Christian History Magazine Collection

What exactly happened at the most important camp meeting in American history?

by Mark Galli from Christian History magazine no. 45

Friday, August 6, 1801—wagons and carriages bounced along narrow Kentucky roads, kicking up dust and excitement as hundreds of men, women, and children pressed toward Cane Ridge, a church about 20 miles east of Lexington. They hungered to partake in what everyone felt was sure to be an extraordinary “Communion.”

By Saturday, things were extraordinary, and the news electrified this most populous region of the state; people poured in by the thousands. One traveler wrote a Baltimore friend that he was on his way to the “greatest meeting of its kind ever known” and that “religion has got to such a height here that people attend from a great distance; on this occasion I doubt not but there will be 10,000 people.”

He underestimated, but his miscalculation is understandable. Communions (annual three-to-five-day meetings climaxed with the Lord’s Supper) gathered people in the dozens, maybe the hundreds. At this Cane Ridge Communion, though, sometimes 20,000 people swirled about the grounds—watching, praying, preaching, weeping, groaning, falling. Though some stood at the edges and mocked, most left marveling at the wondrous hand of God.

The Cane Ridge Communion quickly became one of the best-reported events in American history, and according to Vanderbilt historian Paul Conkin, “arguably … the most important religious gathering in all of American history.” It ignited the explosion of evangelical religion, which soon reached into nearly every corner of American life. For decades the prayer of camp meetings and revivals across the land was “Lord, make it like Cane Ridge.”

What was it about Cane Ridge that gripped the imagination? Exactly what happened there in the first summer of the new century?

Egyptian Darkness

Five years earlier, few would have predicted the Cane Ridge revival. Since the American Revolution, Christianity had been on the decline, especially on the frontier. Sporadic, scattered revivals—in Virginia in 178788, for example—dotted the landscape, but they were short-lived. Religious indifference seemed to be spreading.

On a trip to Tennessee in 1794, Methodist bishop Francis Asbury wrote anxiously about frontier settlers, “When I reflect that not one in a hundred came here to get religion, but rather to get plenty of good land, I think it will be well if some or many do not eventually lose their souls.”

Andrew Fulton, a Presbyterian missionary from Scotland, discovered in Nashville and in “all the newly formed towns in this western colony, there are few religious people.” The minutes of the frontier Transylvania Presbytery reveal deep concern about the “prevalence of vice & infidelity, the great apparent declension of true vital religion in too many places.”

Rampant alcoholism and avaricious land-grabbing were matched by the increasing popularity of both universalism (the doctrine that all will be saved) and deism (the belief that God is uninvolved in the world). Methodist James Smith, traveling near Lexington in the autumn of 1795 feared that “the universalists, joining with the Deists, had given Christianity a deadly stab hereabouts.”

Hyperbole, perhaps. Still, during the six years preceding 1800, the Methodist Church—most popular among the expanding middle and lower classes—declined in national membership from 67,643 to 61,351. In the 1790s the population of frontier Kentucky tripled, but the already meager Methodist membership decreased.

Churches and pastors did not merely wring their hands; they clasped them in prayer—at prayer meetings, at worship, and at national conventions. In 1798 the Presbyterian General Assembly asked that a day be set aside for fasting, humiliation, and prayer to redeem the frontier from “Egyptian darkness.”

Church discipline was thrown into high gear. Church minute books record those excluded from fellowship for alcoholism, profanity, mistreatment of slaves, and sexual immorality. Some congregations were so exacting, they decimated their ranks. No matter, they said; sinning had to be stopped in order that God might again bless.

Divine Flame

All this anxiety, prayer, and discipline, though, were grounded in hope. None was sure when or where it would begin, but many were convinced that God would begin his work of revival. James Smith, after traveling through Kentucky, wrote, “I trust he [God] will yet bring good out of this evil, and that the glory of scriptural religion, [though] obscure for the present, will shine forth hereafter with redoubled luster.”

