MIAMI UNIVERSITY
The Graduate School
Certificate for Approving the Dissertation
We hereby approve the Dissertation
of
Matthew David Smith
Candidate for the Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
____________________________________________
Director
Dr. Carla Gardina Pestana
_____________________________________________
Reader
Dr. Andrew R.L. Cayton
_____________________________________________
Reader
Dr. Mary Kupiec Cayton
____________________________________________
Reader
Dr. Katharine Gillespie
____________________________________________
Dr. Peter Williams
Graduate School Representative
ABSTRACT
"IN THE LAND OF CANAAN:" RELIGIOUS REVIVAL AND REPUBLICAN POLITICS IN
EARLY KENTUCKY
by Matthew Smith
Against the tumult of the American Revolution, the first white settlers in the Ohio Valley
imported their religious worldviews and experiences from a colonial past to their unfamiliar new
surroundings. Within a generation, they witnessed the Great Revival (circa 1797-1805), a
dramatic mass revelation of religion, converting thousands of worshipers to spiritual rebirth
while transforming the region's cultural identity.
This study focuses on the lives and careers of three prominent Kentucky settlers:
Christian revivalists James McGready and Barton Warren Stone, and pioneering newspaper
editor John Bradford. All three men occupy points on a religious spectrum, ranging from the
secular public faith of civil religion, to the apocalyptic sectarianism of the Great Revival, yet
they also overlap in unexpected ways. This study explores how the evangelicalism characteristic
of McGready and Stone fatally eroded the public sphere envisaged by the deistic Bradford. It
also examines the Presbyterian Church's reaction against the alleged enthusiasm within its own
clergy, embracing a more socially conformist mode of religion. It looks at how Stone's faith led
him to denounce the direction of Presbyterian Church. Even as McGready submitted himself to
the discipline imposed by his denominational colleagues, Stone withdrew instead into a primitive
Christianity marked by political quietism and civil disengagement. This study follows the
consequences of such diverging paths, as McGready rehabilitated himself into the Presbyterian
fold and Stone struggled to maintain his prophetic voice while charting an independent course.
An epilogue charts the political persecution of the Shakers, whose emergence in the Ohio Valley
marked the apex of evangelical enthusiasm. The impact of the Great Revival is finally
considered against the cultural parameters of religious expression that emerged in its wake, both
regionally and throughout the United States.
"IN THE LAND OF CANAAN:" RELIGIOUS REVIVAL AND REPUBLICAN
POLITICS IN EARLY KENTUCKY
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to the
Faculty of Miami University
in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Doctorate of Philosophy
Department of History
by
Matthew David Smith
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
2011
Dissertation Director: Dr. Carla Gardina Pestana
©
Matthew David Smith
2010
Table of Contents
Introduction ....................................................................................................1
Chapter One: Early Kentucky: Religious and Political Landscape…………21
Chapter Two: John Bradford, Republican Printer .........................................56
Chapter Three: James McGready, Son of Thunder .......................................87
Chapter Four: Barton Stone, Disciple of Christ .............................................128
Epilogue: Opening the Gospel .......................................................................170
Conclusion .....................................................................................................183
Bibliography ..................................................................................................192
iii
ACKNOWLDEGEMENTS
I owe a great debt to the many friends and colleagues who have guided and advised my study
from the germ of an idea and who continue to encourage my scholarship. I’d like to thank
everyone who assisted me both personally and academically. Without their help, this
dissertation would have been impossible.
Thanks first of all to my dissertation committee for guiding me to the finish with insight and
patient good humor. To my advisor, Carla Pestana, whose erudition led me to the right path, and
whose editing sharpened and polished my prose time and again. To Mary Cayton, who likewise
provided invaluable editing and scholarly guidance. Our conversations during this study were
sometimes mentally acrobatic, but always entertaining and rewarding. To Drew Cayton, who
encouraged me to be bold in my thinking and conclusions. And to Katharine Gillespie and Peter
Williams, both of whom offered expertise and encouragement from start to finish.
Research for this dissertation was greatly assisted by generous scholarships from both the Filson
Historical Society and the Kentucky Historical Society. My visits to both institutions reaped
terrific archival discoveries, and led me to enjoy some fine Kentucky hospitality. Special thanks,
then, to Glenn Crothers and all the staff at Louisville, and to Nelson Dawson and his colleagues
in Frankfort. Thanks also to Matt Harris and the staff at the University of Kentucky Special
Collections, by which means I came face-to-face with the elusive John Bradford. And to James
Trader, curator at Cane Ridge, who guided me through the site that inspired this study to begin
with.
Last but not least, thanks to the many friends and colleagues who have taken interest along the
way, including (and by no means not limited to): Ellen Eslinger; Bob Schmidt; Mary Ellen Scott;
Martin Johnson; Shelly Jarrett Bromberg; Will Taylor; Edwin Yamauchi; David Childs and Jim
Bielo. Special thanks goes to my parents. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to Whitney and
Charlotte, with my love.
iv
INTRODUCTION
If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of
heavenly things?
John 3:12
In one generation from the American Revolution, the Ohio Valley lured tens of thousands
of migrants to Kentucky's Bluegrass region, a region that soon became as synonymous with
evangelical religious fervor as it was coveted for the fecundity of its rich, dark soil. Most of the
newcomers to this land came from the backcountry upper south; many had witnessed the
religious upheavals of the colonial Great Awakening, while America's War of Independence had
painfully affected almost every settler family. These two phenomena – religious revival and
bloody conflict – continued beyond initial settlement, framing the worldview of early
Kentuckians. Distinctions between politics and religion became more stark during the early
years of the republic than at any time before or since in United States history, manifesting in
secular and religious worldviews that were often contested. The experimental nature of
Kentucky led many settlers to envision its utopian development. Some, including pioneer
newspaper editor John Bradford, imagined the Commonwealth as a beacon of republican virtue,
anticipating its vanguard role in the secular reformation of American society. Despite fierce
Indian warfare until the mid-1790s, this deistic civil millennialism flourished for a time
alongside very different, often explicitly Christian visions of Kentucky's future. At the turn of
the nineteenth-century, a series of dramatic religious revivals quickened Kentucky's agricultural
heartland. Evangelical leaders such as Presbyterian minister Barton Warren Stone proclaimed an
outpouring of the Holy Ghost, linking the onset of awakening to earlier stirrings throughout the
American backcountry. Impressed by the sights and sounds of awestruck, trembling worshipers
falling by dozens, as though "slain in battle," Stone noted, "The scene ... was new, and passing
strange." 1 The shock of the Ohio Valley's Great Revival transformed its religious and political
landscape for generations.
This study examines the consequences of the Great Revival, but diverges from many
recent studies of the topic in two key respects. Firstly, it juxtaposes the political and religious
1
Barton Stone, "A Short History of the Life of Barton Warren Stone, Written by Himself (1847)," Voices from Cane
Ridge, ed., Rhodes Thompson, (St. Louis: Bethany Press, 1954), 64.
1
landscapes of Kentucky and the broader Ohio Valley, while at the same time linking them to
broader patterns of development in the early American republic. Secondly, it does not assume,
prima facie, that a secular frame of reference ultimately explains the experiences of evangelical
converts. As historian Ann Taves has noted, statements of religious experience were constituted
in a "contested space," its parameters stretched between the claims of those experiencing the
apparently otherworldly agency of the Holy Ghost, and the counter-claims of revival critics. 2
These critics sought naturalistic explanations for the most dramatic manifestations of the revival,
such as fits, trances and supernatural visions. Though they were not necessarily anti-religious or
anti-clerical, they shared the common assumption that explanations of religious experience were
to be found within the sphere of natural phenomena, and they rejected explanatory appeals to the
supernatural.
The secular study of religion had its earliest origins in the enlightenment psychology of
the eighteenth-century, when critics of alleged evangelical enthusiasm folded the genealogy of
religious belief under the broader umbrella of "natural history." The deistic philosopher David
Hume saw the emergence of a "belief of invisible, intelligent power" (i.e., belief in a supernatural
deity or deities) as the product of human imagination, noting: "that this preconception springs not
from original instinct or primary impression of nature … The first religious principles must be
secondary; such as may easily be perverted by various accidents and causes." 3 While not all
contemporary or subsequent critics of revivalism shared Hume's skepticism towards religion per
se, the naturalistic assumptions of the enlightenment became foundational to secular religious
historiography, to the extent that secular historians tried to explain the phenomenology of
religious experience.
In contrast to the murky phenomenology of the Great Revival, its denominational
contours are familiar to historians. The revival transformed the Ohio Valley from a thin field of
scattered churches served largely by the Presbyterian clergy, to a dense abundance of sects,
vying for a growing religious audience. Evangelical supporters were quick to evoke the
antecedence and coincidence of similar Protestant revivals throughout the world, a convergence
strengthening their claims for their own revival's authenticity. Nonetheless, the huge scale of
2
Ann Taves, Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 16.
3
David Hume, Four Dissertations (London: A. Millar, 1757), 1-2.
2
religious meetings such as Cane Ridge was unexpected, given Kentucky's relatively low
population density at the time. 4 Firsthand accounts convey the intensity of converts' experiences,
unprecedented in their strange variety. The Great Revival's sudden appearance begs the
question: what actually happened; or rather, how did Kentuckians experience the event, either
positively or negatively? The divergence of possible answers suggests a central problem of
religious history. How does the historian untangle claims of divine revelation from counterclaims of mass delusion?
A leap of faith is required to recover the claims of religious experience from the clutches
of historiography. The subjectivity of religious experience amid contested events like the Great
Revival can best be understood (from a historical perspective, can only truly be understood),
from the first hand accounts of participants. Eyewitnesses noted the grand scale and vast crowds
at revival meetings such as the eight-day-long gathering at Cane Ridge, the largest single
religious assembly of the era. Hosted by local pastor Barton Stone, Cane Ridge witnessed
violent bodily exercises and enthusiastic uproar, but was just one of many such meetings, both
large and small, to convulse the region. While it seemed to evangelicals at the time as though the
millennium was at hand, many historians have subsequently interpreted the Great Revival
through materialistic lenses, dismissing religion as an epiphenomenon, or symptom of
underlying social or psychological stress.
A long train of historians following in the tradition of Frederick Jackson Turner – whose
environmentally-deterministic "Frontier Thesis" dominated twentieth-century histories of the
American west – attributed revivalism to the upheavals of pioneer life, reducing spiritual
conversion to the pent-up emotion of backcountry life. Others, exemplified by Nathan Hatch,
conflated the emotional tenor of the Great Revival with the democratization of politics unleashed
by the American Revolution. 5 These two broad approaches have deeply influenced the study of
evangelicalism in early Kentucky. Each subsumes religion within more general categories (the
4
The only revival meeting of comparable size and duration to Cane Ridge occurred at Cambuslang, Scotland in
1742. Cane Ridge and Cambuslang were both rural settlements located within a few miles of booming commercial
cities – Lexington and Glasgow, respectively. Yet Glasgow's population of over 17,000 in the 1740s was more than
eight times larger than that of Lexington at the time of Cane Ridge, and the nearby Scottish countryside was densely
populated. Henry Hamilton, An Economic History of Scotland in the Eighteenth-Century (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1963), 18.
5
Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
3
frontier, or politics), while both implicitly disregard the truth claims, and even the autonomy, of
religion.
Only a handful of recent historians have grasped the importance of religious experience
in early Kentucky, let alone the importance of religious ideas. Richard Boles was perhaps the
earliest to complain that fellow scholars had reduced interpretation of early Kentucky
evangelicalism to the reflexive instincts of "frontiersmen who wanted their whiskey straight and
their religion red-hot." Boles added that these historians had ignored evangelicals' "strongly
believed … ideas about God and his dealings with men," obscuring "a vigorous cerebral element
behind the revivals." 6 The historian Paul Conkin developed Boles's critique, arguing that "most
historians have ignored or slighted" the theological substance of the revivals "and as a result have
crucially distorted what happened." Conkin instead called Cane Ridge "America's Pentecost" –
evoking the charismatic spirit of the apostolic church, and linking the Great Revival directly to
the intellectual history of Christian thought. 7
The Great Revival was the backdrop to a fierce intellectual struggle between partisans
and critics of the revival, yet it is too simplistic to portray this as a contest between religious
enthusiasts on the one hand and the forces of secularism on the other. More often than not, the
controversy was fought between competing visions of secularism, reflecting the broader debate
within the early republic over the value and meaning of freedom of conscience. As sociologist
Wilfred M. McClay vividly described it, the reflexive understanding of the term "secularism" in
today's United States is "the demystified and disenchanted worldview of an affluent,
postreligious society." Whether twenty-first-century America is a secular society by this
definition seems highly debatable, but without doubt, the dominant worldview of early Kentucky
was neither demystified nor disenchanted, and certainly not postreligious. Unfortunately,
historians' failure to appreciate the depth as well as the diversity of religion in the early republic
has often reduced faith to a mere ingredient of the broader culture, rather than its vital stock.
Although the usage of the word "secularism" was not a cornerstone of the religious debates of
the Great Revival, its meaning has evolved, accruing rigidly anti-religious connotations. As
McClay argues, however, a more nuanced definition of secularism distinguishes between two
6
John B. Boles, The Great Revival, 1787-1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 70.
7
Paul Conkin, Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 3.
4
operative concepts – a "negative," or political secularization, advocating at least some degree of
separation between the public sphere of politics and the private sphere of religion; and a
"positive," or philosophical model, "that affirms secularism as an ultimate faith that rightfully
supersedes the tragic blindness and destructive irrationalities of the historical religions." 8 The
former version of secularism is clearly expressed in the First Amendment of the United States
Constitution; most evangelicals in the early republic (including those in the Ohio Valley)
embraced separation of church and state, having suffered first-hand the inequity of colonial
religious establishment. At the same time, some opponents of the revivalism in Kentucky
actively sought to propagate a philosophically secular worldview; a public faith centered on
reason, not revelation. The Great Revival interrupted serious attempts to impose by intellectual
coercion what sociologist Robert Bellah famously described as the "civil religion" of
revolutionary secularism, a public cult devoted to mythologized ideals of virtue and citizenship,
articulated in the symbolic lexicon of the early republic. 9 The philosophical temper of
enlightenment deists such as John Bradford thus went beyond the merely political secularism
(common among all shades of religious and freethinking opinion in the early United States),
which advocated religious disestablishment and the legal disestablishment of religion.
The attempt to fashion Kentucky as a model republican commonwealth foundered under
the burden of its own discontents. Unlike the evangelical faith of the camp meeting, the secular
faith of civil religion was coercively public, grounded in the political fetishism of America's
founding revolution. The quasi-religious flavor of this civil faith emerges in descriptions of July
4th processions, events that were oddly reminiscent of militarized saint's day festivities. John
Bradford approvingly described Lexington's July 4th parade in 1800, "celebrated … with the
usual joy and enthusiasm":
At 12 o'clock the volunteer companies of infantry and horse assembled at the public
square, attended by a considerable concourse of citizens. They proceeded to the court
house where an elegant oration (on the occasion) was delivered by Henry Clay, Esq. after
which a procession was formed … The Fayette troop of horse, in front; the Lexington
light infantry in the rear, and the other citizens in the centre – A Liberty Cap, with this
inscription, 4th JULY, 1776, was carried by one of the citizens.
8
Wilfred M. McClay, "Two Concepts of Secularism," The Wilson Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 3 (summer 2000), 63-64.
For the origin of the term "civil religion," see: Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Journal of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 96, no. 1 (winter, 1967), 1-21.
9
5
The procession culminated around 3 p.m. with "a handsome dinner." Cementing the afternoon's
fraternal spirit with actual spirits, a staggering sixteen toasts were drunk, including toasts to
"[t]he sovereignty and independence of the United States," and to "the tree of LIBERTY …
watered by the blood of our ancestors." 10 As this theatrical procession unfurled, the greater
drama of religious revival in the Bluegrass was at is zenith, though unrecorded by Bradford.
If the quasi-faith of civil religion often degenerated into drunken sentimentality, the
nascent influence of evangelical religion inspired sober political reflection and pragmatic
alliances between unlikely bedfellows. Kentucky's support for Thomas Jefferson in the 1800
election reflected his appeal not just among fellow deists, but also among evangelical Christians:
two groups that strongly approved, though for different reasons, Jefferson's vision of a wall of
separation between church and state. As Jefferson himself wrote, "The rights of conscience we
never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate
powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others." 11 As John Boles has
argued, this outlook was common among evangelicals, a constituency that was typically
"individualistic and … otherworldly," and regarded politics in the abstract with a decided lack of
enthusiasm. 12 In a rare written formulation of evangelical political sentiment, Kentucky Baptist
David Barrow asserted, "Government is an evil … but in our present state of depravity, it is to be
preferred to a state of nature." He added, "civil leaders have nothing more to do with religion, in
their public capacities, than private men." 13 Like so many colonial dissenters who moved to
Kentucky, Barrow's experience of persecution at the hands of a religious establishment informed
his politics. The politics of early Kentucky echoed this mood of political secularization, more
broadly expressed in the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom and the First Amendment of the
United States Constitution. As Kentucky's 1792 constitution insisted (despite clergymen having
served prominently at the constitutional convention), "no minister of religious societies … shall
be a member of either [legislative] House." 14 As such painstaking separation of church and state
implies, however, tensions between religion and polity in the early republic had the potential for
conflict, producing friction amply evidenced in the lives of Kentucky's early settlers.
10
Kentucky Gazette, July 10, 1800.
Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia (Richmond: J.W. Randolph, 1853), 170.
12
Boles, The Great Revival, 178.
13
Carlos R. Allen, jr., "David Barrow's Circular Letter of 1798," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 20, no.
3 (July 1963), 447-448.
14
Lowell H. Harrison, Kentucky's Road to Statehood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 155
11
6
This study centers on the lives and careers of three prominent early Kentuckians, each of
whom was both affected by, and also helped shape, Kentucky's shifting religious and political
landscape. The first of these figures is John Bradford, pioneering editor of the earliest
newspaper west of Appalachia, whose freethinking deism and enthusiastic political ideals
embodied the emotive "civil religion" of the American Revolution. This dissertation also
examines Presbyterian revivalist James McGready, a de facto leader of western Calvinism, and
the leading Presbyterian revivalist in backcountry North Carolina and early Kentucky. Finally, a
third biographical chapter looks at Barton Stone, the host minister at Cane Ridge, whose long
religious career connected the Kentucky Revival to broader currents of nineteenth-century
evangelicalism, illustrating the splintering of religious authority.
The Great Revival transformed the outlook of each of these men. For Bradford, the
consequences were troubling. The chiliastic zeal of the revivalists threatened to reorder
Kentucky society, sweeping away his dreams of a secular republican Commonwealth.
Meanwhile, the Great Revival and its aftermath tore McGready between his loyalty to the
Presbyterian Church and his calling as an evangelical leader. McGready at once enabled and
resisted the fragmentation of the old religious landscape, an upheaval he took to heart. For
Barton Stone, there were no such dilemmas. Events at Cane Ridge enabled him to break the
shackles of denominational self-censorship, proclaiming the gospel liberty of all believers.
For evangelicals like Stone, unfurling revival bore witness to a miraculous outpouring of
the spirit of God. The fact that it happened in Kentucky only magnified popular rhetoric of a
trans-Appalachian promised land, strengthening its resonance. Skeptical observers witnessing
the westward exodus to America's Canaan after the War of Independence took the aspirations of
many evangelical migrants with a pinch of salt. "Ask these Pilgrims what they expect when they
git to Kentuckey," wrote Moses Austin in 1796, watching trains of Baptist migrants congesting
the road to the Cumberland Gap, "the Answer is Land." 15 Yet as the Great Revival confirmed
evangelical Kentuckians as a self-identifying chosen people in a promised land, opponents of
revivalism faced the discomfiting prospect of insurgent religious enthusiasm.
15
Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind: A Cultural History of the Kentucky Frontiersman (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1957), 26.
7
Anti-revivalism was rife among Kentuckians witnessing events, particularly among the
upper classes of Lexington – a muddy, provincial boomtown dubbed the "Athens of the West."
Its aspiring gentry mostly frowned on the Great Revival, seeing the riotous scenes at nearby
Cane Ridge and elsewhere as wild enthusiasm, not vital religion. Rather than spreading alarm,
though, they mostly greeted such scenes with deafening silence. The rising jurist and future
statesman Henry Clay left no mention of Cane Ridge or the revival in his voluminous extant
writing. 16 A French visitor to Lexington remarked, in 1802: "The better informed people do not
share the opinion of the multitude with regard to this state of ecstasy." 17 Most notably, the
Kentucky Gazette, the state's earliest and most influential newspaper never even mentioned the
revival during this period. Its deistic editor John Bradford scorned the enthusiasm, a distraction
from the serious business of commerce and politics. The brunt of active opposition fell to antirevivalists within the Presbyterian Church, the denomination whose evangelical wing initiated
the Great Revival and the denomination most split by its effects.
Whatever its objectors thought, the Kentucky Revival transformed the religious
landscape of the region. Attendance at Cane Ridge alone has been conservatively estimated at
10,000 people but may have passed 25,000. During the solemn sacrament of the Lord's Supper,
distribution of the bread and wine took several hours. 18 These facts are even more impressive,
given Lexington's population of fewer than 2,000 residents at that time. 19 Richard McNemar, a
Presbyterian minister who later converted to Shakerism, remembered the scale of the gathering:
"the surrounding forest, vocal with the cries of the distressed; sometimes to the distance of half a
mile or a mile in circumference." 20 The Methodist preacher James B. Finley – a young boy
when he experienced Cane Ridge – likewise recalled a "noise like the roar of Niagara," a "vast
16
Stephen Aron, How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 171.
17
F.A. Michaux, "Travels to the West of the Allegheny Mountains," Early Western Travels, vol. 3, ed. Reuben Gold
Thwaites, (Cleveland: A.H. Clark, 1904), 249.
18
Ellen Eslinger, Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism, (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1999) 207, 210.
19
In 1801, the Kentucky Gazette gave detailed demographic data for Lexington, based on the latest census. The
total population was just 1,795, including 1,333 white inhabitants, 439 slaves, and 23 "free people of color."
Kentucky Gazette, April 27, 1801.
20
Richard McNemar, The Kentucky Revival; or, a Short History of the Late Extraordinary Out-Pouring of the Spirit
of God, in the Western States of America (Pittsfield: Phineas Allen, 1808), 34-35.
8
sea of human beings … agitated as if by a storm." 21 Yet more significant than the riotous
character of the revival was its shattering impact on religious structure. New sects such as the
Shakers and the Churches of Christ emerged in Kentucky, while others – notably the Baptists
and Methodists – reaped windfalls amid the new evangelical climate. The Presbyterian Church,
by contrast – once the mainstay of backcountry religion and education – shrank to a beleaguered
remnant, its evangelical clergy often abandoning its ranks or forced to leave.
The racial animus of Kentucky's white settlers towards the Indians was a primary fact of
early settlement. The Indian population of the Ohio Valley, whose genocide accompanied
Kentucky's early settlement haunted and continued to haunt its landscape. Persecution of the
Indians rarely inhibited early Kentuckians from fancying themselves as latter-day Israelites.
Indeed, the displacement and slaughter of Indian populations positively reinforced identification
of Kentucky as a new Canaan. Such analogy was remarkably commonplace. Hugh Henry
Brackenridge, a confidante of Kentucky's pioneer journalist John Bradford, casually likened one
Indian chief to the Canaanite ruler Adonibezek, "who had three score and ten kings under his
table." At the same time, however, he demanded "bold and decisive act of hostility" against
local Indian populations. 22 Few white settlers in the region openly voiced concerns about their
displacement of Indian populations, the Shakers proving a remarkable exception.
Descriptions of Kentucky as a cultural melting pot have long disguised the obliteration of
Native culture. The arrival of white settlers brought with it a religious re-imagining of the
region. Indian hunters had themselves seen Kentucky as hallowed ground, although occupying it
on a seasonal and itinerant, rather than sedentary basis. In contrast to white notions of land
ownership, tribal lands were communal resources. These commons constituted much of tribal
identity, with stewardship rather than ownership defining human connection to the land. 23 Early
published descriptions of Kentucky declared that Indians, like animals, lacked any religion. 24
They argued the doctrine of terra nullius – "empty land" – holding that Indians legally
21
James B. Finley, Autobiography of James B. Finley; or, Pioneer Life in the West (Cincinnati: Cranston & Curtis,
1853), 166.
22
Hugh Henry Brackenridge, "Thoughts on the Present Indian War," February 4, 1792, in: John Bradford, The Voice
of the Frontier: John Bradford's Notes on Kentucky, Thomas D. Clark, ed. (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1993), 182, 185.
23
Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York: Viking, 2007), xxviii.
24
See, for example: John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (Wilmington: James
Adams, 1784); Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, 3rd ed.
(London: J. Debrett, 1797).
9
disinherited themselves by neglecting the land. Agriculture and religion were the twin
foundations of civilization, and though most Indians practiced both, settlers consciously or
unconsciously disregarded this fact. Writers such as Kentucky historian Humphrey Marshall
compounded such prejudice, claiming that Indians were savages with "no historical records" and
therefore no claim to sovereignty at all. 25
We must recognize this obliteration of Indian history in the historiography of early
Kentucky, as well as in the early historical record. Depictions of the west as a sterile laboratory
for American self-projection (what Frederick Jackson Turner famously called "an area of free
land") continued to shape the study of early Kentucky until recent years. 26 Turner's so-called
"Frontier Thesis," first outlined in his 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History" prolonged a lengthy process of historical amnesia. It posited "[t]he contest for power
and the expansive tendency furnished … by the existence of a moving frontier" as key to
American development in general, largely disregarding continuous Indian influence upon the
cultural and physical geography of the frontier. Though Turner commented little upon religious
history, his insistence that westward expansion "had important results on the character of
religious organization in the United States" set parameters for subsequent historians of frontier
evangelicalism, while divorcing its study from the religious history of indigenous people. 27
Turner was a good Darwinian: while his historical writings embraced romantic ideals of
national character, he also described the American frontier in specifically biological terms as
"the record of social evolution." 28 Following in his footsteps, a new scholarly generation reinterpreted religion in Kentucky, focusing on both the environmentally-determined influences of
the frontier, as well as the region's fascinating mystique. Among the earliest and most notable
culprits, Catherine Cleveland's 1916 study The Great Revival in the West emphasized the
frontier's "mysterious and fatal attraction," alongside the various "exigencies of life in the
25
Humphrey Marshall, The History of Kentucky: Including an Account of the Discovery, Settlement, Progressive
Improvement, Political and Military Events, and Present State of the Country, vol. I. (Frankfort: Henry Gore, 1812),
3.
26
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frontier and Section: Selected
Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner, Ray Allen Billington, ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 37.
27
Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," 61.
28
Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," 43.
10
wilderness." 29 Other scholars soon followed, describing the rough and tumble of the
backcountry and its essential role in shaping American character. For such scholars, the
inevitable violence of frontier life explained the painful disfigurements of camp meetings.
Despite his often-sympathetic handling of evangelical culture, even the distinguished historian
William Warren Sweet caricatured the camp meeting revival as a caldron of backcountry
profanity; a retrograde excrescence on the progress of American settlement. "There is an
abundance of evidence," he wrote, "that every camp meeting was largely attended by the dregs of
frontier society." 30 By the late 1950s, Bernard Weisberger's description of religious life among
"the squirrel hunters of Kentucky" was a virtual parody of Turnerian themes:
They had concepts of pious experience that went with braining bears and battling Indians.
Theology was presented to them by men whose faith was strong, but who "murdered the
king's English almost every lick." They received it with tears and shouts … For a few
passionate years, something amounting to godly hysteria crackled and smoked in the
backwoods settlements. But this was only the flash of initial combustion. 31
Long into the twentieth-century, Turner's followers sought to explain away the
supernatural aspects of the Great Revival within their own, naturalistic frame of reference. In
doing so, they attempted to defuse any challenge to their construction of the frontier as a site of
material and political progress, plain and simple. Cleveland asserted "that no supernatural
agency is necessary to explain the peculiar bodily exercises that attended the Great Revival in the
western country." Instead, she invoked "suggestion through the sense of sight or hearing" as the
likely proximate cause. 32 Writing in the 1950s, Charles A. Johnson described the camp meeting
as a "socioreligious institution … a natural product of the frontier environment." 33 Writing in the
1970s, Dickson Bruce, Jr. developed a class-oriented twist on the Turnerian model, using the
social aspirations of the "plain folk," or democratic yeomanry, to explain the camp meeting's
social appeal. 34 For Donald Mathews, meanwhile, the Great Revival was "an organizing process
29
Catherine Cleveland, The Great Revival in the West, 1797-1805 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916), 1,
51.
30
William Warren Sweet, The Presbyterians, 1783-1840, vol. 2 of Religion on the American Frontier (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1936), 89.
31
Bernard Weisberger, They Gathered at the River: The Story of the Great Revivalists and their Impact upon
Religion in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), 20-21.
32
Cleveland, The Great Revival, 127.
33
Charles A. Johnson, The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion's Harvest Time (Dallas: Southern Methodist
University Press, 1955), vii, 7.
34
Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800-1845 (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1974). Historian Frank L. Owsley famously coined the term "plain folk".
11
that helped to give meaning and direction to people suffering in various degrees from the social
strains of a nation on the move." 35
Physical conditions certainly shaped the society that emerged in early Kentucky, but they
hardly determined religious ideas and experiences. Historians began exposing the shortcomings
of the frontier as an “interpretive panacea” from the 1950s. 36 Whitney Cross denied that frontier
characteristics in the “Burned-over District” of early nineteenth-century New York explained the
intensity of revivals there, while "territories farther west" remained relatively sedate. 37 Writing
in 1972, Sydney Ahlstrom argued that the persistence of European currents in American
religious life was at least as remarkable as the exaggerated "creativeness of the frontier."
Ahlstrom saw the frontier as process rather than place; this process had not halted at the close of
the nineteenth century, as Turner claimed, but continued to unfurl long into the twentieth.
Ahlstrom also warned against a "religious corollary" between secular and church history,
projecting "'democratic churches' and 'democratic theology'" upon the development of American
religion. 38
Shifting historical assumptions supposedly killed off the frontier as a geographical
section characterized by isolated exceptionalism. As Turner himself acknowledged, "each age
studies its history anew … with interests determined by the spirit of the time." 39 Historical
awareness of Turner's interpretive tradition (a tradition preoccupied by environmental
determinism and the woolly category of national "character") makes even the use of the word
"frontier" problematic, except to highlight the very mythos Turnerian scholars mistook for
objective reality. Reflecting their own interpretive demands, many historians now emphasize the
"middle ground" between Native and European cultures, the market networks that bound
disparate regions of the nation, and the frontier's own diffracted geography. 40 Beginning in the
35
Donald G. Mathews, "The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780-1830: An Hypothesis,"
American Quarterly no. 21, (1969), 27.
36
John B. Boles, “Turner, the Frontier, and the Study of Religion in America,” Journal of the Early Republic, vol.
13, no. 2 (summer, 1993), 210.
37
Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in
Western New York, 1800-1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950), 82.
38
Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 453.
39
Quoted in: Gerald D. Nash, Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890-1990 (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1991), 7.
40
Richard White popularized the term "middle ground:" Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and
Republics in the Great Lakes Region 1650-1815, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Recent works
showing early Kentucky more as a zone of interaction than as a frontier of power include: Aron, How the West was
12
1980s, so-called New Western Historians set about recovering Native voices buried beneath the
historical record. More recently, historians such as Daniel Richter have begun reversing
Turnerian ethnic and topographical orientation from the vantage point of white settlers to that of
American Indians. 41 Others revised the geo-political reference points of the frontier,
emphasizing power relations between core and periphery in the United States. Patricia Nelson
Limerick noted, for example, that the west was where "an expanded role for the federal
government first took hold," complicating notions of the frontier as an arena in which rugged
individuals called the shots. 42
Many historians today confront evangelical supernaturalism with knee-jerk
embarrassment, attributing claims for the agency of the Holy Ghost to sociological foundations.
The imputed democratization of American Christianity remains a useful apologetic for writers
such as Nathan Hatch, seeking to connect the religious revivals of nineteenth-century America to
purely secular change. Such scholars have borrowed deeply from the political model. They do
so without questioning what early evangelicals understood by such terms as "democracy," which
still carried pejorative connotations of demagogery in the early nineteenth-century, or
"republicanism," which was an ideal accepted, if not deeply critiqued, by most Kentucky settlers.
As historian Ellen Eslinger argued, "the particular aspects of Christianity being expressed at
camp meetings also resembled republican social ideals … an emphasis on key qualities of
morality, egalitarianism, and [social] unity." While few would directly question this
resemblance, contemporary Kentucky revivalists such as Barton Stone did not necessarily
correlate politics with religion, as Eslinger herself acknowledges. 43 Indeed, for evangelical
preachers and their audiences, revivals primarily signified the workings of the Holy Ghost,
besides which all other concerns were secondary.
Overlapping with the Frontier Thesis, another sweeping theory – the so-called
"republican synthesis" – further compounded historical misunderstanding of early Kentucky's
Lost; Elizabeth Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Andrew R.L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points:
American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998).
41
Daniel K. Richter, Facing East From Indian Country: A Narrative History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001).
42
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1987), 28.
43
Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 241.
13
religious landscape. Since the 1960s, scholars such as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood drew
attention to the ideological origins and radicalism of the American Revolution, breaking with
earlier (often Marxian) interpretations focused on social and economic discontents. This new
focus revolutionized historical interpretations, exploring the complex roots of the founding
generation's radical Whig ideology, while reclaiming the autonomous power of political ideas. It
also transformed the American Revolution into a watershed of energy and ideas filtering
virtually all intellectual history of the early republic, including religious history.
Writing in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1972, Robert Shalhope identified the
republican synthesis as an emergent historical interpretation of politics of the early American
republic. While focusing on the classical republican politics of the founding generation, it also
made a strong secondary relationship between seventeenth-century Puritanism and eighteenthcentury secular ideology, making religious ethics a handmaid of Revolution. As Shalhope put it,
"Puritanism, with its heavy emphasis on regeneration, strenuous morality, and a sense of
community, prepared the way for republicanism." 44 Among the most influential proponents of
the synthesis, Gordon Wood found that "traditional covenant theology" fused with eighteenthcentury political science in "an imperatively persuasive argument for revolution." 45 This
religious corollary not only reinforced the myth of New England as the spiritual powerhouse of
republicanism, but also subtly influenced the historical study of American religion, yoking
spirituality to political rhetoric. As Daniel Rodgers noted, however, the republican synthesis was
a "paradigm shift" in historical understanding of the early republic, rooted in historians' need to
"unlock the basic riddles of American politics and political culture" within a unifying interpretive
matrix. 46
Published in 1989, Nathan Hatch's influential Democratization of American Christianity
further conflated religious and political themes of the early American republic. Hatch
emphasized the post-revolutionary dynamism of what has been conventionally called the Second
Great Awakening. "Respect for authority, tradition, station, and education eroded," Hatch
44
Robert E. Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in
American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 29, no. 1 (January, 1972), 63.
45
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1969), 118.
46
Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History, vol. 79, no. 1, (June,
1992), 12. John Adams’s comment of 1807—“[t]here is not a more unintelligible word in the English language than
republicanism," is perhaps salutary here. Rogers, "Republicanism," 38.
14
asserted, attributing evangelical enthusiasm to the political zeitgeist. 47 Gordon Wood (whose
celebration of "the democratization of mind" in the early republic inspired Hatch's title)
described the book as "the best book on religion in the early Republic that has ever been
written." 48 Stephen Marini called it "a landmark," which rejected "the recent historiography of
the Second Great Awakening as the extension of conservative social control into frontier
society." At the same time, Marini noted that Hatch’s "tendency to subordinate religion to
politics" obscured the significance of traditional theological currents in the revivals. 49 Stephen
Stein noted strong resemblance between Hatch’s depictions of American society during the
period 1790 to 1830 and "social processes associated with rites of passage by Victor Turner and
other anthropologists." 50 In particular, Turner’s conception of communitas – "direct, egalitarian
encounter" between participants in ritual acts – established a type of liminal anti-structure that
determined Hatch’s socially radical reading of revivalism. 51
Revivalists were seldom political revolutionaries. While one recent scholar has argued
that there was an "almost total lack of organizational structure or form" during the revivals – in
which women, children and black slaves served as exhorters as well as spectators – it does not
necessarily follow that "departures from normal social status," or "departure from normal
religious worship" were socially significant. 52 Evangelicalism was fundamentally hierarchical,
and the Kingdom of Heaven was never simply a metaphor. Eschatological zeal infused revivalist
reform campaigns, most notably against slavery, but the overthrow of social order was rarely an
overlying motive for such crusades, even where it might be the unintended consequence.
Evangelical culture was more than an accretion of moral attitudes. Evangelicals opposed slavery
and other sins not merely because they were immoral, but also because they impeded the
salvation of souls, standing as stumbling stones to the millennial reign of Christ on Earth.
47
Hatch, Democratization, 6.
Quoted in Stephen J. Stein, “Radical Protestantism and Religious Populism,” American Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2
(June 1992), 266. See also: Gordon S. Wood, "The "Democratization of Mind in the American Revolution,"
Leadership in the American Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1974).
49
Stephen Marini, "The Democratization of American Christianity" (review), The American Historical Review, vol.
96, no. 2. (April 1991), 603.
48
50
Stein, “Radical Protestantism,” 268.
Benjamin C. Ray, “Victor Turner,” Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: MacMillan, 1987),
15:95. For an in-depth discussion of communitas, see: Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 94-130.
52
Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 226, 231-32.
51
15
This study questions the assumption flowing from Hatch's Democratization and recent
studies building upon it, that American evangelical religion necessarily or essentially sprang
from broader currents in secular culture. No original quality in the revivalism of the Great
Revival distinguished it as more or less democratic than previous periods of evangelical activity.
Hatch's conception of democratic American Christianity conflated populist religious rhetoric
with political ideals. Indeed, "populism" better describes Hatch's "democratization," defined as
"the incarnation of the church into popular culture." 53 As Marilyn Westerkamp persuasively
argued, American revivalism stretched back across the Atlantic, where the earliest archetypal
revivals were lay-driven. 54 John Boles noted, however, that evangelical focus on Christian
sanctification tempered the communal aspects of revival. Theological categories continued to
inform popular evangelical thought, but the theological emphasis was "personal, inward,
pietistic." 55
The three biographical subjects at the heart of this study reveal the underlying tensions
between the personal and private worldviews of early settlers, far removed from depictions of a
monocultural "Bible Belt" that persist in some contemporary scholarship. In her influential
study, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, Christine Heyrman argued that southern
evangelical leaders sheepishly accommodated their gospel message to the values of slaveholding
elites, trading prophetic authority for political influence. Heyrman constructed her thesis upon a
hostile critique of southern evangelicalism, both historical and contemporary. Evangelical
leaders, she argued, "recast the very cultures they claim[ed] to represent." As she freely
acknowledged, however, southern evangelicalism emerged from "a richly varied popular
culture." 56 It seems facile to argue, as Heyrman does, that Southern evangelicalism was simply
the bastard child of the antebellum pulpit, conceived by an evangelical clergy collectively trading
their conscience behind the backs of their witless congregations. Evangelical culture evolved,
but the outlines of trans-Appalachian evangelical identity were founded in raw expressions of
popular piety.
53
Hatch, Democratization, 9. Hatch fails to clarify what he means by “popular culture;” his distinction between
evangelical and popular culture is fuzzy at best.
54
Marilyn Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scotch-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625-1760 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988).
55
Boles, The Great Revival, 125.
56
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997),
260, 255.
16
This study sheds light on the faltering development of religious and cultural consensus
over time, a process much less linear and less complete than generalizing terms such as the
"frontier" or "Bible Belt" imply. The Ohio Valley's settler society was scraped together from
disparate colonial experience. Most settlers originated from the southern backcountry, often
hailing from communities steeped, but by no means saturated, in religious revival. Many
settlers, such as John Bradford, resisted the evangelical gospel before, during, and after the Great
Revival, although attempts to stifle its message misfired. Kentucky is typically seen as a
beginning point of the Second Great Awakening, but such interpretation heedlessly minimizes
historical continuities with colonial backcountry evangelicalism. Revivals at Cane Ridge and
Logan County sprang from the religious experience of migrants, especially those coming from
the evangelical crucibles of western Virginia and North Carolina.
Only recently have some scholars begun to turn away from schematic chronologies of
American revivalism towards narratives reflecting the expanding spectrum of religious diversity
in the early republic. "There was" as Thomas Kidd has recently argued, "simply no clear break
between the First and Second Great Awakenings." 57 Nineteenth-century authors, however,
folded the Great Revival within a national narrative of evangelical growth. Historians such as
Congregationalist New Englander Joseph Tracy (who coined the term "Great Awakening" in the
1840s) subordinated religion on the frontier to the shadows of contemporaneous revivals in
Boston, New Haven, and other enclaves of eastern United States evangelicalism. In so doing,
they created what Jon Butler has called "the interpretive fiction" of the Great Awakening, using
the term to describe a discreet, monolithic event in American history, rather than as an umbrella
for disparate revivals. 58 By focusing religion at the biographical level, however, this dissertation
recovers the roots of evangelical piety, reflecting divergent and often surprising connections. It
also highlights the disconnection from this evangelical culture of the secular civil religion
championed by Bradford – a creed that was insistently public and performative, inspired by
political zealotry.
57
Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007), 321.
58
Jon Butler “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” The Journal of
American History, vol. 69 (September, 1982).
17
Many religious traditions, as well as different ethnicities and ideologies, converged in
Kentucky. Chapter 1 of this dissertation explores both the political history and the variety of
religious culture in Kentucky from earliest European settlement to the Great Revival. Its
religious landscape was a maze of folkways and migrations. Migrations are understood here in
the context of colonial settlement patterns and broader patterns of religious demographics. Most
early settlers were nominally Protestant, but their religious expectations differed radically.
Spiritual experiences of the new birth primed many to imagine Kentucky as a promised land.
Some saw the church as a political instrument for instilling virtue and morality in its subjects,
while others were simply religiously indifferent. Settlers' political and armed struggles from
exploration to early statehood are examined in this first chapter, which concludes by surveying
the religious landscape.
Chapter 2 looks at John Bradford, pioneering editor of the Kentucky Gazette and civic
spokesman in the early Bluegrass. Bradford's formal but decidedly un-evangelical Episcopalian
faith had its own center of gravity in early Kentucky. His freethinking skepticism was a political
expression as much as a religious identity, yet it aligned him with an inner circle of elite pioneers
seeking to reconstitute much of the hierarchy characteristic of Anglican Virginia. Bradford's
bipolar identity – a cultural conservative, he nevertheless enthusiastically celebrated the French
Revolution – highlights the shifting and complex nature of the public sphere he attempted to
construct in early Kentucky. His refusal to publicize (or even to criticize) religious revivals in
his newspaper reveals the stark exclusion of evangelical discourse. Moreover, this chapter
examines the discontents of republicanism as a quasi-religious faith propagated by Bradford.
Bradford and his ideological fellow travelers were cosmopolitan men, whose identification and
collaboration with the radical forces of the French Revolution tested the emerging boundaries of
nationalism and national identity in the Bluegrass. The emotive "civil religion" of republicanism
bore marks analogous to, but ultimately different from, the faith of the camp meeting revivals,
including appeals to millennial eschatology and divine providence. 59
Presbyterian revivalist James McGready is the focus of chapter 3 in this dissertation.
McGready was a hugely influential figure in both North Carolina and Kentucky, but his
59
For the origin of the term "civil religion," see: Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Journal of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 96, no. 1 (winter, 1967), 1-21.
18
significance as a de facto leader of western Calvinism is largely overlooked. 60 Nathan Hatch
characterized frontier religion at the turn of the nineteenth-century emerging from "a pervasive
crisis of authority in popular religion," coinciding with the collapse of the Calvinist authority
once embodied in the Westminster Confession of Faith. 61 Pulpit demagogues parodied
Calvinism's creedal incongruities, Lorenzo Dow famously ridiculing the Westminster
Confession: "You'll be damned if you do,/ And you'll be damned if you don’t." 62
Unquestionably, the orthodox Presbyterian clergy lost popular influence in this period, but the
extent of this erosion has been exaggerated. As Leigh Eric Schmidt notes, McGready continued
to preach an emphatically Calvinist gospel to large audiences with some lasting success, even as
Arminian currents gathered force. 63 This dissertation explores connections from McGready's life
and career to broader currents of American theology, rhetoric, and revivalism, as well as
transatlantic traditions of Presbyterian piety, challenging assumptions that the Kentucky Great
Revival was a single-minded revolt against Calvinism.
The fourth chapter of this dissertation focuses on the life and career of Barton Stone, the
host minister of the Cane Ridge revival. Stone's long religious career connects the Kentucky
Revival to broader currents of nineteenth-century evangelicalism and late enlightenment thought,
reflecting important trends in American religious life. While never fully comfortable with the
emotional tenor of the revivals, Stone emerged from the revival movement as an acknowledged
leader of Christian primitivism, seeking a return to the uncorrupted ideal Christianity of the
apostolic era. Admittedly, Stone was complex. His "apocalyptic worldview" sprang from a
framework of Protestant millennial thought, the lens through which he viewed such issues as
slavery and civil government. 64 Yet while attempting to deconstruct traditional creedal theology,
notably Calvinism, Stone developed a complex Biblical heuristics reflecting his enlightenment
sensibility. A sober apologist, Stone's cultural impact calls into question recent scholarly
60
James McGready is not even mentioned in several recent surveys of American religion at this period. The most
glaring examples of this omission include: Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Hatch, Democratization.
61
Hatch, Democratization, 40.
62
Hatch, Democratization, 130.
63
Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 11.
64
Richard T. Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America (Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 92.
19
assumptions regarding the Great Revival as an anti-intellectual movement, especially in the
south. 65
This study finally examines the Shakers, the apocalyptic sect that emerged in the Ohio
Valley at the end of the Great Revival. Though stereotyped today as eccentric utopians divorced
from the mainstream of American religious life, Shakers embodied key impulses of Kentucky
evangelicalism writ large, most notably the rejection of secular republican norms for primitivist,
supernatural faith. Their millenarian expectation, ecstatic worship, and emphasis on the fruits of
the spirit resonated with many recently converted evangelicals, whose own experiences
anticipated similar themes. At the same time, Shakers came into occasionally violent
confrontation with their neighbors, both secular and religious. Many critics in Kentucky and
Ohio sought to marginalize Shaker influence, identifying Shakers with stereotypes of Indian
savagery – a comparison only heightened by Shaker identification with Native spiritual revivals
in the region. Moreover, Shaker insistence on celibate communalism tested the fragile
separation of church and state, precipitating the first (by no means the last) legislative
persecution of any religious group in the early republic.
65
See particularly: Hatch, Democratization.
20
CHAPTER 1: EARLY KENTUCKY: RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL LANDSCAPE
"O my dear honeys, heaven is a Kentucky of a place."
A Virginian preacher. 66
Kentucky was an earthly paradise, if the earliest published accounts are to be credited.
To the historian and biographer John Filson, it was paradise regained; redeemed by settlement
from the savagery of its Native inhabitants. In his early biography of the pioneer hunter, Daniel
Boone, Filson attributes the following words to his subject: "Thus we behold Kentucke, lately an
howling wilderness, the habitation of savages and wild beasts, become a fruitful field; this region
so favourably distinguished by nature… the habitation of civilization." Filson's Boone
contrasted the "horrid yells of savages" to "the praises and adorations of our Creator;" the
"wretched wigwams" of the Indians to "the foundations of cities laid, that … will rival the glory
of the greatest upon earth." 67 Following Filson, the young Gilbert Imlay penned his classic
Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, waxing lyrical in praise
of Kentucky's bountiful nature. Describing its benificent climate, he wrote: "Soft zephyrs gently
breathe on sweets, and the inhaled air gives a voluptuous glow of health and vigour, that seem to
ravish the intoxicated senses." 68 Imlay's book also republished Filson's life of Boone as an
appendix, bringing it to a wider audience.
