Chapter 10

THE GREAT REVIVAL

In the summer of 1801, Cane Ridge became a storm-center of the great religious agitation which at that time was sweeping over the Western States.

In the spring of that year, Barton Stone, leaving his Bourbon County churches for a time, had gone to southern Kentucky to attend a meeting conducted by McGready, McGee, and other noted revivalists, upon the edge of a barren tract in Logan County where multitudes encamped, and where worship was in progress in some parts of the grounds during the entire meeting, which lasted over a week.

This southern Kentucky revival was followed by others of a like nature throughout other portions of the State, and like a wind-driven fire through the dried grass of a prairie was the effect of such meetings. In the prevalence of this excitement, sectarianism, abashed, shrank away, and the people, irrespective of creed, united in the services.

It was decided to hold a camp-meeting at Cane Ridge. The woodland slope surrounding the meeting-house was cleared of its thick undergrowth for a space of several hundred yards, and three-fourths of this space was soon covered with long rows of log seats with broad aisles between the rows. In front, a spacious platform was erected, and over all was a roof of loose boughs supported by posts.

The meeting began Thursday night before the third Sunday in August. Before sunrise on that Thursday, the roads were thronged with carriages, wagons, ox-carts, horseback riders, and persons on foot, all moving toward the woodland rendezvous. Many came from distant parts of Kentucky; many from the neighboring States. A Revolutionary officer, skilled in estimating large encampments, declared that the crowd numbered between twenty-five and thirty thousand people.

Enthusiasm gathered intensity with each succeeding hour. There was no fixed time for intermission. Each family cooked, ate, slept at any time its members chose, and returned to the services, which began at sunrise and continued until long after midnight. Sometimes several preachers were each exhorting a large audience in different parts of the ground at the same time, while singing, shouting, praying and groaning were the constant accompaniment of the fervid, chantlike exhortations.

At night the vast encampment, illuminated by scores of bear-grease lamps, hundreds of rush-lights, and thousands of tallow dips, presented a spectacle of weird sublimity. In the improvised auditorium lights suspended from overhanging boughs fell upon a concourse of earnest worshipers whose voices, rising in the solemn melody of a hymn, mingled with the fervid petitions of the preacher, the shouts of the newly converted, the sobs and shrieks of the newly convicted. Pine knots set in sockets upon the rostrum revealed in unearthly radiance the face of some impassioned speaker, silhouetting his form with startling distinctness against a background of forest. In the shadowy depths beyond the rostrum could faintly be seen, by the light of smoldering campfires, the long, ghostly line of tents and wagons, and here and there the fitful gleam of torches, like giant fireflies in the surrounding gloom. Enclosing all this was a black and seemingly illimitable expanse, from which could be heard the occasional hoot of an owl or the baying of a hound, mingled with the unceasing voice of the trees, now rising almost to a scream, now softly sighing, now wailing as in a dying agony.

In an environment of such great natural solemnity, and under the spell of tense religious fervor, it was not strange that the very atmosphere seemed surcharged with a mystical and awful force, and that many of the campers were soon the victims of those singular "manifestations" called, in the parlance of the times, "the falling exercise," "the jerks," "the trance," and "the ecstasy." The various phases of this strange disorder attacked indiscriminately the credulous and the critical, the fervid and the frivolous, the religious and the reprobate. A strong man, while quietly attending to the exposition of some text; a young girl, while listening with blanching lips and quickening pulses to the impassioned appeal of the exhorter; or a careless onlooker, while laughing and jesting, might suddenly be affected by this terrifying malady. Some scoffer might perhaps at one moment be sneering or denouncing the demonstrations as demoniac, and the next be attacked with great violence. Nor were the campers alone affected. New arrivals, while yet upon the outskirts of the encampment, were sometimes seized with violent and inexplicable sensations. The air seemed charged with an irresistible electrical force.

Many farmers of the neighborhood attended the meeting, taking advantage of the comparatively leisure season between summer harvesting and fall wheat-sowing. Mason Rogers was among this number, his wife declaring that "the hull thing would likely fall through ef Mason warn't thar to holp lead the singin'. Ez fer me," she said cheerfully to her children, "I'll stay to home most o' the time to cook things fer you-all ter eat up thar et the camp. Some day when I kin spar' time, I'll be ovah to heah the preachin', an' ter see whut's goin' on. You kin go, too, Susan, ef you want to, seein' ez you air 'titled to a leetle play-spaill arter wuckin' so spry all summah. You kin find a place to sleep with Betsy in Gilcrest's tent, or with Molly an' Ann Trabue. I reckon yer pap an' Henry an' Abner kin git a shakedown in some uv the wagon-beds, or else on the groun'; 'twon't hurt 'em this dry weathah. No, Tommy, nary step do you go; you an' Buddy's gwintah stay right heah. Camp-meetin's hain't no place fer brats. Maybe, though, ef you're good, I'll tek you ovah with me some day; or I'll let you go 'long with Rache an' Tom some mawnin', when they tek the baskets uv vi'tuls fur the folks to eat."