The “glory of scriptural religion” began to “shine forth” in Kentucky when James McGready arrived in Logan County in 1798 to pastor three small congregations: the Red River, Gaspar River, and Muddy River churches. He brought with him from North Carolina a well-deserved reputation for fiery preaching. He was a large, imposing man with piercing eyes and a voice coarse and tremulous. Barton Stone, pastor of the Cane Ridge Church, said of McGready after hearing him preach, “My mind was chained by him, and followed him closely in his rounds of heaven, earth, and hell with feelings indescribable.”

McGready’s preaching so stirred his congregations that when the Red River church sponsored its annual Communion in June 1800, the spiritual climate was charged. Local ministers were invited to participate, as were Presbyterian William McGee and his Methodist brother John, whose preaching had been exciting churches in Tennessee.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday passed quietly and reverently—as these Presbyterian Communions were wont to go. On Monday, though, as one local minister preached, a woman who had long sought assurance for her salvation began shouting and singing. The preacher concluded his sermon, and all the ministers left the church—except for the McGee brothers. Presbyterian William sat on the floor near the pulpit and began weeping. Soon the congregation was weeping, seeking full security for salvation.

Methodist John rose to preach; a witness said he exhorted people to let “the Lord God omnipotent reign in their hearts, and to submit to him.” People began to cry and shout.

Then the woman who had first started shouting let out a shrill of anguish. Methodist John McGee, seemingly entranced, made his way to comfort her. Someone (probably his Presbyterian brother) reminded him this was a Presbyterian church; the congregation would not condone emotionalism! Later John recalled, “I turned to go back and was near falling; the power of God was strong upon me. I turned again and, losing sight of the fear of man, I went through the house shouting and exhorting with all possible ecstasy and energy, and the floor was soon covered with the slain”—people were falling in ecstasy.

The News Spreads

McGready and the other ministers, convinced this was the work of God, laid plans for another sacramental service, to be held at the Gaspar River Church the following month. McGready took pains to circulate the news, but a media campaign was hardly necessary. Speaking of the hundreds who flocked to Gaspar River, one minister said, “The news of the strange operations which had transpired at the previous meeting had run throughout the country in every direction, carrying a high degree of excitement to the minds of almost every character.”

More people began arriving than could be accommodated by the host church’s families, but most came prepared to encamp. (Though large outdoor meetings had a long history, this was probably the first “camp meeting”—though the term was not coined for another two years.)

Friday and most of Saturday passed in a solemn manner, but on Saturday night, just after the last sermon was finished, two women began talking excitedly about how God had entered them, and soon, wrote McGready, “Sinners [were] lying powerless in every part of the house, praying and crying for mercy.” All night long, ministers attended to distressed and desperate penitents.

Sunday morning’s sermon also evoked groans and cries, and at night, with the pulpit illumined by flaming torches, William McGee exhorted with all the energy and oratory he could muster. “Towards the close of the sermon, the cries of the distressed arose almost as loud as his voice,” McGready wrote. “After the congregation was dismissed the solemnity increased. … No person seemed to wish to go home—hunger and sleep seemed to affect nobody—eternal things were the vast concern.”

In the succeeding months, camp meeting revivals spread through Kentucky and Tennessee: at Muddy River, Mr. Craighead’s church, Clay-lick, Little Muddy Creek, Montgomery’s Meetinghouse, and Hopewell. Each seemed more dramatic than the last. As 1800 drew to a close, John McGee reported that at Desha’s Creek, “Many thousands of people attended. The mighty power and mercy of God was manifested. The people fell before the Word, like corn before a storm of wind, and many rose from the dust with divine glory shining in their countenances.”

“The excitement created by these reports,” recalled Methodist James B. Finley, “was of the most intense and astonishing character.” The movement was marked by “some peculiarities” he admitted, and then added, “The nearest approximation to it … was the revival on the day of Pentecost.”