Filson and Imlay exemplify the literary transformation of the American backcountry into
the mythic frontier of popular imagination. Both authors were widely read, their colorful
descriptions of Kentucky becoming transatlantic staples. European romantics such as Lord
Byron adopted Filson's Boone, celebrating an ideal type of rustic American virtue. 69 Imlay went
to Kentucky after wartime service in the Continental Army, but his literary success came as an
émigré writer in London. He followed the success of his Topographical Description with The
Emigrants, a florid epistolary novel describing a utopian "land of freedom and love" in the
66
Quoted in: Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind: A Cultural Analysis of the Kentucky Frontiersman (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1957), 11.
67
Filson, Discovery of Kentucke, 49-50.
68
Imlay, Topographical Description, 28.
69
Byron, in Don Juan, describes how Boone: "Enjoyed the lonely vigorous, harmless days/ Of his old age in wilds
of deepest Maze." Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1997), 448.
21
American wilderness. 70 While Filson and Imlay projected romantic notions of the frontier, both
men were land speculators, standing to profit from increased migration to Kentucky. Filson
struggled as a pioneer schoolteacher before finding his niche as a small-time entrepreneur.
While he was surveying in the Miami Valley, Shawnee warriors ambushed and killed him. 71
Imlay was luckier than Filson and lived a relatively long life, but this "professional American"
who "promoted himself as a New World Émile" turned out to be a confidence trickster, hiding
his cynical nature behind sentimental prose. 72 Through Filson and Imlay, however, the wider
world first glimpsed the bounties of Kentucky.
The North American interior was a place of wonder. Europeans read with delight of the
continuing progress and discovery of a new continent, as settlers scrambled to western lands.
Propagandists such as Imlay and Filson plotted the Ohio Valley as paradise, envisioning the
western frontier as "the Garden of the World." 73 It was, however, a garden with a history. Long
before Daniel Boone set eyes upon the promised land of Kentucky in 1769, rumors emerged of
fertile lands in the western interior. In 1663, a French Jesuit missionary reported an unknown
country marked by bounteous orchards, abundant game and a mild, almost Mediterranean
climate. This information was relayed to him by war-parties of the Iroquois, whose territorial
expansion was driven by the lucrative French fur trade. 74 Shortly therafter, René-Robert
Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, may have become the first European to see Kentucky with his own
eyes. In 1669, La Salle traveled by river to the falls near present-day Louisville, claiming for
France the land between the falls and the headwaters of the Ohio. Like many explorers before
him, La Salle sought passage to the Pacific and the fabulous wealth of Asia. At the headwaters
70
Gilbert Imlay, The Emigrants, W.M. Verhoven, Amanda Gilroy, eds. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 248.
Imlay fled Kentucky for Europe in 1786, having fleeced numerous investors – including Boone – of land and
money. Posing as a transatlantic revolutionary in London and Paris, he began a relationship with the feminist writer
Mary Wollstonecraft; his infidelity drove her to the brink of suicide.
71
John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt &
Company, 1992), 2-7.
72
Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 232.
73
For more on the "Garden Myth," see especially: Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol
and Myth (New York: Vintage, 1950), 138-50.
74
Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind: A Cultural Analysis of the Kentucky Frontiersman (Lexington: University
of Kentucky Press, 1957), 17-18.
22
of the Ohio, he imagined the Mississippi flowing down into the "Vermillion Sea," or Gulf of
California. 75
Kentucky became a keystone in the contest for empire. La Salle had named the
Louisiana territory at the mouth of the Mississippi in honor of the French king and marked out
the putative bounds of empire across the continent. From the seventeenth-century, France sought
to join her territorial claims from the Gulf of Mexico to the St. Lawrence river, trimming a noose
round the British Atlantic seaboard. At the same time, British colonists moved further and
further inland, imagining boundless dominion through the Pacific. Under its royal charter of
1609, Virginia claimed legal authority in what eventually became the district of Kentucky, a
claim the French refuted . Neither France nor Virginia exercised de facto authority in Kentucky,
but both relied upon Native proxies to bolster their interests. Likewise, the British and the
French fought a shadowy war of attrition in North American woodlands. By cultivating allies in
Indian country, creating networks of dependence and reward, and sponsoring particular Indian
leaders for pragmatic ends, Europeans undermined the "traditional systems of shared power and
consensus politics," at the heart of Native sovereignty. 76 Imperial designs on the territory
between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi River escalated over a hundred years – a gathering
storm resulting in the so-called French and Indian War of 1754-1763. The name "Kentucky"
eventually rang with familiarity in the ears of American colonists, stripped of indigenous
associations, yoked to promises of bountiful nature. By the time the first white settlers arrived,
the land appeared depopulated. Indian hunters in Kentucky tracked deer, turkey, and the
occasional buffalo through summer months, returning to the fringes of the Ohio Valley as the
days grew shorter. Yet this buffer zone between nations, an Indian holy ground, had once
supported flourishing sedentary civilization, encompassing as many as fifty towns at any one
time. 77 The cause of this civilization's decline – by war, famine, disease, or some combination of
factors – was long forgotten by the time the first white pioneers trampled over its ruins.
75
Francis Parkman, The Discovery of the Great West: La Salle, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Rinehart & Co.,
1956), 9.
76
Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 48.
77
Ted Franklin Belue, The Hunters of Kentucky: A Narrative History of America's First Far West, 1750-1792
(Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2003), 3.
23
The earliest written mention of "Kentucky" dates to 1753, when a traveler referred to a
Shawnee town on the "Cantucky River." The usage of Kentucky probably evolved from this
original reference to the river, derived in turn from an Iroquois word for prairie, but a persistent
belief linked it to the "dark and bloody ground." Filson ascribed the latter phrase to a Cherokee
chief protesting the 1775 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, ceding Indian land rights to white settlers –
though most authorities now regard this legend as apocryphal. 78 In any case, Filson popularized
the "dark and bloody ground" theory, if not inventing the etymology. 79 Whatever the original
meaning of Kentucky, association with slaughter evoked the bloodshed of the settler generation.
As Filson's Boone relates, "an old Indian" clasped him by the hand: "Brother, says he, we have
given you a fine land, but I believe you will have much trouble in settling it." Years later, Boone
reflected: "My footsteps have often been marked with blood, and therefore I can truly subscribe
to its original name." 80
Victory for the British Empire and its colonial militias during the French and Indian War
triggered European settlement in the Ohio Valley. Native arms and diplomacy once ensured
deadlock between the French and the British, but from the mid-eighteenth century, Englishspeaking settlers spilled into Kentucky. Surveying expeditions pushed into the region, while
backcountry warfare led colonial militiamen away from home. Both surveyors and soldiers
returned with stories of the fertile lands and game to the west. The end of the French and Indian
War heralded a massive westward surge of settlers armed with axes and long rifles. By the turn
of the nineteenth-century, they were thinning the oak and sycamore forests, and extinguishing
Kentucky's buffalo herds. 81 Bursting the seams of colonial jurisdiction in search of free land, the
first settlers encountered heavy Indian resistance. Following the French and Indian War, waves
of violence broke between settlers and Indians, from Pennsylvania to the Great Lakes and south
into Kentucky.
In 1763, Great Britain attempted to secure Indian allegiance by forbidding settler
migration west of the Allegheny crest. The British government hoped that those nations that had
proven friendly in the late war with France would continue to be so, while those that had not
78
Morgan, Boone, 90.
Filson, Discovery of Kentucke, 8.
80
Filson, Discovery of Kentucke, 80.
81
Belue, Hunters of Kentucky, 237-240; Perkins, Border Life, 77.
79
24
might be persuaded of British good will. The so-called Proclamation Line achieved little, but
alienated backcountry migrants and land-hungry speculators while undermining the Crown's
authority. To most Indians the line was immaterial, because ineffective. To colonial war
veterans such as George Washington, however, the Proclamation seemed like a sad betrayal.
Washington wrote that he could "never look upon that Proclamation in any other light… than as
a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians." Privately he feared that failure to
reward military service with land grants west of the Appalachians would mire wealthy planters
like himself deeper in debt to British creditors. 82 From the mid-1760s, meanwhile, hundreds
then thousands of backcountry settlers moved into Indian country, newly defined by the border.
Although the British government probably intended to regulate the flow of westward migration
rather than to staunch it forever, in most respects the Proclamation was an unmitigated failure.
Designed to stabilize colonial relations with Indian alliances, bringing them into "due
submission" to royal authority, instead it brought further war. 83 Vengeful Indian warriors
targeted settlers as they ventured over the mountains. Despite considerable dangers, agricultural
prospects and a lack of sedentary Indian settlement lured many migrants to Kentucky.
Colonial land hunger, more than imperial policy, dictated the tempo of westward
expansion. To preserve the peace with the Indians, the British government negotiated
adjustments of the Proclamation Line in response to mounting colonial discontent, but was
unable to prevent the westward mass migration of homesteading families. It fell to private land
speculators, wealthy colonial syndics, to negotiate land cessions with various Indian leaders to
prevent the trans-Appalachian west from becoming a squatter's haven. Such treaties delineated
Kentucky's borders from the French and Indian War to the American War of Independence, but
were legally dubious; only selectively acknowledging Indian political leadership and land claims.
Most Natives in affected regions bitterly resented them. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768),
negotiated between Britain and the Iroquois confederation, and the Treaty of Lochaber (1770)
between Britain and the Cherokees opened to settlement the land south of the Ohio River
claimed by those Indian nations. The influx of settlers that ensued only antagonized still further
82
Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 99.
83
Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen, 92-94.
25
those Shawnee, Delaware and other Natives who occupied the territory. 84 Shortly afterwards, a
combination of North Carolina land speculators led by Judge Richard Henderson – a
backcountry entrepreneur with feudal pretensions – put together the Transylvania Land
Company in order to found a private colony to the west. Henderson's most famous agent, Daniel
Boone, led two expeditions in 1767 and 1769, opening the Bluegrass of Kentucky to permanent
settlement. In 1775 the Transylvania Company negotiated the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals,
obtaining all outstanding Cherokee land claims in Kentucky. While the right to negotiate Indian
title was vested in the Crown, the Transylvania colony illustrated the evaporation of the Crown’s
regional authority. 85
Backcountry migrants faced violent Indian resistance. The uprising remembered as
Pontiac's War, or Pontiac's Rebellion, had immediately followed the end of the French and
Indian War, lasting several years as Indian allies sought to drive the British from strongholds in
the Great Lakes region. Beyond obvious military objectives, a religious purification movement
with strikingly millenarian rhetoric drove Native insurgence. The charismatic Delaware prophet
Neolin inspired Pontiac's alliance with crusading zeal. Neolin claimed to have been visited in
dreams by the "Master of Life," an all-powerful manitou, or spirit, urging two-fronted resistance
to white colonization. Not only did the Master of Life demand armed opposition to white
soldiers and settlers, he also urged the wholesale rejection of white ways and manners, including
the use of manufactured goods such as clothing and copper kettles that underwrote commerce
between the cultures. The new revelation also spoke strongly against whiskey, the scourge of
Native life. In return for obedience, the Master of Life promised vindication of old ways, a
restoration of the land from its depleted state and bounteous game to be hunted with bow and
arrow. 86 Neolin acknowledged that restoring this holy way of life would be challenging, but
envisioned complete independence from white trader networks within seven years of his first
vision. His nativism sprang from a growing religious culture of Indian resistance to outside
encroachment, characterized by powerful spiritual awakening. This religious movement was not
simply reactionary, but prompted and assimilated strange dreams and visions that diverged from
84
Perkins, Border Life, 13.
The short-lived (1775-76) and illegal Transylvania Colony was dissolved not by Crown authority, but by an act of
the Virginia Assembly on December 7, 1776. This fiat, asserting Virginian jurisdiction over Kentucky reflected the
broad vested interests of Virginia's plantation elite. See: Aron, How The West Was Lost, 61-64.
86
Calloway, Scratch of a Pen, 70.
85
26
traditional Native forms. As Gregory Evans Dowd has argued, the emphasis on a godhead, or
Master Spirit – though adapted to Native sensibilities – suggests a strong influence of Christian
missionary teaching. 87
While some Indians absorbed religious ideas from white settlers, relations between the
two groups in Kentucky was overwhelmingly adversarial. Early Kentucky witnessed racial
killing on an epic scale. White newcomers and Indians fought in Kentucky with virtually
unbroken ferocity until the mid-1790s. On the ground, fighting was mostly skirmish – Shawnee
raiding parties ambushing isolated settlers; local militias burning houses and killing Indian
villagers. In hindsight, however, these small-scale encounters emerged as part of a greater
struggle for empire in the Ohio Valley. Trans-Appalachian pioneers were footsoldiers in a
decades-old struggle – first contested between the French and British empires, then fought on
behalf of the expanding United States.
Kentucky became America's killing ground, with an estimated 3,600 white civilians
slaughtered in the first twenty years of settlement. According to one source, some 100 settlers
died each year along the Wilderness Road alone. 88 Violence became a normal, even an accepted,
fact of life. One old woman recalled that in her youth "the most comely sight she beheld, was
seeing a young man dying in his bed a natural death." She and her friends "sat up all night,
gazing upon him as an object of beauty." 89 An uglier illustration of the power of death was the
popular adulation of militia captain Hugh McGary, after he tomahawked a Shawnee chief in cold
blood. Although his victim had surrendered following an attack on his town, white Kentuckians
openly celebrated the murder. 90 The culture of violence respected no boundaries, affecting
children as well as adults. Settler children were customarily sent to bed with the warning, "lie
still and go to sleep, or the Shawnees will catch you." 91 As Patrick Griffin has argued, Edenic
87
Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 19-20.
88
Ellen Eslinger, Running Mad for Kentucky: Frontier Travel Accounts (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2004), 50.
89
Robert Peter, A Brief Sketch of the History of Lexington, Kentucky, and Transylvania University (Lexington: D.C.
Wickliffe, 1854), 5.
90
Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill & Wang,
2007), 194.
91
Daniel Drake, Pioneer Life in Kentucky, 1785-1800, Emmet Field Horine, ed., (New York: Henry Schuman,
1948), 27.
27
visions soon collided with settler realisations of a primitive "state of nature" where life was
"nasty, brutish, and short." 92
A macabre fascination with the violence of Indian warfare persisted in nineteenth-century
recollections, fueling the long-established rhetoric recently described by Peter Silver as "the antiIndian sublime." 93 Focusing on Native savagery and the infliction of bodily mutilation upon
innocent settlers, anti-Indian writers such as John Bradford, editor of the Kentucky Gazette,
invoked narratives of white victimhood long after Indian resistance in the Ohio Valley had been
supressed. In November, 1826, for example, Bradford imagined the 1782 slaughter of Kentucky
militia at Blue Licks with lurid detail:
A solemn silence pervaded… the field of battle. No sound was uttered but the cry of the
gorged vultures hovering over their heads. Those who were drawn by affection to the
horrid spectacle, with the hope of saving some relic of hair or garment from a lost father,
brother or friend, were denied this favour. The remains of the mangled bodies were so
distended by the excessive heat of the weather, or so disfigured by the tomahawk,
vultures and wild beasts, that it was impossible to distinguish one individual from
another. 94
Against such vividly remembered horrors, Kentucky settlers first staked claims to selfdetermination. In August 1785 a constitutional convention met at Danville, petitioning
Virginia's General Assembly to back Kentucky statehood, her people having "paid the price of
blood" in crossing the Appalachian mountains. 95 Kentucky faced ten more years of vicious
warfare between settlers and Indians, first under the jurisdiction of Virginia and, after 1792, as a
separate state.
Kentucky forged ambiguous relations with federal authority. Kentuckians distrusted the
federal government, accusing it of failure to secure military help against the Indians. Settlers
adopted states' rights rhetoric, stressing the importance of local leadership and militias to
regional stability. In place of the newly ratified federal constitution, they sought assurance of
future prosperity in the natural bounty and abundance of their state. "Nature," wrote John C.
Breckinridge, Kentucky's foremost republican, "has done everything for us; Government
92
Griffin, American Leviathan, 94.
Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton,
2008), 83.
94
Bradford, Voice of the Frontier, 58.
95
Bradford, Voice of the Frontier, 68.
93
28
everything against us." 96 Yet politicians such as Breckinridge were close enough to the eastern
power nexus to know how much they needed the federal government and the assurances of
military intervention.
Indian resistance to white settlement was eventually crushed – not by local militia – but
by a regimented expeditionary force, led by Revolutionary War veteran General Anthony
Wayne. Wayne's 1794 victory against the confederated Ohio Indians at Fallen Timbers
overturned memories of earlier United States military defeats at the hands of Indian opponents.
It was a triumph not just for the military, but for the extension of federal authority. Before
Fallen Timbers, noted one pioneer, new settlements could barely be set up without "being
attacked or having some Killed or wounded at or about them." 97 By the mid-1790s, settlement to
the "Great West" was already approaching 100 immigrants per day – two-thirds of whom settled
in Kentucky, the remainder heading to Ohio and Tennessee. 98 None of this would have been
possible without the crushing of Indian insurgency, a fact widely recognized by contemporaries.
As Elizabeth Perkins notes, Kentuckians soon saw Wayne's victory as "a common historical
reference point." 99
As the United States grew, Indians were killed or driven from their land, their history
rewritten by violence. American citizens memorialized Kentucky Indians as vanquished
savages, yet the Indian nations had once embodied a complex cosmology and ritual life. Unlike
white settler culture, Indian culture had no conception of secular time, and drew no distinctions
between the sacred and the profane. The Shawnee – the Ohio Valley's most powerful tribe –
imagined the land as an island resting atop a giant turtle in a primordial sea. Their prehistoric
ancestors lived in Kentucky as far back as the end of the last Ice Age, 14,000 years ago. 100 Their
descendants – later known as the Adena – flourished in the region from around 1,000 B.C,
leaving only scattered clues to their civilization: skillfully-crafted pottery and plate copper
96
John C. Breckinridge to Samuel Hopkins, 15 September 1794: Griffin, American Leviathan, 233.
May Stone, "History of Springfield Presbyterian Church, Bath County, Kentucky, established 1794" (Filson
Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky), 4.
98
Albert H. Redford, History of Methodism in Kentucky, vol. 1, (Nashville: Southern Methodist Publishing House,
1868), 272.
99
Elizabeth A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 168.
100
Lynda N. Shaffer, Native Americans before 1492: The Moundbuilding Centers of the Eastern Woodlands
(Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 16-17.
97
29
jewelry, the archaeological remains of a flourishing agricultural economy. 101 Later generations,
including the the so-called Hopewell culture, lived in Kentucky around the time of Christ,
transforming the Ohio Valley into a bustling hub of trade with the Mississippi Valley and Central
America. 102 The Shawnee, remembering their history, considered Europeans and American
settlers, or "Longknives," children of a separate and inferior genesis. 103 Land and lineage gave
meaning to Indian identity, until armed resistance ended in defeat and banishment. By the early
nineteenth-century the Native presence in and around Kentucky was reduced to stragglers on the
fringes of subsistence.
Native burial mounds fascinated early white Kentuckians. Filson thought the remains
proved that Kentucky "was formerly inhabited by a nation farther advanced in the arts of life
than the Indians." He attributed the mounds' construction to the ancient Welsh, crediting the
legend of Prince Madoc, a twelfth-century Celtic warrior who sailed west with his fleet into the
Atlantic and was never heard from again. 104 Filson's apparently eccentric notions were in fact
typical of a period when few white Americans had begun to explore the Indian past, and when
even fewer could imagine Indian culture surviving far into the future. By the late eighteenthcentury, Native cultural extinction already seemed inevitable to educated observers. Thomas
Jefferson wrote that it was "to be lamented, that we have suffered so many of the Indian tribes
already to extinguish, without our having previously collected … the general rudiments at least
of the languages they spoke." 105 Kentucky, the hunting ground of perhaps a dozen Indian
nations, was rapidly swelling with settlers, who competed with surrounding Native tribes for
rapidly dwindling game reserves.
The further west settlers ventured during the Revolutionary War, the murkier and more
nightmarish the conflict became. In backcountry Virginia and the Carolinas, fighting was often
over land rights between feuding families. Some of the earliest Kentucky settlers were in fact
101
Albert C. Spaulding, "The Origin of the Adena Culture of the Ohio Valley," Southwestern Journal of
Anthropology, vol. 8, no. 3 (fall, 1952), 263.
102
Bruce D. Smith, "Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America," Science, new series, vol. 246, no. 4937
(December, 1989), 1569.
103
Jerry E. Clark, The Shawnee (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993). 53.
104
Filson, Discovery of Kentucke, 95-97.
105
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 109.
30
Tories, refugees from the lynching justice of Patriot magistrates and mobs. 106 In Kentucky,
however, Tories and Patriots alike discovered the common cause of survival, encountering a race
war between Native and white. The trans-Appalachian west was not only a different theater, but
also a proportionately bloodier conflict than the anti-colonial struggle of the thirteen colonies.
The British encouraged Native hostility to white settlers and surreptitiously paid Indians a scalp
bounty, as was widely believed at the time. 107 In 1777, Britain stepped up efforts to dislodge
Kentucky settlers using whatever indigenous means "Providence has put into his Majesty's
Hands, for crushing the Rebellion." 108 Despite such strategy, the British failed to support Indian
resistance, abandoning Indian populations to settler reprisals.
The Revolutionary War in the west shaped settlers' wariness of federal government,
throwing men and women on their own precarious resources. Warfare reduced Kentucky to
virtual anarchy, stretching nerves and sinews to breaking point. As Patrick Griffin has
suggested, Kentucky's isolation brought into question the contractual basis of government in
general, "suggesting that adherence to any government had its limits." 109
Despite the disruption of the Revolutionary War, settler migration to Kentucky
continued, rapidly escalating in the wake of independence. Defying prospects of death or injury,
some 8,000 settlers came to Kentucky in 1783 alone, bringing the total settler population to
around 12,000. 110 By 1800, over 7% of United States citizens already lived west of the
Alleghenies, a proportion that was growing continuously. According to census figures, just over
220,000 settlers lived in Kentucky this time, though many had already moved north to settle the
fertile Ohio country. 111
106
Settlers from North Carolina were disproportionately reputed to be Loyalist during the American Revolution.
Perkins, Border Life, 103.
107
In Kentucky between 1775-1782, some 860 settlers were killed – a higher fatality rate (proportionate to the
American population) than anywhere else in the United States. Indians knew Henry Hamilton, the British
commander at Detroit, as the "hair buyer" from his policy of paying a scalp bounty on dead settlers. Faragher,
Boone, 144,155.
108
Griffin, American Leviathan, 128.
109
Griffin, American Leviathan, 140.
110
Hazel Dicken-Garcia, To Western Woods: The Breckinridge Family Moves to Kentucky in 1793 (Cranbury, NJ:
Associated University Presses, 1991), 79.
111
Ellen Elsinger, ed., Running Mad for Kentucky: Frontier Travel Accounts (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2004), x, 58.
31
Early Kentuckians came in search of land via two principal routes: the Ohio River and
the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap. Oral testimonies, transcribed in the
nineteenth-century by Presbyterian minister and antiquarian John Dabney Shane, shed valuable
light on their expectations. Elizabeth Perkins, in an insightful analysis of Shane's voluminous
interviews, suggests a conscious gap between the rhetoric of the Edenic West and the
expectations of most lower- and middle-income settlers. Beyond the travel literature produced
by Imlay, Filson and others, which portrayed Kentucky in an idealized light, most backcountry
settlers still relied on word-of-mouth to rationalize their decision to move west. These settlers,
Perkins claimed, "made pragmatic decisions to relocate based on multiple trips to view lands and
good information about actual conditions." 112
Dreams of an Edenic West were reflected in early descriptions of Kentucky's natural
bounty, although this bounty, and access to it, would prove tragically finite. A four-month long
surveying party led by Dr. Thomas Walker in 1750 – among the earliest to Kentucky – killed "13
buffaloes, 8 Elks, 53 Bears, 20 Deer, 4 Wild Geese, about 150 Turkeys, besides small Game."
Walker noted, "We might have killed three times as much meat, if we had wanted it." 113 Pioneer
settler Daniel Drake recalled that wild turkeys were abundant and "often so fat that in falling
from the tree when shot their skins would burst." 114 The Kentucky Gazette reported the amazing
statistic that citizens of Mercer and Lincoln Counties had slaughtered some 5,442 squirrels in the
course of a day's competitive hunt, ahead of a massive barbecue. 115 Hunting, in Europe the
preserve of leisured gentility, in Kentucky became an expression of nature's benificence. As
Stephen Aron notes, the ease with which "ill-mannered backcountry hunters" lived off the land
contributed to early class division. Would-be gentlemen unable to control the land and its
resources through poaching and forestry laws disguised their animus behind "genteel expressions
of contempt for the impoverishment and immorality of backcountry life." 116 Moreover,
development eclipsed the perception of Kentucky as a rich poor-man’s country, as forests were
cleared, roads driven through the wilderness, and wildlife slaughtered. Before long, noted one
112
Perkins, Border Life, 59-60.
Ted Franklin Belue, The Hunters of Kentucky: A Narrative History of America's First Far West, 1750-1792
(Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2003), 32.
114
Daniel Drake, Pioneer Life in Kentucky, 1785-1800, Emmet Field Horine, ed. (New York: Henry Schuman,
1948), 25.
115
Kentucky Gazette, May 18, 1801.
116
Aron, How the West Was Lost, 15.
113
32
pioneer, the buffalo were "driven out" and the elk reduced to "hilly and uninhabited places." 117
As Stephen Aron notes, however, Kentucky's development "was no simple morality play in
which wily plutocrats swindled ingenious common folk." 118 Those working the land and hunting
game proved every bit as rapacious as absentee landlords and developers, although the
interaction of abundance and exploitation of natural resources stirred friction between wealthy
planters and poorer settlers.
Far from a movement of rugged individuals, Kentucky migration was family-based, with
perhaps 80 percent of settlers in the earliest outposts settling alongside one or more relation. 119
Migration was only the latest phase in a backcountry shift of American demographics that had
already depopulated many Virginian counties by the mid eighteenth-century. Yet the new lands
west of the Cumberland Gap held a special allure for migrants. Before long, the settled southern
backcountry virtually poured itself out through the Cumberland Gap. Coinciding with the first
pangs of the American War of Independence, the trans-Appalachian exodus drove some
colonists to imagine their world turned upside down. As early as 1775, one Anglican Virginian
clergyman remarked: "What a buzzel is this amongst people about Kentuck?" 120 Settlers came to
Kentucky for land. In contrast to the bewildered plea of this parson, many migrants expressed an
almost pagan enthusiasm for Kentucky, one settler exclaiming: "We found ourselves passengers
through a wilderness just arrived at the fields of Elysium, or at the garden where there was no
forbidden fruit." 121
Of course, not all immigrants to Kentucky went by choice. The slave population in 1800
was just over 40,000, or nearly one-fifth of the settler total. One in four Kentucky households
owned at least one slave at this time. Most slaveholding was small scale; the statewide average
in 1800 is estimated to have been 4.39 slaves per slaveholding household. This number rose
steadily through the century with the development of staple crops such as tobacco and hemp. 122
117
Harry Toulmin, A Description of Kentucky in North America: To Which are Prefixed Miscellaneous
Observations Respecting the United States (London: s.n., 1792), 85.
118
Aron, How the West Was Lost, 2.
119
Ellen Eslinger, "Migration and Kinship Along the Trans-Appalachian Frontier: Strode's Station, Kentucky, Filson
Club Historical Quarterly, no. 62 (1988), 52-66.
120
Craig Thompson Friend, "Introduction," Craig Thompson Friend, ed., The Buzzel About Kentuck: Settling the
Promised Land (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 1.
121
Daniel Blake Smith, "'This Idea in Heaven:' Image and Reality on the Kentucky Frontier," Friend, ed., The Buzzel
About Kentuck, 78.
122
Elsinger, Citizens of Zion, 39-40.
33
Most slaves imported to Kentucky arrived with their masters from Virginia, and were at first put
to work in small-scale farm agriculture or domestic labors. 123
Despite the abolition of slavery north of the Ohio River – a sanction established by the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787 – slavery was not yet the focus of a definite sectional identity.
Slavery was instead a general inheritance of colonial society, and few Kentuckians were
oblivious to its complexities. In the unfamiliar landscape of the west, many slaves found new
opportunities for escape. John May complained, in a letter of 1780, that he had been forced to
import "a Negro Man of my own," as hired labor was nearly impossible to obtain. May's slave
promptly “fell in with some worthless Negroes who persuaded him to run away & attempt to get
with the Indians.” Although his valuable slave came back after ten days, May concluded, "this
will be a bad place to bring Slaves to, being so near… Indians that they will frequently find their
way to them." 124
On moral and practical grounds, slavery was debated during the constitutional
conventions held at Danville. The issue was debated with unusual vigor in Kentucky, where
religious arguments vied with its legal recognition in the new state. At one such meeting,
Virginia-born Presbyterian minister David Rice ironically echoed the sentiments of Thomas
Jefferson, asserting: "As creatures of God, we are, with respect to liberty, all equal." 125 Rice and
most of his fellow evangelicals had been raised in a backcountry culture that distanced itself
from the slaveholding interests of the Tidewater plantations, and resented the social pretensions
of the Virginia gentry. Antislavery sentiment was common among Kentucky evangelicals, even
though many themselves owned slaves. Tension over this issue caused tremendous strain among
congregations, but institutional character of slavery was far from settled.
While the Ohio Valley was seen as the center ground of a new, experimental society,
Appalachia formed a daunting, if unstable, boundary in the minds of early settlers. One migrant,
traveling overland from eastern Virginia to Kentucky in 1785, noted the abrubt shift from the
123
Concentrated slaveholding did not seem to preclude general availability of freehold land in early Kentucky.
Ellen Elsinger demonstrates from statistics for 1800 that "counties with high proportions of slave-owning
households… fell within the middle range of landholding rates." Elsinger, Citizens of Zion, 69.
124
John May to Samuel Beall, December 9, 1780, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky.
125
David Rice, Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy: Proved by a Speech Delivered in the Convention
Held at Danville, Kentucky (Augusta: Peter Edes, 1804), 4.
34
tidewater to the Blue Ridge foothills: "On the western side of the mountain the inhabitants
appear altogether different from what they call the lowlanders, i.e. the people on the east side.
They have but few slaves, are much more industrious, and instead of raising tobacco, turn their
whole attention to corn and grain." Beyond the Cumberland Gap, however, the traveler's
impression of Kentucky pioneers was far less sanguine. The Ohio Valley was "thickly inhabited,
by all sorts of indolent ignorant people, who raise a little corn, but depend chiefly on hunting for
their support. They live in little log huts, destitute of every convenience of life; but as they never
were acquainted with any other kind of living, they do not appear unhappy. Their only wants are
salt and whiskey." 126
To the untrained eye, differences between Kentucky's first white settlers were subtle, yet
their culture was far from homogenous. Most pioneers belonged to one of two groups; either
"Cohees" or "Tuckahoes.” The "Cohees" came from backcountry North Carolina and the
Virginia Piedmont. The "Tuckahoes," meanwhile, came from the more prosperous low country
of Virginia. Origins, customs, and patterns of religion distinguished these two groups, who not
only spoke but even ate differently. A typical account told of a fistfight between a Cohee who
preferred a diet of fried homminy for breakfast, and a Tuckahoe who lusted after some "good
rum and hot Tea or Coffey." 127 Such incidents revealed colonial geographical divisions,
prompting one local magistrate to complain of "Distinctions and Particions" among the new
settlers. 128
The backcountry settlers, or "Cohees," were part of a diaspora originating in the
"plantation" of Scottish Protestant lowlanders among the seventeenth-century Catholic Irish.
Most were Presbyterian by default of ancestry if nothing else, and religious dissenters by the
legal definition of the Anglican establishments in Virginia and North Carolina. Between 1718
and 1775, well over 100,000 Protestants migrated from the Irish province of Ulster to America –
the greatest ethnic migration to America from the eighteenth-century British Isles. 129 To the
Virginia Tuckahoe, "the Scotch and Irish" settled in Kentucky appeared "in prodigious shoals"
126
Anon., "A Letter from Kentucky," ed. G. Hubert Smith, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XIX (1932),
92-93. The letter's editor tentatively identified the author as the noted Kentucky lawyer, Harry Innes.
127
Perkins, Border Life, 205.
128
Perkins, Border Life, 210.
129
Patrick Griffin, The People With No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots-Irish, and the Creation of a
British Atlantic World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1.
35
west of the mountains. 130 They arose ubiquitously from the Shenandoah Valley to the first
settlements of Kentucky and Tennesse; according to historian Bernard Bailyn: "A map of their
main settlements is almost a map of the pre-Revolutionary frontier." 131 Yet for these habitual
migrants, prolonged settlement was a rarity, and no map could have done justice to the fluidity of
their habitation.
Three overlapping features shaped the religious landscape of the backcountry south: the
legal establishment of the Church of England, the parish system, and the colonial Great
Awakening. According to historian Timothy Hall, colonial elites "determined to fashion …
societies on the model of Augustan England's balanced, stable social order by creating and
maintaining a complex system of spacial and social boundaries." 132 The Anglican Church
became the legally established denomination in Virginia and North Carolina, although such
establishment ultimately foundered in the face of popular religious dissent and elite
anticlericism. As Rhys Isaac has noted, evangelicalism became a powerful countercultural force
in colonial Virginia, carved out in opposition to the "gentry-dominated milieus" of Tidewater
elites. 133 In North Carolina, religious establishment was more tenuous than in Virginia, but the
Great Awakening similarly invigorated popular piety in both colonies. Revivalism triggered the
expansion of Presbyterian and Baptist churches. While Presbyterianism was organized around
its own parish system – the grassroots organizational unit of its ecclesiastic hierarchy – Baptist
churches were joined in looser associations, more readily accommodated to the practices of
itinerant preaching that marked the revivals.
Land hunger, religious liberty, and geographic mobility went hand-in-hand. Religious
dissenters in Virginia and North Carolina – unshackled from the Church of England's colonial
establishment – moved to Kentucky in droves. Although religion was rarely the primary motive
for this exodus, migrants often organized themselves within churches. Chain migration set the
pattern whereby whole communities, as well as families traveled to Kentucky. Early
Presbyterian congregations reflected communal ties formed in the backcountry south, and
130
Anon., "Letter from Kentucky," 92.
Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 27.
132
Timothy D. Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Shaping of the Colonial American Religious World
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 6.
133
Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia: 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1982),
163.
131
36
Presbyterian ministers were among the first identifiable community leaders. The Baptists also
moved prominently to Kentucky, in congregations such as the "Traveling Church," a wagon train
of some 500 people, including a slave preacher known as "Uncle Peter." The migrants' leader,
Rev. Lewis Craig, promised "illimitable acres of a western Canaan" in his sermons, while
holding out the example of the "Israelitish wandering" of the chosen people. 134
The nascent evangelical culture of the backcountry south was oppositional, formed in
resistance to religious establishment. Throughout Virginia – where the Church of England had
been established since the early seventeenth-century – taxation supported the clergy, parishes
were rigidly delimited, and even control of the colony's sole college at Williamsburg was
entrusted to the Anglicans. 135 The established church enjoyed privilege and prestige, yet it
struggled to coerce religious conscience amid the turmoil of the Great Awakening. In Virgina
and the southern backcountry as a whole, the revivals of the 1740s took time to germinate,
despite the dramatic evangelization of the religious landscape by the end of the century. An
itinerant revivalist noted that in 1752, the western county of Albermarle had "no minister of any
persuasion, or any public worship within many miles." 136 Eventually, however, Presbyterian
dissent asserted itself, fueled by popular religious hunger. This same evangelical spirit spread
even more dramatically among the Baptists, whose numbers multiplied exponentially.
While it is tempting to identify Kentucky's religious revivals with the political ideology
of the American Revolution, such an equation would be too simplistic. The squire-and-parson
world of the Old Dominion had already collapsed by the eve of independence, its religious
establishment swept away by evangelical insurgency. Virginia's colonial dissenters have long
been stereotyped as hewers of wood and drawers of water, who – in the words of Richard
Hofstadter – "were not only unchurched but often uncivilized." 137 As Thomas Jefferson noted,
134
John B. Boles, Religion in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 7.
Anglicanism in Virginia was established incrementally. From 1607-19, religious affairs were the jurisdiction of
the Virginia Company and its appointed chaplains; the establishment of the House of Burgesses (1619) incorporated
aspects of ecclesiastic legislation; from 1624, Anglicanism was more formally established under the rule of the royal
governor. Nevertheless, Virginia remained under the purview of the Bishop of London and lacked "clear
ecclesiastical jurisdiction." Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1072), 188. Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 130.
136
Wesley M. Gewehr, The Great Awakening in Virginia, 1740-1790 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1930), 34.
137
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 75.
135
37
however, two out of every three Virginians was a "dissenter" at the outbreak of the American
Revolution. 138
The Ohio Valley was largely settled by people who had been branded dissenters under
the colonial regime, settlers representing a surprisingly broad spectrum of social backgrounds
and religious experience. The region's distinctive evangelicalism had roots far older than the
upheavals of the American Revolution. Political independence did, however, dissolve religious
establishment – at least in the western United States – liberating religious expression from the
yoke of secular government. Even in North Carolina, the least churched colony in British
America and widely considered beyond the pale of religion, evangelicalism became a powerful
force before the outbreak of the American Revolution. The colony's Anglican establishment was
young – only dating to 1764 – and its influence was virtually neglibile in the backcountry. 139
Ironically, the religious landscape of western North Carolina resembled that of the north of
Ireland, where many settlers had ancestral origins. Not only was the scarcity of churches and
settled ministers an acknowledged fact, but a prevailing ignorance of religious custom was also
much commented on. Virginian planter William Bird wrote in 1730 that the Scotch-Irish of
North Carolina had "the least Superstition of any People living. They do not know Sunday from
any other day." 140 Similarly, Presbyterian revivalist James McGready later complained that his
Kentucky congregations – transplanted from backcountry North Carolina – were peopled with
"profane swearers and sabbath-breakers." 141
Anglicans from the prosperous tidewater region denigrated backcountry settlers as
uncouth heathens. Some of the vivid caricatures of this period reveal vicious class tensions
between the two cultures. Charles Woodmason, a tough English clergyman serving as a
domestic missionary in the Carolina backcountry wrote: "The Manners of the North Carolinians
in General, are Vile and Corrupt – The whole Country is in a Stage of Debauchery Dissoluteness
and Corruption." Describing the population as "Out Casts of all the other Colonies,"
138
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 169.
With a white population of some 100,000 people, and only six ministers for twenty-nine parishes, North
Carolina's Anglican establishment was tenuous from the beginning. Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of
Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 50.
140
David L. Holmes, The Faith of the Founding Fathers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 23.
141
James McGready, The Posthumous Works of the Reverend and Pious James M'Gready, James Smith, ed.
(Louisville: W.W. Worley, 1831), ix.
139
38
Woodmason noted "Polygamy… Bastardy… [and] Concubinage" among the outcomes of
irreligion and an absent clergy. 142
Woodmason's sermons were often well-attended and warmly-received, ironically
suggesting that his dismissive assessment of backcountry religiosity was unwarranted. At one
open-air service in 1768, he wrote, "a large Audience" attended, many coming "20, 30 Miles" to
hear him preach. Woodmason "Baptiz'd Children till [he] was weary," adding that his "discourse
pleas'd so well, they said I was inspired." 143 The clerical services he offered – preaching and,
especially, baptism – were clearly in demand. The fact Woodmason was an Anglican
clergyman, from a denomination largely alien to his audience, was little hindrance to his mission.
On the other hand, Woodmason made enemies with censorious moral pronouncements such as "a
Dehortation against Drunkenness." 144 A pious but irascible man, he viewed backcountry culture
with disdain. Rude and unchurched as the backcountry settlers undoubtedly were, however, they
were more open to religion than he was willing to admit.
Anglican religious outreach was rooted in political, as well as spiritual anxiety. Though
Woodmason wanted to edify the unchurched, he fought against more than just apathy. The
shockwaves of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening rippled throughout the colonies. After
years of neglect by the Anglican church, backcountry roads began opening up to evangelicals.
The New Light Presbyterians and so-called Separate Baptists were Calvinists, whose theology
resonated among settlers descended from Scottish and Irish Presbyterians. Moreover, the
southern Great Awakening was part of a trans-colonial phenomenon, influenced by
contemporary revivals in New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies. The backcountry revivals
often resembled field conventicles of the Scottish Covenanters, but there was more to them than
distant echoes of folk memory. Woodmason acknowledged – rather uncharitably – that most of
the first wave of Baptist preachers were outsiders, "notorious Theives, [sic] Jockeys, Gamblers,
142
Charles Woodmason, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings
of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant, Richard J. Hooker, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1953), 80-81.
143
Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 51.
144
Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 137.
39
and what not in the Northern Provinces." 145 This characterization emphasizes the suspicion with
which colonial elites viewed evangelical interlopers.
Woodmason's struggles illustrate the cultural and logistical challenges of churching the
backcountry, but similar obstacles faced the clergy of other religious denominations, persisting
across trans-Appalachian settler society in the early republic. The Presbyterian Church – unlike
the loosely-knit Baptist connections – struggled to reconstitute its religious authority in
Kentucky. Echoing its parochial origins in early modern Scotland, the Presbyterian heirarchy
assigned individual parcels of land to each congregation. Wherever the Presbyterian church
expanded westward, the parish system strained at the seams. "Congregations" were set out
before communities had settled in them; many communities lacked meetinghouses – let alone
settled ministries – and many settlers found themselves many miles from more or less
inaccessible meetinghouses. 146 Outward migration weakened the parish system, the church's
basic organizational unit. In the absence of clerical oversight, many Presbyterian churches in
Kentucky were lay-dominated on the eve of the Great Revival. The church at Cane Ridge
typified this pattern, established by laymen who continued to exert decisive influence on such
ecclesiological questions as the use of church hymnody, even after the first minister was
settled. 147
The ministerial leadership of Kentucky's Great Revival descended from the so-called
"Log College" network of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, which graduates such as John and
Samuel Blair, and Samuel Finley disseminated through colonial North Carolina and Virginia. 148
Presbyterian emphasis on an educated ministry was a stumbling block in the backcountry where
advanced schooling of any sort was a rarity, and the university education demanded of pulpit
ministers a generally distant object. Yet New Lights led the way in countering this educational
deficit, establishing a network of homespun schools to educate ministerial aspirants. Gilbert
Tennent's father William struck the first attempt, founding America's earliest Presbyterian
seminary, the so-called "Log-College" at Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, in 1726. Previously, most
145
Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 101.
Leonard J. Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-examination of Colonial Presbyterianism
(Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1944), 72.
147
Ellen Elsinger, "Some Notes on the History of Cane Ridge Prior to the Great Revival," The Register of the
Kentucky Historical Society, vol. 91, no. 1 (winter 1993) 2.
148
Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity, 167-68.
146
40
Presbyterian ministers were educated at the distant Universities of Edinburgh or Glasgow, or the
Congregationalist Yale College. 149 The establishment of the College of New Jersey – later
Princeton University – in 1746 advanced the prestige of Presbyterian higher education, but
proved socially and geographically inaccessible to many would-be ministers.
Through the eighteenth-century, Log College seminaries began multiplying westward.
Growing distinctions between pro- and anti-revival Presbyterians reflected ministers' educational
backgrounds, and manifested themselves in a temporary schism during the Great Awakening.
Between 1741 and 1758, "New Side" Presbyterian revivalists adhered to breakaway Synod of
New York, while their conservative "Old Side" counterparts remained within the Synod of
Philadelphia. Reconciliation ensued after the initial ardor of the revivals died down, but the
schism revealed significant disjunctures. The backgrounds of New Side and Old Side ministers
reflected growing differences: the former group reflected the pious influences of the Log
College; the latter were typically first-generation immigrants, educated in the more theologically
moderate Scottish universities. A fanciful satire written as far back as 1740, at the expense of
Gilbert Tennent's brother Charles, reflects the cruel stereotyping of provincial New Lights:
Bishop: "Pray Gentlement [sic], what college or university were you educated in?
3d Candidate. Ch-rl-s Tennent: "Please your Bishop-prick, we were learned in
my father's own college and versity at Shameny."
Bishop: "I never heard of it before – what part of the world is it in?"
3d Candidate. Ch-rl-s Tennent: "Why, it was in America, it was near twenty feet
long, and almost ten wide – but the logs are all rotten long ago. I think I
heard lately, that the wicked people that live there, have made a hog-style
of it. Dear, Dir, what a wicked world is this?" 150
Backcountry Presbyterian seminaries were a key source of evangelical culture,
underground cells of lay dissenters another. One group in Hanover County, Virginia, began
meeting weekly for worship at the home of Samuel Morris, a bricklayer and devotee of the
itinerant preacher George Whitefield. Absenting themselves from the established church, these
pietists were summoned to court to account for themselves, and to formally declare their
149
Janet Fishburn, "Gilbert Tennent, Established Dissenter," Church History, vol. 63, no. 1 (March 1994), 34.
150
Fishburn, "Gilbert Tennent," 44.
41
denominational affiliation. Their self-identification as "Lutherans" embarrassed the members of
the court – more used to fining and admonishing Quakers – who knew no legal precedent for
punishing followers of the acknowledged father of Protestant Reformation. The case was thus
dismissed. Hanover County Lutherans went on to form the nucleus of the 1743 revival led by
the New Jersey Presbyterian itinerant – and former Quaker – William Robinson. 151 As in North
Carolina, outside influences ignited Virginia's evangelical Presbyterianism. The evangelical
flame of Hanover County was tended by preaching visits by John and Samuel Blair, Gilbert and
William Tennent, and Samuel Finley, cementing the influence of Log College preachers in the
region. Eventually, Samuel Davies settled as a permanent Presbyterian minister in Hanover
County, where – despite his youth and frail health – he lay down a steady foundation for the
church. 152
Presbyterianism grew significantly in the late eighteenth-century backcountry, but the
Baptists ultimately presented more pressing challenge to Anglican establishment. Distinguished
by spiritual fervor, social discipline, and an insistence on adult – or "believers'" – baptism, these
dissenters sprang up through the region early in the century. The original congregations were socalled Regular or Particular Baptists, a close-knit Calvinist sect with roots in seventeenth-century
England. 153 Following the conversions of the Great Awakening, however, most Baptists in the
backcountry were Separate Baptists – a more actively evangelical sect, originating in separation
from the Congregationalists of New England during the 1740s. The first Separate Baptists in
North Carolina were Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshal, brothers-in-law from Connecticut
converted under the preaching of George Whitefield, the celebrated transatlantic itinerant. After
various evangelical missions through the colonies, under "the guidance of the spirit," Stearns,
Marshal, and their families settled in the Carolina Piedmont in 1755. In spite of North Carolina's
unchurched state, they came because of the reputed spiritual hunger of the inhabitants. 154
Separate Baptists, inspired by the Stearns-Marshal connection, grew from a small,
disparate presence into a powerful religious movement, soon spreading into nearby Virginia.
151
Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 148; Robert Hamilton Bishop, An Outline of the History of the Church in
the State of Kentucky, During a Period of Forty Years, Containing the Memoirs of the Rev. David Rice (Lexington:
Thomas Skillman, 1824), 42-48.
152
Gewehr, The Great Awakening in Virginia, 58.
153
Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, 317-318.
154
Marjoleine Kars, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 85-86.
