighead. Though the revivals continued to attract crowds, opposition to them was significant enough that one Sunday, McGready had to preach from the steps of his Red River meeting house, having been locked out by an anti-revivalist church member.[68]
McGready addressed the controversy by defending the exercises in 1801, using examples from the Bible and the writings of Jonathan Edwards, who had encountered a similar controversy during the revivals of the "awakenings" in the 1730s and 1740s. McGready explained the falling, shrieking, and crying for mercy as responses by the people to the realization of the depth of their sins and the coming of God’s judgment. Loosely quoting Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, he described sinners’ realization that they hung from a "brittle thread of life” over the "devouring flames” of hell.[69][70] Under such an impression, McGready reasoned, it was no wonder a person cried for mercy or lost his strength.
Though McGready did not address directly one of the most controversial of the bodily exercises, convulsive movements called "the jerks,” he did address leaping and dancing, which were sometimes included under the term because all such movements were understood to be involuntary. McGready likened these to biblical examples of people leaping for joy, but at the same time, said that these movements were not orchestrated or integrated as part of the worship service.[71] McGready allowed for, but did not appear to encourage, the exercises. Nor did he assume that they were necessarily signs of conversion. His account reveals that he was most impressed by what he regarded as the extraordinary ability of children to exhort as a result of their conversions.
Ecumenism and egalitarianism
Denominational cooperation, a hallmark of the revivals that began in Logan County, was not necessarily uncommon among frontier preachers, because of the needs related to planting new churches and religious societies in the demanding circumstances of backcountry settlements. However, doctrinal differences between the sects were substantial and often produced suspicion and competition, preventing ministers from the different churches from collaborating, especially in theologically controversial realms such as the means of conversion and baptism, and the observance of the Lord’s Supper. Baptists distinguished themselves apart from Methodists and Presbyterians because of differences over baptism. Presbyterians differed sharply from Methodists because of Calvinist doctrines of universal depravity and predestination, which contrasted with Methodists’ emphasis on free will and universal, rather than limited, atonement. Revival preachers such as McGready circumvented many of the doctrinal controversies during the revivals by stressing the common belief in the necessity of an experience of "saving change.”[72]
Egalitarian practices in evangelical religion also advanced during the revivals, as McGready repeatedly mentioned the presence and conversion of blacks in the revivals and the expansion of the role of exhorter to women, children, and blacks, many of whom were enslaved. An exhorter was a lay person who preached an informal or impromptu sermon, encouraging others toward experiential conversion, often immediately after his own conversion. McGready was especially impressed with recurring instances of child exhorters who sometimes exhibited the falling behavior, only to rise later and expound upon the mysteries of the gospel in words that seemed beyond their years. He reported that "the conduct of young converts, and especially of such as were but children, fastened more convictions at these times than all the preaching."[73] McGready accepted children as young as eight in the sacrament based on their conversion experiences, rather than satisfactory answers to questions based on the catechism, one of the usual requirements for participating in communion.[74] McGready repeated throughout his account the universal character of the revivals’ effects on all kinds of people””young and old, male and female, children and slaves. He also expressed his approval of revival attendees who organized their own religious societies, noting several instances of people who attended the meetings and returned home to tell their neighbors and begin meeting house-to-house without the oversight of a minister.
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