The Missionary Era · 1795-1840 · American frontier
The Second Great Awakening & Camp-Meeting Tradition
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About This Movement
At the turn of the nineteenth century, settlers on the Kentucky and Tennessee frontier began travelling for days by wagon to sacramental gatherings that ran for a week at a time — and something broke loose. At Cane Ridge in August 1801 the crowd was estimated at anywhere from ten to twenty thousand people, camped in the woods around a log meeting house, with several preachers going at once and people weeping, shouting and falling to the ground. Methodist circuit riders and Baptist farmer-preachers carried the pattern across the continent, and by the 1830s Charles Finney was writing up the revival as a method that could be worked deliberately rather than waited for. Whether or not it counts as a tradition of its own, it changed what an entire continent expected conversion to feel like.
Sources
- Itinerants' own accounts: Barton Stone's autobiography (1847, incl. Cane Ridge eyewitness); Peter Cartwright, Autobiography (1856); James B. Finley, Autobiography (1853); Francis Asbury's Journal (primary) — These are firsthand accounts from circuit-riding preachers. The autobiographies were written well after the events they describe, so treat them as retrospective accounts rather than contemporary records.
- Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835) and Memoirs (1876; critical ed. Rosell & Dupuis, 1989) (primary) — Finney theorized revival from inside the movement, but his writing postdates the camp-meeting practices it discusses and should be read as later reflection, not a contemporary account of Cane Ridge-era revivalism.
- The camp meeting's own practice record: songsters and choruses; Methodist quarterly-meeting, conference, and class records; Cane Ridge (1801) participant testimonies (primary) — This is the revival's own lived practice and sung theology. Sources are scattered across archives and editions, and not all are easy to access.
- Women's and Black participants: conversion narratives in the Methodist Magazine; Zilpha Elaw's camp-meeting preaching (Memoirs, 1846); John F. Watson, Methodist Error (1819) (primary) — Watson's Methodist Error is a hostile insider's complaint, but it happens to be the earliest description of Black chorus and ring-shout practice, which gives it real evidential value despite the author's hostility.
- Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale, 1989), with Paul Conkin, Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost (Wisconsin, 1990) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, ch. 22 'Christian America' and 'Christian Canada' (Noll) (reference)