42
There they flourished despite organized government opposition from 1768; doing so in longsettled parts of the colony, as well as the backcountry. In 1768, Virginia had only five Separate
Baptist churches; by 1773 there were thirty-four, representing more than 3,000 adherents. 155 In
contrast to the presumptive orthodoxy of the Anglican establishment, the structure and
ordinances of the Separate Baptist churches were highly individual. Their emphasis on
emotional religious conversion, however, and their strict "gospel discipline" or social order made
them a particularly formidable challenge to the religious establishment. 156 The Church of
England, embodied in the county courts, and – more often – the rural mob, was keen to assert
order on these fractious new sectaries and employed ruthless measures to do so.
The persecution of the Baptists in Virginia remains a dramatic, if patchily remembered,
chapter in American history. Church historian Lewis Peyton Little identified over seventy
Virginia Baptist preachers persecuted between 1768 and the outbreak of the Revolution.
Persecutions ranged from being pilloried "with apples and stones," to being jailed for unlicensed
preaching or vagabondage, or being thrashed with canes, or peppered by shotguns. 157 Perhaps
miraculously, no Baptist minister was killed in this period. The brutality of the mob was
matched only by the the preachers' defiance, and several preached to crowds gathered beyond the
bars of their cramped jail cells. Their spirit was not always appreciated; one onlooker reportedly
urinated on the face of the Rev. James Ireland, an imprisoned Baptist preacher of genteel birth. 158
Even the newspapers joined in mocking the Baptists, as in this "Recipe to make an Anabaptist
Preacher" in the Virginia Gazette for October 1771:
Take the Herbs of Hypocrisy and Ambition, of each an Handful, of the Spirit of Pride two
Drams, of the Seed of Dissention and Discord one Ounce… bruise them altogether in
the Mortar of Vain-Glory, with the Pestle of Contradiction… When it is luke-warm, let
the Dissenting Brother take two or three Spoonfuls of it, Morning and Evening before
Exercise… This will make the Schismatick endeavor to maintain his Doctrine, wound
the Church, delude the People, justify their Proceedings of Illusions, forment Rebellion,
and call it by the Name of Liberty of Conscience. 159
155
Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972),
320.
156
Isaacs, Transformation of Virginia, 164.
157
See appendix in Little, Imprisoned Preachers, 516-20.
158
Little, Imprisoned Preachers, 155.
159
Little, Imprisoned Preachers, 233-34.
43
From humble denominational beginnings, Virginia Baptists scaled the class ladder. The
Baptists' upward mobility has been termed a "social revolution," ascribed to local revivals in the
wake of the Revolutionary War, and shifting social attitudes. Emerging notions of
"respectability" have also been cited, in keeping with the austere vigilance of Baptist
membership and republican notions of sober citizenship. 160 Christine Heyrman attributes the rise
in Virginia Baptist membership to the American Revolution, citing diminishing concern among
"ordinary people … for preserving harmonious relations with the [Anglican] gentry." 161 As
Rhys Isaac notes, the Virginia gentry were especially horrified at the conversion of some of their
numbers to Baptist churches. Their emphasis on plain speech and plain dress was an implicit
affront to the genteel aspirations of the plantation class. 162
Virginia Baptists were among the most numerous immigrants to Kentucky in the late
eighteenth-century, and enjoyed a standard of living "considerably higher" than state population
averages by the turn of the nineteenth-century. As Fred J. Hood has noted, taxable income
among Baptists settled in the Bluegrass region was over twice per capita average for 1800. 163
Aside from tax records, the most prominent measure of wealth was slave ownership; the gulf
between Virginia's plantation gentry and western Baptists was narrower on this point than might
be imagined. Slaveholding was a thorny issue, denounced by many Baptist ministers, yet
perhaps a majority of Kentucky's Baptist householders owned slaves by 1800. 164 Slavery
weighed heavily on Baptists and other evangelicals in the antebellum south, but at the time of the
Great Revival, antislavery sentiment was thoroughly revived in the churches.
Besides owning slaves, Baptists numbered among the most prominent public figures in
early Kentucky. Baptist ministers were often brilliant entrepreneurs. Kentucky's second
Governor James Garrard – an outspoken abolitionist – was an erudite merchant, as well as a
Baptist preacher. 165 The Rev. Joseph Craig – brother of Rev. Lewis Craig, of the "Traveling
Church" – was typical of the wealthier Baptist ministry, boasting after thirty years in Kentucky,
160
Gewehr, The Great Awakening in Virginia, 259-60.
Heyrman, Southern Cross, 17.
162
Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 176.
163
Hood, "Restoration of Community," 34.
164
Elsinger, Citizens of Zion, 177.
165
Ironically, Garrard (governed 1796-1804) owned several slaves; his abolitionism typified the paradoxical thought
of liberal slaveholders. H.E. Everman, "James Garrard," Kentucky's Governors, 1792-1985, Lowell H. Harrison, ed.
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 6-10.
161
44
"thirty or forty thousand acres of land surveyed … nor do I owe a dollar in the world." 166 Baptist
leaders also flourished in education. Dr. James Fishback, for example, combined a pastorate in
Lexington with a professorship at the fledgling Transylvania University. 167
Unlike early Baptists, Methodists were surprisingly few and far between in eighteenthcentury Kentucky, where their numbers grew only haltingly, if at all. In the eyes of many
Americans, Methodism emerged only gradually from the shadows of Anglicanism. The
Methodists had begun life as an evangelical reform movement within the Church of England
founded by the brothers John and Charles Wesley. Despite the immense popularity of the
itinerant preacher George Whitefield – an Anglican clergyman and proto-Methodist, whose
eventually fell out with the Wesleys over theology – the Methodists' numerical significance in
the American colonies was slight. The eighteenth-century Anglican church tolerated
evangelicals within its fold, and yet had persecuted colonial dissenters, seeking to assert
hegemony over the colonial Christian landscape. Church of England policy enabled a minister
such as Virginia's Devereux Jarrett – a theological dissenter in all but name – to retain his
identity as an Anglican, blending high church liturgy with evangelical revivalism. 168 Rising
numbers of actual dissenters – notably Presbyterians and Baptists – rendered colonial Methodism
increasingly marginal, even as Wesley's followers became a dynamic force in the British Isles.
Association with the Church of England and the Crown – Wesley himself was an
outspoken Tory – tarnished Methodism's image in America still further, yet the clean break of
the Revolutionary War enabled American Methodism to flourish in the long run. Having
established formal denominational status at the 1784 Baltimore Christmas conference, America's
Methodist Episcopal Church began systematically to expand its network of preaching circuits
across the entire country. This process of growth would reach fruition with the Great Revival, at
last enabling American Methodists to establish themselves on their own terms.
A gloomy prospect of western Methodism emerges from the journals of the English-born
head of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States, Bishop Francis Asbury. Asbury
was himself a tireless itinerant preacher, and first came to Kentucky in the spring of 1790,
166
Keith Harper and C. Martin Jacumin, eds, Esteemed Reproach: The Lives of Reverend James Ireland and
Reverend Joseph Craig (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2005), 203.
167
Niels Henry Sonne, Liberal Kentucky, 1780-1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 133.
168
Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, 328-329.
45
risking personal danger and enduring hardships to attend the inaugural Methodist Conference
there. 169 Though met upon arrival by faithful preachers and converts, he later wrote a frank and
pessimistic assesssment of the religious landscape:
I am of the opinion it is as hard, or harder, for the people of the west to gain religion as
any other. When I consider where they came from, where they are, and how thay are
called to go further, their being unsettled, with so many objects to take their attention,
with good health and good air to enjoy, and 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. 170
The Methodists played an important role in the Great Revival, although some historians
have exaggerated their initial influence. The Presbyterian sacrament at Cane Ridge was truly the
pivotal camp meeting of the Great Revival, a movement originating with Presbyterian settlers
along the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Methodism has often been portrayed as the camp
meeting's institutional source, yet the Presbyterian field preaching of the seventeenth-century in
fact foreshadowed this characteristic form of worship. Admittedly, camp meetings emerged as a
typical feature of nineteenth-century American Methodist worship. Although (oddly enough) the
Methodist Episcopal Church never officially endorsed them, such meetings did help shape
Methodist piety. As early as 1788, Methodist missionary John Haw reported emotional spiritual
conversions, during "a quarterly meeting held at Bourbon county… the Lord poured out his spirit
in a wonderful manner, first on the Christians, and sanctified several of them powerfully and
gloriously." 171 Historian Charles Johnson claimed that John McGee, a Scotch-Irish Methodist
who worked closely with Presbyterian revivalists and witnessed camp meetings among the
Methodists of North Carolina, introduced the innovation to Kentucky. 172 An avowed Methodist
himself, however, Johnson paid little attention to the Presbyterian roots of the camp meeting
phenomenon.
Ironically enough, the over-identification of the Great Revival with Methodism largely
originated with the anti-Methodist, anti-revival propaganda of conservative Presbyterian clergy.
169
Redford, Methodism in Kentucky, 67.
Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: Peoples, Societies, and Institutions, 1775-1850 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 61.
171
Letter from John Haw to Francis Asbury, 1789, quoted in: Albert Henry Redford, The History of Methodism in
Kentucky, vol. I (Nashville: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1868), 46.
172
Johnson, Frontier Camp Meeting, 31.
170
46
Methodism provided a convenient scapegoat for the disintegrating Presbyterian Church in
Kentucky. Anti-revival Presbyterians blamed the characteristic features of nineteenth-century
camp-meetings – itinerancy, lay exhortation, the "anxious benches," and the camp structure itself
– on the Methodists alone, obscuring the complex genealogy of the revivals. The Presbyterian
church chronicler Robert Davidson was adamant:
It is to the Methodists these measures are to be traced. Their own avowals are our
authority for the statement – avowals made with so much self-complacency, that we must
be exonerated from all suspicion of using the language of reproach. It is a well-known
characteristic of that sect, to exalt zeal above knowledge, while they object to the
Presbyterians a tendency to the reverse… boisterous emotion, loud ejaculations, shouting,
sobbing, leaping, falling and swooning, were in vogue, and were regarded as the true
criteria of heartfelt religion. 173
Early American Methodism faced its own internal dissenters, protesting the church's rigid
heirarchy in general and the leadership of Asbury, in particular. A 1792 schism led by the
charismatic preacher James O'Kelly undermined the cohesion of the Methodist movement, while
highlighting social tensions unleashed by the American Revolution. A Revolutionary War
veteran, O'Kelly styled his faction "Republican Methodists," signaling an overt political agenda
beyond the customary Methodist appeal to primitive Christianity. O'Kelly harnessed the
egalitarian rhetoric of the early republican era, presenting "a unique blend of Old Testament and
antifederalist rhetoric." 174 Nathan Hatch has sought to identify Republican Methodism as one of
the pre-eminent examples of the "democratization" of American Christianity, linking its
republican message to later movements in primitive evangelicalism. 175 The appeal of O'Kelly's
message and leadership was timely, prompting the defection of around one in ten mainstream
American Methodists by the mid-1790s. 176 Republican Methodism also made some impact in
Kentucky, claiming the adherence of pioneer missionary James Haw, among others. 177
The 1790s, however, was a period of malaise and declension for Methodism in Kentucky,
of which the O'Kelly schism was a relatively transient manifestation. Driven partly by
emigration from Kentucky to Ohio, and partly by the stagnation of the church's missionary
173
Davidson, History of the Presbyterian Church, 140.
Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 203.
175
Hatch, Democratization, 70.
176
Redford, History of Methodism in Kentucky, 253-54.
177
Redford, Methodism in Kentucky, 251.
174
47
enterprise, Methodist numbers actually dropped between 1792 to 1800; from 1,808 to just 1,741
recorded members. 178 National adherence to the Methodist Episcopal Church was also
surprisingly limited at the turn of the nineteenth-century; an estimated 60,000 members in
1800. 179 It would take the Great Revival to transform American Methodism into one of the
dominant religious movements of the nineteenth-century.
Though many early Kentuckians hungered for the gospel, their lack of religious
instruction was a perennial concern among the clergy. Riding through the Ohio Valley in 1795,
Virginian Baptist minister David Barrow bemoaned the heathen indifference of settlers. "Of all
the denominations … in that country, the Deists, Nothingarians, and anythingarians, are the most
numerous," he wrote in his journal. 180 Barrow later settled in Kentucky, becoming one of the
state's leading Baptist clergymen, an outspoken opponent of slavery. His 1795 tour was
undertaken to stake out a suitable plot of land for himself and his family, but local religious
prospects interested him at least much as the agricultural landscape. By linking the freethinking
skepticism of educated elites to the irreligion of the common people, Barrow reified the
shapeless forces drawn up against the gospel in his imagination. Likewise, Presbyterian Adam
Rankin saw infidelity at large, warning that "our present inhabitants, the learned and the
unlearned, the teachers and the taught, fron the highest to the lowest… are tinctured with
deism." 181 Most Kentucky clergymen drew similar conclusions, convinced of that the popularity
of Tom Paine's Rights of Man and the French deists somehow accounted for the weak
institutional presence of Kentucky churches.
Barrow's phrase "Nothingarian" sounds strikingly modern; linked to the term
"anythingarian," its suggests both spiritual vacuity and a promiscuous indifference to religious
structure and ideas. It is easy to see how Barrow drew his conclusions. Perhaps as few as onefifth to one-tenth of all Kentuckians belonged to a Christian church in 1790. 182 This figure omits
the many people who attended church without formally confessing membership, however. Low
church membership in fact concealed high levels of popular piety, where laity chose not to
178
Redford, Methodism in Kentucky, 249.
Boles, The Great Revival, 21.
180
David Barrow Diary, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky. Emphasis added.
181
Adam Rankin, Review of the Noted Revival in Kentucky: Commenced in the Year of Our Lord, 1801 (Lexington:
John Bradford, 1803), 7.
182
Aron, How the West Was Lost, 173.
179
48
subscribe to confessional creeds or declined communion because they felt unworthy to receive
the sacrament. Conversely, the fact of church membership demonstrates little about individual
belief. 183 Barrow's label of "Nothingarian" was handily rhetorical, in other words, but hardly
described actual religious experience.
Historians have often equated the low profile of formal religion in the early south with
popular spiritual apathy. While this is a plausible conclusion, low levels of church membership
need not reflect religious indifference. Most church history has reflected denominational
perspective, often decrying the secularization of society, or the heterodoxy of rival sects. From a
denominational perspective, this trend is understandable, but it obscures the complex religious
mentalities of those uncommited to any particular grouping. Establishing formal patterns of
worship was a persistent problem in post-revolutionary Kentucky. Irreligion was held to be
symptomatic of a primitive state of nature; a brutalizing fear of violence encouraged fleeting
pleasures at the cost of religious piety. Even as life became easier and civil society took root,
irreligion was seen as the hallmark of backcountry primitivism. One early Kentuckian – an
educted Presbyterian – remembered how religion "was but very little attended little attended to
… dancing, and the hustings constituted the general amusement of both young and old.” 184 Seen
from the perspective of Reformed ecclesiology – with its emphasis on covenant and consensus –
the erosion of clerical authority signaled a collapse of religion. That religious influences
rekindled during the Great Revival, however, suggests a different reality. The incohate
tendencies of evangelical religion flowed directly from the Great Awakening's privatization of
conscience.
The archetypal frontiersman, Daniel Boone migrated from Kentucky to Missouri in 1799,
just as the flames of evangelical revival were spreading through the Ohio Valley. An unlikely
exemplar of piety, Boone nevertheless embodied the quiet spiritual energy of backcountry faith,
a quality that persisted through the tumult of the Great Revival, and went hand-in-hand with a
primitive distrust of creedal theology. Mythologized as a solitary culture-hero traversing the
wilderness, Boone's career as a speculator, surveyor, and commercial hunter in fact bound him
183
This observation derives from: Heyrman, Southern Cross, 265.
Robert Breckinridge McAfee, “The History of the Rise and Progress of the First Settlements on Salt River &
Establishment of the New Providence
Church” (handwritten mss), Filson Historical Society, Louisville,
Kentucky, 16.
184
49
within a nexus of land, business connections, and family ties in early Kentucky. Like most
Kentuckians of his generation, Boone did not belong to a church. He nevertheless revered the
scriptures and absorbed subtle religious influences (though stopping short of spiritual
conversion) throughout his life. Born to a family with Quaker roots going back generations,
Boone was raised outside the tradition. He was an occasional churchgoer, attending Baptist
services later in life, but never sought communion, nor did he profess a creed. He did, however,
leave an extraordinary statement to his sister-in-law Sarah Boone in his unlettered hand.
Crippled by rheumatism at the end of a long life, Boone confessed to being "ignerant as a Child"
in religious matters. Exhorting Sarah to "Love and fear god [and] beleve in Jesus Christ," Boone
reflected on his own spiritual condition. Stoically he wrote, "god neve made a man of my
prisipel to be Lost," before adding a hope that his sister-in-law was well on her way to finding
Christ – a surprising wish from a semi-nomadic backwoodsman. 185
Despite the preponderance of unchurched settlers in Kentucky after the Revolutionary
War, by the middle of the nineteenth-century, evangelicals were assuming cultural hegemony
throughout the region. Church membership grew dramatically: in the south alone, Baptist and
Methodist adherence roughly tripled between 1790 and 1813 in the United States, reflecting a
massive assimilation of revivalism. 186 Revivals themselves were increasingly seen as
instruments of church expansion, rather than simply outpourings of divine grace. These cultural
changes resulted in historiographical distortions of regional religious character. The
Revolutionary generation's relative indifference to formal religion was a quandary for church
historians, who often idealized the first pioneers through rose-tinted spectacles. Most nineteenthcentury church historians equated the lack of religious instruction with spiritual deadness,
aggravated by contagion of deistic thought. Yet many were surprisingly apologetic in describing
the religious landscape. Writing in 1847, Rev. Robert Davidson, a Presbyterian minister from
Lexington, noted: "Although these early settlers were imbued with a sense of religious
obligation, and appear to have quitted their homes with a pious trust in Providence … The
185
Morgan, Boone, 431-34; see also: Faragher, Daniel Boone, 310-12.
Heyrman, Southern Cross, 263. Heyrman states: "The South includes Delaware, Virginia, District of Columbia,
Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, as well as Ohio and Indiana
because of the large number of southerners settled there."
186
50
absence of ministers, and of Sabbath services, and being removed from the inspection and
discipline of the church, tended to foster habits of carelessness and irreligion." 187
At the same time, Davidson was certain that actual "infidelity" was attributable to "the
demoralizing effects of war, and the pernicious influence of … the French," in particular. 188
Similarly, the Methodist author Albert H. Redford connected the harrowing cost of the
Revolutionary War to the purportedly devastating influences of Jacobinism and the writings "of
Paine, Voltaire, and others, intended to sap the foundations of Christianity." 189 By depicting
infidelity as an alien growth, nineteenth-century church historians at once exaggerated the
influence of the skeptical enlightenment on the popular imagination and reinforced assumptions
of spiritual barrenness.
Of course, Kentucky's earliest settlers did include some deists and freethinkers, whose
cultural and political aspirations by far outweighed their modest impact on the religious
landscape. Historians have largely neglected these peculiar pioneers, reflecting their own
imaginative blind spots. 190 Many Kentucky deists were members of the Episcopalian Church,
often retaining and sometimes actively reconstituting the social connections of colonial Virginia.
Moreover, the old Anglican Church had been the bastion of deistic thought in Virginia, from
which deism migrated westward – a thin stream of natural religion, reflecting polite metaphysics
and the evisceration of systemic thought. As one typical Virginia parson averred: “every Man
has a moral Sense, & whether it be intuitive, as some think, or derived from Reflexion, is a
Matter not worthy of warm Disputation.” 191 Nevertheless, Kentucky deists (Episcopalian and
otherwise) included some of the most learned and influential settlers. They were a tiny sliver of
the total population, but "had the right numbers in the right places,” including prominent citizens
such as John Breckinridge and John Bradford. 192
187
Robert Davidson, History of the Presbyterian Church in the State of Kentucky: with a Preliminary Sketch of the
Churches in the Valley of Virginia (New York: Robert Carter, 1847), 63-64.
188
Davidson, History of the Presbyterian Church, 48.
189
Redford, History of Methodism in Kentucky, vol. 1, (Nashville: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1868),
263.
190
Niels Henry Sonne's Liberal Kentucky (1939) is the only monograph about the development of freethought in
Kentucky, with a particular focus on Unitarianism. Sonne, Liberal Kentucky.
191
Anthony Walke, “Miscellany Book,” Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky, 65.
192
Jon Butler, “Coercion, Miracle, Reason: Rethinking the American Religious Experience in the Revolutionary
Age,” Religion in a Revolutionary Age, Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds. (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1994), 20.
51
The term "Deism" remains naggingly elusive. Originating in the intellectual soil of
enlightenment Europe, the term was used widely but often indiscriminately, usually (but not
always necessarily) implying a rationally justified belief in a creator deity divorced from
conventional associations of divine providence. Deists' literary and philosophical tastes were
eclectic rather than canonical. 193 Their belief system was without creed and defined in negative
terms, carved out in opposition to the tenets of orthodox Christianity. Deists rejected the
inerrancy of scripture, rejected divine revelation as a reasonable basis for faith, rejected belief in
miracles, and rejected the efficacy of prayer. They maintained belief in a creator God, but
rejected the personal knowledge of God that confirmed most Christians, and all evangelicals, in
their religious faith. Deism reduced God to a cypher. As historian Herbert Morais put it, once a
deist had "finished saying what God was not, the Supreme Being had few positive attributes
left." 194
The 1794 publication of part one of Tom Paine's Age of Reason sparked a minor deistic
revival throughout the United States, but an even stronger Christian backlash. As Henry May
observed, Paine's notoriety lay in the tone of his message more than its content. His description
of the Bible as "a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy" offended many, but he stated
nothing beyond what more genteel authors had already written. 195 Yet such was the persuasive
power of the "late publication of Thomas Paine" that evangelicals in Kentucky at once worried
about its demoralizing effect on popular thought. 196 The triumph of evangelicalism transformed
authors such as Paine into general targets of abuse. Lamenting "the deplorable prevalence of
vice and infidelity," evangelical apologists in early Kentucky compounded popular skepticism
with actual adherence to the cult of deism. 197
193
The two outstanding texts of American deism – Ethan Allen's Reason, the only Oracle of Man, and Tom Paine's
Age of Reason – both fall short of canonical status. Allen's Reason, the only Oracle attracted some controversy but
few readers. The original print run sold around two hundred copies before lightning smote the publisher's
warehouse, burning it to the ground. The publisher later converted to Methodism. Paine's Age of Reason ran into
twenty-one American editions but prompted more revulsion than sympathy, galvanizing evangelicals while inspiring
only "a tiny minority of militant deists." Darline Shapiro, "Ethan Allen: Philosopher-Theologian to a Generation of
American Revolutionaries," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 21, no. 2 (April, 1964), 238; May, The
Enlightenment in America, 226.
194
Herbert M. Morais, Deism in Eighteenth Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 26.
195
Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 174.
196
David Barrow Diary.
197
Davidson, History of the Presbyterian Church, 186.
52
Ironically, Age of Reason was written as a defense of republican natural religion,
protesting the atheistic turn of the French Revolution. At the time it was first published,
however, many American clergymen applauded French anticlericism, directed as it was at the
Catholic church. One New England minister, later a prominent critic of the French Revolution,
defended the proscription of the French clergy, footsoldiers of the "disgusting… hierarchy of
Rome." 198 Despite the reign of terror, Paine was writing at a time of surging support for the
revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution in America, but his American readership largely
misunderstood his polemical object in Age of Reason. Far from strengthening Paine's contention
"that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system
of religion," his words provoked reaction through the United States in defense of Christianity and
against his peculiar conjugation of democratic politics and freethought. 199 The republican
ideology espoused by Paine continued in Kentucky among evangelicals and religious skeptics
alike, but his brand of deism became increasingly marginalized.
Deism in Kentucky never assumed the polemical tone of deism in the northeastern United
States during the 1790s, when spokesmen such as Ethan Allen and Elihu Palmer came to national
attention. In Philadelphia and New England, the deistic movement momentarily attained a level
of organized sophistication seen nowhere else in the early republic. Deistical societies and
newspapers briefly flourished also in such cities as New York and Philadelphia, as well as
smaller eastern towns. Kentucky deism, by contrast, was strangely disconnected from organized
skepticism elsewhere in the United States. Some Kentuckians read Tom Paine, yet most local
deists espoused a more discreet skepticism. Philadelphia's Temple of Reason – the leading
deistic newspaper in the republic – made no reference to subscribers or even sympathisers
beyond the Alleghanies. 200
Alongside the deists, a few Unitarians settled in early Kentucky. In 1796, the English
scientist and religious refugee Joseph Priestley established his Unitarian Society in Philadelphia,
bolstering the transatlantic profile of American liberal theology. 201 Most Unitarians in early
198
Rev. Jedediah Morse, quoted in: Gary B. Nash, "The American Clergy and the French Revolution," William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 22, no. 3 (July 1965), 393.
199
Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005), 81.
200
G. Adolf Koch, Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter
Smith, 1933, 1964), xiii-xiv.
201
Koch, Republican Religion, 236.
53
Kentucky were transplanted New Englanders or immigrants from beyond the Atlantic. Their
numbers included the English-born Harry Toulmin – a disciple of Priestley – and the Harvardeducated academic Horace Holley, both of whom attracted much religious controversy. Toulmin
and Holley had been members of organized Unitarian congregations before migrating to
Kentucky, where such churches were non-existent. Many local deists, however, including
Kentucky Gazette editor John Bradford, espoused Unitarian theology, admiring Christ as a moral
teacher, while rejecting claims of Christ's divnity.
Unitarianism, with its epicenter in New England, was a liberal Protestant reform
movement with limited appeal in Kentucky. Unitarians shared much in common with many
deists. They celebrated the human nature of Christ and sought to dispel Trinitarian mystery.
They also criticised the Reformed doctrines of predestination and the total depravity of man –
criticisms, incidentally, shared with a majority of evangelicals in the early republic. In some
instances, however, the common ground between Unitarians and evangelicals produced
surprising hybridity, such as the Unitarian tendencies of Kentucky Baptist ministers James
Garrard and Augustin Eastin. 202 After Cane Ridge, critics even charged Barton Stone with
espousing Unitarian theology. Stone did indeed publicly question orthodox Trinitarianism,
although he assiduously avoided self-identifying as Unitarian. More generally, overt
Unitarianism – not to mention deism – was incompatible with the groundswell of evangelicalism,
prompting fresh emphasis upon Christian orthodoxy if not "unbending conservatism" among
Kentucky's clergy. 203
Deism was a complicated phenomenon; a medium of sociability, as well as an ideological
framework. The worldview of Kentucky deists was embedded in the public language of ritual
and ceremony employed at "republican festivals" and Masonic ceremonies. Most local deists
were themselves Freemasons, or belonged to other fraternal societies of the era. The symbolic
language embedded in this culture was an integral to the construction of national identity – the
mythos famously but ambiguously described by Robert Bellah as "Civil Religion." 204 The God
of deism was abstract and impersonal, befitting the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence
202
The theological heterodoxy of Garrard and Eastin was not inconsequential, however – in 1803 the Elkhorn
Baptist Association found both men guilty of propagating heterodox theological beliefs, and subsequently severed
their connections. Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 172.
203
Boles, The Great Revival, 189.
204
Bellah, "Civil Religion in America."
54
more than that of the Ten Commandments. Yet the symbolism of deism played an important
role in shaping early national identity. It filtered its way through local print culture into the
secular public sphere, furnishing the political vocabulary of the first Kentuckians. In the hands
of Kentucky's first newspaper editor John Bradford, the emerging language of nationalism,
entwined with enlightenment concepts of natural religion, was the template for a new model of
society. The seismic shifts of the Great Revival, however, soon destabilized the secular
identification of nationhood, republicanism, and public virtue, as evangelical Kentuckians
challenged the collective, secular ethos of the deistic enlightenment with apocalyptic visions
rooted in their own religious experiences.
55
CHAPTER 2: JOHN BRADFORD, REPUBLICAN PRINTER
In a republican government it is a duty incumbent on every citizen to afford his
assistance… the spirit of liberty, like every virtue of the mind, is to be kept alive only by
constant action. 205
The United States was born in revolution, but for citizens like John Bradford, founding
editor of the Kentucky Gazette, the struggle against Great Britain was only the opening salvo in a
global struggle against tyranny, ignorance, and superstition. Republicanism at home and
overseas was interwined, its defeat on one side of the Atlantic heralding defeat on the other. For
many self-consciously enlightened Americans, the French Revolution signified a new dawn of
universal liberty. As historian James Sharp noted, "Americans embraced the French Revolution
as a confirmation of their own revolution." 206 Of course, United States public opinion on
France’s revolution was far from unanimous. National sentiment during the 1790s split between
partisans of revolutionary republicanism and an emerging Federalist faction centered in the
northeastern states, identifying politically with Britain while denouncing the contagion of French
anarchy. Federalist skepticism left republicans unbowed, however; James Madison eventually
calling enemies of the French Revolution "enemies of human nature," a sentiment shared by
many. 207 Bradford wrote in the Gazette, Kentucky's first and only published journal until 1795:
"As the events of the French Revolution must be interesting to every lover of liberty; so the
success of their patriotic arms must be proportionately pleasing. The citizens of this country,
however, distant, think nothing uninteresting, which affects the cause of freedom." 208
Few identified more strongly with the French Revolution than Kentuckians, many of
whom were disillusioned with their own federal government. Far from being a secure outpost of
the United States, early Kentucky was isolated, with an uncertain future. Local economic
205
German Republican Society of Philadelphia, "To Friends and Fellow Citizens," (April 11, 1793) in Philip S.
Foner, ed. The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790-1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions,
Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976), 53.
206
James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993), 70.
207
Sharp, American Politics, 72.
208
Kentucky Gazette, 15 February, 1793.
56
concerns outweighed the luxury of abstract patriotism. The federal government seemed
unwilling or unable to defend settlers militarily against Indian attacks. It apparently cared more
about financing the national debt than the economic interests of western farmers. Access to
outside markets was vital to local agriculture, yet under the Articles of Confederation, Secretary
of Foreign Affairs John Jay bartered United States navigation rights on the Mississippi for
Atlantic trade concessions with Spain. 209 To many citizens, this diplomatic trade-off was
betrayal masked as diplomacy. As Washington himself acknowledged, "The Western settlers …
stand as it were upon a pivot – the touch of a feather would turn them any way." 210
Kentucky was the cornerstone of "the Long War for the West," as François Furstenberg
has termed the North American struggle for empire. 211 From the outbreak of the French and
Indian War in 1754 until Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British army at New Orleans in 1815,
the region was the focus of military conflict between American settlers and the European
colonial powers of Great Britain, France, and Spain. This contest overlapped with American
Indian armed resistance to white settler expansion after the United States War of Independence.
Although America's federal government came to regard the Ohio Valley as a manageable
problem, the neighboring Spanish and British empires still coveted the region, impinging upon
its security. To the south-west, Spain's ramshackle landholdings still seemed impressive,
bolstered by the buffer zone of the Louisiana Territory and control of the lower Mississippi from
New Orleans. To the north-west, British involvement in Indian warfare against settlers was
widespread and widely denounced.
Kentuckians had no love for either the British or the Spanish, yet political disaffection
made their loyalties to the United States tenuous. Though identifying with the sacrifices of the
American Revolution, many imagined pragmatic alliance with a foreign power to be a necessary
evil. Thomas Jefferson warned as early as 1786 that Kentucky might "separat[e] not only from
209
On political relations between the Kentucky frontier and the federal government, see especially: Griffin,
American Leviathan; John Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); James E. Lewis, jr. The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood:
The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783-1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998).
210
George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, October 10, 1784, Papers of George Washington: Confederation
Series, W.W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohigh eds. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992-1997), 2:92.
211
François Furstenberg, "The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History," American
Historical Review, vol. 113, no. 3, (June 2008), 648.
57
Virginia … but also from the confederacy." 212 In this uncertain climate, many settlers rejoiced at
the prospects of a republican France carrying the beacon of revolutionary liberty against the
monarchical empires of Europe.
Reception of radical French revolutionary ideology soon became a litmus test of political
allegiance. To many Kentucky republicans, conservative revulsion in the wake of the French
regicide of Louis XIV pointed to monarchist sympathies. In an editorial of May, 1793, Bradford
wrote: "Instead of reviling the French republicans as monsters, the friends of royalty in this
country should rather admire at their patience in so long deferring the fate of their perjured
monarch, whose blood is probably considered as an atonement for the safety of many guilty
thousands that are still suffered to remain in the bosom of France." 213
It is tempting to read religion into the fervor inspired by France's turmoil, but
contemporary observers only did so with a strong leavening of irony. A stray Federalist voice in
Kentucky politics, Humphrey Marshall later lumped radical republicanism with the zeal of camp
meeting revivals, recalling how Kentuckians celebrated the French Revolution with "frantic
enthusiasm." 214 As Bradford's subversive invocation of the Christian doctrine of atonement
suggests, however, republicans echoed insinuations of superstition and fanaticism against
opponents. Though there were few "friends of royalty" in Kentucky, the phrase was cleverly
chosen, tainting Federalist sympathy with the incense of European church-and-state absolutism.
Accusations of enthusiasm reflected feverish times, in which traditional boundaries
between politics and religion were cracking under pressure. According to historian Ruth Bloch,
the number of American printed works on eschatology rose dramatically at the height of the
French Revolution, between 1793 and 1796. 215 This new interest in end times differed from
earlier forms of millennialism, combining tendencies "at once conflicting and mutually
reinforcing." Alongside explicitly Christian eschatology, a revival of the civil millennialism that
shaped the American Revolution "set its sights on the fundamental republican transformation of
212
James E. Lewis, jr., The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse
of the Spanish Empire, 1783-1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 14.
213
Kentucky Gazette, May 11, 1793.
214
Collins, Sketches of Kentucky, 46.
215
Bloch claims this number "averaged between five and ten times more per year than during the period 1765 to
1792." Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 121.
58
the entire world." 216 For Bradford, a freethinking deist and Kentucky's pioneer publisher,
republicanism assumed providential significance. His Kentucky Almanac included a timeline of
"remarkable occurrences," leading through the major national events of Revolutionary history,
beginning in 1774 (the year of earliest Kentucky settlement) and culminating in 1792 with
Kentucky statehood. Bradford also dated the letterhead on his Almanac from the year of the
American Revolution, in imitation of French revolutionary practice. 217
Bradford's mode of nationalism assumed a quasi-religious passion rooted in universal
republican fellowship, yet it was strangely detached from actual revolutionary developments in
the Atlantic world. Though expressing much ink in praise of Jacobin idealism, Bradford's
Kentucky press was a world away from the scaffold of the guillotine at the Place de la
Revolution. And unlike its French counterpart, the American Revolution entailed no substitution
of civil religion for the Nicean Creed. Though the United States had endured a traumatic birth, it
had suffered no Reign of Terror. Even the nightmarish Indian warfare of the Ohio Valley's
settlement no longer threatened settler society as before, and Indian armed resistance was
effectively crushed in the region, following Wayne's 1794 victory at Fallen Timbers. On the
national stage, the victors of the American Revolution slowly hashed out the compromise of the
Federal Constitution and the Bill of Rights; across the Atlantic, however, the French Revolution's
odyssey of self-immolation was only just beginning. In a desperate attempt at religious deprograming, Robespierre eventually constructed a Cult of the Supreme Being, intended to
replace Roman Catholicism. Imposing a festive natural religion on France's religious landscape
was a doomed experiment, yet it reflected a sincere attempt to embody the general will of
society, first articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's call for "a profession of civic faith." During
the Reign of Terror, the Jacobin dictatorship denounced enemies of the state as atheists –
effectively excommunicated by the creed of natural religion – and church lintels were etched
with the proscription: "The French people recognize the existence of the Supreme Being and the
immortality of the soul." 218 By contrast, the United States remained religiously conservative.
Although Kentuckians toasted the goddess Liberty, republican sentiments scarcely threatened the
bedrock of revealed religion.
216
Bloch, Visionary Republic, 150-151.
Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 97.
218
A. Aulard, Christianity and the French Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1927), 124, 128.
Robespierre was an apostle of civic natural religion, vigorously opposing both Christianity and "atheism."
217
59
Bradford's career as a publisher, editor, and civic leader embodied what Benedict Anderson
dubbed that "essentially North American phenomenon," the self-taught printer-journalist. 219
Founded in 1787, his Kentucky Gazette was a uniquely influential agent of genteel culture,
boosting the local economy and providing space for merchants to advertise the accoutrements of
civilization. Although Bradford was trained in land surveying and confessed to having "not the
least knowledge of the printing business," he became the founding father of western
journalism. 220 Besides his editorial career, he established Kentucky's first postal courier service,
and chaired many public committees, including the Lexington Town Board of Trustees and the
Transylvania University Board of Trustees. His first editorial stint at the Gazette lasted from its
inception until 1802. In 1792, he achieved new levels of influence as the new state's first public
printer. From 1802 to 1825, he retired from the Gazette's helm, although he and his family
retained their guiding influence at the paper and he continued in public life. Bradford returned to
the editor's desk from 1825 to 1827, before ill health once again forced his resignation. At his
height, noted historian George Ranck, Bradford rivaled the great orators of frontier politics in his
"power to shape the popular will." 221 As late as August 1801, as the fires of revival sprang to life
at Cane Ridge, the Kentucky Gazette boasted of "a more extensive circulation than any
[newspaper] in the Union." 222 Yet Bradford's influence soon waned, reflecting Kentucky's
changing milieu.
Although Bradford became an apostle of philosophical secularism, he grew up in colonial
Virginia, surrounded by a fervently sectarian religious landscape. Born June 6, 1749, he was the
eldest son and and second child to Daniel Bradford and Alice Morgan Bradford of Prince
William (later Fauquier) County. The Bradfords belonged to Virginia's middling planter class, a
beleaguered elite on the eve of the American Revolution. Though Bradford's family lived west
of the fall line dividing the Virginia Piedmont from the more prosperous Tidewater region, his
father was a wealthy farmer, land surveyor and Anglican vestryman, with substantial
219
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 1983), 62.
220
Kentucky Gazette, January 4, 1797.
221
George Washington Ranck, History of Lexington, Kentucky, vol. 1 (New York Columbia University Press, 1925),
132.
222
Kentucky Gazette, August 3, 1801.
60
landholdings and perhaps two dozen slaves at the time of his death. 223 Yet during these years,
plummeting tobacco values and rising debt to British merchants fed economic depression,
affecting almost every inhabitant of the Piedmont and hitting the Anglican planter class hardest
throughout the colony. 224 The effects were crippling, the prospects for a settled life in Virginia
increasingly elusive. Economic stagnation and religious upheaval uprooted an entire generation
westward in search of land – including all but one of John's six brothers. 225
As Virginia's economy foundered, its Anglican squirearchy struggled against popular
religious insurgency. Historian Rhys Isaac has shown how a revivalistic Baptist "counterculture"
challenged Virginia's "gentry-dominated" hierarchy, ending the "domination of county society"
by families like the Bradfords. 226 In Fauquier County, sectarian persecution by the Episcopalian
establishment was rife, with warrants issued regularly for the arrest of unlicenced preachers.
Often these warrants were executed by cudgel-wielding mobs, such as greeted Baptist preacher
Richard Major during a sermon. Fearing for his life, Major attributed his narrow escape to the
protection of two bodyguards, brothers described as "giants." 227 Major was only one of over
seventy Virginia Baptist preachers known to have experienced similar persecution in the period
1768 to 1775. 228 With its gospel of spiritual equality, however, the colonial Great Awakening
transformed Virginia's deferential society – underpinned by a tax-supported, legally established
Church of England.
Bradford experienced the emotional tenor of evangelical revivalism before he ever
stepped foot in Kentucky. While Baptist participation during the Kentucky revivals has been
described as relatively orderly, the first wave of Virginia Baptist settlers brought with them a
223
Daniel Bradford's will was written January 16, 1800 and probated on April 28 that year, listing seventeen negro
slaves in the estate divided between his wife and eleven children. The existence of other slaves is implied by
references to those already in the possession of surviving children; the will's execution conferring legal ownership.
John Bradford himself received two slaves under the terms of the will. An excerpt transcript of Hamilton Parish
Records in Fauquier County, Virginia records Daniel Bradford's election to the vestry. For transcript of Daniel
Bradford's will and vestry record, see: Wilson Papers, "Notes," files 1, 7.
224
For economic background on Virginia, see especially: T.H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great
Tidewater Plantations on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Woody Holton,
Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
225
John Bradford's youngest brother, Simon, remained in Virginia. Another brother migrated to western
Pennsylvania, another ended up in Tennessee. Elizabeth Gould Davis, "John Bradford's Contributions to Printing
and Libraries in Kentucky, 1787-1800" (Master's Thesis: University of Kentucky, 1951), 12-13.
226
Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 163.
227
Little, Imprisoned Preachers, 90.
228
Little, Imprisoned Preachers, 516-20.
61
reputation for enthusiasm. Evangelicals delighted in seemingly miraculous instances of
spectators stricken with the power of the Holy Ghost. Interrupting Baptist minister Daniel
Fristoe during an open-air ordination service, one heckler "began to curse and swear and be very
outrageous until at last he blasphemed God and threw himself on the ground… tumbling like a
fish taken out of water." Fristoe described in his diary a riverside service the following day, with
"multitudes … roaring on the ground, some wringing their hands, some in extacies, some
praying, some weeping; and other so outragious cursing & swearing that it was thought they
were really possessed of the devil." 229 Later descriptions during the Kentucky revival echo the
same manifestations of physical distress.
The American Revolution virtually killed off the colonial old order, only vestiges of
which would be reconstituted in Kentucky. The Anglican church typified this sorry mess, being
rotten to its established foundations. The vestry on which Bradford's father served was
embroiled in controversy with the local parson, a wife-beating drunkard. 230 In Kentucky,
Bradford helped to establish the sort of orderly Anglican society that had proven so elusive in
Virginia. Bradford was "a leading man among the Episcopalians," a conscientious vestryman,
memorialized by Lexington's Christ Church parish as "an unfailing supporter." 231 He was also
prominent among the "Lynx-eyed Illuminati" who appalled so many evangelicals. 232 Bradford's
deistical faith had strong social foundations, as well as a distinctly anti-supernatural worldview.
Deism was disproportionately the faith of lettered gentility, yet social class did not determine
religious sympathy, as Bradford knew. His own cousin, John Taylor, was among Kentucky's
most prominent Baptist ministers, having converted at an open-air revival in Virginia. 233
Bradford was among the earliest if not the first wave of Kentucky settlers, part of a
perilous trans-Appalachian exodus during the War of Independence. By his own account, he
229
Little, Imprisoned Preachers, 242-43.
Jewel L. Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in
the Late Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 102-103.
231
Joseph Ficklin interview, John D. Shane papers, Draper MS, 16cc261; Christ Church Parish Records, March 22,
1830, transcribed in Samuel McKay Wilson papers, 51W17, "Notes," file number 7, Special Collections, University
of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky.
232
Bernard Mayo, Henry Clay: Spokesman of the New West (New York: Archon Books, 1937, 1966), 81.
233
Bradford's cousin John Taylor found religion at an open-air revival in 1772, later becoming a leading Separate
Baptist minister in the Bluegrass, where he participated in the Great Revival around the turn of the nineteenthcentury. John Taylor, Baptists on the American Frontier: A History of Ten Baptist Churches of Which the Author
Has Been Alternately a Member, ed. Chester Raymond Young (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1995).
230
62
first visited Kentucky on a surveying mission some time in the fall of 1779. In July and August
1780, he volunteered as a militiaman in the expedition led by George Rogers Clark and
Benjamin Logan against Indian settlements at Chillicothe and Piqua in the Ohio Valley. The
raids were short but brutal, revenge for earlier Indian incursions across the Ohio. Bradford left a
description of the episode, telling how the Virginia-Kentucky militia burnt "more than 500 acres
of corn … as well as every species of vegetables cultivated for the purpose of food," reducing the
Indians "almost to a state of famine." 234 However inglorious Bradford's military career – the
Ohio raid was his only documented taste of combat – he took pride in his status as a
Revolutionary War veteran, a badge of honor in the early republic. Bradford returned to Virginia
briefly, where he was commissioned as an ensign in the local militia. He moved west
permanently around 1782, finally removing his young family to Kentucky in the spring of 1785.
Their first home was "a comfortable log cabin" on Cane Run Creek, some five miles northeast of
Lexington and a dozen more from Cane Ridge. 235
Bradford dabbled in politics prior to his editorial career, but focused his energies on land
speculation and property development. Like many entrepreneurs, Bradford was a litigious,
prickly man. His personal papers attest to nearly a dozen property title disputes with fellow
settlers, including a long-running legal action against Robert Patterson, Lexington's founding
father. 236 Though successful in business, his forays into mainstream politics did not always
flourish. In 1783, he ran for the Virginia Assembly, hoping to represent the Kentucky District's
recently-organized Fayette County, but lost to "the well known and popular Captain John
Fowler, of Lexington." 237 Bradford's private pursuit of land was voracious, and combined with
his position as a surveyor of public lands – one of his earliest appointments in Kentucky – made
him powerful enemies. His career change, then, to public printer and newspaper editor, revealed
strong instincts for political survival.
Bradford cultivated public opinion, but his perceived arrogance shifted the political
weight he tried to cultivate against him, eventually tarnishing his personal reputation. His
Gazette was Kentucky's first printed forum of political debate, encouraging settlers along the
234
Bradford, Voice of the Frontier, 41.
Coleman, John Bradford, 2-4.
236
John Bradford papers (49W37), University of Kentucky Special Collections.
237
Coleman, John Bradford, 4.
235
63
road to statehood in 1792, yet his social pretensions garnered the scorn of a rising generation, to
whom he became simply "A would-be Lexington Franklin" [emphasis added]. 238 And though
Bradford portrayed himself, Franklin-like, as the architect of his own fortunes, he was no social
leveler. His public career embodied a combustive blend of republicanism, theological liberalism,
and conservative social attitudes characteristic of Lexington's gentry elite. The tensions inherent
in Bradford's character and personality peaked late in his career, isolating him from the
increasingly populist tide of Kentucky politics.
Like Franklin, Bradford was a physically large man. The University of Kentucky library
has a color photograph of an oil portrait, showing him in sturdy middle-age. The anonymous
original's whereabouts are unknown, but the image is striking and well-executed. In an 1897
melodrama, The Choir Invisible, Lexington author John Lane Allen mused on a portrait closely
matching this version. The political manueverings of a fictionalized Bradford fueled much of
Allen's storyline, and though ephemeral, Allen's description is worth repeating. Bradford, he
wrote, was "a bald-headed man with a seedy growth of hair sprouting laterally from his temples
… a long arched nose, running on its own hook in a southwesterly direction; one eye a little
higher than the other; a protruding upper lip, as though he had behind it a pair of the false teeth
of the time, which were fixed into the jaws by springs and hinges." Despite his unflattering
depiction, Allen described his subject as "a foremost personage of his day, of indispensable
substance … Revolutionary soldier, Indian warrior; editor and proprietor of the Kentucky
Gazette, the first newspaper in the wilderness … author of the now famous 'Notes,' which will
perhaps make his name immortal among American historians." 239 Allen evoked a landscape of
intrigue in which Bradford and his fellow Kentucky republicans – mocked as "Frenchified
Jacobins" in their own day – plotted secession from the United States. 240
The paradox of Bradford's career – in microcosm, the paradox of early western
republicanism – was a steady articulation of republican patriotic sentiments despite an often
tenuous allegiance to the fledgling United States. Bradford edited the Gazette during an
238
William Barry to John Barry, January 2, 1807, William Taylor Barry Letters, Filson Historical Society,
Louisville, Kentucky.
239
John Lane Allen, The Choir Invisible (London: MacMillan & Co., 1897), 95-96. The University of Kentucky
holds a photograph of a portrait of Bradford, corresponding to Allen's description. The artist, location, and date of
the original are unknown. See: Samuel McKay Wilson papers (51W17), University of Kentucky Special
Collections, Margaret I. King Library, Lexington, Kentucky.
240
Mayo, Henry Clay, 81.
64
especially fraught, even antagonistic, period between settlers and the federal government. His
journalism embraced both the radicalism of the French Revolution and Jeffersonian
Republicanism, reflecting the national debates raging around states' rights and the meaning of
liberty. As Kentucky developed economically and politically, Bradford struggled to reconcile
with its rising tide of populist democracy. He went on to nurture the careers of many Kentucky
statesmen – notably Whig firebrand Henry Clay – yet his personal vision of Kentucky as a
prosperous, enlightened commonwealth emerged from the American Revolution, a time of
contrasting national visions and international turmoil.
Bradford's biographical elusiveness remains daunting. For all his substance, surprisingly
little manuscript material survives of anything beyond his public life. Ironically, for so
meticulous a chronicler of Kentucky affairs, Bradford was less than meticulous about his own
records, a trait he passed on to his children. As Bradford's close friend Joseph Ficklin remarked:
"There was a perfect carelessness in the race of the Bradfords. They none of them preserved
anything." 241
Kentucky jurist and historian Samuel McKay Wilson, who died in 1946, remains the only
scholar to have attempted a life in full. Wilson's quest was unfulfilled, despite his amassing
decades worth of notes. Aside from Wilson's efforts, Bradford has garnered only brief
biographical sketches, intertwined with the historiography of regional print culture. There has
been little written about him since the mid twentieth-century. 242 Since that time, historians have
transformed our understanding of the frontier from what Frederick Jackson Turner termed "the
line of most rapid and effective Americanization" into a very different region, a cultural middle
ground marked by shifting sources of identity. 243 Bradford's life and career exemplify the
ferment of his setting, beckoning him from obscurity into the broader historical context of the
early United States.
241
John D. Shane interview with Joseph Ficklin, Lyman Copeland Draper Manuscript Collection, 16cc257
The major published secondary sources on John Bradford are: Douglas C. McMurtrie, John Bradford, Pioneer
Printer of Kentucky (Springfield: Private Print, 1931); Willard Rouse Jillson, The First Printing Press in Kentucky:
Some Account of Thomas Parvin and John Bradford and the Establishment of the Kentucky Gazette in Lexington in
the Year 1787 (Louisville: C.T. Dearing, 1936); Samuel McKay Wilson, "The 'Kentucky Gazette' and John Bradford
its Founder," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. xxxi, pt. 2 (1937); J. Winston Coleman, John
Bradford, Esq.: Pioneer Kentucky Printer and Historian (Lexington: Winburn Press, 1950.
243
Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," 39.
242
65
As someone involved in politics beyond the bounds of Kentucky, Bradford deserves
attention. A recent major study of newspaper politics in the early republic mentions the
Kentucky Gazette only fleetingly, while ignoring Bradford altogether. 244 Moreover, with the
region's political and intellectual life sidelined on the margins of national history, Kentucky
historians themselves significantly neglect Bradford. What little awareness persists owes much
to the republication of his "Notes on Kentucky," a compendium of historical articles published in
the Gazette between August 1826 and February 1829. Less widely celebrated than John Lane
Allen anticipated, the "Notes" nevertheless remain an important historical source, accepted by
Bradford's contemporaries as "the best, most accurate account of K[entuck]y" then available. 245
In 1993, the "Notes" appeared for the first time in a complete, single volume, edited and
introduced by the late doyen of Kentucky historians, Thomas D. Clark. "No other Kentuckian,"
he wrote of Bradford, "has made so complete a record of his generation." Unlike the
comprehensive but curmudgeonly 1824 History of Kentucky by local Federalist Humphrey
Marshall, Bradford's "Notes" created a sympathetic panorama of the pioneer generation. 246 In
them, Bradford focused on brutal Indian conflict and Kentucky's early political struggles,
glorifying the Lexington Democratic Society and colorful characters such as Daniel Boone and
"Mad" Anthony Wayne. As Clark argued, however, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia
influenced Bradford's "Notes on Kentucky." Bradford idolized Jefferson, and the "Notes" reflect
a radical republican worldview colored by deism, covering politics comprehensively, while
barely sketching Kentucky's complex religious landscape. Illustrating Bradford's disregard for
evangelical religion, the upheavals of nearby Cane Ridge in 1801 – perhaps the single largest
religious revival in United States history – were entirely omitted. Despite Clark's insistence that
"scarcely an incident or activity" took place in Kentucky "in which he [Bradford] was neither a
participant nor an observer," Bradford traveled through the religious landscape like an
eighteenth-century passenger in the wilderness, the blinds pulled firmly down. 247
For all Bradford's prejudice, though, it would be wrong to label him an enemy of religion
244
Jeffrey L. Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2001).
245
Joseph Ficklin interview, Draper Manuscripts, 16cc257
246
Thomas D. Clark described Marshall's History as "agitated … conservative … [and] "prejudiced." Clark, History
of Kentucky, 383.
247
Clark, "Introduction," Voice of the Frontier, xvi.
66
in general, although contemporaries smeared him with the stigma of Jefferson's anti-clericism.
Like his other hero Benjamin Franklin, Bradford in fact subscribed to the idea of Christianity as
a public good. His expansive philanthropy supported some church-affiliated, as well as secular
causes. From 1816, he gave money to the American Bible Society, dedicated to disseminating
scripture, and one of America's fastest-growing philanthropic concerns. 248 He even publicly
promoted a Presbyterian mission among local Indians, aimed at "converting the Wild Man of the
woods, into the wise, virtuous, and patriotic citizen." 249 Yet Bradford's religion fits what
William James called the "healthy-minded," or once-born pattern – far removed from the
redemptive complexities of authentic spiritual conversion. 250 The emerging culture of
revivalism reminded him embarrassingly of the irrational urges and sectarian strife he had
witnessed in colonial Virginia. He emphasized distinctions between legitimate public religion
and excessive zeal. In his Kentucky Almanac, for example, he condemned "the ignorance and
prejudices of an illiterate people," who attempted to lynch an alleged Virginia witch. 251
Superstition and illiteracy were joined at the hip, Bradford implied, twin aspects of enthusiasm.
Given Bradford's outlook, the Gazette's silence during the Cane Ridge revival makes sense.
The revival seemed too vulgar and parochial to warrant mention, though one settler at the time
found it "remarkable" that there was no newspaper account. For such evangelicals, rumors that
the same "extraordinary appearance" was at work in the British Isles and continental Europe
seemed proof of the revival's divine authenticity. 252 From the Gazette's secular standpoint,
however, absence of coverage reflected editorial concerns typical of this period. Like most
journals of its era, news reports were generally digested from sources distant from local events.
Furthermore, Bradford sought to deny the revival the oxygen of publicity, both by ignoring the
event itself and by prohibiting revivalists from advertising future revivals within its pages. In the
strongly oral culture of Kentucky, camp meetings were substantially advertised by word of
mouth, in any case.
Coverage of local news in the Gazette instead reflected what Catherine Albanese has called
248
Dwight Lawrence Mikkelson, "Kentucky Gazette, 1787-1848: 'The Herald of a Noisy World,'" (PhD dissertation:
University of Kentucky, 1963), 202.
249
Kentucky Gazette, November 27, 1801.
250
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures
Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), 140.
251
The Kentucky Almanac for the Year of our Lord 1804 (Lexington: John Bradford, 1804), 12.
252
Henry Alderson to Thomas Alderson, September 10, 1801. Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, Kentucky.
67
"the high theater" of civic republican ceremony. 253 Many events reported had ritualistic, quasireligious aspects, though having no foundation in revealed religion. Among these occasions
were local “Republican Festivals,” as well as a memorial parade for George Washington in
which Masonic ceremony was prominent. 254 The Gazette furthermore projected a narrative of
civic improvement, reflecting Bradford's own endeavors. In 1797, for example, he founded the
Lexington Immigration Society to attract hardworking farmers to the area. 255 And exactly two
months before Cane Ridge, Bradford published a circular signed by Lexington's leading citizens
and its four professional physicians, denouncing rumors of a local smallpox outbreak. 256 In a
comparable vein, Bradford resisted portraying the Bluegrass as a breeding ground of
supernatural enthusiasm, however much he feared this was becoming the case.
As Bradford knew from his Virginia days, religious revivals were riotous assemblies,
attracting not only pious converts but also the curious and the rowdy of all sorts. Though
Bradford shunned such gatherings, eyewitnesses nevertheless identified his son James Bradford
as a mob ringleader at Cane Ridge. 257 James and several friends drew the ire of the crowds,
heckling preachers and making lewd comments. When challenged by the imposing Rev. John
Lyle, James reportedly "drew his fist and said he was a man." He accused Lyle of being "an
infernal scoundrel," and of provoking hysteria among the women at the revival; promising to
"whip" Lyle severely. 258 The threatened violence did not erupt, but the incident highlighted the
dangerous friction between evangelicals and their opponents.
If whiskey fueled James Bradford's antics, his father may have set the example. Lexington
postmaster Joseph Ficklin recalled how John Bradford: "Was a great drunkard, when a young
man, but became sober thirty years before his death." 259 This places Bradford's temperance to
around 1800, squarely in the period of the Great Revival – an intriguing, if inconclusive
253
Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1976), 12.
254
Kentucky Gazette, no. 776 (3 August 1801), 2; no. 697 (30 January 1800), 2.
255
Staples, Pioneer Lexington, 132.
256
Kentucky Gazette, June 8, 1801.
257
John Boles mistakenly identifies James Bradford as John Bradford's brother. Boles, The Great Revival, 96.
258
Cleveland, The Great Revival, 177. John Lyle's grandson described the Rev. as "6 feet 2 ½ inches high; a tall,
spare, raw-bone[d] man," with white shoulder length hair. Draper MS, 15cc69. James Bradford moved to Louisiana
in 1804, founding the Orleans Gazette. James F. Hopkins, ed., The Papers of Henry Clay (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1959), 165n.
259
John D. Shane interview with Joseph Ficklin, Lyman Draper manuscripts, 16cc261.
68
coincidence. As W.J. Rorabaugh noted, the early United States was an "alcoholic republic,"
where binge consumption of "vast quantities of liquor," was becoming more, not less,
pervasive. 260 Nevertheless, middle-class manners were already shifting towards the sober
"respectability" of the nineteenth-century. It would be wrong to ascribe this shift entirely to
religion, however much evangelicalism adopted the temperance crusade. Parallels between the
public morality of Bradford and Benjamin Franklin – the American archetype of thrifty, middleclass sobriety – are telling. Like Franklin, who flaunted long hours at the press for the sake of
"character and credit," Bradford understood the value of exhibiting one's labor in a republican
society. 261 Bradford's industry impressed contemporaries – one recalling how "he set the type
and pressed the sheets himself … without any assistance or instruction." 262 In his autobiography,
Franklin emphasized his reputation as "the Water-American," in contrast to fellow-workers at a
London print-house, all "great guzzlers of beer." 263 The elderly Bradford's physician described
how his patient "drank no spirious liquors, ate but twice a day – and that of the plainest diet." 264
Bradford converted to sobriety, but there is no evidence to suggest that he renounced his
old lifestyle entirely, in the manner of religious conversion. Like many respectable Kentuckians,
he enjoyed gambling, a private and popular pasttime. A widely-reported anecdote suggests the
extent of his gaming habits. He and his young friend Henry Clay often sat up late at the poker
table. The stakes were high, but both men were willing to extend their credit. One night, a game
got out of hand, and Bradford lost $40,000. Next morning, he stumbled across Clay in the street.
Bradford was anxious to settle his debt, but had neither cash nor assets to do so. Clay reassured
him; Bradford’s note for $500 would settle the matter. Some weeks later, the two met at the table
once more. This time, the situation was reversed and Clay owed Bradford $60,000.
Remembering the favor, Bradford settled for the return of his $500 note. 265
Socially ambitious men such as Clay and Bradford made up the pivotal generation whose
republican politics, blending public good works and private enterprise, has been dubbed the
260
W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979),
150.
261
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1858), 176.
262
Samuel MacKay Wilson, "The 'Kentucky Gazette' and John Bradford its Founder, Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America, vol. xxxi, pt. 2 (1937), 117.
263
Franklin, Autobiography, 146.
264
J. Winston Coleman, John Bradford, Esq., Pioneer Kentucky Printer and Historian (Lexington: Winburn Press,
1950), 19.
265
Perrin, Pioneer Press of Kentucky, 15-16.
69
"Bluegrass system." 266 Bradford was among the earliest settlers of Lexington, while Clay was a
relative latecomer, settling in the town and opening his law practice in the fall of 1797. Yet
Clay's connections ensured entry into Lexington's provincial elite. His cousin – the oddly-named
Green Clay – was among the charter officers of the Lexington Masonic Lodge, where both Clay
and Bradford were Master Masons, and which numbered "almost every Kentuckian of note"
among its members. 267 While Bradford laid the foundations of the western press, Clay later won
renown as leader of the Whig party and United States Presidential candidate. His national
political career – boosted at its grass roots by Bradford – rested upon a fortune from the
settlement of "shingled" land claims, the result of slipshod surveying and hasty land allotment.
Attorneys like Clay and litigious speculators like Bradford got rich, while pioneer settlers and
surveyors were frequently cheated of even their most modest claims. The result was a widening
gulf between the wealthy and the dispossessed.
The question of statehood precipitated Bradford's involvement in the public sphere of
Kentucky. Kentucky was the first trans-Appalachian state, but massacres between early settlers
and Indians threatened its survival. From the beginning, many Kentuckians considered
themselves virtually unrepresented in the Virginia Assembly, but resisted the prospect of
financing their own state government. Those advocating separation from Virginia met in a series
of ten political conventions, beginning in 1784 and continually for several years thereafter.
Bradford was a delegate to the early conventions, eventually chronicling their proceedings in the
Gazette – a newspaper that was both the product and catalyst of Kentucky's political
development. In May, 1785, delegates "Resolved unanimously, That to insure unanimity of
opinion of the people respecting the propriety of separating from Virginia … it is deemed
essential to have a printing press." At that time there was neither a printing press nor a printer in
all Kentucky. Bradford lobbied hard to secure his appointment as Kentucky's first official
printer, a lucrative position once statehood was achieved. To fulfill his new role, he personally
undertook to import a second-hand printing press from Philadelphia, shipping it by river to
Maysville, from where it was carried along the Buffalo Trace to Lexington. Chief among
Bradford's sponsors in the establishment of Kentucky's first newspaper was General James
266
Aron, How the West Was Lost, 125.
Mayo, Henry Clay, 118; Charles R. Staples, The History of Pioneer Lexington, 1779-1806 (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1939, 1996), 58.
267
70
Wilkinson, later identified with the so-called "Spanish conspiracy," but a respected local leader
at that time. 268
Bradford first claimed that the Kentucky Gazette's purpose was to record proceedings of
statehood conventions as well as to inform and stimulate popular political opinion, highlighting
the travails and prospects of those "who have come so many miles to cultivate a deserted
land." 269 As he later recalled, it "exhibit[ed] to public view, the situation in which the country
was placed … its then perilous conditions, as well as its future prospects." 270 The situation on
the ground was indeed perilous, both economically and politically. As editor of the Gazette,
Bradford articulated political complexities, balancing the voices of local elites with an eye to
national current affairs. He also followed closely America's global entanglements, through
events such as the arrival of revolutionary France's minister, "Citizen" Edmond-Charles Genêt.
Genêt, disembarking in America to strains of the Marseillaise in the spring of 1793, soon
came close to playing a decisive role in the history of the trans-Appalachian United States.
Thumbing his nose at diplomatic protocol, he at first shunned the capital city of Philadelphia,
arriving instead at Charleston, South Carolina, a southern port known for its strong pro-French,
anti-British sentiments. While the United States government struggled to avoid foreign
entanglements, Genêt sought to enlist American military and economic aid in France's war
against Great Britain. Touring the country, he preached a gospel of international liberty,
denouncing the Washington administration's perceived abandonment of republican ideals. As
historian Harry Ammon has rightly noted, Genêt was no simple diplomat; rather he was "a
political missionary." 271 A florid, sprightly man with a genius for mischief, his populist political
theater dramatized the radicalism of the French Revolution only months after the execution of
Louis XVI. His controversial mission inspired one of Washington's rare "passions." As
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson recorded in his journal – "by god," the President thundered,
268
Thomas D. Clark, "Introduction," Bradford, Voice of the Frontier, xxii.
Kentucky Gazette, August 18, 1787.
270
Bradford, Voice of the Frontier, 97-98.
271
Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 79.
269
71
"he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation." In a cooler but perhaps more
prescient vein, John Adams described Genêt's provocations as "terrorism." 272
As administration insiders feared, Genêt's mission galvanized resistance to the federal
government. Ironically, Genêt's destabilizing presence focused the efforts of a growing network
of anti-adminstration activists, utilizing a burgeoning free press for local political ends.
Beginning in Philadelphia and spreading rapidly throughout the United States, this corresponding
network of citizens' committees, or "Democratic-Republican Societies," set the agenda of
domestic political discourse. Genêt himself suggested the first usage of the term "Democratic
Society" to describe the largest and most important of these societies in Philadelphia. 273 In
August 1793, Bradford proposed the establishment of the Lexington Democratic Society, the
first of three such Democratic-Republican Societies to emerge in Kentucky over coming months.
With Bradford as secretary, the Lexington society was the Bluegrass's most influential political
association during its brief but eventful span. Equating republican ideals with embryonic notions
of popular sovereignty, Bradford and his fellow activists consciously fashioned their society
upon "the laudable objects" and terms of address of their Philadelphia counterparts. 274
The press was the lynchpin of the Democratic-Republican movement. Throughout the
United States, Democratic-Republican Societies drew on multiple sources of inspiration, most
notably the revolutionary Sons of Liberty, as well as the radical Jacobin Clubs then flourishing in
France. Newspaper editors were prominent, with at least thirty known members, including
Benjamin Franklin's grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, and Philip Freneau, the radical poet
and journalist. What Federalist pamphleteer William Cobbett dismissed as "butchers, tinkers,
broken hucksters and trans-Atlantic traitors" was in fact an efficient political network. 275 The
Kentucky Gazette published not only the Lexington Democratic Society's resolutions and
statements, but also those of its sister societies. Combining cosmopolitan sensibilities with local
activism, radical editors such as John Bradford declared the independence of the public sphere.
272
Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 (New York: Harper
Collins, 2007), 468-469.
273
Philip S. Foner, "Introduction," Philip S. Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790-1800: A
Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1976), 8-9.
274
Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 357.
275
Eugene Perry Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790-1800 (New York: Octagon Books, 1965), 12
72
Genêt arrived at a difficult time for the Washington administration. On the global stage,
American neutrality was strained. The French Revolution grew increasingly violent, conflict
between France and the monarchies of Europe dividing public opinion along party lines. From
1791, slave rebellion in Saint Domingue underscored the contagious nature of revolution in the
Atlantic. Against this global backdrop, local issues consumed the attention and energy of
Kentucky citizens. No sooner had Kentucky joined the Union in 1792, than Kentuckians
denounced the federal government's neglect. Ongoing violence characterized settler relations
with neighboring Indians, the Gazette chronicling and commemorating its grim toll. British
encroachments to the northwest violated United States' territory, contravening boundaries
established by the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The Spanish grasp on Louisiana, a territorial possession
since 1763, isolated Kentucky merchants from vital Atlantic trade opportunities, denying them
free navigation of the Mississippi. Such international questions directly challenged Kentucky
settlers' self-interest.
Kentuckians increasingly adopted the rhetoric of regional independence, even as they
lobbied for the federal government to come to their aid. "Nature has done everything for us;
Government everything against us," wrote John Breckinridge in 1794. 276 Breckinridge served as
president of the Lexington Democratic Society, going on to serve as a United States Senator and
then Attorney General under Thomas Jefferson. A close political ally of Bradford, he capably
articulated popular resentment of federal authority. One the Lexington Democratic Society's
earliest addresses, probably written by Breckinridge, complained that the federal government
treated local interests "with a neglect bordering on contempt." The society later remonstrated to
Congress, that "patriotism, like every other thing, has its bounds … attachments to governments
cease to be natural, when they cease to be mutual." 277 In the politics of the early republic,
loyalty began closest to home.
Just as Bradford and fellow members of the Lexington Democratic Society identified
enthusiastically with republicanism throughout the world, the early leaders of the French
Revolution were students of American affairs. Jacques Pierre Brissot, the Girondin
revolutionary leader who commissioned Genêt's mission, made clear in his instructions the
276
277
John Breckinridge to Samuel Hopkins, September 15, 1794, in: Griffin, American Leviathan, 233.
Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 367.
73
importance of the trans-Appalachian west to revolutionary France. Brissot had visited the United
States in 1788, noting western settlers' resentment of Spain's commercial monopoly on the
Mississippi, while apprehending Spain's military weakness. "[I]f ever Americans shall march
toward New Orleans," he declared, "it will infallibly fall into their hands." 278
While Genêt never in fact visited Kentucky, Kentucky was central to his mission. Shortly
after arriving in the United States, Genêt sought out a private audience with Secretary of State
Thomas Jefferson, obtaining letters of introduction for four French botanists, including the
celebrated André Michaux. The botanists covertly sought to recruit a volunteer militia in the
west to invade Spanish-controlled Louisiana, and Jefferson was in on the plot. While the
invasion would carry a French flag, mustering armed volunteers violated the United States
Declaration of Neutrality, signed into law by President Washington that April. Nevertheless, the
Genêt conspiracy appealed widely in Kentucky, a state already known for seccessionist,
conspiratorial politics thanks to General James Wilkinson's alleged dealings with Spain. Armed
invasion promised what the federal government seemed powerless to deliver – free navigation of
the Mississippi and the opening of Kentucky commerce to the Atlantic. Genêt offered the
support of the French National Convention, going so far as to name ageing Revolutionary War
veteran George Rogers Clark "Major-General in the Armies of France and Commander-in-Chief
of the French Revolutionary Legions of the Mississippi." 279 The Genêt conspiracy also let
Bradford and his fellow citizens in the Lexington Democratic Society exert their zeal, in action
as well as words.
In the end, however, Genêt's Louisiana ambitions failed miserably. Through the winter of
1793, Genêt, his agents and co-conspirators wrote frantically back and forth, yet failed to muster
even the 1,500 recruits General Clark had asked for as the minimum force required. By spring
1794, the conspiracy was going nowhere. Worse still, the Jacobin wing of the French Revolution
usurped the Girondist faction to which Genêt owed allegiance, and embarked upon an
increasingly blood-crazed Reign of Terror. Ironically, given Democratic-Republican admiration
for the Jacobins of Paris, the Jacobin government now menaced the very life of the lionized
Genêt. In an ominous communiqué, France's new administration ordered him home at once.
278
Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Policy of France Towards the Mississippi in the Period of Washington and
Adams," American Historical Review, vol. 10, no. 2 (January 1905), 258.
279
Bradford, Voice of the Frontier, 224.
74
Genêt's diplomatic successor, Joseph Fauchet, officially terminated the Louisiana expedition in
March. 280 In a final twist, Genêt's political archenemy Alexander Hamilton intervened to avert
his deportation, fearing his martyrdom on the guillotine. 281 Kentuckians, meanwhile, had
supported the expedition morally and even financially but ultimately, few had chosen to risk
their lives on a quixotic adventure.
Bradford's involvement in the conspiracy was ambivalent, reflecting a more cautious spirit
than his vocal praise of the French Revolution would suggest. On the one hand, he reached into
his own pocket, appearing with several other prominent Kentuckians on a secret list of
subscribers pledging much-needed specie and gunpowder. 282 On the other hand, while Bradford
corresponded with Genêt's agents, he hesitated to publicize the proposed invasion as they
requested. In December 1793, he declined conspirator Charles de Pauw's request to insert a
resolution in the Gazette's pages. The "address to the Inhabitants of Louisiana" included the
wording "That the Republicans of the Western Country are ready to go down the Ohio and
Mississipi." Bradford argued that such an incendiary threat would be "inadmissible into the
Kentucky Gazette," and that if published, would "excite opposition in the Executive of this
State," not to mention the federal government. 283 Yet the following month, a notice matching
this description appeared in the newly-established Centinel of the Northwest Territory, a
Cincinnati-based journal and the Ohio country's first newpaper, published by William Maxwell,
Bradford's recent protégé at the Gazette. Given the timing of this scoop, there is some irony in
the Centinel's editorial motto: "Open to all parties but influenced by none." A fortnight later, the
Gazette republished the conspirators' notice, calling "For raising Volunteers for the reduction of
Spanish posts on the Mississippi, for opening the trade of the said river, and giving freedom to its
inhabitants." The notice advertised handsome rewards including a minimum of 1,000 acres per
volunteer and "All lawful PLUNDER to be equally divided according to the custom of war." 284
In delaying the announcement, Bradford may simply have taken his cue from Kentucky's
280
Ammon, The Genet Mission, 82, 165.
Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 447.
282
The list of subscribers to the Genet expedition included Robert Patterson, Thomas and Levi Todd. Samuel Fulton
to Edmond-Charles Genet, March 29, 1794. "Selections from the Draper Collection in the Possession of the State
Historical Collection of Wisconsin to Elucidate the Proposed French Expedition under George Rogers Clark against
Louisiana, in the Years 1793-94," Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1896, I
(Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 1074.
283
John Bradford to Charles de Pauw, December 19, 1793, Report of the American Historical Society, vol. 1., 1024.
284
Centinel of the Northwest Territory, January 25, 1794; Kentucky Gazette, February 8, 1794.
281
75
Governor Isaac Shelby. Shelby was privy to the Genêt conspiracy early on, but played his hand
discreetly, hoping to avoid a scandal in his home state. As Kentucky's state printer and a close
political ally, Bradford had the ear of Governor Shelby. Shelby also corresponded with Thomas
Jefferson, Genêt's confidante in the Washington administration. Together, Shelby, Jefferson, and
Bradford conspired to minimize the political fallout had forces from Kentucky invaded
Louisiana. In August 1793, Jefferson requested that Shelby investigate reports of illegal
mobilization in Kentucky. Shelby's response that October was nicely disingenuous. Assuring
Jefferson, "that I shall be particularly attentive to prevent any attempts of that nature from this
country," Shelby went on: "I am well persuaded, at present, none such is in contemplation in this
place. The citizens of Kentucky possess too just a sense of the obligations they owe the general
government, to embark in any enterprise that would be so injurious to the United States." 285 As
Harry Ammon has noted, Shelby did not follow the example of Arthur St. Clair, Governor of the
Northwest Territory in issuing a formal prohibition against the Louisiana expedition, but chose
instead to sit and wait as the plot unraveled. 286 In July 1794 – once the prospect of such an
invasion had vanished – Bradford published Shelby's letter to Jefferson in the Gazette.
Bradford's hesitancy, together with that of other Kentucky conspirators, undermined the
French expedition. As historian Jon Kukla has noted, however, leaks of intelligence did not
impede the conspiracy (the Spanish knew of the expedition, but were woefully underprepared for
effective military resistance) as much as Genêt's increasingly erratic behavior, which led to both
his hosts and the French government seeking his recall. 287 By highlighting local grievances,
however, Genêt's American confederates embarrassed the federal government. Once again, the
threat of treason or secession underlined Democratic-Republican rhetoric. The Lexington
Democratic Society expressed sectional demands in language that foreshadowed Manifest
Destiny, resolving "That the inhabitants west of the Appalachian mountains, are entitled by
nature … to the free and undisturbed Navigation of the Mississippi." 288
The Genêt controversy continued to overshadow Kentucky politics. It had already
contributed to Thomas Jefferson's resignation as Secretary of State in late 1793, and tensions
285
Isaac Shelby to Thomas Jefferson, October 5, 1793, in Kentucky Gazette, July 19, 1794.
Ammon, The Genet Mission, 82, 165.
287
Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense, 170-171.
288
"Resolutions Adapted on Navigation of the Mississippi, May 24, 1794." Foner, ed, The Democratic-Republican
Societies, 371.
286
76
within the cabinet reached such a head that negotiations on the Mississippi question were soon
revived. Washington almost appointed Jefferson special envoy to Madrid, before choosing
instead South Carolina's Thomas Pinckney. The Washington-Hamilton faction had small hopes
for diplomatic success, beyond anticipating that American citizens would blame the Spanish
government for any impasse, yet the talks were fruitful. Spain's negotiator Manuel Godoy
willingly gave ground, perturbed by events in revolutionary Europe, while Pinckney forced
American demands with unexpected vigor. In October 1795, Spain signed the Treaty of San
Lorenzo with the United States, establishing friendly diplomatic relations and open peacetime
navigation of the Mississippi. 289 Jubilant Lexingtonians greeted news of the treaty with bonfires
of pine crates and blazing tar barrels. 290 In spite of other national grievances, resolution of the
Mississippi question was a conclusive victory for Kentucky's Democratic-Republicans. While
its members continued to be politically active, the Lexington Democratic Society officially
disbanded itself in August 1794. 291
Genêt's conspiracy was hardly the last time sectional tensions threatened the United States,
but rather it was an omen of things to come. Before the Civil War, each new crisis of disunion
wrought the fabric of American nationalism. From 1805 to 1806, when disgraced former VicePresident Aaron Burr threatened to muster forces from the newly-annexed Louisiana territory in
a land grab against Mexico, newly-appointed Territorial Governor and serial conspirator James
Wilkinson at first supported him. Burr's secessionist plot reflected the bitter dregs of his failed
political career, though its sketchy nature and constitutional illegitimacy did not dampen its
appeal among Louisiana settlers, many of whom were recently arrived from Kentucky. Among
them was John Bradford's evangelical-baiting son, James, who founded the outspokenly
republican Orleans Gazette in 1804. He soon boosted Burr's ambitions, writing:
Gallant Louisianans! Now is the time to distinguish yourselves … Should the generous
efforts of our [Territorial] Government to establish a free, independent republican empire
in Mexico be succesful, how fortunate, how enviable would be the situation of New
Orleans! The deposit at once of the countless treasures of the South, and the inexhaustible
fertility of the Western States, we would soon rival and outshine the most opulent cities of
289
Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense, 190-194.
Robert Breckinridge McAfee, "The Life and Times of Robert B. McAfee and his Family and Connections,"
Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society, vol. 25, no. 74 (May 1927), 131.
291
Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 204.
290
77
the world. 292
Like Genêt's conspiracy, Burr's empire never got off the ground. Burr was charged with treason
in Kentucky, but thanks to legal representation from Henry Clay, the case against him was
dismissed. 293
Retiring from the Kentucky Gazette between 1802 and 1825, John Bradford lost little
appetite for public life, nor did controversy cease to follow him. As Chairman of Trustees at
Transylvania University, Bradford helped lure the college's New England-born president, Horace
Holley, in 1818. Holley had strong liberal appeal, and the Christ Church Episcopalian
congregation to which Bradford and Henry Clay belonged soon welcomed him as their own.
Admirers regarded Holley, a distinguished scholar and "an avowed Unitarian" since 1809, as one
of "the most eloquent pastors that ever graced the Boston pulpit." 294 A tall, graceful man, with
dark receding hair, he was John Adams's personal friend, and had been invited to preach to the
House of Representatives. 295 The poet Charles Sprague enthused that "Holley was a man of
great personal masculine beauty," while the painter Gilbert Stuart considered him among the
finest sitter he had ever captured. 296 Yet Holley's genteel manners and easy ecumenicism did not
appease local opinion. The numerically significant Presbyterian faction on Transylvania's Board
of Trustees especially objected to his theological liberalism, typified by a scripture-free sermon
on the Marquis of Rochefoucauld's moral character. 297 As faculty member Robert Hamilton
Bishop wrote in his diary: "our new President instated last week – A decided Socinian, if not an
infidel." 298
Although much of the objection against Holley's administration was ostensibly sectarian,
his "habits of life" were as much a stumbling block as his theology. Though a clergyman, he
adorned his Lexington house with expensive works of art and neo-classical nude statuary. The
Lexington elite thronged to his parties, but some of his own students considered these gatherings
292
Orleans Gazette, 23 September, 1806, in: Thomas Perkins Abernethy, The Burr Conspiracy (Gloucester, Mass.:
Peter Smith, 1954, 1968), 140141.
293
For background to the Burr treason case, see: Mayo, Henry Clay, 222-260.
294
James Spear Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators Appointed by the Municipal Authorities and other Public
Bodies from 1770 to 1852; Comprising Historical Gleanings Illustrating the Principles and Progress of Our
Republican Institutions, 3rd edition, (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1854), 370, 373.
295
Sonne, Liberal Kentucky, 163-164
296
Loring, Hundred Boston Orators, 373.
297
Loring, Hundred Boston Orators, 370.
298
Rodabaugh, Bishop, 40.
78
too riotous. Moreover, Holley was seen often at the theater and horse races, mingling with the
beau monde of the Bluegrass. 299 At least as damaging to Holley, perhaps, as charges of religious
infidelity, were allegations of sexual impropriety. A tantalizing letter by Thomas Percy of
Alabama to his friend, physician Samuel Brown of Lexington, reveals the inflammatory spread
of such rumors:
I hear lately in Huntsville more explicit accts than you gave me of Dr. Holly & a young
lady of Lexington. It is asserted that she is in the way that “women love to he who love
their cards” but not such as belongs to maidens. That Holly’s family have left Lexington.
That he is to go soon. This must be a feast for the scandalizing folks of that good town –
may they have the good of it. 300
This letter was written fully five years before Holley's eventual resignation and departure from
Lexington with his family, but its fugitive tone suggests the perennial sway of gossip. Salacious
ad hominem insinuations were generally conducted through private correspondence and word-ofmouth, while in this case, the public press was apparently aloof from the depths of domestic
scandal.
According to Bradford, Holley's proposal to rotate Sabbath services at the college chapel
eventually sparked open revolt. According to Holley's critics, however, the president's inept
administration and tactless personal dealings were at issue. The chapel service at Transylvania
was an established Presbyterian prerogative, but Holley insisted it be shared between local
ministers of different denominations, including Baptists, Methodists, and most controversially,
Roman Catholics. Ironically, Holley's opposition on this matter was itself ecumenical. Baptists,
Methodists, and even those of no discernible denomination soon joined the Presbyterians in an
insurgent coalition, attacking Holley for alleged financial incompetence and misguided attempts
to secularize the curriculum. Bradford angrily defended the college president, denying financial
mismanagement, while denouncing critics who "prostituted [the chapel] to the unhallowed
purpose of religious controversy or sectarian abuse." 301
299
Sonne, Liberal Kentucky, 187-200.
Thomas G. Percy to Samuel Brown, February 15, 1822, Brown Family Papers, Filson Historical Society,
Louisville, Kentucky.
301
John Bradford to Revs. John Breckinridge and Nathan Hall, May 7, 1824. Robert Hamilton Bishop papers,
Miami University Archives, Oxford, Ohio, (transcript). Original in Special Collections and Archives, Transylvania
University.
300
79
Attempts to portray the Transylvania University power struggle as a straightforward
battle – between sectarian bigotry on the one hand and enlightened secularism on the other –
must be qualified. On the matter of the college chaplaincy, for instance, the lines of controversy
were surprisingly murky. Many critics accused Holley himself of being bigotedly sectarian.
One local Presbyterian claimed Holley had publicly charged Baptist faculty member James
Fishback, "before a large assembly ... with having preached and endeavoured to impress false
impresions on the students." Holley was further accused by this critic of abusing ecumenicism to
his own ends, claiming undue credit for "the new regulations [of the chapel] (which regulations
Mr. Holley appeared, and I believe did claim as originating with him, but which were the
productions of Dr. Fishback and [Episcopalian minister and antiquarian Rev. Dr. George T.]
Chapman." 302 Undoubtedly, Holley's invitation to the Catholic clergy exacerbated sectarian
tensions within the college, but like most academic power struggles, opposition to his tenure
flowed from a clash of personalities as well as serious religious differences.
The Ohio Valley's flourishing market of locally-published periodicals and newspapers
fanned the flames of the Holley controversy, ensuring victory for opponents of Transylvania's
president. By the 1820s, the Kentucky Gazette was just one of many local journals. Though it
retained its original tone of secular republicanism, the Gazette competed with a variety of new
journals, some of which were irreverently democratic in editorial outlook, others explicitly
religious. In 1812, for example, Lexington publisher Thomas Skillman issued the short-lived
Evangelical Record, the first religious periodical printed west of the Alleghenies. In July 1824,
Skillman followed this up with a second newspaper, The Western Luminary, proclaiming: "The
time has fully come … when the People of the West can and ought to sustain a press, whose
great object it shall be to advance the interests of the Redeemer's kingdom." 303 A conservative
Presbyterian, Skillman had originally criticized the emotional extravagance of camp meeting
revivalism, but now directed his venom against Horace Holley's supporters on the Transylvania
University Board of Trustees. The Holley controversy became a litmus test of religious attitudes
in early Kentucky, pitching a broad spectrum of conservative Presbyterians, evangelical Baptists
and Methodists, and Jacksonian Democrats against Bradford and fellow theological liberals.
302
Dr. James Fishback – Baptist minister, Transylvania professor and trustee – had proposed the original measure
more than a year earlier, albeit without inviting Roman Catholic participation. Western Luminary, March 30, 1825.
303
The Evangelical Record and Western Review lasted from 1812-1813. The Western Luminary, July 14, 1824.
80
Bradford, as Secretary of the Board, promoted "principles of religion, in which the enlightened
and benevolent of all denominations harmonize … such as all patriots and devout men would
wish to see inculcated in a State University, leaving the particular tenets of different sects to be
taught in families, parishes, and theological schools." 304 Yet as Baptist minister James Fishback
argued in the Luminary, the enlightened "principles" embodied in civil religion no longer
satisfied public religious demands: "Socinian or Unitarian tenets are so unpopular here as to
deprive a man who professes them of being useful or obtaining public confidence. The religious,
and indeed … a portion of the irreligious part of the community will not sustain a man who
regards Jesus Christ in the character of simple humanity." 305
Holley was eventually driven from office in 1827, after the Kentucky legislature withheld
Transylvania's public financial support. His supporters, including Bradford, were reviled as outof-touch, irreligious elitists, dedicated to what Jacksonian Governor Joseph Desha termed an
"aristocracy of wealth." 306 Bradford defended Holley's administration, but the broad base of its
opposition clearly blindsided him. He denounced Governor Desha and the Presbyterian clergy as
bigots, calling their criticisms "an attack on the institution [of Transylvania] itself." 307.
Returning to the Kentucky Gazette in 1825, he finally set out his version of the Holley
controversy in his serialized "Notes on Kentucky." Chronologically and topically set apart, his
six 1828 articles on Transylvania University focused unflinchingly on recent events. Of all the
"Notes," only the Transylvania series discussed Kentucky's religious struggles, expressing
Bradford's religious views. Bradford republished a memorial in the Gazette, drafted by him in
support of the retiring Holley. It concluded: "The patronage of the Commonwealth may be
withdrawn, the institution may decline, the walls themselves may be crumbled; but so long as the
name remains, there will be associated with it, those remembrances that flow from mutual
attachments; or have a habitation in the hearts of those who are susceptible to the emotions of
gratitude." 308 But Holley was now gone. While crossing the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, the
beleaguered Unitarian perished from yellow fever and was buried at sea. 309
304
Bradford, Voice of the Frontier, 247.
The Western Luminary, March 9, 1825.
306
John D. Wright, jr., Transylvania: Tutor to the West, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), 111-112.
307
Bradford, Voice of the Frontier, 245.
308
Bradford, Voice of the Frontier, 262.
309
Rebecca Smith Lee, Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 182-184.
305
81
The relation of Bradford's proselytizing republicanism and his distaste for religious
enthusiasm must be understood in terms of periodization. Kentucky's Great Revival effectively
eclipsed the revolutionary mania for festive civil religion; a mania that reached its peak during
the 1790s, but gradually declined in the early decades of the nineteenth-century. While the
lexicon of republican nationalism emerged in the generation following the War of Independence,
evangelical revivalism soon supplanted it as a medium of popular assembly, drawing much
bigger audiences, more readily embodying heartfelt emotions, and providing a more meaningful
framework of experience than the colorful but splashy pagaentry of July 4 parades and municipal
banquets sponsored by Bradford and other representatives of the Bluegrass political elite. The
voluntaristic profusion of evangelical culture, characterized by the tumult of camp meeting
revivals, directly challenged and undermined the outwardly radical, but culturally conservative
model of republican society Bradford espoused.
John Bradford was an original specimen of America's enlightenment, but the direction
and meaning of this enlightenment in American history is not self-evident. Like Franklin,
Bradford constructed a public persona that was both cosmopolitan and parochial. Like Jefferson,
his republican idealism masked a surprising appetite for revolutionary violence. Recognizing
such paradoxes as characteristic of the American enlightenment does not necessarily entail
rejecting it as a fuzzy category, nor as Daniel Boorstin controversially claimed, as a figment of
disingenuous "intellectual historians." 310 As intellectual historian Henry May recognized,
however, it is problematic to regard the American enlightenment as a movement in a unitary
sense. Rather, the enlightenment was a complex global phenomenon, marked by successive,
overlapping phases assimilated to varying degrees into American culture. May characterized
these phases as fourfold: a "Moderate" enlightenment, rooted in the ideas of Newton and Locke,
preaching "balance, order, and religious compromise;" a "skeptical," anti-clerical phase, tending
towards "systematic epistemological skepticism ... or ... systematic materialism;" a
"Revolutionary" phase, preaching the possibility of constructing a new heaven and earth out of
the destruction of the old;" and finally, a "Didactic" phase, foreshadowed in Franklin's practical
310
Daniel Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (New York: Meridian
Books, 1960), 75.
82
ideology, assimilating "the certainty of progress" with a commitment to the instructive value of
education, as well as "the essential reality and dependability of moral values." 311
May's schema, while somewhat arbitrary, suggests the labyrinthine intellectual world of
the long eighteenth-century. Bradford was perhaps more virtuous than moral, and he clearly fits
– both historically and ideologically – into a revolutionary characterization of the enlightenment.
On another level, however, many of his character traits – industry, civil activism, and
philanthropy, among others – belong to the enlightenment's didactic phase. This didactic mode
was the most successfully assimilated part of the American enlightenment; as a practical
ideology, it enabled economic and political consolidation of the early American republic after the
War of Independence. Yet in addition to his civic-mindedness and business instincts, Bradford
was primarily an ideological creature, and the decline of Kentucky's elite-governed republican
culture was a serious personal blow to him.
Bradford was not alone in his alarm at the spread of religious enthusiasm, but this fear
was streaked with much class anxiety. A visiting Pennsylvania author, Josiah Espy sneered that
in Kentucky, "the more illiterate were downright fanatics and zealots in religion." 312 Shortly
after the Great Revival, the Anglo-Irish traveler Thomas Ashe bemoaned the decline of religion
in the Ohio Valley, though himself a stranger to its religious landscape:
… religion is not extinct, though the professors of it are employing the best possible
means for its destruction. They are frittering it into a thousand ceremonies, a thousand
absurd and eccentric shapes … religious worship is expressed here by every vagary that
can enter into the disturbed mind. Some sit still, and appear to commune with themselves
in silence and solemnity: others, on the contrary, employ themselves in violent
gesticulations, and shouting aloud. 313
Bradford, Espy, Ashe and others discovered in the heat of revival dramatic deteriorations
in the social order. Unfortunately for them, civil religion never replaced the compulsion of
spiritual religion in most people's lives. As demonstrated by the Great Revival, "revelation was
still the alphabet" that future American generations held to. 314
311
May, The Enlightenment in America, xvi, 358.
Espy, "A Tour," 24.
313
Ashe, Travels in America, 28.
314
Henry May, "The Problem of the American Enlightenment," New Literary History, vol. 1, no. 2 (winter 1970),
203.
312
83
Bradford's transition from Jeffersonian radical to demonized aristocrat no doubt
confirmed in him a disillusion with Kentucky politics. Recently, historian Craig Thompson
Friend has echoed populist critique, noting Bradford's essentially conservative outlook. While
posing as a disinterested arbiter of public opinion, Bradford nonetheless exerted "subtle
reinforcement of a deferential society and polity." 315 Undoubtedly, the republican editorials of
his Gazette, extolling social hierarchy alongside the fraternal bonds of the American Revolution,
were far removed from the democratic sensibilities of the Jacksonian era. Yet it is unfair to
judge Bradford's politics through the prism of his twilight years. In 1790s Kentucky, his
newspaper was the dominant source of popular republicanism, dispensing weekly critiques of
federal government policy while expanding readers' cosmopolitan sympathies. As Bernard
Bailyn has noted, eighteenth-century republicanism was in any case a Janus-faced ideology,
looking back as much as forward historically, concerned "not with the need to recast the social
order … but with the need to purify a corrupt constitution and fight off the apparent growth of
prerogative power." 316 In defending Kentucky's commercial and political interests, Bradford was
more politically consistent than his contemporaries and subsequent historians have allowed.
In May 1825, an elderly John Bradford welcomed a fellow veteran of the Revolutionary
Wars to Lexington. "[W]ith considerable emotion," Bradford spoke before the large crowd
gathered in the muddy wake of a recent rainstorm. He praised the Marquis de Lafayette, whose
"memorable exertions in the glorious struggle … were early impressed, on the minds of the first
settlers of this western wilderness." Addressing Lafayette directly, Bradford both acknowledged
the Frenchman's contributions to the War of Independence, while also invoking the unique
struggle of western settlers against Indian insurgency: "You and our brethren of the more early
settlements in the United States, were engaged in a struggle for FREEDOM; – whilst we were
here contending with a savage foe for life." 317 For all Bradford's effusiveness, however, the
significance of the French alliance was already fading from public memory. Evangelical authors
increasingly disparaged France's alliance during the American Revolution as a catalyst of deistic
315
Craig Thompson Friend, Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian
West (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 83-84.
316
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1992), 283
317
Kentucky Gazette, May 19, 1825.
84
infidelity, even as they grossly exagerrated deism's popular appeal. 318 More importantly,
Kentuckians were forgetting France's longstanding involvement in western affairs, exemplified
by Genêt's "picturesque effrontery," as Frederick Jackson Turner later described it. 319
Drawing on the files of his paper, Bradford finally justified his own role in the Genêt
affair, implying that the Lexington Democratic Society, rather than the federal government
deserved full credit for Kentucky's navigation rights. "From government," wrote Bradford in
1828:
the people of the west had nothing to hope. It was never intended to invest them with the
right of freely navigating the Mississippi. Its procurement evidently depended upon the
people alone; and that appeared to be the most critical moment. Such a conjuncture of
favorable circumstances as then presented themselves, seemed to have been designed by
providence for the completion of this event. 320
The federal government had forfeited legitimacy by its actions, Bradford implied. Such
circumstances might justify the most radical resistance, even secession.
Bradford and his fellow conspirators had wanted to embarrass the federal government
into safeguarding Mississippi navigation, and this they achieved. In view of this outcome, their
lukewarm commitment to Genêt's ambitious scheme seems more likely to have been a strategic
ploy than a failure of nerve. What John Lane Allen called "the two-forked fire – gratitude to
France, hatred of England" lit up the political landscape of Kentucky long after the
Revolutionary War. 321 Nevertheless, the idealism of most Kentuckians was inflected with
pragmatism, as Bradford's political dealings suggest. Both Genêt and his Kentucky allies ground
their axes against the Washington administration, but ultimately, diplomacy decided the fate of
the west.
In old age, Bradford flaunted his conspiratorial role as proudly as his service in the
Revolutionary War. Perhaps he sought to distance himself from earlier connections with James
Wilkinson, whose double dealings with the Spanish monarchy were by then widely suspected if
not proven. More importantly, though, Kentuckians seemed at last reconciled to United States
318
Davidson, History of the Presbyterian Church, 48; Redford, Methodism in Kentucky, vol. 1., 263.
Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Origin of Genêt's Projected Attack on Louisiana and the Floridas," American
Historical Review, vol. 3, no. 4 (July 1898), 650.
320
Bradford, Voice of the Frontier, 223.
321
Allen, The Choir Invisible, 121.
319
85
citizenship. Admittedly, Bradford's political admiration for the "Great Compromiser" Henry
Clay reflected the lingering insecurities many Kentuckians felt, as the question of slavery drove a
wedge through the Union. A generation of Kentuckians following Bradford's death would again
find their loyalties tested. Yet in antebellum Kentucky, fading memories of revolutionary
insurrection appeared more romantic than sinister. As John Lane Allen evoked the sentiments of
the period: "there were no more battles to fight in Kentucky, but there were the wars of the
Nation; and far away on the widening boundaries of the Republic they conquered or failed and
fell." 322
Bradford died aged eighty in March 1830, not long after finally resigning his editorial
chair because of ill health. His obituary in the Gazette hailed him as "the moral philosopher of
the West." 323 One of the last pioneers of the Revolutionary generation, Bradford left behind a
Kentucky unrecognizable from the one he had known as a young settler. The fashionable deism
of his youth had died out, and natural religion was most likely to be found invoked in pulpit
jeremiads as a specter of the past. Evangelical denominations flourished in the wake of
disestablishment and revival, and what John Boles has called "the religious sphere of the
southern mind" began to take hold. 324
322
Allen, The Choir Invisible, 342.
Kentucky Gazette, April 2, 1830.
324
Boles, The Great Revival, x.
323
86
CHAPTER 3: JAMES McGREADY, SON OF THUNDER
And he ordained twelve, that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to
preach,
And to have power to heal sicknesses, and to cast out devils:
And Simon he surnamed Peter;
And James the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James; and he surnamed them
Boanerges, which is, The sons of thunder.
Mark 3: 14-17
Of all the major figures of the Great Revival, James McGready is perhaps the most
elusive. At first glance, his historical outline is solid. The power of his sermons was a recurring
theme of nineteenth-century Presbyterian chroniclers, eager to preserve his charismatic legacy.
McGready was a "Son of Thunder" whose preaching inspired singing, weeping and cries of
distress among his audience. His "Short Narrative of the Revival of Religion in Logan County,"
a testimony of the Great Revival's birth pangs in the Cumberland Valley, has been called
America's most influential religious narrative since Jonathan Edwards's account of the
eighteenth-century Great Awakening. 325 Indeed, McGready's Calvinistic brand of
evangelicalism was steeped in earlier revivalistic tradition. As historian Leigh Eric Schmidt has
demonstrated, McGready also embodied the Presbyterian "Holy Fair" tradition of sacramental
revivalism centered on the Lord’s Supper. Schmidt notes, however, "To read McGready's
narratives of the Kentucky revivals is to read what was, after more than a hundred and seventy
years of similar outpourings, a somewhat standard litany of the wonders of the Scottish
communion season." 326 McGready, then, is buried beneath the debris of antiquarian hagiography
as a "Son of Thunder," a caricature of New Light Presbyterianism. What more is to be said
about him?
Historians today must struggle not so much to preserve McGready's legacy as to recover
it. He has become a more or less distant figure, one-and-a-half centuries from the hagiographies
325
326
Conkin, Cane Ridge, 55.
Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 63.
87
following his death. The biographical facts of his life are few and far between, often concealed
in antiquarian church histories. These sources, though valuable in themselves, tend to reduce
McGready's character to pious stereotype. Infused with nineteenth-century romantic
sensibilities, early descriptions of McGready emphasize his remarkable physical attributes, but
do little to illuminate his mind. "Mr. McGready was an unusual man," noted the Rev. Richard
Beard. "He had great physical strength and a voice like thunder … precisely fitted for the field
of labor to which Providence assigned him." 327 The Rev. Robert Davidson described McGready
with pathos as a "zealous and animated preacher," who "wielded the curses of Sinai with great
power. He would sometimes exhort after sermon, standing on the floor, or sitting or lying in the
dust, his eyes streaming and his heart so full, that he could only ejaculate, 'Jesus! Jesus!'" 328
Similarly, the Rev. Franceway Cossitt noted, "His genius … was better suited to the sublime than
the beautiful, to the dreadful than the enrapturing." 329
Though largely forgotten by historians today, McGready was a key transitional figure,
grounding the individuation of conscience unleashed by the Great Revival amid the sacramental
Calvinist theology of early Presbyterianism. As a leading Presbyterian clergyman, McGready's
belated submission to church discipline set an example to many of his revivalist colleagues,
helping to limit the damage between schismatically evangelical and theologically conservative
Presbyterian factions in the Ohio Valley. Yet while McGready was less obviously radical than
other figures of the Great Revival, including Barton Stone, his experimental religious
understanding led him to test the boundaries of denominational authority. His preaching was
instrumental in inspiring the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, one of the most ardently
evangelical groups produced by the Kentucky revival. Though McGready remained loyal to
mainline Presbyterianism, the Cumberland sectarians revered his legacy, a legacy transcending
ecclesiastic schism.
Continuous spiritual struggles made McGready a complex, contradictory character. In
important ways, his saintly reputation remains compelling. He was an ascetic, sacrificing his
health for the sake of his ministry. He was an otherworldly man who hated politics, though the
327
Richard Beard, Brief Biographical Sketches of Some of the Early Ministers of the Cumberland Presbyterian
Church (Nashville: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1867), 14.
328
Davidson, History of the Presbyterian Church, 263.
329
F.R. Cossitt, The Life and Times of Rev. Finis Ewing, One of the Founders of the Cumberland Presbyterian
Church (Louisville: Cumberland Presbyterian Publication, 1853), 44.
88
politics of the Presbyterian Church and of his own congregations often vexed him. Beneath the
surface, we find layers of ambiguity. His sermons express anxious moral concern, condemning
such common sins as drinking and brawling. Yet on broader moral questions, notably slavery,
he was silent. His stance on this issue is unclear – we do not even know whether or not he
owned slaves. His antebellum chroniclers, middle-class, southern Presbyterians to a man,
reflected McGready's quietism, at a time when even to have mentioned slavery would have
invited controversy. The desire to sanitize McGready's reputation also led the same writers to
downplay and even overlook his religious doubts and anguish, which are revealed in primary
sources.
McGready died poor and intestate, leaving no personal diary and few papers. His
gruelling itinerant lifestyle aged him beyond his years. The primary sources relating to his life
are limited to printed accounts of the Great Revival circulated and republished by McGready and
his fellow evangelical Presbyterian ministers; to Presbyterian Church records; to a dozen
posthumously published sermons; and to a handful of manuscript letters in Pennsylvania and
Kentucky archives. 330 Eyewitness accounts vividly describe McGready – "chaste, solemn, and
impressive," a physically massive man – yet no known pictorial likeness has survived. 331 More
frustratingly, we can no longer hear McGready's voice. The biblical adage that "faith cometh by
hearing, and hearing by the word of God" underlined McGready's affecting sermons, and
underlay the conversions experienced at his revivals. As Leigh Eric Schmidt has suggested,
emphasis on hearing by faith was ironically echoed through the enlightenment by CommonSense philosophers, "identifying the voice with a continuous self." 332 Converts appreciated
McGready's gospel oratory as the means of their conversion; critics depreciated it as the hallmark
of his enthusiasm. Attempting to conjure McGready's voice, however, only highlights the
relative dearth of surviving primary material generated by his sermons.
330
For the largest extant collection of McGready correspondence, see: McGready-Ingram Family Collection,
Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort Kentucky. This collection contains the only known surviving
correspondence between McGready and family members, specifically his daughters. The Special Collections and
Archives of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary possess an important letter by McGready to his former mentor James
McMillan. Fragmentary correspondence between McGready and the Transylvania Presbytery is contained in:
Sweet, The Presbyterians.
331
Beard, Biographical Sketches, 17.
332
Schmidt, Hearing Things, 171.
89
Probably because McGready is seen first in regional focus, historians have largely
overlooked or downplayed his broader significance. Awash in A Sea of Faith, Jon Butler's
influential survey of American "Christianization" in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries
does not even mention McGready. 333 Nathan Hatch, in his similarly influential Democratization
of American Christianity, dismissed McGready in a single sentence, as a preacher "who used
gestures described as 'the very reverse of elegance.'" McGready's crude gestures, implied Hatch,
marked the transition of revival preachers from traditional sources of authority to charismatic,
populist ones. 334
Stretching back to seventeenth-century Scotland and Ulster, the charismatic New Light
Presbyterian tradition undermines Hatch's odd claim that Kentucky revivalists exhibited more
"radical dependence on audience" than earlier generations. 335 McGready knew his audience, of
course, but Hatch over-emphasizes the novelty of such pulpit performances. For some two
centuries, Presbyterian "Sons of Thunder" on both sides of the Atlantic drew large audiences
with hellfire sermons. At the 1625 Six-Mile-Water revival, for example, the "godly but
eccentric" James Glendinning addressed gatherings of Presbyterian immigrants in Ireland's
County Antrim. Contemporaries wrote that Glendinning "fell upon a thundering way… and
exceedingly terrifed his hearers," preaching "nothing but law, wrath, and the terrors of God for
sin." 336 Early Presbyterian awakenings elsewhere presaged the mass participation of Kentucky,
with perhaps 20,000 worshipers attending the 1742 Cambuslang revival in south-west Scotland,
for example. Critics denounced the Scottish enthusiasm in words that would sound familiar to
nineteenth-century American evangelicals, claiming that audiences: "expressed their Agony not
only in Words, but by clapping their Hands, beating their Breasts, terrible Shakings, frequent
Faintings and Convulsions; the Minister often calling out … to encourage them." 337
For most of the last century, scholars narrowly equated McGready with the purported
religious tendencies of the frontier. Although Frederick Jackson Turner said little about religion
in his 1893 essay, "The Significance of the Frontier," many who followed him in seeing the
333
Butler, Awash in A Sea of Faith.
Hatch, Democratization, 134.
335
Hatch, Democratization, 134.
336
Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity, 23-24.
337
Arthur Fawcett, The Cambuslang Revival: The Scottish Revival of the Eighteenth-Century (Edinburgh: Banner of
Truth Trust, 1971), 109.
334
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frontier as "the line of most rapid and effective Americanization" adopted his interpretive
framework to explain American religious development. 338 Such interpretations undermined
serious attempts to evaluate Kentucky revivalism in intellectual context. Writing in 1916,
Catherine Cleveland attributed McGready's success to his abandoning "[t]he stiff, technical
theology, or dry, speculative orthodoxy of the pulpit." 339 Leonard J. Trinterud's impressive 1949
study of backcountry Presbyterianism set the scene for subsequent Turnerian treatments,
emphasizing the significance of the Log College tradition of backcountry seminaries to the
exclusion of broader geographical and cultural reference points. 340 While Trinterud did
emphasize the rigorous, though conservative education McGready and his peers received at Log
Colleges, the emotional, apparantly spontaneous nature of evangelical Presbyterian worship
compounded interpretations of revivalism as anti-intellectual, rooted in the soil. As late as 1974,
Dickson Bruce, while crediting McGready with the earliest camp-meeting revival in Kentucky,
could claim: "[t]he camp-meeting itself simply 'grew up' with the frontier." 341
In this chapter, I hope to go beyond the frontier stereotype of James McGready, the rude
but charismatic fire-and-brimstone preacher. McGready's importance transcended his
geographical origins, or even his mercurial charisma. Understanding McGready is an uphill task,
however, made harder by his ministry's physically and mentally harrowing toll. Unlike many
comparable preachers, McGready never found time to keep a diary, nor did he enjoy the leisure
to write a memoir. His preaching gave rise to political attacks from his colleagues, leaving him
debilitated with depression. Late in life, he exhausted himself itinerating in backwaters even
wilder than his old Kentucky stomping ground. He spent too long in the field to develop the
social criticisms occasionally glimpsed in his sermons. He sacrificied his identity to the
Presbyterian Church, his outlook shaped by traditional patterns of religious discipline.
McGready belonged to the group dubbed "Scotch-Irish" in the nineteenth-century and
mythologized by Theodore Roosevelt as "that stern and virile people … whose preachers taught
the creed of Knox and Calvin." 342. They were, noted historian Patrick Griffin more recently, a
"people with no name," sometimes referred to in the eighteenth-century as "northern dissenters."
338
Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier," Frontier and Section, ed. Billington, 39.
Cleveland, The Great Revival, 48.
340
Trinterud, The Forming of An American Tradition.
341
Bruce, And They All Sang Hallelujah, 51.
342
Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. 1 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), 124.
339
91
Colonial settlers derisively mimicked them for being neither fully "Eerish" nor fully
"Scoatch." 343 While James Leyburn has argued that the Revolutionary generation of these
settlers came into maturity as fully-fledged "Americans," recent historians have challenged this
thesis. 344 Patrick Griffin notably portrays the Scotch-Irish as a "protean" and elusive people,
moving "along the margins of an Atlantic world," while standing "at its center." 345
The Scotch-Irish were relative newcomers to America. From 1717 onwards, agricultural
and manufacturing depression drove mass migrations from Ulster to the Pennsylvania
backcountry. Benjamin Franklin expressed the common view that "Poverty, Wretchedness,
Misery and Want are become almost universal" among these Irish immigrants. 346 By
comparison to most colonial Americans, the new settlers were indeed poor; by comparison with
most native Irish, however, they were relatively well-off. The poorest Ulster immigrants hoped
to redeem their passage as indentured servants, but most paid their own way across the
Atlantic. 347 Emigration of thousands of families like the McGreadys left a gaping hole in the
north of Ireland, compounding the cycle of economic depression that bound British America into
the chain of folk migration. 348
343
Griffin, People With No Name, 2; David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 618.
344
James Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 318.
345
Griffin, People With No Name, 173.
346
Pennsylvania Gazette, 20 November, 1729.
347
Under Ulster's leasehold system, the most industrious tenant farmers were those most able to leave for America
as free men and women; compensated for improving their lands, they used the proceeds for their passage. Patrick
Griffin, The People With No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scotch-Irish, and the Creation of a British
Atlantic World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 78.
348
A complex mixture of push and pull factors drove Scotch-Irish migration. These tensions remain evident in
contemporary Northern Ireland, where a dwindling Protestant majority clings to an attenuated sense of British
identity. Both colonizers and colonized, the Scotch-Irish have always been aliens in their own country. Ireland's
Catholic majority has historically regarded them as agents of colonial oppression, yet the British Crown considered
them religious non-conformists, penalizing them as such. Irish Presbyterians were thus made to support the
established Episcopal Church through taxation, and subjected to such humiliations as the 1704 Test Act – an act of
legislation originally intended to restrict the civil rights of Roman Catholics. By making participation in the
established church's eucharist prerequisite to a host of civil and military offices and benefits, however, the Test Act
became an additional burden to Irish dissenters. On the other hand, the high points of eighteenth-century ScotchIrish migration can be positively identified with economic crises in Ulster in 1717-18, 1725-29, 1740-41, 1754-55,
and 1771-75. James Leyburn described this as "a chart of the economic health of northern Ireland." Low points
were associated with bad harvests, spiking rack rents, and slumps in Ulster's lucrative linen manufacture. These
pulses of human mobility point towards the proximate triggers of migration, however, not necessarily an ultimate
motivation for hazarding the Atlantic. Demonstrating economic stimuli not only stops short of psychological
explanation, but actually risks obscuring subtler rationales for voluntary migration. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 169.
92
Even before the Revolutionary War's end, the trans-Appalachian United States teemed
with Scotch-Irish and German settlers. By 1775 alone, an estimated sixty thousand settlers
inhabited backcountry North Carolina, perhaps most being Scotch-Irish. 349 Among these were
the McGreadys, who moved from Pennsylvania to Guilford County, North Carolina in the mid1770s. 350 While their motivation to relocate was presumably economic, their decision reflected a
much larger folk migration. Presbyterian settlement in Kentucky in turn originated from North
Carolina and Virginia mountain communities, reflecting social and family bonds over
generations. Such migration drained the entire backcountry.
McGready's childhood was obscure. He was the oldest of eight sons born to James
McGready, sr. and his wife, "respectable" Presbyterian farmers from Ireland. Only secondary
sources suggest the year of his birth in western Pennsylvania, placing it between 1758 and
1763. 351 He was a pious child, according to William H. Foote, his foremost nineteenth-century
interpreter. The sketch Foote gives of McGready's childhood resembles Calvinist conversion
narrative – the peculiar spiritual morphology continually rehearsed by early Presbyterians. Foote
noted: "Mr. McGready used to say that he never omitted private prayer from the time he was
seven years old, and having been preserved from outbreaking sins, from profane swearing, from
intoxication, and sabbath breaking, and other excesses, he had begun to think that he was
sanctified from his birth." 352
For early Calvinist evangelicals, the childish nature of faith was a fact to be gloried in,
not ashamed of; such attitudes were further reinforced during the Great Revival. Foote's
description of McGready's soul-searching suggests the signs of salvation a pious Calvinist would
have sought from childhood. Taught the doctrine of double predestination, believing that God's
349
Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Harper
Collins, 1990), 79.
350
John Thomas Scott, "James McGready," (Ph.D. dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1991), 37.
351
Rev. James Smith asserts that McGready was born in 1763, although " little is known… of his infancy and
youth." Rev. Robert Davidson puts him "about thirty-three years of age" in the fall of 1796, when he first set foot in
Kentucky. Other sources state that he was thirty years-old at the time of his licensing by the Presbytery of Redstone,
Pennsylvania, on August 13, 1788. Coincidentally, Jonathan Edwards— the great apologist of the colonial Great
Awakening and a strong influence on McGready's theology— died in the year 1758. See: James Smith, History of
the Christian Church, Including a History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church (Nashville: Cumberland
Presbyterian Publishing Office, 1835), 561; Davidson, History of the Presbyterian Church, 132; Joseph Smith, Old
Redstone: or, Historical Sketches of Western Presbyterianism (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co, 1854), 359;
Beard, Biographical Sketches, 7.
352
Foote, Sketches of North Carolina, 368.
93
will determined not only the sanctified elect but also the reprobated remnant, faithful Calvinists
were never assured of their places in heaven, yet looked instead for inward evidence of grace.
McGready later came to doubt his own salvation, but his earliest religious experiences were
sincere. Calvinists maintained the doctrine of original sin, yet privileged the witness of children
to the Holy Ghost, often making extravagant claims for the spiritual gifts of the very young.
Childishness was an ideal to be tempered by the sober life of the saint, but also analogous to the
state of grace itself. As Jonathan Edwards, a Calvinist theologian close to McGready's own
understanding put it: "That text Matt. xviii. 3. has often been sweet to me, Except ye be
converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." 353
Although McGready was near adulthood when he and his family moved to the Carolina
backcountry, its distinctive religious, political, and educational landscape powerfully shaped his
life. His family's relocation made economic sense, given the availability of relatively cheap land,
but the presence of a settled ministry nearby may also have been important. Since 1764, the Rev.
David Caldwell served the local congregations of Buffalo and Alamance. A formidable
Presbyterian who lived into his hundredth year, Caldwell transformed Guilford County into an
outstanding center of piety as well as a regionally important center of learning. Through the
local grammar school and academy he established, Caldwell also gave McGready a springboard
for his revival career.
Even where church membership flourished, as in Guilford County, backcountry ministers
struggled to reconcile factions within their own congregations. Many members of the Buffalo
and Alamance churches migrated en masse from Pennsylvania, having taken opposite sides on
the question of revivalism. Caldwell refused to revive the schismatic tendencies of the Great
Awakening; his pulpit was moderately, rather than torridly, evangelical. His ministry paved the
way for fellowship between the predominantly conservative Old Light congregation of Buffalo
and the predominantly evangelical congregation of Alamance. 354 Caldwell's conciliatory
policies foreshadowed McGready's own aversion to ministerial and congregational schism.
Physical, as well as spiritual conflict scarred Guilford County. Many of McGready's
neighbors were veterans of the late Regulator Rebellion, a period of civil violence that
353
354
Samuel Hopkins, ed., Memoirs of the Rev. Jonathan Edwards (London: J. Black, 1815), 68.
Caruthers, David Caldwell, 25.
94
anticipated some aspects of the American Revolution, while differing in other important ways.
Outraged by corrupt sherrifs and the extortionate tax collection of local placemen, backcountry
farmers took up arms to oppose the local political elite. As Marjolene Kars has noted, use of the
term "Regulation" stopped short of the rhetoric of revolution, instead signaling a desire to
"regulate" government abuses, restoring the political balance to its hypothetical status quo
ante. 355 The uprising, however, was a disaster. After numerous minor skirmishes, militia loyal
to the royal governor finally crushed the rebels at the Battle of the Alamance in 1771, by the
creek that gave the nearby church its name. While both the Regulator Rebellion and the
American Revolution hinged upon questions of local political representation, allegiances were
not identical in both cases. Many of the colonial political elite were native-born North
Carolinians who defended their local privileges by fighting the British Crown during the
American Revolution. Similarly, local political rivalries turned many former rebels Loyalist. As
one North Carolina farmer recalled: "I have fought for my country, and fought for my king; and
have been whipped both times." 356
Caldwell was wary of muddying his hands in politics, an aversion later exhibited by his
protégé James McGready. Living in the epicenter of the Regulator Rebellion, Caldwell never
turned partisan. The Apostle Paul's injunction to remain "subject unto the higher powers,"
restraining passion for the soul's sake, tempered his response. Nevertheless, most members of
his churches supported the Regulation, and two were hanged on Governor William Tryon's
orders. Others left Caldwell's churches, protesting his alleged collaboration with the
authorities. 357 Caldwell himself attended the hangings of six rebels at the small Piedmont town
of Hillsborough on the morning of June 19, 1771, seeking – in the words of his nineteenthcentury biographer – "to aid them by his counsels and his prayers in preparing them for the
solemn change which awaited them." 358 Himself of humble origins, Caldwell sympathised with
the farmer rebels but he condemned their tactics. His actions on the eve of the Battle of
Alamance reveal his aversion to bloodshed, as well as a naïve faith in authority. Riding between
opposing camps that night, he sought to mediate between both sides. Securing an audience with
355
Marjolene Kars, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2.
356
Kars, Breaking Loose Together, 214.
357
Kars, Breaking Loose Together, 126-27.
358
Caruthers, David Caldwell, 162.
95
Governor Tryon, who personally commanded the colonial militia, he wrung from him the
promise of negotiation. Caldwell then spoke before the Regulators, urging them to go home
quietly. 359 None of this could avert the two-hour battle, leaving dozens dead and dying the next
day. For Caldwell, it was a galling lesson in the limits of ministerial influence.
Caldwell's experiences during the Revolutionary War were even more harrowing.
Perhaps chastened by former Regulators, Caldwell gave measured support to American
Independence in solidarity with his congregation. Local Tories accused him of acting like “a
popish priest,” absolving oaths of loyalty previously administered by the crown upon former
Regulators. Caldwell did no such thing, instead pointing out the coercive nature of these oaths,
noting that the British Crown was a gross and perpetual violator of Americans’ chartered
rights. 360 As a pastor, Caldwell urged no man to take up arms; he merely argued that those
coerced into taking oaths were free to dissolve them.When the war reached Guilford County,
however, he became a hunted man. The British lumped him with the hated "Black Regiment" of
Presbyterian ministers, and placed a £200 reward on his head, forcing Caldwell and his family to
flee their home. He narrowly escaped capture by British cavalry, after a premonitory dream
persuaded him to switch safe houses. British soldiers confiscated his property, setting fire to his
prized library, including "the large Bible which contained the family record." 361 Throughout this
trying period, Caldwell and his family encouraged local Patriots. On the eve of the pivotal Battle
of Guilford Courthouse in 1781, Caldwell's wife spent the day fasting and praying with a number
of women of the Buffalo congregation. 362 Among the local residents who heard the crash of
artillery during the bloody American victory that followed was Barton Warren Stone, then a boy
of eight, who went on to become a leader of the Great Revival alongside James McGready. 363
At first sight, Caldwell's public leadership during both the Regulator Rebellion and the
Revolutionary War suggest a personal radicalization, but the consistency of his actions tells a
different story. Caldwell's revolutionary patriotism in fact reflected his moderation during the
359
Caruthers, David Caldwell, 152.
Carruthers, David Caldwell, 172-73.
361
Caruthers, David Caldwell, 210-223; British antipathy to the Presbyterian ministry was not unwarranted. In
1775, for example, the Continental Congress hired two Presbyterian ministers to itinerate through the North Carolina
backcountry, drumming up support for the Revolution. The Presbyterian clergy were overwhelmingly Patriots.
Kars, Breaking Loose Together, 214.
362
Caruthers, David Caldwell, 232.
363
Stone, "Life," 32.
360
96
Regulator Rebellion. Neither conflict was black-and-white; historical allegiances shaped
responses in both cases. During the American Revolution many Patriots read constitutional
violations to indict the British Crown for treason. One minister, who, like Caldwell, had
cautioned against the Regulation, described the Patriot cause as "just, and reasonable, and no
rebellion." 364 As late as 1775, many Presbyterians still subscribed to the Solemn League and
Covenant. This document, drafted during the British Civil Wars in 1643, emphasized the
contractual nature of Crown authority with regard to both the consent of the governed and the
rights of Presbyterian worship. 365 In Presbyterian terms, a covenant was a solemn agreement
before God, as well as an agreement between signatories. The Crown's negation of colonial
demands together with its persecution of Presbyterian clergymen thus broke its sacred obligation.
As will be shown, the Presbyterian practice of formal covenanting outlasted the American
Revolution, and McGready himself would later use it.
Even during the Revolutionary War, North Carolina's backcountry offered newcomers
economic mobility, if not actual social advancement. 366 After the war, settlers continued pouring
into the the Piedmont region. Land was still relatively cheap, although a terrain of rough slopes
kept typical farm sizes small. Established farmers such as the McGreadys prospered in this
dynamic agricultural economy. In 1784 James McGready's father purchased a generous 353 acre
plot for his old age. This land was purchased from David Caldwell, whose longevity ensured his
status as an almost feudal patriarch. 367 Economic, as well as pastoral relations bound together
Caldwell and the McGready family.
Caldwell's Guilford Academy became the cradle of southern evangelicalism. Little more
than an extension of Caldwell's wood framed, two-story house, it nevertheless offered young
male scholars a thorough schooling. It was not a religious seminary, but during its years of
operation it gave some fifty future ministers their educational foundations, McGready almost
364
Kars, Breaking Loose Together, 214.
Kars, Breaking Loose Together, 155.
366
Statistical evidence suggests a correspondence between the high economic mobility, sustained population growth,
and relatively limited and evenly-distributed patterns of slave ownership in North Carolina's Piedmont through the
late colonial period. Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary, "Class, Mobility, and Conflict in North Carolina
on the Eve of the Revolution," The Southern Experience in the American Revolution, Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E.
Tise, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 122.
367
Land deed, Guilford County Deed Book 2, 435, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina, referred
to in: Scott, "James McGready, " 37.
365
97
certainly among them. 368 Thus Paul Conkin described Caldwell as “the grandfather of the great
revival.” Almost every single Presbyterian revival preacher in the early West had some
connection to the venerable minister. Of the dozen or so ministers at the epic Cane Ridge
revival, four were known to each other through study at his academy. As Conkin wrote, "they
were literally his boys." 369 Caldwell was also a bridge between the piety of the colonial Great
Awakening and the Great Revival at the turn of the nineteenth-century, both of which he
participated in. Caldwell was born in Virginia, and studied at Princeton under the Rev. Samuel
Davies, the evangelical Presbyterian revivalist whose coffin he shouldered in 1761. 370
According to John Boles, McGready's evangelicalism descended directly from the Presbyterian
revivalism of 1740s Pennsylvania, through the intellectual discipleship of Samuel Davies and
David Caldwell. 371
McGready left no account of his decision to enter the ministry. For reasons that were not
explained, he waited until he was around twenty-seven years old to embark upon ministerial
training. McGready's late development reflects an early adulthood spent working his parents'
land, further highlighting his biographical obscurity. As the oldest of eight sons, McGready's
long years on the family farm suggest an extended economic dependence. As Jim Potter has
noted, colonial Americans "married and produced offspring when they had the means to set up a
separate household." 372 McGready was – economically at least – not yet fully an adult when he
chose to enter the ministry. Yet his parents' purchase of 353 acres the previous year suggests
family fortunes were healthy, the availability of younger sons and perhaps servants or even
slaves enabling him to make his own way in life. Moreover, his choice of profession reflected
educational self-confidence, suggesting the influence of David Caldwell. The Presbyterian
Church prided itself on its educational standards, demanding linguistic mastery of Latin and
Greek as well as long periods of probation before licensure and ordination, typically over several
years. McGready's decision to uproot removed a useful worker from the family farm, but came
with family blessings nonetheless. A visiting uncle encouraged McGready's calling, according
368
Caruthers, David Caldwell, 37.
Conkin, Cane Ridge, 43-45.
370
Caruthers, David Caldwell, 19.
371
Boles, The Great Revival, 159.
372
Jim Potter, "Demographic Developments and Family Structure," Colonial British America: Essays in the New
History of the Early Republic, Jack Greene and J.R. Pole, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988),
147.
369
98
to one posthumously-published account. An elder of the church on the lookout for prospective
ministerial candidates, he persuaded McGready's parents to allow their son to leave home,
promising him ministerial training upon his return to Pennsylvania. 373
McGready enrolled at the Rev. Robert Smith's grammar school in Pequea, Pennsylvania
around the year 1785. The Pequea Academy was a small, rustic establishment, consciously
patterned on the "Log College" model pioneered by William Tennent in the early eighteenthcentury. Its founder, Ulster-born Robert Smith, insisted on rigid pedagogy, supplementing the
rudimentary English and catechistical education McGready already possessed with the
comprehensive grounding expected of the Presbyterian ministry. Smith demanded students
practice close-reading of texts, "not merely to dip into the Latin and Greek classics … [but] to
read carefully and attentively the entire work." 374 Log College academies such as Pequea sought
to emulate the academic standards of the Scottish Universites and the Presbyterian flagship of
Princeton. Few schools embodied such unusual evangelical zeal. As Leonard J. Trinterud has
noted, the Log Colleges fostered a particularly strong Calvinistic emphasis on the role of the
minister as "a direct personal agent of God in the salvation of men." 375
Lacking the social prestige and financial endowments of most universities, Log Colleges
relied upon kinship and mentoring relations. As evangelicals created new backcountry
seminaries, they tended to pool resources and co-operate, rather than compete. Ministers were
encouraged to take young novices under their wings, training them on the job. McGready
himself would lodge and instruct at least one divinity student, later the senior minister in North
Carolina's Orange Presbytery. 376 Ministerial candididates also required more formal
qualifications, however, and students passed from the supervision of one minister to another, as
demand and opportunity dictated. Thus when the Rev. John McMillan, himself a former student
of both Robert Smith's academy and of Princeton, decided to open his own ministerial school in
western Pennsylvania, Smith agreed to transfer several students, including McGready. McMillan
later recounted:
373
Beard, Biographical Sketches, 7.
Dwight Raymond Guthrie, John McMillan: The Apostle of Presbyterianism in the West, 1752-1833 (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1952), 12.
375
Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition, 180.
376
This student was Ebenezer B. Currie, who assisted McGready's revivals in North Carolina and was the source for
William H Foote's material on McGready. Foote, Sketches of North Carolina, xii.
374
99
When I determined to come to this country, Dr. Smith enjoined it upon me to look out for
some pious young men, and educate them for the ministry; for, said he, though some men
of piety and talents may go to a new country at first, yet if they are not careful to raise up
others, the country will not be well supplied. Accordingly I collected a few who gave
evidence of piety, and instructed them in the knowledge of the Latin and Greek languages,
some of whom became useful, and others eminent ministers of the gospel, viz., James
Hughs, John Brice, James McGready, William Swan, Samuel Porter, and Thomas Marquis.
All these I boarded and taught without any compensation, except about forty dollars,
which Mr. Swan gave to my wife after he had settled in the ministry. 377
In later correspondence, McGready addressed McMillan as "D[ea]r Father," reflecting his
influence over both McGready's ministry and religious conversion. 378 The two men's
personalities and talents were complimentary though often contrasting. McMillan, like
McGready, was a large, ungainly Scotch-Irish man. His preaching was designed to "riddle the
sinners over hell" as one old woman recalled, but he was an austere orator. A fellow minister
noted, "He had, I think, no great talent at extemporaneous preaching, – at least in early life." 379
Though employing fierce imagery, McMillan struggled to imbue his delivery with charisma.
The young McGready, by contrast, was a natural orator.
McMillan influenced McGready, but the younger man was no carbon copy of his mentor.
McMillan was the "father of education in western Pennsylvania," McGready considering him
instrumental to his religious conversion, but the two men differed in one important respect. 380
Sacramental theology cut to the heart of evangelical Presbyterianism, with observance of the
Lord's Supper the sacred calendar's dramatic climax. McMillan viewed the body and blood of
Christ as a merely symbolic presence in the Lord's Supper, in contrast to the orthodox
interpretation of the Westminster Confession that "the outward elements … truly, yet
sacramentally" embodied Christ's flesh and blood. 381 What may seem a pedantic matter today,
the question of sacramental presence was fraught with contention. The logocentric Calvinism
established by sixteenth-century Scottish reformers retained significant elements of festive piety,
most evidently in the Holy Fair, or sacrament of the Lord's Supper, "a corporate commemoration
377
Guthrie, John McMillan, 81.
James McGready to John McMillan, November 18, 1801 (transcript). Original letter in: Special Collections and
Archives, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
379
Guthrie, John McMillan, 65.
380
Guthrie, John McMillan, 80.
381
"Westminster Confession of Faith," Chapter 29, Article V: <http://www.reformed.org.
documents/westminster_conf_of_faith.html> (14 December 2009).
378
100
of the corpus of Christ." 382 Presbyterians transformed the Catholic Mass of Corpus Christi,
retaining the sensual drama of re-enactment, but framed with powerful sermons – "constructing
the eucharistic word as an active and profoundly affective experience." 383 Both Calvin and Knox
rejected the doctrine of the Catholic church – whereby the sacramental elements became the
blood and body of Christ – as well as the Lutheran belief that the elements became both the
blood and body of Christ and remained physically unaltered. Calvinism maintained a purely
spiritual presence in the eucharist, with Christ's celestial body as distant from material substance
"as the highest heaven is from the earth." 384 This dualistic conception underwote the Lord's
Supper's miraculous power as an instrument of divine, not merely human, significance. Almost
all early American revivalism emerged from this sacramental kernel; as Leigh Eric Schmidt
argued, "the awesome power of the eucharist" continued to inform popular understanding of
Christian revival as a miraculous fount of grace. 385 And yet, by the late eighteenth-century, a
more pragmatic interpretation of the Lord's Supper entered Reformed clerical thought, deemphasizing the supernatural significance of the sacrament. Regarding Christ's actual presence
in the Lord's Supper, McGready emphasized the supernatural import of the sacrament more than
McMillan ever did. His receptivity to Calvinism's dynamic and popular sacramental traditions
underline his great success as a revivalist, as well as some of the violent opposition he would
meet.
McGready dated the beginnings of his religious conversion to his time with McMillan. In
1786, an outbreak of smallpox ravaged western Pennsylvania. The variola virus remained a
deadly threat, even among populations accustomed to its ravages. Several years after the
Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania was still a hotbed of the putrid affliction, as it had been during
the fighting. 386 In 1786, McGready fell violently ill and spent some weeks recuperating at his
teacher's farm. But for McMillan's care, McGready might well have died that summer.
According to one posthumously published account, McGready became convinced of his
382
Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002),
85.
383
Todd, Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, 26.
384
Theodore Beza, quoted in: Bernard Cottret, Calvin: A Biography, trans. M. Wallace McDonald (Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 248.
385
Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 15.
386
Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001),
108.
101
spiritual peril amid the throes of fever. As he lay in bed, eavesdopping on McMillan and a
fellow student, McGready heard them speaking in hushed tones of his prospects for salvation.
Listening to his friends' talk of "experimental and practical religion," McGready was appalled to
discover "their views of his religious character," that he was "a mere formalist, and a stranger to
regenerating grace." Rather than betraying his alarm, McGready lay still through the night,
thereafter embarking upon "a close and candid examination of his heart." 387 Given his childhood
assurance of his own salvation, it was devastating to hear others talk of him as a condemned
man. This episode highlights the spiritual introspection at the heart of Calvinism, as well as the
collective mutual surveillance of church members. Though McGready had lead an upright life,
confident in his theological opinions, his assurances of grace fell flat. To borrow from Jonathan
Edwards, McGready saw spiritual salvation was "a fervid, vigorous engagedness of the heart,"
not a question of moral acts or even of doctrinal orthodoxy. 388 His new birth was a birth of the
emotions, a baptism of the Holy Ghost.
For McGready, as for most Presbyterians, conversion was a public event, however
privately it was revealed. Religious awakening went hand-in-hand with gospel preaching, the
sermon assuming sacramental power among evangelical Presbyterians. Supernatural grace
attended an effective sermon, measured by the testimony of the converted. The performative
nature of religious conversion, coupled with the Presbyterian organization of religious "harvests"
around the observation of the Lord's Supper provided a template for the later camp-meeting
revivals. McGready's own conversion experience culminated in an outdoor sacramental meeting
in western Pennsylvania. He "earnestly sought an interest in the blood of the Atonement," wrote
an early biographer, and "was savingly converted to God" by the instrumentality of the
sacrament. 389 McGready spoke in one of his later sermons of "the Monongahela, where I first
felt the all-conquering power of the love of Jesus … on the morning of a Sabbath in 1786." 390
Such gatherings became a common sight during the Great Revival.
Of McGready's next few years we have little record, until the Presbytery of Redstone,
Pennsylvania licenced him to preach on 13 August, 1788. Only after two-and-a-half more years
387
Smith, History of the Christian Church, 560-61.
Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (Philadelphia: James Crisst, 1821), 21.
389
Smith, History of the Christian Church, 561-562.
390
McGready, Posthumous Works, 26.
388
102
was he permanently settled with a congregation. Meanwhile, the Presbytery shuffled him around
western Pennsylvania, in a series of temporary "supply" positions to counter the ongoing
ministerial drought. 391 During this period, he married Nancy Thompson, a young woman "from
the bounds of Redstone." 392 James and Nancy McGready would have four surviving children
together, all daughters. McGready revealed a sentimental streak in an undated acrostic love
verse to Nancy, perhaps written about this time. 393
McGready's restless spirit first won him fame as a revivalist. Tiring of his supply work in
Pennsylvania, he turned further afield, apparently on his own initiative, and traveled extensively
in both Virginia and North Carolina. Both states were then experiencing religious stirrings, and
McGready found ready audiences. In 1787, Baptist preacher John Williams rekindled the
embers of the Great Awakening in Virginia, and the revival soon spread among the students of
Rev. John Blair Smith at Hampden-Sydney, a recently-founded Presbyterian college. Smith was
the son of McGready's former teacher, the Rev. Robert Smith, and helped to develop the Log
College network beyong the rudiments of the backcountry seminary. The Hampden-Sydney
revival was ecumenical, involving both Baptist and Methodist, as well as Presbyterian ministers.
Yet Presbyterians enforced adherence to social discipline, with President Smith urging emotional
restraint among lay participants. 394 McGready took part alongside Smith and the Rev. William
Graham, enjoying his first flush of success as a revivalist. Witnessing conversions, "his heart
[was] warmed by what he heard and saw." 395 Around this time, McGready's old pastor Caldwell
invited him to join in the revival begun at Guilford County in the churches of Buffalo and
Alamance and at the local academy. McGready preached at Guilford County several times,
impressing Caldwell's students and parishioners alike. 396 The future revival leader Barton Stone
was among those swayed by McGready's sermons. Alongside McGready's fiery preaching, the
gentler sermons of the young Presbyterian minister William Hodge enabled the conversions of
Stone and many of his peers. 397 This was the beginning of Hodge and McGready's fruitful
partnership. As did the revival at Hampden-Sydney, Guilford County fostered the evangelical
391
Smith, Old Redstone, 362.
Foote, Sketches of North Carolina, 373.
393
"MISS NANCY THOMPSON," n.d., McGready-Ingram Family Collection, Kentucky Historical Society.
394
Boles, The Great Revival, 7-8.
395
Foote, Sketches of North Carolina, 370.
396
Boles, The Great Revival, 39.
397
Stone, "Life," 39-41
392
103
network that emerged years later in Kentucky.
While McGready enjoyed early successes, he remained unsatisfied with his itinerant
position. Though gaining stature as a revivalist, he was not yet a pastor. On April 20 1791, the
minutes of the Presbytery meeting at Dunlap's Creek recorded: "Mr. James McGready, being
detained by sickness in the bounds of Orange Presbytery, applied by letter, for a dismission to
that Presbytery. The Presbytery ordered the clerk to send him a dismission and a letter of advice
on the occasion." 398 This was not the last time McGready pleaded ill-health to excuse himself
from a Presbyterial session. Throughout his life, sickness dogged the preacher, and the Redstone
Presbytery demanded heroic efforts from him. At thirty years old and on the verge of family life,
McGready found the toll of his ministry exhausting. Only by expressing dissatisfaction with his
lot did McGready secure a permanent position to the North Carolina communities of Stony
Creek and Hawfields.
McGready's first pastoral charge taught him that cultivating religion in the backcountry
was far harder than preaching to congregations aroused by revival. Moreover, his zeal pitted him
against his new congregations in North Carolina. He strove to impose strict personal piety,
speaking out against profanity and public drunkenness. The temperance crusade of the
nineteenth-century had not yet coalesced, but emphasis on self-restraint was an already
pronounced feature of evangelical morality. Diction mattered to evangelicals, clinging to the
words of 1 Peter, 4:11: "If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God." Drunkenness
led not only to social embarrassment, but was a stumbling block to grace. Yet emphasis on holy
manners brought McGready and other would-be reformers into conflict with a rowdy popular
culture. Whiskey was a staple of settler life, sweetened with sugar and served to children at the
dinner table. 399 It was also used as currency, even in subscriptions to support churches. 400 The
eighteenth-century west was often more spiritous than spiritual – McGready called the whiskey
bottle the "drunkard's Christ" – but whiskey culture was a target ripe for evangelical reform. 401
McGready condemned all forms of alcohol abuse, including the widespread practice of drinking
398
Smith, Old Redstone, 362.
David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), 730.
400
South Elkhorn Baptist church in Kentucky, for example, was founded in 1789 with a subscription including 36
gallons of whiskey. William Warren Sweet, Religion and the Development of American Culture, 1765-1840, (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952), 139.
401
McGready, Posthumous Works, 108.
399
104
whiskey at funerals. When asked by mourners at a Guilford County burial to bless their
whiskey, McGready reportedly said, "I will not be guilty of insulting God by asking a blessing
upon what I know to be wrong." 402 Such absolutism generated a backlash against the pious
McGready, whom later writers would approve as "an uncompromising reprover against sin in
every shape." 403 Robert Davidson, the nineteenth-century Presbyterian noted that McGready
"made himself extremely unpopular by his unsparing invective against horse-racing, gambling,
and other vices." 404
Yet as Christopher Waldrep has argued, McGready's morality was
unusually vehement, springing from adherence to a Calvinist morphology of conversion. To be
blameless in action, watchful against transgression, and spiritually sincere did not itself assure
grace, but was a necessary first stage in the purgation of sinful nature. Only then would the Holy
Ghost lay bare the "hidden wickedness" of a sinner's heart in preparation for salvation. 405
Eighteenth-century Presbyterians such as McGready maintained a dual belief in both God's
omniscient sovereignty and the need for human agency in salvation, recognizing the paradox that
human agency, if not necessarily absolute free will, might co-exist with divine providence.
According to such understanding, liberty to act in accordance to God's injunctions was intrinsic
to the process of spiritual conversion and in converts' attainment of grace. Unlike free-will
Arminians, however, Calvinists like McGready understood such agency in a limited sense,
believing that free will was merely the active faculty of the human mind, distinguishable from
the passive faculty of the understanding. This understanding owed more to Locke than to
Calvin, and was filtered through such theologians as Jonathan Edwards, who argued that "the
soul has no other faculty whereby it can, in the most direct and proper sense, consent, yield to, or
comply with, any command but the faculty of the will ... it is by this faculty only that the soul
can directly disobey [God's plan of salvation]. " 406
McGready's rigid morality helped shorten his stint in North Carolina, as a violent mob
drove him from his own pulpit. As he knew from experience, backcountry North Carolinians
were notorious for "regulating" local grievances, and even the ministry was not immune to
vigilantism. In late 1795 or early 1796, a group of disaffected parishioners stormed the church at
402
Foote, Sketches of North Carolina, 372.
Smith, Old Redstone, 363.
404
Davidson, History of the Presbyterian Church, 259.
405
Christopher Waldrep, "The Making of a Border State Society: James McGready, the Great Revival, and the
Prosecution of Profanity in Kentucky," American Historical Review, vol. 99, no. 3, (June, 1994), 770.
406
Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1860), 166.
403
105
Stony Creek, tearing it up, trashing benches and removing the pulpit to the graveyard, where it
was set alight. They also "left in the clerk's seat a letter written with blood," warning McGready
to cease preaching or face dire consequences. 407 The letter is long lost, and its contents can only
be imagined. Yet as Gordon Woods noted, mob violence was a normal fact of provincial life on
both sides of the Atlantic. Such violence owed less to economic impoverishment and more to a
lack of institutional ordering and policing of society, especially in the backcountry. 408 William
H. Foote describes McGready's opposition as "families of wealth and influence," suggesting they
comprised more than the local dregs of society. 409 Whoever they were, McGready looked next
to his own safety and that of his family.
On August 9, 1796, a special meeting of the Orange Presbytery, convened at McGready's
request, examined his appeal "that he had sufficient reason to lay before them to grant him a
dismission from his charge." Although unimpressed by his "hasty preparations for a removal,
[and] his not giving his people timely and public notice of his intended departure," the
Presbytery acquiesced, allowing him to seek employment elsewhere. 410 McGready's urgent
demands forced Orange Presbytery into a painful decision. Struggling to maintain a stable
institutional presence in the backcountry, the Presbytery's members reluctantly bade farewell to
one of their most zealous colleagues.
McGready and his family did not leave immediately, however, but bided their time that fall
in North Carolina. McGready even continued his ministerial duties. The Sabbath after the
desecration he ordered Isaac Watts's "Will God Forever Cast Us Off?" sung in church. This
hymn, adapted from the 74th Psalm, laments the Babylonian destruction of King Solomon's
Temple. "Over thy gates their ensigns hang," sang the loyal worshipers, "Sad tokens of their
power." 411 Though braving further mob violence, McGready held out, awaiting a ministerial call
whenever it might arise. Early in winter 1796 the call came from a settler outpost where
members of his family were already established. McGready and his family finally left North
Carolina for good.
407
Foote, Sketches of North Carolina, 375.
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1969), 320.
409
Foote, Sketches of North Carolina, 375.
410
MSS, Minutes of Orange Presbytery, September, 1796, in: Guion G. Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina: A
Social History (electronic edition), <http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/johnson/chapter13.html> (7 August 2008).
411
Smith, History of the Christian Church, 563-34.
408
106
They moved west to Logan County, Kentucky. Their new home was rough country,
nestled in the Cumberland region alongside northern Tennessee. It was also desolately beautiful
– rugged terrain of limestone canyons, dense forest, and sinuous waterways. The famed
Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright grew up here, and would soon be converted in the revival
that swept Kentucky. Some fifty years later in his bestselling Autobiography, Cartwright
recalled the lawlessness of his childhood, when Logan County was known as "Rogues' Harbor."
Society was in a "desperate state," the countryside filled with "wretched banditti." Local
vigilantes, or "Regulators," fought to drive out the outlaws. A battle in the court town of
Russelville was chaotic, "with guns, pistols, dirks, knives, and clubs." Some died, and many
were wounded. There followed an ugly vendetta; lynchings and mob resistance eventually drove
the outlaws away. 412 This was the Wild West of the 1790s – a daunting refuge for a persecuted
man and his family.
McGready was eager to make a fresh start. In January, 1797, he assumed charge of his
three new congregations of Muddy River, Gasper River, and Red River. The evocative names of
these young settlements became synonymous in later years with religious awakening, due in
large part to narratives McGready would himself circulate. For now, they offered him the
prospect of ministerial redemption. The fact that these communities knew of McGready by
reputation and had put in a call for him, suggests at least some of his new parishioners were open
to the idea of revival. McGready's first major act as pastor was to present his churches with a
strongly-worded written document – a covenant, binding its signatories in supplicatory prayer:
When we consider the word and promises of a compassionate God, to the poor lost family
of Adam, we find the strongest encouragement for Christians to pray in faith – to ask in the
name of Jesus for the conversion of their fellow man. None ever went to Christ, when on
earth, with the case of their friends that were denied, and although the days of his
humiliation are ended, yet for the encouragement of his people, he has left it on record, that
where two or three agree, upon earth, to ask in prayer, believing, it shall be done. Again,
whatsoever you shall ask the Father in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be
glorified in the Son. With these promises before us, we feel encouraged to unite our
supplications to a prayer-hearing God, for the outpouring of his spirit, that his people may
be quickened and comforted, and that our children and sinners generally, may be
converted. Therefore, we bind ourselves to observe the third Sunday of each month, for
one year, as a day of fasting and prayer, for the conversion of sinners in Logan county, and
412
Peter Cartwright, The Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, ed. Charles L. Wallis (New York: Abingdon Press,
1956), 30-31.
107
throughout the world. We also engage to spend one half-hour every Sabbath morning, at
the rising of the sun, in pleading with God to revive his work. 413
Drawing on established models of Presbyterian praying societies as far back as Reformation
Scotland, such covenants were familiar and effective instruments of revival. 414 Setting aside
every third Sabbath in prayer for spiritual conversions, both locally and far afield, McGready
called upon the resolve of his congregations. While the idea of the covenant was conventional
enough, its significance was far more than simply a call to prayer. McGready effectively
challenged his churches to show evidence of collective grace, shifting the onus of revival from
his own shoulders to the shoulders of the laity.
The covenant soon yielded evidence of its effects. Towards the end of spring, 1797, a stir
broke through the Gasper River meeting, later interpreted as the beginning of the Kentucky
Revival. McGready, preaching "doctrines of Regeneration, Faith, and Repentance," witnessed a
new spiritual seriousness in his congregation. The work, he later wrote, began with a solitary
instance of conversion, and spread rapidly:
A woman who had been a professor in full communion in the church found her old hope
false and delusive. She was struck with deep conviction, and in a few days was filled with
joy and peace in believing. She immediately visited her friends and relations from house to
house, warned them of their danger in a most solemn and faithful manner, and pleaded
with them to repent and seek religion. This as a mean was accompanied with the divine
blessing to the awakening of many. About this time the ears of all in that congregation
seemed to be open to receive the word preached, and almost every sermon was
accompanied with the power of God to the awakening of sinners.
This spiritual hunger continued through the summer. McGready later described parishioners'
demanding tone: "Is religion a sensible thing? If I were converted would I feel it and know it?"
Yet immediate conversions were few and far between. According to McGready, only eight or
nine more congregants were "savingly brought to Christ" over the course of the year, and this
first religious stir cooled towards winter, reflecting the seasonal nature of Eucharistic
413
Smith, History of the Christian Church, 565-66.
The "Concert for Prayer," begun in 1744, involved quarterly synchronized worship between congregations in
Scotland and New England. Participant Jonathan Edwards described it as a "visible union" of Christians in Scotland
and New England, "offering up their cries with one heart, and … one voice." It aimed "to promote more abundantly
application to a duty that is perpetually binding, prayer that our Lord’s kingdom may come." Jonathan Edwards to
anonymous correspondent, George S. Claghorn, ed. Jonathan Edwards: Letters and Personal Writings (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1998), 182.
414
108
observance. 415
The Logan County revival progressed haltingly at first, gathering momentum the following
year. From its beginnings at Gasper River, the revival ignited, moving to Muddy River and then
Red River, site of a climactic June 1800 sacrament. The revival then spread south into
Tennessee, manifesting powerfully among congregations near Shiloh. Traveling eastward along
chains of migration, it spread into North Carolina, affecting David Caldwell's congregations at
Buffalo and Alamance, among others. Especially remarkable to contemporaries and later
observers alike were the characteristic "exercises," or physical manifestations of spiritual
distress. According to McGready, "many persons were so struck with deep, heart-piercing
convictions, that their bodily strength was quite overcome … they fell to the ground, and could
not refrain from bitter groans and outcries for mercy." 416 Baptist physician and preacher James
Fishback recalled: "the opinion prevailed very generally that these were new revelations of the
Spirit … miraculous outpourings & were known & felt in sensible feelings & strange
imaginations & passions." 417
It is easy to dismiss the enthusiasm of the Great Revival with skepticism. Recent
scholarship has mined the social sciences to explain the apparently supernatural experiences of
religious converts. Some scholars have sought to explain function of revivalism itself in purely
social terms. Anthropologist Victor Turner coined the term communitas to describe the sort of
"anti-structure" he witnessed in central Africa, where normal social distinctions temporarily
dissolved amid the liminal ecstasy of tribal rituals. "What is structurally 'visible' to a trained
anthropological observer," wrote Turner, "is psychologically 'unconscious' to the individual
member of the observed society." 418 Historian Ellen Eslinger borrowed the concept of
communitas to describe a "new style of sacramental occasion," exerting "extraordinary power
over individuals in part because it offered them something painfully lacking in normal social life,
a sense of connection and belonging." 419 No doubt the revivals did offer extraordinary emotional
connection between otherwise distant neighbors. Yet surely they offered something more.
415
McGready, "Narrative," New York Missionary Magazine (1802), 156.
McGready, "Narrative," Western Missionary I (March 1803), 46.
417
Boles, The Great Revival, 60.
418
Turner, Ritual Process, 176.
419
Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 225.
416
109
While structural anthropology pours doubt upon the supernatural claims of conversion,
McGready himself interpreted social transformations during the revival as tokens of divine
agency. He consistently maintained that human agency was bound to God's providential will.
This did not prevent him from celebrating the leveling effects of religious exercises, uniting
converts across lines of race, class, and gender. Slaves were prominent among the converted in
Logan County, and McGready exulted that "the Negroes appeared to be powerfully seized with
convictions" at Red River. 420 McGready's "Narrative" also placed special emphasis on children
as witnesses to the revival, emphasizing their surprising powers of exhortation. In one of his
more heterodox statements, McGready even claimed: "The conduct of young converts, and
especially … children, fastened more convictions at these times, than all the preaching." 421
McGready was not simply describing the disruption of normal social relations, however. To his
eyes, the operation of the Holy Ghost transformed men, women, slaves, children, and the socially
marginal into instruments of divine salvation. The tumult was awful, he admitted, but
supernatural ends justified human means. He defended the exhortation of women, slaves, and
even children, from purely religious motives. In doing so, he distinguished sharply between
what he considered to be the unguided dictates of human emotion and the demonstrably
scriptural foundations of true religion:
I stood by some dear young creatures, little boys and girls, and heard their groans and cries
in the pangs of the new birth, like the shrieks and cries of condemned criminals at the place
of execution … To hear them describe the sweet plan of salvation … the good language,
the good sense, the clear ideas, and the rational, scriptural light in which they spoke, truly
amazed me. I felt mortified and mean before them. 422
For McGready, and other evangelical apologists, the fruits of the revival were "rational,"
grounded in scriptural orthodoxy and common sense. The physical manifestations of revival,
meanwhile, were mere epiphenomena – bodily reactions to "the pangs of the new birth." While
acknowledging that such violent outpourings were unsettling, McGready described the summer
of 1800 as "the most glorious time that our guilty eyes have ever beheld." 423
The suddenness of the revival worried many within the Presbyterian Church, tearing them
420
McGready, "Narrative," Western Missionary I (March 1803), 51.
McGready, "Narrative," Western Missionary I (April 1803), 101.
422
McGready, "Narrative," Western Missionary I (March 1803), 50.
423
McGready, "Narrative," Western Missionary I (March 1803), 47.
421
110
between an evangelical desire to propagate the gospel and apprehensions that the revival was at
best enthusiastic, at worse diabolical in nature. A number of senior clergymen traveled to the
western country to evaluate for themselves the revival's effects. Perhaps the most prominent of
these was George Baxter, president of Washington Academy in Pennsylvania (where John
McMillan was a trustee) who wrote a detailed account of his journey to Archibald Alexander,
then president of Hampden-Sydney College. 424 The evangelical press soon republished the
letter, and it circulated widely among eastern readers. As Paul Conkin has noted, Baxter's letter
"soon became, in evangelical circles, the most authoritative evaluation of the great revival in
Kentucky." 425
Writing on January 1 1802, Baxter described the revival in qualified but approving terms.
Not having witnessed the revival first hand, he limited his assessment to empirical observations
of moral effects. "On my way to Kentucky," he wrote, "I was informed by settlers on the road,
that the character of Kentucky travellers was entirely changed; that they were now as remarkable
for sobriety as they had been for dissoluteness and immorality. And indeed I found Kentucky, to
appearance, the most moral place I had ever seen. A profane expression was hardly ever heard.
A religious awe seemed to pervade the country." Baxter observed, as had many others, that the
"phenomena of falling" distinguished this revival from others in living memory, although he
noted the physical resemblances of the Kentucky revival and much earlier revivals in Scotland
and Ulster. The converts he interviewed "had seen no image or sensible representation …
besides the old truths contained in the Bible. Among those whose minds were filled with the
most delightful communications of divine love, I but seldom observed any thing ecstatic."
Baxter concurred with McGready that the revival was "just and rational," adding: "there is
perhaps as little enthusiasm in Kentucky as in any other revival." 426
Yet not everyone was so readily convinced or assured of the revival's divine character, and
within the Presbyterian Church, sacramental revivals soon met resistance. McGready's
"Narrative" alluded to local opposition, but did so to emphasize the power of grace over
424
Alexander later served as the first president of Princeton Theological Seminary, established 1812.
Conkin, Cane Ridge, 107.
426
George Baxter to Archibald Alexander, January 1 1802. Western Missionary Magazine I (August 1803), 260266.
425
111
skepticism, describing the deliverance of "malicious opposers" by divine influence. 427 Yet in
private correspondence, McGready acknowledged a far more complex and determined resistance
to the revival. The mobs encountered by McGready and his fellow evangelicals went beyond
anything described in print at the time. Writing to John McMillan in November 1801,
McGready gave "a continuation of the history of our blessed revival … in Kentucky and
Tennessee." He optimistically described the "visible tokens of God's power & presence,"
including the conversion of his two oldest daughters, then aged six- and eight-years-old.
"Nothing except the salvation of my own soul," he wrote, "ever made me feel so happy."
A dark cloud overhung this happiness, however. McGready went on to describe the
disruption of his sacrament at Muddy River by the Rev. James Balch, his son and two nephews,
and an undisclosed number of followers referred to as "Balchites":
A number of people were collected together for social prayer. The Balchites ran in among
them & seized hold upon a man that was upon his knees at prayer and commanded him to
stop and not blaspheme the Name of God. A violent riot was likely to begin. I ran in
among them in order to stop it. Balches son and nephews blackguarded me with the most
abusefull language, and dared me to concern with them. Still crying out, we will contend
for the Faith once delivered to the Saints and bear our Testimony against delusion – I found
it in vain to speak to them and walked out of the company. The Balchites followed me
crying. 'Ant you the pope. We are upon [the] pope's command …' I called aloud [to] the
people to repair to the tent and attend the publick worship and in the meantime I spoke to
Mr. McGee to begin preaching in order to stop the uproar.
McGready assured McMillan that his opponents were deluded, but made sure to refute explicit
charges against him and his fellow revivalists. Opponents circulated "the most unheard of
falsehoods," claiming that the revival party "denyed part of the Bible … held perfection in this
life … denyed sanctification to be an evidence of regeneration … [and] publickly preached that
every Christian knowed the time and place of his conversion, and would never have a doubt,
until his dying hour." McGready denounced these charges, which blended accusations of
Arminian lassitude with characterizations of antinomian zealotry. As far as he was concerned,
McGready remained true to the Reformed theology of the Presbyterian Church, no matter what
his opponents claimed. He warned McMillan to "believe nothing that you hear from this country
unless it is well authenticated … the devil will roar and roars louder at this time than he ever
427
McGready, "Narrative," Western Missionary Magazine I (April 1803), 102.
112
did." 428
As McGready's letter shows, critics of the revival struggled to comprehend evangelical
worship. Opponents' claims to one side, the evangelical clergy were not illiterate exhorters, but
they were diverse and sometimes contradictory individuals. They differed among themselves,
both theologically and over the significance of the revival's dramatic physical manifestations.
Yet a common apprehension of the "glorious season of the out-pouring of the Spirit of God,"
drew them together. 429 The Kentucky Revival began with the Presbyterian clergy, but soon
included other denominations. The ecumenical dimension leavened the revival, imparting
emotional force through the preaching of Methodist and Baptist ministers. Cooperation between
revivalists of different denominations took place occasionally during the colonial Great
Awakening, but its unprecedented occurrence in Kentucky suggests the extent to which faith
itself was becoming privatized, removed from exclusive spheres of denominational influence.
The evangelical clergy also cohered around old friendships, transcending denomination.
Methodist itinerant John McGee – a former Presbyterian – embodied the social network
established years before at Guilford County, North Carolina. As Paul Conkin noted, McGee
"gave the Methodists a special claim to the great revival," even though he preached hand-in-hand
with his brother William, a locally established Presbyterian minister. 430 John McGee's sermons
at the 1800 Red River sacrament were particularly potent. "This was indeed a blessed day of the
Son of Man," wrote McGready, "The Lord afforded more than common light, life and zeal to his
ministers, and more than common life to the exercise of his praying people." 431 McGee
remembered how he was moved to preach at the meeting house by the shouting of a distressed
female convert, although:
it was suggested to me: "You know these people are much for order – they will not bear
this confusion. Go back, and be quiet." 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 slain. Their screams for mercy pierced the heavens, and
428
McGready to McMillan, November 18, 1801 (transcript).
McGready, "Narrative," Western Missionary Magazine I (June 1803), 175.
430
Conkin, Cane Ridge, 59.
431
McGready, "Narrative," Western Missionary Magazine I (March 1803), 48.
429
113
mercy came down. 432
In the setting of the sacramental season, the Methodist McGee's "uninhibited fervor" was a
powerful instrument of conversion. 433 Thanks to such cross-fertilization, nineteenth-century
Methodism soon adopted the camp-meeting phenomenon with which it eventually became
synonymous.
The Great Revival demonstrated fragile lines of authority between clergy and laity, which
its opponents quickly seized upon as evidence of evangelical disorder. McGready worried about
possible excesses within the revival, but noted that critics should "beware of that fanatical spirit,
which has led some men to discover the most violent and religious zeal, against any thing, and
every thing in religion, which is supremely affecting, warm and interesting." 434 McGready's
accusation of "fanatical spirit" in his opponents had some foundation. As his letter to McMillan
showed, the Balchites quickly resorted to vigilante tactics. William McGee faced down pulpit
assault by a cudgel-wielding mob at Muddy River, while Balch openly lambasted McGready as
"the Deceiver, the Beast of America, the American Anti-Christ." Antirevival violence became so
endemic in Logan County that the local militia was drafted to restore order. 435
This latest stirring harked back to seventeenth-century revivals of Scotland and Ulster –
occasions dramatically centered on the Lord's Supper. While McGready's revivals were notable
for provoking violent opposition, the Lord's Supper was no less central to them. His Eucharistic
theology was unusually zealous, underpinning both the structure of his sermons and the outlook
of his ministry. As Kimberly Bracken Long has noted, two parallel objectives were at work in
McGready's revivals. His sermons were intended not only "to proclaim the gospel to
unbelievers," but also "to perpetuate a rhythm of repentance, renewal, and release … acted out in
rituals of exhortation, self-examination, and communion." 436 McGready used the sacrament of
the Lord's Supper to address eschatological concerns while reinforcing communal standards of
Christian behavior. As Long noted, McGready's preaching focused on "describing the Lord's
432
Rev. John McGee to the Rev. Thomas L. Douglass, June 23, 1820. The Methodist Magazine for the Year of Our
Lord, 1821, vol. 4, (New York: N. Bangs & T. Mason, 1821), 190.
433
Boles, The Great Revival, 53.
434 434
McGready, "Narrative," Western Missionary Magazine I (February 1803), 27.
435
McGready to McMillan, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
436
Kimberly Bracken Long, "The Communion Sermons of James McGready: Sacramental Theology and Scots-Irish
Piety on the Kentucky Frontier," Journal of Presbyterian History, vol. 80, no. 1 (spring 2002), 5-6.
114
table as the anticipation of the heavenly banquet and the promise of the life to come … preparing
his listeners to come to that table as worthy participants." 437 By looking forward to salvation
rather than emphasizing the purely commemorative aspects of the sacrament, McGready
underscored the sacrament's power.
McGready insisted upon the doctrine of transubstantiation, believing that the sacramental
bread and wine literally became Christ's flesh and blood. This interpretation went further
towards the supernatural than either the Westminster Confession or the sermons of most of his
Presbyterian contemporaries. 438 In the "action sermon" preceding observation of the Lord's
Supper, McGready exhorted would-be communicants to approach the table in a penitent frame of
mind, willing to receive the body of Christ. "Well, God is as really present at a sacramental table
as he was in the burning bush at Horeb," he preached, "or on Mount Sinai, or as he will be at the
judgment of the great day." He then expounded on the immanence of the Holy Ghost:
Then, as Moses did at the burning bush, turn aside and see this great sight, here you may
behold all the perfections of God shining with amiable brightness in the face of Jesus
Christ; here you may view the infinite love of God towards our guilty race finding vent
through the breaking heart and bleeding veins of the dying Jesus, and flowing to the chief
of sinners. Here you may see mercy and truth meeting each other, righteousness and peace
kissing each other in the salvation of guilty sinners of Adam's race. 439
As Leigh Eric Schmidt has noted, the sacramental sermon imbued time-honored rituals and
customs with the word of God, providing theological context for an elaborate performance of
faith. This combination of word and action, liturgical and experimental piety, endured into the
nineteenth-century, especially through southern and western regions – "bastions" of sacramental
revivalism. 440
The Great Revival coincided with restructuring of Presbyterian boundaries. Reflecting
demographic growth, the Synod of Kentucky voted on October 15, 1802 to form a new body
from the bounds of the Transylvania Presbytery. 441 Straddling the Kentucky-Tennessee
borderlands where McGready preached, this body became the Cumberland Presbytery.
437
Long, "Communion Sermons," 8-9.
"Westminster Confession of Faith," Chapter 29, Article 2: <http://www.reformed.org.
documents/westminster_conf_of_faith.html> (14 December 2009).
439
McGready, Posthumous Works, 176.
440
Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 66.
441
Sweet, The Presbyterians, 310.
438
115
Infighting between pro- and antirevival ministers soon proved its bane. The evangelical
Cumberland ministers eventually formed their own entity, first as an independent (and
unofficial) council of ministers within the presbytery, and in 1810, following disciplinary actions
by the Synod of Kentucky, as a separate body called the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. The
Cumberland Presbyterians became a regionally prominent fellowship independent of the General
Assembly, undermining the popular authority of the Presbyterian Church. During this
separation, McGready played a pivotal role as both an agitator and a mediator.
At its first meeting at Ridge Church, Tennessee on April 5, 1803, the Cumberland
Presbytery split evenly between supporters and critics of the ongoing revival. McGready was
prominent in the former group, along with William Hodge, William McGee, John Rankin and
Samuel McAdow. James Haw, a former Republican Methodist minister recently received by the
Transylvania Presbytery, boosted their numbers. 442 Thomas Craighead and James Balch headed
the antirevival faction, alongside John Bowman, Samuel Donnell and the aged Terah Templin. 443
The theology and practice of the two groups followed eighteenth-century Presbyterianism's New
Light and Old Light traditions. 444 Divisions within Cumberland Presbytery made it a microcosm
of American Presbyterianism's own divided body. As William Warren Sweet noted, the four
main issues of contention were revivalism, ministerial training, doctrine, and constitutional
rights. 445 From the Presbytery's first session, the New Lights strove to augment local ministerial
ranks, sponsoring the licensure and ordination of revivalist candidates whose lack of classical
education made them unnacceptable to the Old Light faction. These candidates were socially
diverse. They included Finis Ewing, a wealthy and outspoken lay elder converted during the
revival, and Samuel King, a poor but charismatic preacher, later among the earliest Christian
missionaries to the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians. 446 Critics decried the evangelical
ordination policy as a radical departure from tradition, yet ironically it was the brainchild of
442
"Minutes of the Cumberland Presbytery," April 5, 1803. Sweet, The Presbyterians, 284.
Matthew H. Gore, The History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Kentucky to 1988 (Memphis: Joint
Heritage Committee of the Covenant and Cumberland Presbyteries of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 2000),
21.
444
I use the terms "New Light" and "Old Light" here, in keeping with popular usage at the time of the Great Revival.
The cognate but distinct terms "New Side" and Old Side" were used during the colonial era to describe the
Presbyterian factions. The New Light-Old Light terminology originally referred to colonial New England
Congregationalists, but its usage had become general by the late eighteenth-century.
445
Sweet, The Presbyterians, 282.
446
Beard, Biographical Sketches, 54.
443
116
Kentucky's venerated patriarch, the Rev. David Rice. 447 The fast-streaming of lay candidates
was ultimately a pragmatic response to popular demand, intensified by the revival.
The politics of the Cumberland Presbytery reflected an ongoing, and by then seemingly
intractible, national debate as to whether experiential piety or formal education better qualified
ministerial candidates. Colonial Presbyterians had divided from 1741-1758 into a revivalist
Synod of New York and a largely antirevival Synod of Philadelphia. Revivalism's antiauthoritarian tendencies perturbed Presbyterian ecclesiarchs, who had complained during the
First Great Awakening that ministers required "not an universal Toleration of all Things; but a
well bounded Toleration to discharge their Duties to God and Man in their Proper Places,
Callings, and Relations, without disturbing others in their proper Stations." 448 Even after formal
reconciliation, noted Sydney Ahlstrom, the two parties disagreed "on the importance and
knowability of 'holiness' in the ministry, and cognate disputes occurred over the problem of
ministerial discipline." 449 The Cumberland Presbytery controversy was thus the latest local
manifestation of unresolved tensions within the church. Personal animosities between the clergy
further complicated theological disagreements, developing into personal feuds. Generational and
geographic differences were discernable. The New Light faction included many younger
ministers, most with North Carolina connections. McGready was the acknowledged leader,
having known William Hodge, William McGee, John Rankin and Samuel McAdow since
Guilford County days. The Old Light ministers, by contrast, were mostly middle-aged men such
as James Balch and Thomas Craighead, graduates of the College of New Jersey. Factional
bitterness ran deep. Craighead, for one, was "a tenacious personal enemy of Finis Ewing,"
accusing his former parishioner of enthusiastic Arminianism. 450 Ewing complained, in return,
that "Dr. Craighead's … sermons appeared to have not the slightest tendency to alarm the
consciences of his hearers, or to render them dissatisfied with themselves. On the contrary, his
preaching seemed calculated to quiet the fears of the people and keep them from becoming
disturbed about their souls salvation." 451 Although Ewing's theological stance was less
emphatically Calvinistic than McGready's, both men preached a gospel message emphasizing
447
Gore, Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 18.
Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 121.
449
Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, 274.
450
Boles, The Great Revival, 160.
451
Cossitt, Finis Ewing, 37.
448
117
God's grace in salvation, urging audiences "to flee from the wrath to come." 452 By contrast,
revivalists condemned Craighead and his theological allies' reserved preaching for neglecting
audiences' spiritual welfare. 453
Sweeping aside Old Light opposition, Finis Ewing's ordination underscored the revival's
local impact. Presbytery minutes for April 3, 1804 condensed an emotionally charged
confrontation into an opaque sentence: "Some of the members having some difficulty respecting
the legality of Mr. Ewing taking a seat as a member, presbytery took the matter into
consideration, the decision of which was that he was invited to a seat by a large majority." The
evangelical party was now clearly ascendant. Next evening, the Cumberland Presbytery met
after prayers to examine one James Porter for ministerial license. Old Light Reverends Balch
and Craighead were notably absent as Porter gave "sufficient testimonials of his having gone
through a regular course of literature; of his good moral character; and of his being in the
communion of the church." The general nature of Porter's qualifications – notably his "regular
course of literature" – suggest only a modestly rigorous examination, undoubtedly to the chagrin
of many traditionalist Presbytery members. Nevertheless, Presbyteries had always interpreted
their own standards, and Porter was typical of the candidates being accepted into Cumberland
bounds. The normal requirements for licensure remained, excepting proficiency in Latin and
Greek. Porter attested to "experimental acquaintance with religion," and "adopted the confession
of faith" without scruple. 454 Ministerial examinations recorded by the Cumberland Presbytery
reveal a pragmatic acceptance of literate candidates, whose lack of classical learning was the
only regular objection to their calling. The records do not convincingly support the idea of an
evangelical conspiracy to overturn accepted standards of licensure and ordination.
Vehement opposition to the Cumberland Presbytery's New Light ministry seems all the
more surprising, given the dearth of good ministerial candidates. As Paul Conkin notes, the
offending candidates may have lacked the classical educations normally expected of Presbyterian
clergymen, but most were otherwise well educated. In comparison to regularly ordained New
452
Both McGready and Ewing emphasized the doctrine of the Day of Grace – forcing
Ewing stated the point succinctly: "Whitefield once said, God could not permit a greater curse to come on a
people than a christless [sic] minister. But Jesus has settled this matter at once, when he said, 'if the blind lead the
blind both will fall into the ditch'; that is, if the unconverted teach the unconverted, they both will fall into hell."
Finis Ewing, A Series of Lectures on the Most Important Subjects of Divinity (Fayetteville: E. & J.B. Hill, 1827).
454
Sweet, The Presbyterians, 290-292.
453
118
Light ministers such as Barton Stone and Richard McNemar – then active in the Ohio Valley –
"none were as wild in style, as egalitarian in spirit, or as heretical in doctrine." Finis Ewing, in
particular, belied "the received image of the frontier enthusiast," being a wealthy slaveholder
(although he later emancipated his slaves as a matter of conscience), a political friend and agent
of Andrew Jackson, and son-in-law of the slain Continental Army General William Davidson.
"By the time of his ordination," wrote Conkin, "he was arguably the most wealthy, socially the
most prominent, and politically the most influential of all Presbyterian clergymen in the
West." 455
Unable to control the revival among their own congregations, Old Lights on the
Cumberland Presbytery turned to the Synod of Kentucky for help. Under Craighead's
supervision they drafted a formal protest against their revivalist colleagues, alleging irregularities
in the licensing and ordaining of new ministers, most notably failure to subscribe properly to the
Westminster Confession of Faith. 456 A special five man commission looked into the charges,
while the Rev. John Lyle – an austere giant, described by his grandson as a "spare, raw-bone[d]
man" with flowing white hair, and by this time a noted opponent of the revivalists – set off on an
extended tour, to report on the religious state of the Cumberland Presbytery. 457 Lyle's dramatic
presence personified the Synod's party line. As John Boles noted, the Synod's reaction did not
simply reflect the relatively "minor" disruptions of the Cumberland region, but those of
Kentucky as a whole. In particular, the revival already underway in the Bluegrass illustrated the
perils of unchecked enthusiasm. Only the previous year, the Synod struggled through the case of
Richard McNemar, a New Light minister whose heterodox theology eclipsed anything the
Cumberland Presbytery had to offer. Shaken by the Great Revival and determined to reimpose
its authority, the Synod of Kentucky's "orthodox center" inaugurated a Presbyterian inquisition in
all but name. 458
Lyle's 1805 journals contain a largely scathing assessment of the ongoing Cumberland
Presbytery revival. From the outset, he characterized the newly-appointed ministers as "illiterate
exhorters … chiefly Arminians in sentiment … who ride in circuits after the manner of the
455
Conkin, Cane Ridge, 150, 152-153.
"Minutes of the Synod of Kentucky," October 22, 1804. Sweet, The Presbyterians, 328-329.
457
John Lyle interview. Draper MS, 15cc69.
458
Boles, The Great Revival, 161-162.
456
119
Methodists." 459 Lyle heard and saw things that both intrigued and appalled him, and conceded
that "Mr. Finis Ewing, one of the illiterate ministers of this Presbytery" gave a livelier and more
orthodox sermon than anticipated. 460 Lyle presumably knew that Ewing was among the
presbytery's most learned ministers, and it seems disingenuous to have described him as
"illiterate." As Paul Conkin noted, Lyle presumably took illiterate to mean unschooled in the
classics – he nonetheless libeled Ewing, who knew both Latin and Greek. 461 Lyle questioned the
Cumberland ministers closely on their theology, noting that McGready and several other
ministers claimed to be orthodox Calvinists, although he doubted the sincerity of such claims. 462
He scrutinized McGready with special attention, almost willing him to reveal Arminian
sentiments. Tellingly, he discovered that McGready was "a good deal irritated" by the conduct
of local Methodist ministers, by then poaching numerous converts from the ranks of the
Presbyterian Church. 463 McGready remained devoted to his pastoral mission, however much
Lyle suspected him of enthusiasm. Lyle observed McGready closely at a sacramental service,
and was invited to take part. "Preached the action sermon on 1 Cor. 1:18-25." wrote Lyle:
The people heard with attention even the doctrine of a holy or effectual calling with
seeming patience – a doctrine not much preached or believed in these parts. Mr.
McCready [sic] introduced or fenced the tables lengthily & served the first. He spoke very
affectionately. Some of the Communicants appeared tenderly affected – some wept &
some rejoined; others seemed but little engaged. The wicked were in the general to
appearance unmoved. I served the second table. The people were then dismissed. 464
Lyle's journal yields more solid evidence of problematic behavior among the laity than
heterodox belief or practice among the clergy. Shortly after participating at McGready's
sacrament, Lyle recorded his horror at seeing "a baptist negro" exercised by the apparent
impressions of the Holy Ghost.
Sometimes he sang – sometimes prayed – Some of the people attempted to sing a tune for
him – but Mr. McCready & most of the people stood & looked at the negro dancing, I think
half an hour. The negro then stopt a little while – some began to sing (I believe), the tune
of a reel or march to a hymn – the negro began to dance in a step by which he beat it
459
John Lyle, "Journal of a Missionary Tour within the Bounds of the Cumberland Presbytery Performed in the Year
1805," 3. Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, Kentucky.
460
Lyle, "Missionary Tour," 12.
461
Conkin, Cane Ridge, 152. On Ewing's education, see: Beard, Biographical Sketches, 31.
462
Lyle, "Missionary Tour," 16.
463
Lyle, "Missionary Tour," 6.
464
Lyle, "Missionary Tour," 5.
120
exactly. I enquired into the reason of this exercise … Mr. McCready said sometime
afterwards that we could not account for jerking &c on any natural principle – that the jerks
were designed to answer the end of miracles – in drawing the attention of mankind &
convincing infidels of the power of God. 465
Such displays only strengthened Lyle's hostility to the revival. A conservative man, he felt a
duty to restrain, rather than encourage, displays of emotional religion. At times his
disapprobation was almost comical. Visiting William McGee's house, he noted that "The people
who lodge here appear engaged in singing, conversation, leaping and shouting – They appear
much like a drinking party when heard from the other room." 466 Lyle acknowledged spiritual
hunger among the people of the Cumberland Presbytery, lamenting only that their own
enthusiasm and the misguided Arminian theology he detected among the New Light clergy led
them astray. Addressing the Synod directly, he concluded his journal with a call for new
preachers: "My reason for wishing missionaries to spend some time in these congregations … is
that I think there are many pious people here who are in a measure, deluded, that would receive
the truth were it proposed in a plain affectionate manner." 467
The Synod's actions went beyond even Lyle's recommendations. On October 28, 1806 it
met at Lexington, resolving once and for all to remove a thorn in its side. The Cumberland
Presbytery was simply dissolved, re-annexed into the older Transylvania Presbytery. 468 New
accusations of irregularity against McGready and his fellow revivalists accompanied the
dissolution. McGready was suspended from the church – along with McAdow, McGee, Rankin
and Hodge – remaining beyond the Presbyterian pale for another four years. He and his allies
had taken the brunt, subjected to blistering scrutiny, called to account for their defiant
evangelical position. Through all the pressure, McGready saw the writing on the wall. Shortly
before his suspension, he submitted a letter, read by the clerk of the Presbytery at its meeting on
October 15. Minutes simply observed "that bodily indisposition & the inclemency of the season
prevented his attendance." The criticism of fellow ministers may have hastened McGready's
long decline in health, while his actions reveal a man already wearied by controversy. In any
event, Transylvania Presbytery commissioned a committee of six ministers "to attend at
Russellville on the second Tuesday in February next to inquire into the conduct of the Rev.
465
Lyle, "Missionary Tour," 5-6.
Lyle, "Missionary Tour," 8.
467
Lyle, "Missionary Tour," 20.
468
Sweet, The Presbyterians, 353.
466
121
James McGready relative to those things alleged against him by the late Cumberland pby." 469
A simple choice now faced McGready and his Cumberland colleagues – either follow the
new Presbytery beyond the bounds of the church, or return to the fold of Transylvania. 470
McGready was the most prominent Cumberland revivalist to submit to church discipline,
returning to his old Presbytery. Several others did likewise, including William Hodge,
McGready's preaching partner from North Carolina. Hodge appeared before the Transylvania
Presbytery in December 1809, making his "statements, acknowledgements, professions of
sorrow for past irregularities … [and] fully & unequivocally adopted & adhered to the
Confession of Faith of this church." 471 McGready had already submitted a letter to Transylvania
Presbytery, expressing "due submission" to church discipline, although his rehabilitation was
only recognized shortly afterwards when he appeared in person. 472
The Synod's commission demanded public affirmation of the Westminster Confession of
Faith, reifying the charges of heterodoxy McGready and his colleagues had originally faced. The
commission's findings and demands killed off prospects of reconciliation between McGready's
more radical colleagues and the Presbyterian Church. The Cumberland Presbytery was accused,
for example, of failing to vet former Methodist preacher James Haw, yet the Transylvania
Presbytery had ordained Haw before the Cumberland Presbytery was even established. 473 As the
Synodic commission pressed its charges, McGready's submission to church discipline
demonstrated his outstanding denominational loyalty.
Around the time of McGready's restoration to the Presbyterian Church, his personal
reputation took an unexpected blow. Passers-by found him drunk on the open road, after
drinking whiskey "on a cold day, with an empty stomach." While McGready railed against
alcohol from the pulpit, his own physical and mental health had started declining. A strong but
sometimes critical admirer of McGready, Robert Davidson apologized for the preacher's slip,
469
The committee comprised: "Rev. Messrs John Andrews, John Howe, Saml. B. Robertson, Thomas Cleland, &
Joshua L. Wilson, with Mr Clayborne Rice, ruling elder, or any two of them." "Minutes of Transylvania
Presbytery," October 15, 1806, Sweet, The Presbyterians, 201.
470
Only one Cumberland minister – John Rankin – chose a third path, becoming a Shaker. Gore, Cumberland
Presbyterian Church, 24.
471
"Minutes of Transylvania Presbytery," December 6, 1806, Sweet, The Presbyterians, 226.
472
"Minutes of Transylvania Presbytery," October 5, 1806, Sweet, The Presbyterians, 224.
473
Gore, Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 22.
122
blaming the "wicked men" who tempted him with liquor. 474 Yet other factors suggest
explanations beyond even the pressures of his ministry. McGready's wife Nancy had died
suddenly the year before, and liquor may have softened his immediate anguish. 475
McGready's alcoholic lapse was mortifying, claimed Davidson, and "he drew up a written
covenant, never to taste spiritous liquors again." In doing so, he vowed "to observe every month,
the day of his fall as a day of fasting and humiliation, to pray thrice a day in secret, and to
maintain a stricter watch over himself, and a closer walk with God." McGready was hardly the
first Presbyterian minister in Kentucky to drink too much whiskey, but his drafting the covenant
– making public his humiliations in compact with God – once more underlined the voluntaristic
foundations of Presbyterian church discipline. McGready's drunkenness may have been
"deplorable" to some, but as Davidson wote, "we cannot doubt the sincerity of his
repentance." 476
A chastened McGready left the Cumberland region with his family soon after his
restoration to the Presbyterian fold. He settled near Henderson, in western Kentucky, a tobacco
trading post on the banks of the Ohio. An English traveler described Henderson around this time
as a rough hamlet of "about twenty wooden houses and cabins, including two stores and two
large tobacco warehouses." These warehouses received around five hundred hogsheads of
tobacco annually. Though lacking civilized amenities, "the place now begins to thrive a little,
since several wealthy people have settled in the neighbourhood." 477 Tiny but busy, Henderson
teemed with riverboat men – a hard-drinking and notoriously profane constituency.
Nevertheless, McGready discovered hopeful glimmers there a few years earlier, during the Great
Revival. In the fall of 1801 he administered the Lord's Supper at what was then called Red
Banks, encountering surprising piety. What was once "the very synagogue of Satan," he
claimed, now boasted "Christs [sic] victorious standard." 478
McGready died in February, 1817. He preached almost to the very end of his life.
Between 1811 and 1816, the Presbyterian General Assembly employed him as one of its several
474
Davidson, History of the Presbyterian Church, 260-261.
Scott, "James McGready," 230.
476
Davidson, History of the Presbyterian Church, 260-261.
477
Cuming, Sketches of a Tour, 242.
478
James McGready to John McMillan, November 18, 1801.
475
123
field missionaries to Indiana. 479 McGready had already made some missionary forays "in the
vicinity of Vincennes" around 1804 and 1806, and Henderson, Kentucky placed him at a key
staging point on the westward migration routes. 480 Indiana was a testing ground for the
Presbyterian ministry, as well as a final destination for many of its ministers. McGready's
former nemesis James Balch, by then "an aged man," was settled a few miles up the Wabash
River from Vincennes, dying there around 1819.
The New England Presbyterian missionary Isaac Reed traveled to Indiana shortly after
McGready's death, noting at least three congregations founded by the late revivalist. 481 In fact,
McGready had ventured even further west, founding Old Sharon – the earliest Presbyterian
church in Illinois – shortly before his death. 482 Reed noted the scale of the challenge facing
Presbyterian missionaries such as McGready: as late as 1826, "There was not one Presbyterian
minister from Indianapolis to Vincennes." 483 Yet the Presbyterian General Assembly established
its authority in Indiana, the young state becoming a focus for growing numbers of home mission
bodies such as the New York-based United Domestic Missionary Society. 484 The success of
such enterprises suggests the impinging influence of the "Benevolent Empire," as the revivalistic
impulse assumed a more organized national character into the nineteenth-century.
Nineteenth-century historian William Foote bemoaned McGready's lack of a male heir to
assume his clerical mantle and propagate his legacy. 485 Yet McGready's letters in his final years
show a fiercely proud, loving and anxious parent. McGready's daughters were: "My Dear
Children … dearer to me than my life." 486 "I am well but much fatigued," he wrote them. "I
preach every day, and almost every night." 487 Though hopeful of personal salvation, McGready
still grieved his wife and two infant daughters, and fears that his own children would reject
479
L.C. Rudolph, Hoosier Zion: The Presbyterians in Early Indiana (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 41.
Rudolph, Hoosier Zion, 38.
481
The three churches are listed as Pisgah, Blue River, and Livonia. Isaac Reed, The Christian Traveller: in Five
Parts, Including Nine Years, and Eighteen Thousand Miles (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1828), 213
482
A.T. Norton, History of the Presbyterian Church in the State of Illinois, vol. 1, (St. Louis: W.S. Bryan, 1879), 1819.
483
Reed, Christian Traveller, 6.
484
Rudolph, Hoosier Zion, 48.
485
Foote, Sketches of North Carolina, 368.
486
James McGready to "My Dear Children," February 18, 1812. McGready-Ingram Family Papers, Kentucky
Historical Society, Frankfort, Kentucky.
487
James McGready to "My Dear Children" February 18, 1812. McGready-Ingram Family Papers, Kentucky
Historical Society, Frankfort, Kentucky.
480
124
Christ tormented him. "My beloved child," he wrote his daughter Marianne in 1814, "just
consider how near you were to death and Eternity last winter – how the Lord spared your life and
has given you another chance to pray and seek your salvation." 488 To his daughter Margaret, he
wrote: "Why is it, my Dear Child, that you would not watch and pray, and deny yourself to sin
and the giddy toys and vanitys of the world, for the Joys of pardoned sin, the smiles of a
reconciled God, the blessed hope of Eternal life, and the victory over Death through the death of
Christ [?] … O that the Lord would reach your heart and know your will, with the all conquering
arm of redeeming mercy, and reveal Jesus to your precious soul." While prolonged absence
from his family caused McGready anguish, extended preaching tours destroyed his physical
health. "I received a heavy stroke from a horse upon my leg," he wrote, "since then … my foot
has swelled considerably." 489 Enduring cold, pain and hunger, McGready was a pale shadow of
his former self.
More surprising than McGready's rehabilitation in the Presbyterian fold was his continued
association with the Cumberland Presbyterians, whose spirit he evidently shared, if not their
fellowship. In 1816, some few months before his death, he attended a Cumberland Presbyterian
camp meeting near Evansville, Indiana. This was perhaps the last camp meeting at which
McGready would ever preach. At the end of his sermon "The Character, History, and End of the
Fool," he climbed down from the pulpit, praying "with great fervency" among the anxious
hearers gathered to the front of the audience. Finally rising from his knees, McGready
reportedly cried: "O blessed be God! I this day feel the same holy fire that filled my soul sixteen
years ago, during the glorious revival of 1800." 490 Tradition holds that McGready would later
urge his congregation, from his deathbed: "Brethren, when I am dead and gone, the Cumberland
Presbyterians will come among you and occupy this field; go with them they are the people of
God." A majority of his congregation did just that. 491
As Leigh Eric Schmidt has noted, more has been written on McGready as a revivalist and
controversialist than as a bearer of sacramental traditions. The Lord's Supper helped soften the
social and spiritual upheavals of revival and held an enduring appeal among Presbyterian
488
James McGready to Marianne McGready, April 10, 1814. McGready-Ingram Family Papers.
James McGready to Margaret McGready, January 27, 1814. McGready-Ingram Family Papers.
490
Beard, Biographical Sketches, 13-14.
491
Gore, Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 26.
489
125
evangelicals, mystically bridging the private nature of faith and the covenanted body of the
church. Far from a mere relic of eighteenth-century Calvinist orthodoxy, then, McGready should
be seen "as an embodiment of a particular movement and a longer tradition, both of which were
far larger than himself." 492 In this context, the vitality of sacramental revivals in early Indiana
and the western settlements emerges. To observers such as Isaac Reed, the solemn festivity of
such revivals was remarkable. Travelling through Indiana some ten years after McGready's
death, Reed encountered several such meetings. He recorded his impressions, hoping that such
seasons of piety would be noted and approved by a broad public readership:
As the Presbyterians there are chiefly from the southern states, they have brought with
them the customs of the Presbyterians of Virginia and Carolina; and these have brought
them from the mother church in Scotland. One of these customs is, to have a sacramental
meeting consist of several successive days, including a Sabbath. At this meeting it is
common to have a plurality of ministers … Preaching everyday is at the same place, which
is either a meeting-house, or a stand in some piece of woods; and often where there is a
meeting-house, the house is so small, and the assembly so large, that they have to go to the
woods. The congregation consists of the people of the congregation, where the meeting is
held, and numbers, from others round about.
Reed himself took part in several such sacramental meetings, although his New England
background was far removed from the Scotch-Irish folk tradition. Commenting on the regional
character of such revivals, he added: "I have sometimes seen members from six different
Presbyterian churches, and all destitute. Some of these came 25, and others 30 miles, purposely
to attend." 493 Even as the age of the sacramental revival began to wane, increasingly marked by
Methodist-influenced camp meeting revivals, the power of the Lord's Supper retained a
compelling hold on popular piety.
In the end, however, McGready's true significance faded from memory along with the
sacramental revivals that made his name. Thus this chapter concludes where it began,
acknowledging an enigma. While he might inflect his pulpit rhetoric with counter notes of
consolation, he made no apologies for preaching the terrors of the law in order to drive sinners to
repentance. The plain style of his sermon rhetoric, rooted in scriptural exegesis and Calvinist
theology, distinguished his ministry from later varieties of populist preachers, who appealed to
notions of free-will and employed folksy vernacular before large audiences. The Gospel of Mark
492
493
Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 60.
Reed, Christian Traveler, 228-230.
126
states that Jesus named his followers James and John "Boanerges," meaning Sons of Thunder.
The sobriquet was well-used among McGready's Presbyterian contemporaries, evoking a long
line of fire-and-brimstone preachers from Glendinning in Ireland, to Gilbert Tennent in New
Jersey, and McGready in Kentucky. Among McGready's Presbyterian predecessors, the Ulsterborn Tennent would have sounded a familiar warning, railing against the "cold and sapless"
preaching of "Pharisee-Teachers" during the eighteenth-century. 494 Yet distinguishing the Son
of Thunder as a type enabled nineteenth-century Presbyterians to honor the Tennents and
McGreadys of generations past, without seeming to condone the apparent enthusiasm of
contemporary preachers, a Charles Grandison Finney or a Lorenzo Dow. Even a moderate
Calvinist like Scottish-born Robert Hamilton Bishop could comfortably assert: "McGready …
was not only a subject of divine grace and unfeigned piety, but … he was favoured with great
nearness to God and intimate communication with him." 495 Although critics often accused
McGready of enthusiasm in his own lifetime, his conformity to Presbyterian Church discipline
ensured posterity among later ranks of genteel Reformed clergymen, who turned their Son of
Thunder into a useful, domestic saint.
494
Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1966), 160.
495
Bishop, History of the Church, 211.
127
CHAPTER 4: BARTON STONE, DISCIPLE OF CHRIST
Sola experientia facit theologum.
Martin Luther
Barton Stone sat up in an armchair at his daughter's home in Hannibal, Missouri in the
small hours of November 9, 1844. Wracked by pain, he asked for a last pipe of tobacco as
family members sang to him. Mouthing the first verse of the Isaac Watts hymn, "Why should we
start, and fear to die?" he called his son to his side, rested on the young man's shoulder, and died.
His death was a long time coming. Less than a month earlier, an audience member at his final
sermon noted, "He can preach well yet. But he looks like time has marked him as a victim of
eternity." 496 Forty-three years earlier, Stone led the Cane Ridge revival, preaching to audiences
of thousands until his lungs ruptured. Ignoring medical advice, he preached on, blood and sweat
drenching the pores of his body, palsied with fever. "My mind became unearthly," he
remembered, attributing his seemingly miraculous survival to "the grace of God." 497
Stone was a figure who provoked mixed feelings even among those closest to him.
Shortly after his death, one admirer wrote: "If justice is ever done to his memory, he will be
regarded as the first great American reformer – the first man who, to much purpose, pleaded the
ground that the Bible, without note, commentary or creed, must destroy antichristian powers, and
eventually conquer the world." 498 In a more circumspect obituary, Stone's ostensible religious
ally, Alexander Campbell, while acknowledging Stone's "good character and benevolent spirit,"
noted: "In the heat of controversy he may … have been carried too far on some points." 499
Though Stone and Campbell merged their churches in 1832, significant tensions frustrated the
aim of these two former Presbyterians to restore the model of a primitive apostolic church.
496
William Barrett West, Barton Warren Stone: Early American Advocate of Christian Unity (Nashville: Disciples
of Christ Historical Society, 1954), 219.
497
Stone, "Life," 74.
498
Tolbert Fanning, "A Good Man Has Fallen," Christian Review, vol. 1, no. 12, (December 1844), 288.
499
The Millennial Harbinger, (December 1844), 621-22, reprinted in: James M. Mathes, ed., The Works of Elder
B.W. Stone, vol. 1, (2nd edition) (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, Keys & Co., 1859), 39.
128
Stone's childhood was free from the extravagant instances of piety claimed by many
evangelical leaders of his era. He was born on Christmas Eve, 1772, to a large landowning
family in Port Tobacco, Maryland. Although famed as a Presbyterian revival preacher even
before founding his own religious movement, he was raised in the Church of England. Stone's
formal religious upbringing was moderately lax. He never, for instance, took Holy Communion
in his parent church, a remarkably common omission even among practicing colonial Anglicans
of that era. 500 As a youth he aspired to become a magistrate or a merchant rather than a minister,
and enjoyed romances such The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, The History of Tom Jones, and
The Adventures of Roderic Random. 501 All told, Barton Stone was an unlikely religious rebel.
Stone's family struggled financially, though his ancestors were among the colonial elite.
His great-great-grandfather, Captain William Stone was the first Protestant Governor of the
formerly Catholic colony of Maryland in 1648. 502 A second cousin, Thomas Stone, signed the
Declaration of Independence, although he was a lukewarm revolutionary, one of the few
Congressional delegates to favor peace negotiations as late as September 1776. 503 Stone's
parents struggled to maintain appearances of respectability. His father John Stone, counted as a
"gentleman," bequeathed fifteen slaves along with his estate in 1775. With his death, however,
family fortunes went downhill. He split his bequest between his "beloved wife," eight children,
and a grandson. Barton was mentioned only once in the will: "I give and bequeath to my loving
children Matthew Stone, Warren Stone, Elizabeth Stone and Barton Stone one wench big with
Child named Cate, one negro boy named Ned, and two negro Girls Priss and Henny." 504
Barton Stone was three years old when his father died, and many further disruptions
marked his early life. His widowed mother Mary, née Warren, inherited one-third of the family's
Port Tobacco estate but the Revolutionary War made hard economic times even worse. The
Atlantic tobacco trade had peaked earlier in the century and the local economy was in recession.
500
Colonial Anglicans typically observed just four "sacrament Sundays" per year; even among those who attended,
non-communion was remarkably common. Holmes, Faiths of the Founding Fathers, 64.
501
Stone, "Life," 34.
502
Charles C. Ware, Barton Warren Stone: Pathfinder of Christian Unity (St Louis: Bethany Press, 1932), 1.
503
Thomas Stone had also been a prosecuting attorney in court cases involving non-payment of a poll tax for the
support of Anglican clergy. Robert G. Ferris, ed., Signers of the Declaration: Places Commemorating the Signing
of the Declaration of Independence (Washington, D.C.: Department of Interior, 1975), 136.
504
Ware, Barton Warren Stone, 10.
129
Barton Stone's hometown began a long slide to oblivion, culminating in soil erosion filling the
local creek by the middle of the nineteenth-century. 505
Although Stone spent his first seven years in southern Maryland, as an old man writing
his memoirs he summarized this period in just three sentences: "I was born near Port-Tobacco, in
the State of Maryland, December 24th, 1772. My father, John Stone, died when I was very
young. I have no recollection of him in life." His life, as he remembered it, really began when
poverty drove his family to the "back-woods of Virginia, Pittsylvania county." 506 Stone's early
life took place on the move, as did the lives of so many of his contemporaries.
The historian Nathan Hatch lumps Stone alongside "obscure Christians without social
grace and literary education … [who] began to piece together a popular theology that inverted
the traditional assumption that truth was more likely to be found at the upper rather than the
lower reaches of society." Hatch makes Stone "a rawboned character," preaching a simple
"gospel liberty" inspired by the ferment of the American Revolution. 507 Hatch's neo-Turnerian
interpretation of America’s religious landscape is a familiar refrain, but Stone's biography belies
the crude stereotype of the unlettered backcountry preacher. A prolific writer, Stone was no
bawling enthusiast, but an educated, thoughtful man whose emphasis on the accessibility of
reason should not be mistaken for simple anti-intellectualism. Though Stone insisted upon the
Bible alone as the source of Christian authority, his hermeneutic approach stemmed from
enlightenment currents, albeit significantly far removed from John Bradford's philosophical
brand of secularism. Applied to the revealed word of scripture, Stone's didactic Common Sense
approach bore the hallmarks of his Presbyterian education. "If a man be in a dungeon," he wrote,
"and light be emitted, he must see, if he does not shut his eyes against the light … when the
gospel is preached in the spirit, the light beams upon sinners in darkness, and were they not to
resist the light, or shut their eyes against it, they would see, and believe." No "previous
505
Ware, Barton Warren Stone, 5. Port Tobacco is now a ghost town, as unfashionable as the crop it was named
for.
506
507
Stone, "Life", 31.
Hatch, Democratization, 45, 70.
130
mechanical operation" was needed to enable faith, Stone added, but the gospel itself radiated the
supernatural efficacy of grace. 508
Stone's heterodox theology and revival leadership "Scandalize[d] the Presbyterian
Church," which expelled him from its ministry shortly after the Cane Ridge revival, yet his
troublesome reputation sprang from religious conviction more than hot-headedness. 509 A
Restorationist, he sought to restore the fellowship of early Christianity, opposing sectarian
divisions of the church. He also embraced Arminianism, the free-will tendency of
evangelicalism, emphasizing human agency in obtaining salvation. The theological divisions of
the Great Revival evolved gradually, yet Stone's rejection of Calvinist predestinarian theology
soon alienated both the conservative wing of evangelical Presbyterianism – led by James
McGready – as well as the Old Light Presbyterian establishment. Opposition to Stone among
fellow evangelicals was especially severe. According to one scholar, “Stone represented all that
McGready feared might go wrong in revivalism.” 510 Some New Lights who had stood with
Stone in the early stages of the revival also later denounced him, having embraced the newer
light of the Shaker gospel.
Ironically, Stone is best remembered as a founder of a religious denomination rather than
(as he aspired to become) a restorer of primitive church unity. The principle of restoration –
restitutio – emerged from the bedrock of Protestant thought, pointing back to the primitive
practices of the first Christians. As early as the sixteenth-century, an emphasis on ritual and
scriptural purity distinguished it from the mainstream reformatio principle of justification by
faith alone, although neither principle existed wholly independent of the other. Restitutio or
Restorationism characterized the radical, apocalyptic Protestant Reformation of the Anabaptists,
emphasizing the timelessness of the means of grace represented by the early church, as well as
the appeal to God's sovereign grace found in Luther and most early modern evangelicals.
Positing a scripturally evident model of ideal communion, Restorationists modeled both their
ethos and their worship upon the primitive church. Restitutio was an expression of biblical
rationalism, as well as an outgrowth of the privatization of faith, resulting in "postures of
508
Barton Stone, "A Compendious View of the Gospel," The Biography of Elder Barton Warren Stone, Written By
Himself: With Additions and Reflections, John Rodgers, ed. (Cincinnati: J.A. & U.P James, 1847), 217-218.
509
"Minutes of the Synod of Kentucky," October 15, 1808. Sweet, Presbyterians, 372.
510
Opie, “James McGready,” 451.
131
profound self-reliance," as Richard T. Hughes has noted. 511 In practical terms, it continued to
fan the flames of conscience lit by the earliest church reformers.
This chapter addresses the significance of Stone's millenarian outlook, grounded in his
experiences as a Kentucky revivalist, related to the key events of his life and times. Stone
increasingly rejected the secular culture of his day. In his final years, he urged his Christian
followers to turn their backs on civil society altogether, abstaining from jury service, political
elections, and office-seeking. By spurning politics, he wrote, Christians would be "clearing
away the rubbish from the foundation of God's government of the world." 512 Stone became
fervently millenarian, and as time progressed, his anticipation of end times grew stronger.
Although political quietism can often be interpreted as an ironic form of political statement,
Stone's eschatological convictions can also be accepted on their own terms. Worldly affairs were
trivial to him, except inasmuch as they related to the ultimate reality of Christ's kingdom. His
opposition to slavery, for example, developed over time from an expression of simple revulsion
into a triumphal vision of radical spiritual equality.
Millenarianism shaped Stone's self-understanding. He dedicated his ministry to
advancing "the Redeemer's kingdom, irrespective of party," though his career embroiled him in
sectarian controversy. 513 Despite chronicling both the progress of Christianity in general and of
his own spiritual life in particular, Stone viewed history through the primitivist and millenarian
lens of sacred time. Stone became apocalyptic, living as though the Kingdom of God was at
hand, stating: "the time is approaching, when the government and laws of Jesus will universally
prevail, and all the rest shall pass away, as fogs of the morning." 514 At the same time, he
cautioned fellow Christians against complacency: "We must be co-workers with God; everyone
should be engaged; and as large bodies move slowly, let each one begin in himself." 515 This
emphasis on the private, inner operations of conscience was the foundation of Stone's powerful
religious vision.
511
Richard T. Hughes, "Are Restorationists Evangelicals?" Donald W. Dayton and Robert K. Johnston, eds, The
Variety of American Evangelicalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 111.
512
Williams, Barton Stone, 238.
513
Stone, "Life," 79.
514
Christian Messenger, vol. 6, no. 8 (August 1832), 251.
515
Christian Messenger, vol. 13 no. 9 (January 1844), 257.
132
Stone's post-revolutionary Virginia childhood shaped his later distaste for sectarian
Christianity. His memoirs vividly illustrate the religious landscape of that time, describing an
influx of demoralized and disheartened former army conscripts: "Every man did what seemed
right in his own eyes; wickedness abounded, the Lord's day was converted into a day of pleasure,
and the house of worship deserted." Yet Virginia also felt seismic religious stirrings. Baptists
and Methodists had proselytized the loose-knit population since the days of the colonial Great
Awakening, and continued doing so after the War of Independence. Driven by curiosity, Stone
attended many religious meetings, including sacramental services conducted by famed Baptist
preacher, Samuel Harris. Stone "was particularly interested to hear the converts giving their
experience," a reflection, perhaps, of his own seeking frame of mind. He got into the habit of
praying in secret, "with an earnest desire for religion," but remained unconverted. The warmth
of individual preachers was impressive, yet the theological infighting he witnessed, particularly
between the Baptists and the Methodists, left him cold. Abandoning religion, he "quit praying"
in favor of "the youthful sports of the day." 516
Stone's education underlined both the cultural shortcomings and the unexpected
opportunities of his milieu. Though Stone was a naturally bright and attentive student, his
elementary schooling in Virginia was wretched. A "tyrant of a teacher" unwittingly instilled a
lifelong abhorrence to cruelty, through sadistic and seemingly indiscriminate canings. Stone later
reflected on this time, expressing strong views on corporal punishment. Questioning the
received wisdom of his day, he argued that teachers should only beat their charges: "in cases of
necessity; and then by the arm of mercy." The teacher "should act the part of a kind father
towards … his children. Gain their respect and love, and they will delight in obedience." 517
For Stone, this teacher turned out to be the Rev. David Caldwell, an avuncular sixty-five
year old minister, who embodied the Log College tradition of Presbyterian education. Caldwell's
Guilford County, North Carolina academy underwrote church influence through the backcountry,
attracting prospective ministers as students, as well as others with secular aspirations. Though
nominally Episcopalian, Stone lived in backcountry Virginia, far removed from the cultural
outreach of his church. Ambitious to become a lawyer, Stone had few higher education options.
516
517
Stone, "Life," 36.
Stone, "Life," 33.
133
Virginia's Anglican-established College of William and Mary offered the most rounded
education in Virginia, but it was socially and geographically exclusive. Stone was drawn west
instead to Caldwell's academy, enrolling there in 1790.
Caldwell's academy was the Great Revival's crucible, and the epicenter of a fateful
awakening that was underway at the time of Stone’s arrival. Although Stone came to admire
Caldwell, he tired of what he considered excessive religious zeal among his fellow students.
James McGready, himself a former grammar student at the academy, dazzled the student body
with his charismatic preaching and personal piety. About thirty of Stone's peers found Christ
under the Son of Thunder's ministry. But Stone was unimpressed, withdrawing into his books
with an almost-monastic singlemindedness. Rising early and living on milk and vegetables, he
nevertheless struggled to ignore the burgeoning exhortation, which from 1790 to 1791
continually disrupted normal student life at the academy. Stone even considered transferring to
Hampden-Sydney – itself the site of Presbyterian revival – to "get away from the constant sight
of religion." 518
Stone's roommate – "a pious young Virginian" – eventually persuaded him to attend one
of McGready's sermons. McGready's preaching both fascinated and unnerved Stone. There was
nothing remarkable in McGready’s appearance save for his "small piercing eyes" and wild,
gesturing limbs, but the preacher’s "coarse, tremulous voice" sowed "feelings indescribable" in
Stone's imagination. Recorded some fifty years later, Stone's impressions retain their power:
Every thing appeared by him forgotten, but the salvation of souls. Such earnestness –
such zeal – such powerful persuasion, enforced by the joys of heaven and miseries of
hell, I had never witnessed before. My mind was chained by him, and followed him
closely in his rounds of heaven, earth and hell, with feelings indescribable. His
concluding remarks were addressed to the sinner to flee the wrath to come without delay.
Never before had I comparatively felt the force of truth. Such was my excitement, that
had I been standing, I should have probably sunk to the floor under the impression. 519
The tide of excitement soon swept Stone up. McGready's sermon was stirring, but Stone
claimed to have resisted the idea of conversion, anticipating "a long and painful struggle" if he
"should get religion." Nevertheless, he traveled some fifty miles with a large group of fellow
518
519
Stone, "Life," 37.
Stone, "Life," 38.
134
students in February 1791, attending a religious meeting at Sandy River, Virginia. Ministers at
this major sacramental observation – a Presbyterian Holy Fair – included McGready, William
Hodge, John Blair Smith, and James Blythe, one of the clergymen who later ordained Stone.
This was Stone's first experience of Holy Communion; for him as for McGready,
personal awakening began with the sacrament. The scene was a reenactment of Presbyterian
piety amid rolling hillscapes, strangely redolent of seventeenth-century Scotland or Ireland.
President Smith of nearby Hampden-Sydney delivered the opening sermon, from Psalm 51: "The
sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart. O God, thou wilt not despise."
Stricken with repentance, Stone imagined his own heart described. 520 As Leigh Eric Schmidt has
noted, sermonic "fencing of the tables" was a key element of the Lord's Supper, warning those
partaking of the sacramental bread and wine to do so in good faith, lest they eat and drink
damnation unto themselves. Such sermonic ritual carefully constructed "the boundaries defining
… [the] community." 521 Yet as Stone's participation underlines, faith was the only formal
prerequisite for communion.
Stone was awakening, but as he had foreseen, conversion was "long and painful."
McGready's sermon for that evening, from Daniel 5:27 – "Tekel, thou art weighed in the
balances, and art found wanting" – struck dread into Stone's heart. He described how McGready:
went through all the legal works of the sinner – all the hiding places of the hypocrite – all
the resting places of the deceived – he drew the character of the regenerated in the
deepest colors, and thundered divine anathemas against every other. Before he closed his
discourse I had lost all hope – all feeling, and had sunk into an indescribable apathy. He
soon after inquired of me the state of my mind. I honestly told him. He labored to arouse
me from my torpor by the terrors of God, and horrors of hell. I told him his labors were
lost upon me – that I was entirely callous. He left me in this gloomy state, without one
encouraging word. 522
Stone wrote this judgment of McGready more than twenty years after the Son of
Thunder's death, yet he chose his words cautiously. McGready was a powerful preacher in his
prime, captivating large audiences. Stone respected him as a revivalist, but denounced his
theology. McGready's sermon was harrowing, precipitating Stone's eventual disillusionment
520
Stone, "Life," 39.
Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 109.
522
Stone, "Life," 63.
521
135
with Calvinism. He described this tradition in his memoirs as that "dark mountain between
heaven and earth" – a misguided system emphasizing human depravity and divine predestination
at the risk of those very souls seeking salvation. 523 Stone's theology evolved differently. He
rejected, for example, both the idea of Christ's death as substitutional atonement for the elect,
and the notion that individuals were powerless in their own salvation.
Debilitating anxiety preceded Stone's conversion. He languished for several weeks,
during which time his "altered appearance" alarmed even close friends and relatives. He stayed
with his mother at Pittsylvania County after McGready's sermon, expressing fear for her
"dangerous condition." Mary Stone "had always been a praying woman," but had not yet
experienced spiritual conversion. She eventually found religion, embracing the Methodist
Church; a journey Stone dated to this time. "My visit proved to be a blessing to several of my
relatives," he wrote, descrying the hand of providence. 524
The means of Stone's deliverance was not the famed McGready, but "a strange young
preacher, William Hodge." After returning to Guilford County, Stone attended one of Hodge's
sermons at Alamance, on the text (1 John 4:8) "God is love." Hodge's sermon spoke to Stone's
heart, rousing him to embrace the faith he had so long struggled with. At the same time, Stone
expressed surprise that his conversion was of a different order than he had been led to anticipate:
With much animation, and with many tears … [Hodge] spoke of the Love of God to
sinners, and of what that love had done for sinners. My heart warmed with love for that
lovely character described, and momentary hope and joy would rise in my troubled
breast. My mind was absorbed in the doctrine – to me it appeared new. But the common
admonition, Take heed lest you be deceived, would quickly repress them. This cannot be
the mighty work of the spirit, which you must experience – that instantaneous work of
Almighty power, which, like an electric shock, is to renew the soul and bring it to
Christ. 525
Hodge's tender sermon triggered Stone's conversion, yet Hodge was not a solo instrument
of divine grace. Stone underestimated (or willfully ignored) the extent to which Hodge and
McGready worked in tandem. McGready and Hodge preached together in North Carolina, just
as they would during the Kentucky revivals; the former preacher riling spiritual anxiety, the
523
Stone, Autobiography, 33.
Stone, "Life," 40.
525
Stone, "Life," 40-41.
524
136
latter appealing to gentler emotions. The Cumberland Presbyterian minister James Smith wrote
that Hodge "was the reverse of Mr. McGready … His [Hodge's] great Excellency appears to
have been in his skill, under God, to heal the broken hearted and bind up their wounds." 526 Yet
Hodge's gentle gospel was the perfect foil to McGready's strident preaching; their sustained
cooperation suggests the symbiotic relationship between consolation and terror typical of
successful revivalism.
While Stone recognized the gospel's transformative power – implanting a "new" spiritual
outlook – the nature of his conversion gave him pause. Seeking a Damascene conversion, he
instead discovered God as a quieting, persuasive presence. Though Stone's conversion was
unaccompanied by blinding light, he did not consider it any less contingent on divine grace. His
description of heartwarming faith – a new spiritual sense – reflected his understanding of
revealed religion. It is worth noting the similarity between Stone's experience and many
Methodist conversion narratives, not least John Wesley's. 527 Stone had admired Methodist
preaching in Virginia (if not Methodist sectarianism), and he worked closely with the
denomination in Kentucky. His revivalism was in many ways Methodistic. Both the Arminian
emphasis on free will and the Wesleyan doctrine of sanctification, or Christian perfectibility,
resonated within him.
Stone worried at first, being convinced that his intellectual assurance of grace was
delusory. John Wesley had suffered similar doubts about his own conversion. As a revivalist,
the Methodist leader was amazed by "the signs and wonders" often accompanying the earliest
conversions among his followers, later blaming the ebbing of God's spirit at Methodist meetings
on his own ambivalence towards such emotional manifestations. 528 Both Stone and Wesley
resisted naturalistic explanations of conversion, however, instead seeking evidence of the Holy
Ghost in their own hearts. Conversion was understood as a process, as well as an event.
Assurance of salvation thus became something to be groped towards, testing the prospective
convert's experience against scripture, openly confessing doubts. When Stone described his
spiritual agony to David Caldwell, the old man rebuked him. "He removed my scruples on this
526
Smith, History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 668.
See, for example: Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, 324-327.
528
Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 73-74.
527
137
subject," wrote Stone, "by assuring me that I had no right to expect a miracle." 529 Ironically,
while Stone never experienced the ecstatic visions and physical exercises typical to Presbyterian
conversion, those very phenomena among his own congregations led later critics to label him an
enthusiast.
Stone's religion was self-consciously heterodox by Presbyterian standards, yet his calling
was unperturbed. After his course of studies, he discussed his prospects with Caldwell,
expressing a "great desire to preach the gospel." 530 While the Westminster Confession of Faith
might have proven a stumbling block to Stone's ambition, Caldwell encouraged Stone to seek
Presbyterian ordination regardless. In so doing, he reaffirmed his confidence in the young man,
as he had done time and again with other young waverers.
In 1793, Stone and several of his fellow students became ministerial candidates in the
Orange Presbytery, where McGready was stirring up religious excitement. The young men soon
got tangled in their required theological reading. Along with some of his peers, Stone struggled
with the Calvinist view of the trinity, emphasizing the co-equal, co-existent and co-eternal
tripartite nature of the Godhead. Herman Witsius, the seventeenth-century Dutch divine whose
trinitarian apologetics the students were expected to master, "wound up all in incomprehensible
mystery," complained Stone. Stone instead derived an understanding of the trinity from the
eighteenth-century English theologian and hymnodist Isaac Watts. 531 Watts's position resonated
with Stone's later writings on the trinity, and was decidedly unorthodox from the standpoint of
the Westminster Confession. Watts maintained the tripartite distinctions of the Godhead, yet
downplayed the metaphysical import of Christ's humanity, particularly the idea of the crucifixion
as a substitutional atonement for sinful humanity. More generally, Watts inferred, "it can never
be necessary to Salvation, to know the precise Way and Manner how one Godhead subsists in
three personal Agents, or how these three Persons are one God." 532 Like Watts, Stone proved to
be a theological pragmatist in such matters.
529
Stone, "Life," 42.
Stone, "Life," 42.
531
Stone, "Life," 43.
532
Isaac Watts, The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity: or, Father, Son, and Spirit, Three Persons and One God,
Asserted and Prov'd (London: J. Clark; E. Mathews; and R. Ford, 1722), 152.
530
138
Pressed by a shortage of suitably qualified candidates, the Presbyterian Church exhibited
its own pragmatism when it came to theological examination. Although the ghost of Herman
Witsius haunted Stone and his peers, their anxiety was misplaced. Rev. Henry Patillo,
examining the candidates in theology, proved "very short" on the doctrine, his questions
involving "no peculiarities of the system." As Stone later surmised, Patillo wished "to prevent
debate on the subject in the Presbytery," and avoid unnecessarily embarrassing the candidates. 533
Stone would not be licensed until 1796; meanwhile, he sought refuge from his studies.
Still riled with theological angst, he spent a year in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, at the home of
his half-brother Matthew Stone, a recent settler in the area. He found work at an academy run by
Hope Hull, the famous Methodist preacher, teaching languages to a class of around seventy
students. He enjoyed his time in Georgia, later expressing some guilt for attending too many
"tea parties and social circles." As in Virginia, Stone once more admired the Methodists' warm
religion, attending at least one conference to hear Hull preach. 534
At age twenty-three, Stone returned to North Carolina in the spring of 1796, with enough
money to pay off his debts. He at last received his license from the Orange Presbytery, and was
"appointed to ride and preach in the lower parts of the state." Itinerating through the
backcountry, Stone was soon discouraged by the indifferent reception to his preaching. Feeling
himself "not qualified for such a solemn work," he decided to migrate instead to "some distant
country, where I should be a perfect stranger." The following day, he set out towards Florida,
but did not get far. "A pious old lady" in the neighborhood recognized Stone and scolded him,
likening him to the biblical Jonah in his flight from responsibility. Rather than seeking
anonymity in the south, she said, he should "go over the mountains, to the West." This
injunction, linked to patterns of chain migration, underlined the fact that Kentucky was already a
familiar migration point to Stone's neighbors. The idea of the west as a theater for personal
reinvention and strenuous activity had become a cliché by the time these words were published
533
Stone, "Life," 44. For theological background to Watts and Witsius on the trinity, see: Williams, Barton Stone,
28-33.
534
Stone, "Life," 45.
139
in the 1840s, but it was a powerful force in the popular imagination of the 1790s. "This advice
pleased me," remembered Stone, at once changing his course. 535
Stone's description of his travels reflected his belief that divine providence guided him.
Traveling north in 1797 through the Shenandoah Valley into Tennessee, Stone and his traveling
party (comprising a handful of fellow migrants picked up en route) narrowly escaped a band of
"fifteen or twenty Indians" startled at the edge of a canebreak. Praising God for their
deliverance, Stone and his party spent some time near Nashville before moving up through the
Cumberland area (where McGready migrated the following year) and on to the Bluegrass. "The
fine timbered country" around Lexington impressed Stone, and was "densely settled by wealthy
farmers." Before winter set in, the fledgling congregations of Cane Ridge and Concord invited
Stone to stay and preach. Gratefully accepting the offer, Stone applied himself "closely to
reading and study" and to his sermons. Over the following months, Stone claimed his first
successes as a budding minister, adding around fifty members to the church at Concord and
another thirty to Cane Ridge. In the fall of 1798, the two congregations put in a formal call for
Stone's ordination via the Transylvania Presbytery. 536
In his memoirs, Stone tactfully omitted any mention of his predecessor, Rev. Robert
Finley. An evangelical Presbyterian who was also an alcoholic, Finley was suspended from duty
in 1795 for drunkenness and insubordination. One eyewitness remembered watching him pass
by on his horse "so drunk he could scarcely ride." 537 Finley's decline was especially tragic given
his sharp intellect and solid credentials. A graduate of the College of New Jersey, taught by the
Rev. John Witherspoon, Finley itinerated through the south during the 1780s before settling as
the first minister at Cane Ridge and Concord in 1793. 538 Stone's ascetic self-discipline was a
welcome change, but Finley's brief tenure was not entirely insubstantial. Three of the local
ministers he helped train – John Thompson, John Dunlavy, and Richard McNemar – played key
roles alongside Stone in the Kentucky revival. 539
535
Stone, "Life," 46-47.
Stone, "Life," 55.
537
Ellen Eslinger, "Some Notes on the History of Cane Ridge Prior to the Great Revival," Register of the Kentucky
Historical Society, vol. 91, no. 1 (winter 1993), 5.
538
Eslinger, "Notes on the History of Cane Ridge," 5.
539
William E. Tucker and Lester G. McAllister, Journey in Faith: A History of the Christian Church (Disciples of
Christ) (St Louis: Bethany Press, 1975), 68.
536
140
Stone at last stood for ordination but once more, self-doubt got in his way. He "stumbled
at the doctrine of the Trinity as taught in the [Westminster] Confession," an apparently
insuperable contradiction in his mind. Stone recalled his examination by the Revs. James Blythe
and Robert Marshall as uneventful until "the question was proposed 'Do you receive and adopt
the Confession of Faith, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Bible?'" Stone
"answered aloud, so that the whole congregation might hear, 'I do, as far as I see it consistent
with the word of God.'" The Westminster Confession was of course highly contentious, and
would soon prove to be the hook that unraveled Presbyterian unity. Yet despite Stone's fraught
response to their question, Stone's examiners certainly anticipated a pro forma response.
Presbytery minutes record nothing memorable about Stone's ordination; it is unlikely that Blythe
and Marshall would in any case have pressed him on his subscription to the Westminster
Confession. 540 Prior to the Great Revival, demand for qualified ministers generated goodhumored tolerance of theological individualism; afterwards, creedal orthodoxy determined battle
lines within the church.
By 1798, the seeds of the Cane Ridge revival were already sprouting, even if Stone
would have considered it improper to credit human agency for their eventual fruition. Stone's
understanding of the nature of revival was never that of Charles Grandison Finney – nineteenthcentury America's most famous evangelical – who claimed revivals were "to be judged of by the
ordinary rules of cause and effect." 541 Rather, thought Stone, the origins and significance of
revival were entirely supernatural. In the spring of 1801, he attended McGready's revival "on the
edge of a prairie" near the Tennessee border, and was amazed to see dozens of spectators
stricken for hours "in an apparently breathless and motionless state." Several of Stone's
acquaintances were among this number, including "a careless sinner," whom Stone "observed
with critical attention" during his strange ordeal:
I noticed the momentary revivings as from death – the humble confession of sins – the
fervent prayer, and the ultimate deliverance – then the solemn thanks and praise to God –
the affectionate exhortation to companions and to the people around, to repent and come
to Jesus. I was astonished at the knowledge of gospel truth displayed in the address. The
effect was, that several sunk down into the same appearance of death. After attending to
540
"Minutes of Transylvania Presbytery," October 4, 1798. Sweet, Presbyterians, 180.
Keith J. Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney 1792-1875: Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1987), 279.
541
141
many such cases, my conviction was complete that it was a good work – the work of
God; nor has my mind wavered since on the subject. 542
In the month preceding Cane Ridge, Stone began a new chapter in his life, marrying
Elizabeth Campbell. Elizabeth was the daughter of Colonel William Campbell of Muhlenberg
County, southern Kentucky. A "pious" woman, "much engaged in religion," she may well have
attended the Logan County revival, and possibly met Stone there. Afterwards, the newlyweds
hastened to Cane Ridge "with ardent spirits … in readiness for a great meeting." 543 Thousands
of fellow Kentuckians likewise descended on the Bluegrass, for what one participant anticipated
as "one of the greatest meetings of its kind ever known." 544
Cane Ridge was Kentucky's Pentecost; it also marked a crossroads in the authority of the
Presbyterian Church. Stone later acknowledged the revival's power as "fire in dry stubble driven
by a strong wind," rejoicing in a foretaste of the "Christian love" under a restored church. 545
Stone's actions on the ground revealed a more doubting spirit than his later recollections of
events let on, however. Although he later denounced denominationalism as un-Christian, Stone
was at first suspicious of preachers from outside his own Presbyterian circle. An estimated
eighteen Presbyterian ministers preached at Cane Ridge, and possibly even more Baptist and
Methodist preachers preached or were present. 546 At Cane Ridge, Stone attempted to bar
Methodist preacher William Burke from the pulpit, frowning upon Burke's loud enthusiastic
style. Burke refused to give in to Stone's demands. Climbing upon "the body of a fallen tree,"
he recalled, "I commenced reading a hymn with an audible voice, and by the time we concluded
singing and praying we had around us… ten thousand people." 547 Stone's Presbyterian colleague
John Lyle lamented the effects of this ex tempore intervention, while acknowledging its power in
attracting "a large audience" engaged in shouting, singing, and shaking in "extacy." 548 Burke's
uninvited sermon transformed Cane Ridge from a Presbyterian sacramental meeting into a
chaotic jubilee.
542
Stone, "Life," 65.
Stone, "Life," 67.
544
Williams, Barton Stone, 58.
545
Stone, "Life," 67.
546
Boles, Great Revival, 65.
547
William Burke, "Autobiography of Rev. William Burke," W.P. Strickland, ed., Sketches of Western Methodism:
Biographical, Historical, and Miscellaneous, Illustrative of Pioneer Life (Cincinnati: R.P. Thompson, 1857), 78.
548
Lyle, "Diary," 24.
543
142
The Cane Ridge revival shook the surrounding countryside for eight days. Critics from
within the church soon decried its cacophony of preachers, audiences, and religious styles.
Lexington's ultra-Calvinist Presbyterian minister Adam Rankin, though personally absent from
Cane Ridge, condemned deluded participants who exhibited:
extravagant affliction, such as falling into dead fits, strong convulsions, fearful exertions,
great swoonings, foamings, faintings, pedantic whimsical gesticulations, leaping,
dancing without taking the least notice of any person or thing, imaginary sights,
visionary representations, starting upwards, and reaching their hands toward heaven, as
though they were apprehending some invisible object, extatic [sic] raptures, bawling,
screaming, yelling, bellowing, crying, laughing and wallowing, until they have spent their
strength in such ungovernable measures. 549
Rankin lamented this "motley crew" as a deafening wall of voices – exhorters as well as
preachers – the former group including women, children and slaves. 550
At Cane Ridge, as at Logan County, children were especially vocal, even forming their
own ad hoc worship groups. The socially conservative John Lyle was both disturbed and moved
to find "a number of boys & girls singing & shaking hands & sort of wagging" near the
meetinghouse, adding: "they appear'd very loving & joyful & almost dizzy with joy." 551 Rev.
Richard McNemar, meanwhile, approvingly described one twelve-year-old boy exhorting from a
log: "With tears streaming from his eyes, he cried aloud to the wicked, warning them of their
danger." 552 Like most evangelicals, McNemar celebrated such instances of religious precocity as
proof of a work of God. McNemar's faith in child exhorters was exhibited in his nine-year old
daughter Vincy, who allegedly perched on her father's shoulders to address the crowds at Cane
Ridge. 553
Among the most striking outcomes of the Great Revival – eclipsing the incidental tumult
of the camp meetings themselves – was its challenge to slavery. The egalitarian spirit of
revivalism confronted white evangelicals with the humanity of the enslaved, though it did not
necessarily overturn paternalistic racial attitudes. A sizeable black presence was recorded at
549
Adam Rankin, Review of the Noted Revival in Kentucky, Commenced in the Year of Our Lord, 1801 (Lexington:
John Bradford, 1803), 24.
550
Rankin, Review of the Noted Revival, 20.
551
Lyle, "Diary," 35.
552
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 25.
553
J.P. MacLean, Shakers of Ohio: Fugitive Papers Concerning the Shakers of Ohio, with Unpublished Manuscripts
(Columbus: F.J. Heer, 1907), 24.
143
Cane Ridge, led by a slave preacher identified as Old Captain. Unfortunately, no extant
description of this collective worship exists, save for a few passing references in accounts of the
revival. White ministers at Cane Ridge were not especially interested in chronicling the
participation of black worshipers, and Stone did not even mention their presence at Cane Ridge
in his memoirs. The black participants apparently separated from the general audience of their
own free choice. They heard Stone's ministerial colleagues preach, however, for as Paul Conkin
has noted, "white ministers addressed the Negro assembly as a matter of respect and out of
concern for their social welfare." 554 The overwhelming drive for salvation generated by the
revival weakened the institution of slavery, however, even as racial segregation and
condescension underlined social norms.
Stone framed slavery in millenarian, rather than simply humanitarian terms; its survival
was an emblem of fallen humanity. As far as he was concerned, the revival's social import was
inextricably bound within an eschatological framework, rendering the idea of Christian
slaveholding self-contradictory; the outstanding stumbling block to a gospel-oriented society.
Yet slavery thrived in every state where Stone had lived, and it had existed in Kentucky since
earliest settlement; on the eve of statehood in 1792 over one-fifth of Kentucky householders
owned at least one slave. 555 The Cane Ridge meeting house, built in 1791, still contains its
restored slave gallery, and its burial ground originally included a separate plot for the
enslaved. 556 In the end, the spur of revival goaded Stone toward emancipation: "This revival cut
the bonds of my poor slaves," he noted, "and this speaks volumes in favor of the work. For what
avail is a religion of decency and order without righteousness [?]" 557
Even before the Great Revival, Stone's antislavery was pronounced. Though sometimes
sentimental in its expression, it was always rooted in an Augustinian sense of Original Sin.
During his early itinerant ministry, Stone claimed to have witnessed in South Carolina in 1797,
"slavery in more horrid forms than I had ever seen it before; poor negroes! some chained to their
work – some wearing iron collars – all half naked, and followed and driven by the merciless lash
of a gentleman overseer." Stone described this sight as "the exciting cause of my abandonment
554
Conkin, Cane Ridge, 174.
Harrison, Kentucky's Road to Statehood, 108.
I am indebted to James Trader, curator of Cane Ridge, for guiding me through the historical site.
557
Stone, "Life," 74.
555
556
144
of slavery." but even at this early juncture, he began expressing opposition to slavery in
millennial terms.
558
Writing a colleague in 1798, he linked the gospel message of Christian
unity to slave emancipation, foreshadowed in Old Testament law: "Under the old Dispensation a
Jubilee was appointed in which all should go out free who had been slaves; of this Jubilee the
Christian day is the antetype – now should the trump of the Gospel proclaim Liberty to the
captives." 559
Stone's antislavery position around the turn of the nineteenth-century resembled that of
Rev. David Rice, a moderate evangelical and delegate to Kentucky's constitutional conventions.
Rallying opposition to the establishment of slavery in the state, Rice's 1792 speech against
slavery was issued as a pamphlet, Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy, first
published in Lexington (by John Bradford, no less), then later that year in Philadelphia. Rice
argued against slavery on moral, political and religious grounds, linking the birth of Kentucky to
the principle of grace: "Slavery is the national vice of Virginia; and while a part of that State, we
were partakers of that guilt. As a separate State, we are just now come to the birth, and it
depends upon our free choice, whether we shall be born in this sin, or innocent of it. 560 Rice
acknowledged that immediate emancipation was unlikely, comparing slavery to "a tree that has
been long planted, it has taken deep root, its trunk is large, and its branches extended wide," yet
he attacked as "gross absurdity, a contradiction to common sense, and an indignity to human
nature," that slaves be protected as personal property. 561
Religious spokesmen such as Rice were the conscience of Kentucky's first antislavery
movement, but they waged a losing political battle. The most contentious issue in Kentucky's
1792 constitution was its underwriting of the right to own slaves, enacted at a time of growth in
the region's slave population and slave labor economy. Article IX stated: "That all men, when
they form a social compact, are equal." 562 This exclusive, contractual definition of citizenship
through compact rather than natural rights foreshadowed future racial divisions in Kentucky
society, juxtaposed against an explicit guarantee of universal white male adult suffrage.
Kentucky's legal protections ensured that the state would attract slaveholding settlers –
558
Stone, "Life", 57.
Barton Stone to Samuel Rennels, 1798. Cane Ridge Preservation Site, Cane Ridge, Kentucky.
560 David Rice, Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy (Philadelphia: M. Gurney, 1792), 24.
561
Rice, Slavery Inconsistent, 13, 22.
562
Harrison, Kentucky's Road to Statehood, 164.
559
145
incidentally encouraging antislavery settlement to what soon became the neighboring free state
of Ohio. From 1792 to 1800, Kentucky's slave population rose 225 percent, eclipsing even the
burgeoning rates of white population growth. 563 This growth ensured that slavery would be even
more firmly enshrined in a revised constitution of 1799. All loopholes in the anti-emancipation
clause were sealed, and the phrase "all men, when they form a social compact" was changed to
"all free men, when they form a social compact." 564
Among the major local churches, slavery was an obvious and embarassing moral
dilemma. Bourbon County became the epicenter of antislavery sentiment in Kentucky, not just
among Presbyterians, but among Baptists and Methodists as well. While most Kentucky
Baptists may have been slaveholders at the turn of the nineteenth-century, the Baptist Elkhorn
Association explicitly condemned slavery as un-Christian as early as 1791, before internal
dissent eventually forced withdrawal on this position. Among Methodists (numbering fewer
slaveholders per capita) antislavery was generally firmer; in Bourbon County, lay pressure
prompted the resignation of at least one pro-slavery class leader. 565 Among Presbyterians, the
slavery issue seemed intractable, generating tortured clerical debate. In 1797, for example, the
Transylvania Presbytery declared that slavery was "a moral evil," though paradoxically, its
members voted against branding all slaveholders "guilty of a moral evil." A third question,
asking "Who are not guilty of moral evil in holding slaves?" was "put off till a future day." 566
Such farcical hand-wringing reflected the fact that many ministers present were themselves
slaveholders, and that even where they may have regarded slavery as problematic, the
institution's social context often paralysed the urge to emancipate.
Despite Kentucky's legal entrenchment of slavery, antislavery sentiment remained strong.
Even disregarding religious arguments, many white Kentuckians still dreaded a slave plantation
economy devaluing their labor and inflating land prices. The growth of slavery spurred a
westward exodus of small farmers, such as Abraham Lincoln's family. 567 Nevertheless, the
yeoman farmer population of the Bluegrass was disproportionately evangelical, and the Great
Revival provided a powerful emotional focus for the forces of antislavery. Kentucky's free black
563
Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, 62.
Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, 138. Emphasis added.
565
Elsinger, Citizens of Zion, 177.
566
"Minutes of Transylvania Presbytery, October 5, 1797," Sweet, Presbyterians, 169-170.
567 Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 41-42.
564
146
population rose significantly during the revivals, indicating rising local emancipation of slaves,
and surpassing the general growth rate of the enslaved population. In Bourbon County
(including Cane Ridge), census figures show the free black population rising from zero in 1790,
to 62 in 1800, and 169 in 1810. 568 Members of the Cane Ridge congregation filed thirteen
separate deeds of manumission between 1801 and 1805, including those for Stone's two slaves,
Ned and Lucy. 569 Inspired by apocalyptic expectations, evangelicals clamored for emancipation
– including one Bourbon County woman who cornered the Rev. John Lyle and, he recalled, "in a
kind of agony told me to set my slaves free." 570
The primitive Christianity of Stone and his followers – a historically-neglected major
religious stream – contradict Christine Heyrman's assertion that accommodation to secular
culture distinguished southern evangelicalism in the early republic. Finding "common ground
with worldlier men, the cultures of primal honor and evangelical Christianity interpenetrated …
there issued a new ideal of evangelical manhood, one distictly southern at its inception but
foreshadowing the 'muscular Christianity' later elaborated throughout the United States."
Heyrman blames this "ideal of evangelical manhood" for both southern defense of slavery and
Civil War secession. 571 Likewise, John Boles has written of a "vigorously self-correcting"
evangelical "orthodoxy" cementing "the tradtional southern way" through the nineteenthcentury. 572 Whether or not such generalizations applied among southern Baptist and Methodists,
they hardly represent the Stoneite position on culture. Stone's leadership during the Great
Revival and afterwards highlights some fundamental complexities of America's emerging "Bible
Belt."
The battle lines of the Great Revival reflected controversies over social order and the
question of slavery, but they also emerged from complex personal animosities within the ranks
of the clergy. The Rev. John Lyle wrote the fullest eyewitness account of Cane Ridge, a revival
in which he actively participated, despite later misgivings concerning evangelical enthusiasm.
Lyle's journals plot evolving ministerial opposition to the Great Revival, critiquing the sermons
and leadership of figures such as Barton Stone and James McGready. Lyle did not think much of
568
Elsinger, "Notes on the History of Cane Ridge," 20.
Williams, Barton Stone, 77, n. 38.
570
John Lyle, "Diary, June 1801-July 1803," 130. Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, Kentucky.
571
Heyrman, Southern Cross, 248-249.
572
Boles, Great Revival, 197.
569
147
Stone – "Mr. Stone is fickle in a high degree & no how deeply penetrating," he noted, dissenting
from depictions of the revivalist as a charismatic leader – but he demured from demonizing him
as a serious challenger to Presbyterian orthodoxy. Lyle found future Shaker convert Richard
McNemar far thornier, calling him "a weak man but lively in desultory exhortation," who
"speaks & sings with all his power & in address much like a Methodist." 573
Simplistic pro-revival versus anti-revival dichotomies fall short of explaining why some
Presbyterians supported the revival while others ended up opposing it. John Lyle's initial
conflicted reaction was typical of his Presbyterian colleagues. On balance, he at first approved
of the revival, despite its obvious eccentric tendencies. He worried that lay enthusiasts of the
revival "were wild and disorderly … but as religion seems to be dull in my bounds I would
probably rather wish them to be lively & wild & disorderly than cold & unanimated." 574
Moreover, all Presbyterian clergy were in some sense revivalistic; all wishing to harvest converts
for the church, if not embracing the same means to do so. What conservatives such as Lyle
ultimately rejected was not revival itself, but the accompanying enthusiasm and social disorder.
Noone more fully embodied the enthusiasm of the Great Revival than Richard McNemar,
whose wild behavior and heterodox statements soon attracted Presbyterian censure. Some three
months after Cane Ridge, a member of Cincinnati minister James Kemper's congregation filed a
verbal complaint to McNemar's Presbytery. The plaintiff alleged that McNemar preached
Arminian doctrine, in flagrant disregard of the Westminster Confession of Faith. These charges
hovered over McNemar for almost two years, eventually being heard alongside similar
accusations against McNemar's colleague, Rev. John Thompson, at the Synod of Kentucky
meeting at Lexington in September 1803. McNemar protested the informal manner in which the
complaint had been lodged, but the charges appeared ultimately incontestable and were
eventually upheld.
Though the ongoing revival destabilized the Presbyterian Church, prompting a
crackdown against alleged ministerial waywardness, McNemar and Thompson had some
support. Together with Stone, Robert Marshall (one of two ministers who had examined Stone
prior to ordination), and John Dunlavy, they signed a letter protesting the charges brought before
573
574
Lyle, "Diary," 22.
Lyle, "Diary," 66.
148
the Synod and attempting to clarify points of doctrine. Stone in his memoirs described how "we
five withdrew to a private garden, where, after prayer for direction … we drew up a protest
against the proceeding of Synod in McNemar's case, and a declaration of our independence, and
of our withdrawal from their jurisdiction, but not from their communion." 575 Their case was in
three parts. Firstly, they argued that hearsay and prejudice created "distorted and false
representations of McNemars [sic] sentiments." Secondly, the protesters denied the Arminian
label, claiming instead "the privilege of interpreting the Scriptures by itself." 576 This privilege,
they noted, was in the Westminster Confession, which states: "The infallible rule of
interpretation of Scripture, is the Scripture itself." 577 "We remain inviolably attached," they
added, finally, "to the doctrines of grace which through God have been mighty in every revival
since the Reformation." The revivalists saved their bombshell till the end. claiming "These
doctrines however … are in a measure darkened by some expression in the confession of Faith
which are used as the means of strengthening sinners in their unbelief and subjecting many of the
pious to a spirit of bondage." 578
This protest letter was the first open statement of schism within the Presbyterian Church
resulting from the Great Revival. Though the revivalists explicitly denied wanting "to separate
from your Communion, or exclude you from ours," their "your … ours" distinction was
unambiguous. 579 Their defense of sola scriptura, followed by denunciation of Calvinism reflects
Stone's later claim to have subscribed to the Confession of Faith only insofar as it was
"consistent with the word of God." Unlike McGready, for whom loyalty to the Presbyterian
Church was absolutely binding, Stone found conflicts between creed and conscience
insurmountable.
The short-lived Springfield Presbytery, as the seceders first called themselves, coalesced
around Stone's charismatic leadership. Presbyterians upheld a tradition of secession, or "relief
churches" of disaffected clergy and laity, going back to the schisms of eighteenth-century
Scotland. These churches had separated from the organizational hierarchy of the Presbyterian
575
Stone, "Life," 77.
"Minutes of the Synod of Kentucky, September 10, 1803." Sweet, Presbyterians, 318.
577
"Westminster Confession of Faith," Chapter 1, Article IX: <http://www.reformed.org.
documents/westminster_conf_of_faith.html> (14 December 2009).
578
"Minutes of the Synod of Kentucky, September 10, 1803." Sweet, Presbyterians, 318-319.
579
"Minutes of the Synod of Kentucky, September 10, 1803." Sweet, Presbyterians, 319.
576
149
Church – sometimes permanently, sometimes not – but they remained fundamentally
Presbyterian in discipline and outlook. 580 Stone and his colleagues were headed in an entirely
different direction, however. "Under the name of Springfield Presbytery," wrote Stone, "we
went forward preaching, and constituting churches; but we had not worn our name more than one
year, before we saw it savored of a party spirit. With the man-made creeds we threw it
overboard, and took the name Christian – the name given to the disciples by divine appointment
first at Antioch." 581 The usage of the term "Christian" – invoking primitive church unity – was
first suggested by Rice Haggard, a former Methodist attached to Stone's churches in Kentucky.
Notably, Haggard had belonged to the so-called Republican Methodist sect founded in the 1790s,
whom Stone had briefly encountered in Georgia, and who were established in opposition to the
perceived "ecclesiastical monarchy" of episcopal Methodism. 582 As Paul Conkin has noted,
however, the Republican Methodists had already abandoned their overtly political-sounding
label by the time Stone came across them. 583
Stone's Christian connection grew dramatically, feeding on the still-glowing embers of
revival. By late 1804, it numbered some fifteen churches in Kentucky and southwest Ohio, and
eventually boasted many more, especially in the southern United States. 584 Its primary concerns
– Christian unity, Apostolic faith, and an emphasis on scriptural rationalism – resonated with a
broad population saturated in the backcountry revival tradition. Moreover, the lack of creedal
requirements for membership enabled Christians to identify with Stone's movement without
compromising theological freedom of conscience.
While outsiders referred to his followers as "Stoneites," Stone never saw himself as a
denominational founder. Nor did he seek some "vapid ecumenicism," or relativistic liberal
Christianity. Rather, as Richard Hughes has argued, Stone viewed all Christian denominations
as equally fallen and degenerate; believing that "the collapse of denominational structures and
the final triumph of primitive Christianity would characterize the millennium." 585 As McNemar
argued, "revival was not sent to RE-FORM the churches … but to prepare the way for that
580
See, for example: T.C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560-1830 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1969), 229-239.
581
Stone, "Life," 80.
582
Hatch, Democratization, 70.
583
Conkin, Cane Ridge, 74-75.
584
Tucker and McAllister, Journey in Faith, 82.
585
Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith, 105-106.
150
kingdom of God, in which, all things are new." 586 Stone, and evangelicals like him, were
apocalyptic Christians, led by religious experience to anticipate a new millennial dispensation.
Given the shared millennialism of Stone, McNemar, and fellow revivalists, their 1803
organization into the Springfield Presbytery was only ever a temporary arrangement. In June
1804, the five original seceders from the Synod of Kentucky, together with David Purviance, a
lay elder of Cane Ridge, sat down to compose "The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield
Presbytery," a semi-satirical declaration of religious independence, written – as the title suggests
– in the style of legal testimony. The following excerpt underscores the emergence of a
distinctly anti-denominational Christianity from the Great Revival:
The Presbytery of Springfield, sitting at Caneridge, in the county of Bourbon,
being, through a gracious Providence, in more than ordinary bodily health, growing in
strength and size daily; and in perfect soundness and composure of mind; but knowing
that it is appointed for all delegated bodies once to die; and considering that the life of
every such body is very uncertain, do make, and ordain this our last Will and Testament,
in manner and form following …
We will, that this body die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of
Christ at large; for there is but one body, and one Spirit, even as we are called in one
hope of our calling …
We will, that our weak brethren, who may have been wishing to make the
Presbytery of Springfield their king … betake themselves of the Rock of Ages, and
follow Jesus for the future.
We will, that the Synod of Kentucky examine every member, who may be
suspected of having departed from the Confession of Faith, and suspend every such
suspected heretic immediately; in order that the oppressed may go free, and taste the
sweets of gospel liberty. 587
Nineteenth-century Presbyterian critics denounced The Last Will and Testament as both
"nonsensical and profane," and "a sorry attempt at wit," but Stone and his colleagues had serious
ends. 588 Completing the separation begun at the Synod of Kentucky, Stone, McNemar, and other
evangelicals broke decisively from the Presbyterian fold, moving beyond the New Light
emphasis on personal piety towards millennial frontiers of apocalypticism.
586
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 4-5.
Stone, "Life," 81-83.
588
Ware, Barton Warren Stone, 142.
587
151
The apocalyptic movement of the Great Revival endured, attracting new followers, but
not without the factional infighting Stone most dreaded. Given the emotional religious
experiences of the five founding Springfield Presbytery ministers, united in the heat of the Great
Revival, there is little wonder that the ebbing of the revival soon brought disunion among them.
As later with the Cumberland Presbyterians, some former Presbyterians grew convinced of the
errors of their ways. John Thompson and Robert Marshall, signatories of the "Last Will and
Testament," renounced the document in print as "a mischievous engine of disorganization, and
distraction to all churches, or individuals, who receive it," and went back to the Presbyterian
fold. 589 Thompson and Marshall's renunciation of their former opinions also reflected alarm at a
new religious development; namely the emergence of Shakerism in Kentucky and Ohio, to which
their colleagues Richard McNemar and John Dunlavy had lately converted.
Before the Great Revival, the Shakers had no presence west of Appalachia, and were
obscure to most Americans. Founded in eighteenth-century Lancashire, England by "Mother"
Ann Lee, the illiterate wife of a blacksmith, their name derived from the pejorative "Shaking
Quakers," although members referred to themselves as "The United Society of Believers in
Christ's Second Appearing." A former Quaker, influenced by apocalyptic sects then active in
England, Mother Ann attracted a small but devoted following with her claims of divine
revelation. Jailed for blasphemy, she experienced a series of visions in her cell, witnessing the
"grand vision of the very trangression of the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden, the
cause wherein all mankind was lost and separated from God." 590 From this vision grew the
insistence upon celibacy that characterized Shaker society, attributed by many authors to Mother
Ann's unhappy marriage or the loss in infancy or stillbirth of her eight children. 591 Struggling in
their native England, the first band of Shakers sailed with Mother Ann for New York on the eve
of the American Revolution, inspired by further prophetic revelations. America was literally the
promised land, and though the Shakers met with some hostility during the Revolutionary War,
589
John Thompson and Robert Marshall, "A Brief Historical Account of Sundry Things in the Doctrines and State of
the Christian, Or as it is Commonly Called, the Newlight Church," in: Levi Purviance, The Biography of Elder
David Purviance (Dayton: B.F & G.W. Ellis, 1848), 257.
590
Edward D. Andrews, The People Called Shakers: A Search for the Perfect Society (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1953), 11.
591
As Stephen Stein notes, early Shakers were particularly sensitized against the suggestion that Mother Ann’s loss
of her children "increased her religious 'conviction'" –
a view which "has since become commonplace." Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of
the United Society of Believers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 78.
152
they adapted to their new surroundings, purchasing farmland at Watervliet near Albany, and
establishing the celibate communal lifestyle with which they soon became synonymous. Having
attributed to herself the spirit of Christ – in effect, claiming divinity – Mother Ann died in 1784,
her followers anticipating her imminent spiritual reincarnation.
As Stephen Stein has noted, Shakerism "was poised for expansion" by the turn of the
nineteenth-century, "having successfully come through a period of gathering and institutional
consolidation." 592 Moreover, the sect’s charismatic origins shaped its expansionist mission.
Before she died, Mother Ann spoke of the opening of the gospel in "a great level country in the
southwest." 593 Believing the Great Revival in Kentucky to be this prophesied event, the Shakers
of New Lebanon, New York sent three missionaries to stoke its embers. On New Year’s Day,
1805, elders Issachar Bates, John Meacham, and Benjamin Seth Youngs set out some 1,200
miles to the burnt-over lands of the Ohio Valley. The journey took them three months along a
"Wilderness of very tedious Mountains, lonesome rivers, & some disagreeable inhabitants." 594
They took with them a pack horse, but went on foot as a sign of penitence.
The missionaries enjoyed much success, converting not just individuals but entire
communities to the Shaker faith. They exuded charisma without ostentation – though softlyspoken and simply dressed, their calm presence appeared to signify divine grace. They appealed
to many evangelicals, who lacked any preconceptions of Shakers and Shakerism. They targeted
those settlements most affected by revival, focusing their powers of persuasion upon the clergy.
One of the first ministers to encounter the Shakers was Barton Stone, who "hospitably
entertained" them on March 18, 1805. 595 He recalled his first impression of the missionaries as
"humble & interesting … plain & neat … grave & unassuming, very intelligent & ready in the
Scriptures," adding "[they] have a great boldness in their faith." 596 Stone soon turned violently
against the Shakers, but their personal humility and open demeanor readily impressed him at
first, as they did many settlers.
592
Stein, Shaker Experience, 57-58.
Calvin Green and Seth Wells, A Summary View of the Millennial Church, or United Society of Believers,
Commonly Called Shakers, 2nd edition, (Albany: C. Van Benthuysen, 1848), 78.
594
Stein, Shaker Experience, 58.
595
MacLean, Shakers of Ohio, 41.
596
Stone, "Life," 92.
593
153
The Shakers carried a letter of introduction, from "The Church of Christ unto a People in
Kentucky and the adjacent states," referring approvingly to the "work of God among you." The
letter described "The time being nearly finished, according to Scriptures, that Anti-Christ should
reign, and time fully come for Christ to make his second appearance." The burden of this new
millennial dispensation was threefold: "First. To believe in the manifestations of Christ in this
display of the grace of God to a lost world. Secondly. To confess all our sins; and thirdly, to
take up our cross against the flesh, the world, and all evil." Nowhere did the letter explicitly
refer to the prophecies of Mother Ann, although it did state: "that it was impossible for those
who lived in the works of natural generation, copulating in the works of the flesh, to travel in the
great work of regeneration and the new birth." 597
The Shaker missionaries did not at first reveal the entire contents of their letter, but
shrewdly withheld the more controversial aspects of their faith. At a time when the family
household was the cornerstone of economic security, the idea of celibate communalism was
widely repugnant to outsiders. Nevertheless, entire evangelical communities converted to
Shakerism, willingly renouncing family ties and sexual relationships. The discovery of Shaker
celibacy turned Stone decisively against the sect, which he described as "a vortex of ruin." 598
Stone described his wife Elizabeth as "a help-meet to me in all my troubles and difficulties," and
valued the integrity of the family in the same light as the integrity of the church. 599 Indeed, the
disruption of natural ties was one of the main reasons Stone opposed slavery. "Slavery, " he
wrote, "dissolves the ties of God and man; ties the most strong and indissoluble of all others.
One of these ties is conjugal affection." 600 Yet in the afterglow of the Great Revival, such
affections proved dangerously unstable.
It would be wrong to dismiss the Shakers as an eccentric, picturesque sect, divorced from
America's broader religious landscape. The rapidity of their westward expansion alone suggests
that they fitted within this landscape, or were able to accommodate to it. They won their first
western convert on March 27, 1805 – little more than a week after their first arrival in the region.
Malcolm Worley was a New Light Presbyterian farmer "of respectable character, handsome
597
Letter "Signed in behalf of the Church: David Meacham, Amos Hubbard, Ebenezer Cooly, " December 30, 1804.
MacLean, Shakers of Ohio, 61-63.
598
Stone, "Life," 93.
599
Stone, "Life," 97.
600
Barton Stone to Samuel Rennels, n.d. Cane Ridge Preservation Site, Cane Ridge, Kentucky.
154
fortune, and liberal education" who became a preacher during the revival. 601 Significantly, he
was also a congregant of Richard McNemar. Acting on local intelligence, the Shaker
missionaries directed themselves to Worley’s Turtle Creek, Ohio farm, spending the following
days in prayer and discussion at his house. A few days later, Worley’s conversion was followed
by that of Anna Middleton, a black former slave living nearby. Ironically, given Stone's
comparison between Shaker celibacy and the practice of slavery, Shakerism appealed powerfully
to many slaves and former slaves, and the sect's antislavery attracted notice in the Antebellum
era. On April 24, the Shakers claimed their biggest prize, with the conversion of McNemar
himself. Worley and McNemar's Turtle Creek properties went on to form the nucleus of Union
Village, the largest Shaker commune of the region. 602
The Shakers embodied many New Light characteristics. As Paul Conkin noted, their
"antitrinitarian stance, their emphasis on a purely spiritual baptism, their advocacy of the gifts of
healing, prophecy, and tongues, their loud and joyful singing, their visions, their contact with
departed spirits, and their perfectionism," appealed to many evangelicals. 603 The forms of
enthusiastic worship most harshly denounced by critics of the revival uncannily foreshadowed
the patterns of Shakerism. Richard McNemar described "innumerable signs and gifts" such as
rapturous visions, ecstatic worship, and communing with spirits, before the advent of the Shaker
mission. Visionary experiences were not limited to the visual or even auditory sphere, but
encompassed "fragrant smell[s]," transporting converts to heavenly raptures. 604 Others claimed
"to be carried clear out of the body, and to be favored with a particular interview with the spirits
of their departed friends." 605 Western evangelicals even foreshadowed the characteristic circular
dance worship of the Shakers, including one who "for an hour or more … dance[d] in a regular
manner round the stand, all the while repeating in a low tone of voice – 'This is the Holy Ghost –
Glory!'" 606
Though the Shakers at first impressed Stone, his later writings obscured this fact, leaving
little indication as to when or why his sympathy soured. Contrasting with Stone's ironic tribute
601
Green and Wells, A Summary View, 79.
MacLean, Shakers of Ohio, 63. For discussion of Shaker attitudes to slavery, see: Julia Neal, The Kentucky
Shakers (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 45-58.
603
Conkin, Cane Ridge, 145.
604
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 76.
605
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 80.
606
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 72.
602
155
to the Shakers' "grave & unassuming" demeanor, the Shakers themselves intimated that he was
greatly enthused, and on the verge of conversion. Issachar Bates kept a journal of the Shaker
mission, recording his first encounter with Stone and his colleagues: "We had much conversation
with him and a number more; they sucked in our light as greedily as ever an ox drank water, and
all wondered where they had been that they had not seen these things before. Barton said that he
had been expecting it would come about so in the end they were all filled with joy; this is what
we have been praying for and now it is come." Though Bates doubtless exaggerrated the extent
of Stone's sympathy, he and his colleagues were invited to share the pulpit at Cane Ridge on
March 27. 607
Bates recorded that Stone and some of his colleagues had cooled considerably by the
appointed meeting, which incidentally was the day that Malcolm Worley announced his
conversion. Though the Shakers were "received with outward kindness and a number of the
people felt very friendly … the preachers were struck with great fear." That morning, wrote
Bates, Stone and Marshall "preached first and preached the people back to Egypt. Stone told
them to let no man deceive them about the coming of Christ, for they would all know when He
came, for every eye would see him in the clouds and they would see the graves opening and the
bones rising and the saints would rise and meet the Lord in the air." By contrast, Rev. Matthew
Houston – soon to announce his own Shaker conversion – encouraged the audience: "Let us go
up and possess the land for we are fully able." Bates's later sermon was greeted with some
enthusiasm, although he admitted it left "the multitude … completely divided." 608
Following the Shaker meeting at Cane Ridge, Stone became a professed enemy of the
sect. Stone, along with Marshall and Thompson (who later returned to Presbyterianism)
shadowed the Shaker missionaries, preaching against them in cacophonous proximity. Stone
exerted himself so vigorously, "a profuse spitting of blood ensued" – exacerbating his earlier
mysterious illness. 609 Although Stone limited his opposition to the spoken and the written word,
some of his followers used physical violence and intimidation against Shaker audiences,
including one who spat in John Meacham's face. 610 Stone sought vigorously to dissuade Shaker
607
MacLean, Shakers of Ohio, 41-42.
MacLean, Shakers of Ohio, 42-44.
609
Stone, "Life," 93.
610
MacLean, Shakers of Ohio, 365.
608
156
converts, even writing McNemar in July 1806 warning him that the Shakers were "worldlyminded, cunning deceivers, whose religion is earthly, sensual and devilish," and whose true
mission was to grab farmland from unsuspecting converts. As D. Newell Williams has noted,
this "was not … the kinder, gentler Barton Stone of later hagiography." 611
Stone put a brave face on the "lamentable departure" of his colleagues Richard McNemar
and John Dunlavy to Shakerism, but their apostasy unsettled him. "They have made shipwreck
of faith," he wrote in an apologetic pamphlet, "and turned aside to an old woman's fables."
Denying that recent Shaker inroads vindicated antirevial skepticism, he argued that "wolves
always go among sheeps for prey. These wolves, in sheep's clothing, have smelt us from afar,
and have come to tear, rend and devour." 612 Stone later highlighted his opposition to "the worm
of Shakerism, which was busy at the root of all the sects and brought on them great distress; for
multitudes of them, both preachers and common people, also joined the Shakers." Stone claimed
that the "reproach" of Shakerism had been "rolled away" from his churches – that unguided
enthusiasm, rather than heterodox teaching by the New Lights made Shaker converts. He
described evangelical converts to Shakerism as "excrescences … lopped off our body," refusing
to acknowledge continuities between his own theology and Shaker apocalypticism. 613
Nevertheless, he felt obligated in his memoirs to spell out the heresies at the heart of the Shaker
faith: "They denied the literal resurrection of the body from the grave: they said the resurrection
of the body meant the resurrection of Christ's body, meaning the church. They, the elders, had
constant communication and conversation with angels and all the departed saints. They looked
for no other or better heaven than that on earth." 614
Stone's premillennial apocalypticism distanced him from erstwhile Presbyterian
contemporaries, but his chiliastic hopes jarred with attempts to moderate popular enthusiasm. 615
As Ruth Bloch has noted, while insistence on the physical nature of Christ's second coming and
the resurrection of the dead at the Last Judgment was endemic to radical Protestant thought, this
premillennial tendency was present in Calvinism since at least the seventeenth-century,
"subsumed by a commitment … to a basic millennialism." Shaker millennialism, by contrast,
611
Williams, Barton Stone, 126-127
Barton Stone, A Reply to John P. Campbell's Strictures on Atonement (Lexington: Joseph Charless, 1805), 65-66.
613
Stone, "Life," 93, 95.
614
Stone, "Life," 93.
615
Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith, 109.
612
157
was new and peculiar, premised on the belief that Ann Lee was a second incarnation of Christ. 616
In 1842, Stone might insist that: "The second coming of Christ is at the commencement of his
millennial reign on earth – here on earth he will reign till the 1000 years be finished – nor will he
cease to reign on earth till he has raised from death the wicked, and judged them according to
their works," yet he did so forty years after the Great Revival, at a time when evangelical
premillennialism was becoming relatively commonplace. 617 In early Kentucky, however, the
Shakers articulated the most comprehensive expression of apocalyptic faith, resonating with the
homegrown enthusiasm of the Great Revival. Though the Shakers embraced extreme otherworldliness – condemning all carnal attachments as irredeemably degenerate – theological
similarities between Shakerism and the New Lights on such matters as human perfectibility go
some way to explain Stone's visceral opposition to the sect. Yet for many evangelicals in
Kentucky and Ohio the Shaker mission opened the gospel anew, something that Stone was
loathed to admit.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide an exhaustively review of Stone's
theology, but its outline highlights the major controversies emerging from the Great Revival.
Stone always acknowledged having "other views of religion, different from what I formerly
had," describing his emergence from "the labyrinth of Calvinism" towards a clearer
understanding of spiritual regeneration. 618 For Stone, regeneration was another word for
atonement, transforming "unholy, unjust and wicked" humanity towards God's "holy, just and
good" nature. 619 Stone's faith was centered on the fact of Christ's crucifixion and its
consequences, but he interpreted it very differently from Calvinistic orthodoxy.
Stone's rejection of the Calvinist belief that Christ died in place of sinful humanity sprang
from his questioning of Calvinist predestinarianism. The doctrine of substitionary atonement
was especially complicated by Calvinist insistence that Christ died only for the predestined elect,
and that his death was the surety for divine grace – which Stone found cosmically absurd. Stone
published a short but biting pamphlet, Atonement (1805), summarizing his views. Denouncing
creedal authority, Stone claimed to find only one Biblical reference to the "surety" of Christ:
616
Bloch, Visionary Republic, 32, 90.
Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith, 110.
618
Barton Stone, Atonement: The Substance of Two Letters Written to a Friend (Lexington: Joseph Charless, 1805),
3.
619
Stone, Atonement, 20.
617
158
"Heb. 7, 22. 'By so much was Jesus made the surety of a better Testament.'" This statement by
St. Paul portrayed Christ as the surety of the New Testament only, mentioning nothing of the
doctrine of the elect, yet as Stone argued, the doctrine of surety was "the nail" on which
Calvinism depended: "On it hang election, partial redemption, justification by the imputed
righteousness of Christ the surety; the atonement, faith, the operations of the Spirit, &c." 620
Not only was the doctrine of surety unscriptural, argued Stone, it positively corrupted the
Bible. Believing that Christ died in substitution for humanity, Christians misled themselves,
mistaking the gift of grace for an imputed surety. Supposing Christ's death to be substitution,
atonement merely reflected a debt paid by another. "But," asked Stone, "is there any grace in
this act of forgiveness? Or is it forgiveness at all?" 621 Stone denied it. Rather, he argued,
Christ's crucifixion typified the Old Testament practice of animal sacrifice, "a propitiation
through faith in his blood," as claimed in Romans 3:25, rather than a substitution for faith, as
implied by the Westminster Confession. The crucifixion symbolized God's love for all
humanity, but it did not substitute God in place of the elect. If Christians were justified by faith
in Christ, argued Stone, the crucifixion served as a means to atonement, yet it did so without
altering God's immutable nature. 622
Atonement was one of the most iconoclastic published works of the Great Revival.
Among the first to respond in print, the Rev. David Rice penned "An Epistle to the Citizens of
Kentucky, Professing Christianity; Especially Those Who Are Or Have Been, Denominated
Presbyterians." Although Rice did not mention Stone by name, he defended "the Doctrines of
Grace," as written in the Westminster Confession, calling them "mysterious, and … above
human comprehension." According to Rice, insistence upon the role of human agency in
salvation offended the dignity and sovereignty of God. Further, he warned, those questioning the
teachings of the Presbyterian Church risked a slippery decline into atheism. He listed "several
grades of error" as follows:
1st. The first step is from Calvinism to Arminianism. Here I believe many good men,
whose hearts are sounder than their heads, stop, and proceed no farther in that road that
leads to Atheism.
620
Stone, Atonement, 7.
Stone, Atonement, 10.
622
Stone, Atonement, 21.
621
159
2d. From Arminianism to Universalism.
3d. From Universalism to Pelagianism.
4th. From Pelagianism to Semipelagianism.
5th. From Semipelagianism to Arianism.
6th. From Arianism to Socinianism.
7th. From Socinianism to Deism.
8th. From Deism to Atheism. 623
Appealing directly to former Presbyterians, Rice held out an olive branch to those evangelicals
drawn from strict Calvinist doctrine to Arminian sentiments. But Stone's personal declension, he
implied, was far more worrying – at best a universalist, he was pitched ineluctably towards total
disbelief.
Rice's schema was artificial, but it reflected widespread perceptions of Stone – notably
the idea that he was a Socinian, or Unitarian. Stone certainly furnished grounds for this belief in
Atonement, calling God "an uncompounded, eternal, infinite and unchangeable being." Recalling
the trinitarian doubts with which he struggled as a young student, Stone wrote: "to say that three
such persons or subsistences are in the Godhead, is undoubtedly contrary to scripture, and
perfectly unintelligible." 624 Stone assumed the fundamental intelligibility of God lay in the
essential continuity of the Godhead, but when his former colleague John Dunlavy published an
apologetic tract years later, citing Unitarian arguments from Atonement in defense of Shaker
antitrinitarian doctrine, Stone was unamused. 625 Hostile suspicions of Stone's alleged
Unitarianism surrounded him through his life, yet as D. Newell Williams has argued, Stone was
no typical Unitarian. Instead, he adopted the mystical interpretation of Isaac Watts, the
eighteenth-century theologian who believed that "the Son was the soul of Christ, formed before
the creation of the world and united to the one God, who in the fullness of time was united with a
human body." 626
623
David Rice, "An Epistle to the Citizens of Kentucky, Professing Christianity; Especially Those Who Are Or
Have Been, Denominated Presbyterians," in: Bishop, History of the Church, 323, 330-331.
624
Stone, Atonement, 17.
625
John Dunlavy, "The Manifesto," in: Robley Edward Whitson, ed., The Shakers: Two Centuries of Spiritual
Reflection (New York: Paulist Press, 1983), 69.
626
Williams, Barton Stone, 241.
160
Stone's faith emerged from scriptural interrogation, but reflected broader intellectual
currents as well as personal idiosyncrasy. While differing from the deistic Unitarianism of John
Bradford or Thomas Jefferson, it emerged from the same climate of radical religious criticism
and opposition to Calvinist orthodoxy. New intellectual battle lines emerged throughout
America, influenced by the diffuse legacy of the enlightenment. Although many historians have
portrayed the Great Revival as an anti-intellectual movement, evangelical hermeneutics were not
entirely sealed off from the enlightenment. Particularly influential was the Scottish "Common
Sense" philosophy, popularized in America by Princeton's influential president, John
Witherspoon. The Common Sense originated with thinkers like Thomas Reid and Dugald
Stewart in reaction to Humeian skepticism, both epistemological and to some extent religious. It
was readily reconcilable, argued Peter Williams, "with any number of varieties of Christianity by
undergirding the reliability of our everyday knowledge of the external world." 627 Stone
particularly tended towards a Common Sense interpretation of the Bible, attempting to
harmonize the "facts" of the Bible with religious experience. Paradoxically, the Common Sense
philosophy taught at Guilford Academy strongly shaped Stone's philosophical outlook, even
after he rejected Calvinism.
Following Rice's attack on Stone's theology, Presbyterian minister John P. Campbell
published Strictures, On Two Letters, Written By Barton W. Stone, Entitled Atonement. A
Calvinist apology for the doctrine of substitutional atonement, Campbell's Strictures also notably
accused Stone of deriving his thought from deism, and of placing Christ "in the same class with
Confucius, Zoroastre [sic] and Mahomet." 628 Stone hit back with A Reply to John P. Campbell's
Strictures on Atonement, reiterating many of his earlier comments on atonement, but also
acknowledging Campbell's comparison between himself and various deist authors, including
Tom Paine. Stone described them as "men of discernment … [who] could easily see the
inconsistencies and absurdities of Calvinism; and had they not considered this to be Christianity,
they might not have been deists." 629 This comment revealed the kinship between Stone's
religious views and the broader intellectual milieu, but also emphasized their contingency upon
scripture and revelation.
627
Williams, America's Religions, 139.
John P. Campbell, Strictures, On Two Letters, Published by Barton W. Stone, Entitled Atonement (Lexington:
Daniel Bradford, 1805), 24.
629
Barton Stone, A Reply, 24.
628
161
As D. Newell Williams has argued, Stone refrained from responding to Rice out of
deference to his moral character but he had no such qualms towards Campbell. Campbell was
Stone's relative (through his wife Elizabeth Campbell Stone) and the two men were formerly
close friends, yet they pummeled each other in the press following the publication of
Atonement. 630 Significantly, the moral question of slavery generated even more friction between
them than did theological differences. In his Reply, Stone defended his followers against
Campbell's accusation of deism, charging that Campbell and other Presbyterian slaveholders like
him were merely formal Christians:
You think we are deists. You are at liberty to think. But show yourselves to be
christians [sic] indeed, "Do justice, let the oppressed go free, break every yoke, love
mercy and walk humbly with God." Then with a better face you may call us deists. Till
then the world will think the difference between a deist and a nominal or formal christian
is very little. By the fruits ye shall know them. 631
Campbell published a further response, entitled Vindex: Or, The Doctrines of the Strictures
Vindicated, Against the Reply of Mr. Stone. "We think it our duty," wrote Campbell, on behalf
his fellow slaveholders, "to subject ourselves to the powers that be; to live peaceably; to 'exhort
as many servants as are under the yoke, to count their own masters as worthy of all honor; that
the name of God and his doctrines be not blasphemed.'" 632 Stone's apocalyptic reputation
preceded him, marking him as a dangerous troublemaker.
In 1834, the unresolved question of slavery finally convinced Stone to move his family
from Kentucky. He had always led an uprooted life. His preaching often took him on the road,
and he and his family relocated together on several occasions. In 1811, his wife Elizabeth
having died suddenly the previous year, Stone married a second wife, Celia Wilson Bowen.
"Then by advice and hard persuasion," recalled Stone, "we were induced to move to Tennessee,
near my wife's widowed mother." This first move outside Kentucky was only temporary,
however. Stone and his growing family returned to the Bluegrass in 1814, apparently after
learning that his mother-in-law did not intend to bequeath him the farm. Settling in Georgetown,
Stone supported his family by a combination of teaching and farming, actively declining offers
630
Williams, Barton Stone, 117-120.
Stone, Reply, 24.
632
John P. Campbell, Vindex: Or, The Doctrines of the Strictures Vindicated, Against the Reply of Mr. Stone
(Lexington: Daniel Bradford, 1806), 45.
631
162
of financial support from his own congregation. He accrued significant debts during the great
economic depression of 1819, but later insisted that he had supported himself by the sweat of his
brow, turning "to hard labor on my farm, to support my family." 633 Such labor limited his
itinerant ministry, but the establishment in 1826 of his Christian Messenger enabled his message
to reach a wider audience.
The Christian Messenger spread Stone's religious views and provided a platform against
his opponents' most cutting accusations, which by September 1830 included charges of
slaveholding. Stone acknowledged the presence of seven slaves (a man, two women, and four
children) at his Georgetown farm. These slaves were the embarrassing legacy of his now
deceased mother-in-law, who bequeathed them to Stone's trust. Stone professed he was caught
in moral dilemma, faced with the prospect of manumitting slaves in Kentucky, where the
rampant slave trade flourished, and prospects for even free blacks were grim. Instead, he
announced his intention to move his family to a free state, where his slaves would be manumitted
on arrival. Writing in the Messenger, Stone took the opportunity to castigate slavery's "plague
and destruction … We in anticipation, hail the day when our general government shall take up
this subject, and free our happy land of this dreadful pest, this destroying monster." 634 Between
1830 and 1835, Stone set about purchasing farmland totaling 277 acres near Jacksonville,
Illinois; in 1834, he finally moved there with his family, manumitting his slaves as a result. 635
Stone's legacy was rooted in the Bluegrass, but his Christian movement was not unique in
America. Throughout the United States, disaffected groups of evangelicals sought a return to the
sort of primitive Christianity Stone espoused. Around the turn of the nineteenth-century, former
Baptist preachers Abner Jones and Elias Smith started their own Christian movements in New
England, rejecting creedal authority in place of scriptures. Like Stone's followers, those in the
New England movement referred to themselves simply as "Christians." 636 More fatefully, from
Stone's perspective, was the growing influence of Alexander Campbell (no relation to John P.
Campbell) with whom he would eventually join forces.
633
Stone, "Life," 100.
Christian Messenger, vol. 7 (September 1830), 64, in: Ware, Barton Warren Stone, 296.
635
Williams, Barton Stone, 212.
636
Winfred E. Garrison and Alfred T. DeGroot, The Disciples of Christ: A History (St. Louis: Bethany Press, 1948),
86.
634
163
Campbell was a former Presbyterian minister, born in Ireland and educated in theology at
the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Campbell immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1807 with his
father Thomas, also a Presbyterian minister. Thomas Campbell preached in the Chartiers
Presbytery, near Pittsburgh, but church authorities soon expelled him for disregarding
confessional standards at the Lord's Supper. In 1809, he founded the anti-creedal, apostolic
Christian Association of Washington, which grew to exert similar influence in Pennsylvania and
western Virginia to the Stoneites in Kentucky and neighboring states. Increasingly influenced by
the young Alexander Campbell, the Campbellites (or "Reformers" as they were commonly also
known) adopted the practice of believers' baptism by immersion, modeled on the practices of the
early church. This decision led to growing associations with sympathetic Baptist congregations,
many of whom communed with the new movement. The growing influence of Campbellite and
Stoneite congregations in the upper South and Midwest made contact and interaction inevitable,
raising awkward issues of jurisdiction for two movements professing to disown
denominationalism. 637
In theory, merger between the followers of Stone and Campbell was logical; in practice,
problematic. Campbell first met Stone in September 1824, while on a preaching tour of
Kentucky. According to one eyewitness: "They conversed freely together, and were mutually
led to love and esteem each other as brothers in the same heavenly family." 638 In fact, little else
is known of this first meeting. The two men corresponded closely over the coming years. For
merger of their churches to occur, key differences remained to be resolved. In particular, the
sacramental question of believers' baptism by immersion was a stumbling block. Campbell
adhered to strict Biblical literalism, sticking to apostolic models even more rigidly than Stone.
In his opinion, infant baptisms or baptisms performed by "sprinkling" were invalid; those
previously so baptized were denied communion until they submitted to baptism by immersion.
His rigid insistence effectively disbarred many of Stone's followers from fellowship, even though
Stone himself had approved baptism by immersion since 1807. The issue at stake was not
merely baptism for baptism's sake, but that baptism supposedly effected the remission of sin,
637
638
Williams, Barton Stone, 163-165.
Ware, Barton Warren Stone, 226.
164
allowing proper access to communion. The question fueled much controversy between Stone
and Campbell, but also led to increasing negotiations between their churches. 639
Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell announced the formal union of their churches on
January 1, 1832. This new communion became the present-day Christian Church movement,
commonly (yet not officially) known as "Disciples of Christ." 640 Many outstanding questions
remained – not least the status of baptism – but the model appeared to be one of cooperation
rather than competition, with congregations retaining significant autonomy. Stone attempted to
downplay his differences with Campbell, using his Christian Messenger to clarify doctrinal
points. Stone had come to regard immersion baptism as "a divinely instituted means, in
connexion with faith and repentance, of salvation, remission of sins and the gift of the Holy
Spirit." As D. Newell Williams has noted, he did not actively disbar the unimmersed from
communion, but habitually referred to 1 Corinthians: 11: 28-29: "Let a man examine himself,
and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup, for he that eateth and drinketh unworthily,
eateth and drinketh damnation unto himself." 641
As William Garrett West observed, Stone and Campbell "never became warm personal
friends," and the Campbellite faction dominated the union of their churches. 642 Differences of
temperament and personality between the two men left a lasting impact. Sixteen years younger
than Stone, Alexander Campbell was the more formally educated, more dynamic and more
politically astute leader. As the Methodist Peter Cartwright cruelly remarked: "B.W. Stone stuck
to his New Lightism, and fought many bloodless battles, till he grew old and feeble, and the
mighty Alexander Campbell, the great, arose and poured such floods of regenerating water about
the old man's cranium, that he formed a union with this giant errorist, and finally died, not much
lamented out of the circle of a few friends." 643 Stone was no senile fool, as Cartwright
639
For discussion of the Stone-Campbell baptism controversy, see especially: Williams, Barton Stone, 175-202.
"Disciples of Christ" was a term used by Alexander Campbell and his followers; its usage is associated with
"mainline" adherents of the movement. Within the Christian Churches, a smaller, more culturally conservative wing
(ultimately descending from the Stoneites) self-identifies as the Churches of Christ. In some cases, the
meetinghouse sign indicates that the Church of Christ "meets" within, distinguishing the meetinghouse from the
human body of the church. Paradoxically, the Christian Churches claim not to be a denomination; an "official"
name for the movement is thus avoided.
641
Williams, Barton Stone, 197-198.
642
William Garrett West, Barton Warren Stone and Christian Unity (Nashville: Disciples of Christ Historical
Society, 1954), 13.
643
Cartwright, Autobiography, 35.
640
165
suggested; he entered into the merger with Campbell in good faith, committed to the ideal of
Christian unity. And certainly, his influence was greater than Cartwright claimed: by 1832, as C.
Leonard Allen noted, there were nearly 400 Stoneite churches in Tennessee and northern
Alabama alone, "most of them established by men who were unaware of Campbell's work." 644
Yet Campbell's grip on the movement was surer, his self-promotion more sophisticated than
Stone's.
Campbell's faith differed from Stone's, more so perhaps than Stone realized. Though
Stone underwent his share of religious controversy, he never positively sought out the spotlight
in the way that Campbell did. In 1829, English traveler Fanny Trollope witnessed some of
Campbell's marathon public debates with the atheist utopian Robert Owen in Cincinnati.
Campbell, she noted disapprovingly, "requested all who wished well upon Christianity to rise,
and a very large majority were instantly on their legs." Despite such populist ploys, Trollope
found Campbell's arguments disappointingly scholastic: "he would have been much more
powerful if he had trusted more to himself and less to his books." 645 Campbell's rigid Biblical
literalism and sacramental formalism contrasted with Stone's revivalist sensibility, ultimately
rooted in the Great Awakening of the eighteenth-century. According to one Stoneite preacher in
Ohio, Campbell's preachers "seem to labor more especially to reform the churches of other
denominations over to their views, than they do to reform the wicked from the error of their
ways." 646
Campbell's most striking contrast to Stone was his position on slavery. Campbell, like
Stone, freed his own slaves, but he shied away from promoting emancipationist views, fearing
they would destroy church unity. Campbell claimed to read the Bible as neither positively
promoting nor condemning slavery; therefore he was silent on the matter. Shortly after Stone's
death, he argued: "there is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting it, but many regulating it. It is
644
C. Leonard Allen, "'The Stone that the Builders Rejected:' Barton W. Stone in the Memory of the Churches of
Christ," Anthony L. Dunnavant, ed., Cane Ridge in Context: Perspectives on Barton W. Stone and the Revival
(Nashville: Disciples of Christ Historical Society, 1992), 45.
645
Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Penguin Classics, 1832, 1997), 115.
646
Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith, 115.
166
not, then, we conclude, immoral." 647 For Stone, whose antislavery position was rooted in
apocalyptic eschatology, such apparent political compromise would have been unthinkable.
Campbell died in 1866, outliving Stone by more than twenty years and supplanting his
religious influence. As Anthony L. Dunnavant has noted, Campbell and his followers "codified
many of the 'sacred stories'" surrounding Stone, "and significantly influenced subsequent
histories." 648 Robert Richardson, author of the two-volume official Memoirs of Alexander
Campbell (1868, 1869) particularly reduced historical memory of Stone within the Christian
Church movement, folding discussion of his legacy within a single chapter, even while
acknowledging its subject "deserves a more extended notice." 649 Recent scholarship by church
historians Richard T. Hughes and D. Newell Williams has re-evaluated Stone's legacy, part of a
recent historiographical "re-discovery" of Stone within the Christian Churches themselves. 650
Yet Stone's peculiarly influential apostolicism, the fruit of his apocalyptic eschatology, withered
in the years following the Campbell merger of 1832.
***
Returning at last to Cane Ridge, we find Barton Stone oddly silent. The Cane Ridge
revival was the dramatic highlight of his career – the single greatest revival of the period – yet he
gives us only glimpses of his experience. It features in only a few short paragraphs of his
memoirs, which were published in 1847, shortly after his death. Stone renders himself almost
invisible in the retelling, which comes across as remarkably flat compared to contemporary
eyewitness accounts – compared indeed, to Stone's usual, lively prose. Stone recalls witnessing
the large crowds converging along the roads, "judged … between twenty and thirty thousand."
"The sight" of so many people, he adds, "was affecting." But he goes on, "A particular
description of this meeting would fill a large volume, and then the half would not be told." 651
In contrast to Stone's enduring reticence, numerous Cane Ridge eyewitnesses quickly
evoked their recent impressions in letters, diaries, and other writings. Col. Robert Patterson, for
647
Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith, 274.
Anthony L. Dunnavant, "From Precursor of the Movement to Icon of Christian Unity: Barton W. Stone in the
Memory of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)," Dunnavant, ed., Cane Ridge in Context, 2.
649
Robert Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1869), 185.
650
Dunnavant, "From Precursor to Icon," Dunnavant, ed., Cane Ridge in Context, 12.
651
Stone, "Life," 68.
648
167
example, conjured the teeming congregation: "assembled in the woods, ministers preaching day
and night; the camp illuminated with candles, on trees, at waggons, and at the tent; persons
falling down, and carried out of the crowd, by those next to them, and taken to some convenient
place, where prayer is made for them; some Psalm or Hymn, suitable to the occasion, sung." 652
One Presbyterian minister wrote of: "Sinners dropping down on every hand, shrieking, groaning,
crying for mercy, convulsed; professors praying, agonizing, falling down in distress, for sinners
or in raptures of joy! Some singing, some shouting, clapping their hands, hugging and even
kissing, laughing; others talking to the distressed, to one another, or to opposers of the work." 653
Stone's extensive failure to record his experience of the Cane Ridge revival is curious.
His private correspondence – excepting published letters and a few fugitive papers preserved by
the Disciples of Christ at Cane Ridge – is now lost, further limiting our understanding of this
biographical chapter. Instead of attempting to conjure his impressions of the revival, his
memoirs formulaically rehearse the "bodily agitations or exercises, attending the excitement in
the beginning of this century," then note (by way of apology) "the good [moral] effects …
acknowledged in every neighborhood, and among the different sects." 654
The Cane Ridge revival was a source of more than just physical pain to Stone. In later
life, it was a source of contention, perhaps even an embarrassment. As Leigh Eric Schmidt has
noted, sacramental camp meeting were on the wane long before the 1840s, precipitated by an
"emergent bourgeois culture" that recoiled from such intimate and inclusive displays of
emotional fellowship. 655 While Presbyterians such as James McGready carried the torch of New
Light Holy Fairs well into the nineteenth-century, nothing of the scale and nature of Cane Ridge
would be seen again. Stone's religious experience stemmed from backcountry revivalism, but
throughout his life, he retained a subtle aversion to the chaos of camp meetings themselves.
Recalling Cane Ridge in 1831, for example, Stone conveyed "a mournful pleasure" in the
spreading of the gospel, tarnished by regret at a prevalence of "enthusiasm, mismanagement,
652
Colonel Robert Patterson to Rev. John King, September 25, 1801. William Woodward, ed., Surprising Accounts
of the Revival of Religion in the United States of America, in Different Parts of the World, and Among Different
Denominations of Christians, with a Number of Interesting Occurrences of Divine Providence (Philadelphia:
William Woodward, 1802), 53-54.
653
The original account was excerpted into a letter by Rev. Moses Hoge to Rev. Ashbel Green, September 10, 1801.
Woodward, ed., Surprising Accounts, 53-54.
654
Stone, "Life," 72.
655
Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 218.
168
and unscriptural means." Again, Stone shied away from further exploration, declaring: "a full
history of [the revival] … would be impossible." 656
Their paths crossed, Alexander Campbell would forever overshadow Stone. Campbell
was a religious leader lacking in revivalist background; someone who insisted upon an even
more Biblically rational approach to primitive Christianity than Stone ever would. Campbell and
his followers also rejected the kind of spontaneous, chaotic revivals that had flourished through
the backcountry since early settlement, regarding them as scripturally unwarranted instruments
of proselytization. While Stone's followers never abandoned revivalism to such an extent, the
scale and emotional tone of their own revivals diminished through the nineteenth-century. The
Stoneites instead focused on gathering themselves in fellowship, severing their ties with the
world and living in apocalyptic anticipation. Their growing quietism contrasted with fading
memories of tumultuous revivals, rooted in the folk tradition of the Presbyterian Holy Fair.
656
The Christian Messenger, vol. v, no. 7 (July, 1831), 65.
169
EPILOGUE: OPENING THE GOSPEL
Was it not reasonable for the subjects of the revival to expect that God would shake the
heavens and the earth with his Shakers? 657
Stone's feud with the Shakers represents more than just a colorful footnote to the Great
Revival. Though the celibate sect proved unable to sustain its early numerical growth over the
course of the nineteenth-century, it encompassed numerous contradictory but powerful religious
trends in the early American republic. Critics of all religious stripes and none angrily ridiculed
the sect as a sinkhole of deluded millennial enthusiasm. Paradoxically, however, Shakers shared
many of their core beliefs and convictions with their most virulent evangelical opponents.
Shakerism was the hidden hollow of the Ohio Valley's self-projection. The Shakers cut an
incongruous figure, but the strength of their religious convictions demanded attention. Their
communes were standalone expressions of America's centrifugal religious landscape; a landscape
characterized by denominational variety and increasing millennial fervor, its very diversity
eluding organizational principles.
On a cold March day in 1807, three Shakers rode north into the Ohio wilderness,
embarking on a mission that would ultimately focus the animosity of settlers in the region
against their sect. David Darrow, Benjamin Youngs, and Richard McNemar were investigating
"vague reports" of a group of Indians near the Greenville Treaty boundary line, whose presence
threatened white settlements in the area. While many feared bloodshed, the Shakers had also
heard rumors "that they had prophets among them who told of great things at hand." The
Shakers noted the strange landscape: "large upland plains on which were extensive
entrenchments & all the evident marks that the country was once inhabited by a great & warlike
people." Whereas most settlers imagined the Indians as predatory savages, however, the
Shakers were undaunted. Approaching the rough dwellings, they encountered scattered Natives
telling of a prophet "one LALLAWASHEKA … who had prayed mightily among the people &
told many strange things." Warned to avoid this "bad character" who "deceived the people," the
657
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 133.
170
Shakers pressed on, reading such remarks as evidence that a divine spirit had indeed touched the
Indian nation. 658
In attempting to reach out to the Indians, these Shaker missionaries echoed the spirit of
their denominational forebears the Quakers, pacifists whose special sympathy with beleaguered
colonial Indians exposed them to the indictment of their white neighbors. Although Indian
resistance to United States settler expansion had been suppressed in the Ohio Valley following
the 1794 battle of Fallen Timbers, large gatherings of Indians – even those at the fringes of the
region – still struck terror into the hearts of many local settlers. In a broader context, Native
resistance to settler expansion was actually increasing, and soon coalesced around the pan-Indian
leadership of the Shawnee warrior Tecumseh. From the settler perspective, the narrative of
Indian encounter was one of conflict, terror, and adversity. Many white Americans viewed
attempts to build cultural bridges with the Indians, whether by colonial Quakers or Shakers in the
early republic, as a bizarre sub-species of treachery, spawning "hybrid nightmares" of hidden
conspiracies. As one eighteenth-century Pennsylvanian complained, under poetic inspiration:
"In many things change but the Name,/ Quakers and Indian are the same." 659 Settlers in the Ohio
Valley soon made strikingly similar connections between the strange Shakers and the
purportedly savage Indians.
The Shaker missionaries soon found what they were looking for. Arriving at the Indians'
camp, Barrow, Youngs, and McNemar were "struck" by its "resemblance … to places of
encampment during the late revival." Tents and tree stumps, platforms and puncheon benches
gave the enclosure the appearance of the great religious camp meetings that had only recently
convulsed the Ohio Valley. It was a scene they knew well. The Indians – "a mixture of
Shawneese & Mingo's [sic]" – greeted their strange guests with cautious hospitality. The prophet
himself cut a plain figure: "his dress plain & decent, his countenance grave & solemn – his
person of a common size, rather slender & of no great appearance." 660
658
Edward Andrews transcribed the Shaker's manuscript journal. He credited authorship to Benjamin Youngs and
published the document in 1972. Edward Deming Andrews, "The Shaker Mission to the Shawnees," Winterthur
Portfolio, vol. 7, (1972), 113-128.
659
Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 107, 109.
660
Andrews, "Shaker Mission," 120.
171
This sober portrait belies the black legend of "the Prophet," the religious leader who later
styled himself Tenskwatawa – "Open Door" – allegedly infusing the rebellion of his brother
Tecumseh with virulent nativist enthusiasm. The Shakers' first impressions of the prophet are
striking. He was unknown to them personally; his subsequently fearsome reputation among
white Americans was not yet solidified. As Gregory Dowd has noted, Tenskwatawa – then
known as "Lalawethika," or "the Rattle" – was just one of several Indian prophets emerging from
the Great Lakes through the Ohio Valley following United States expansion in the 1790s.
Though he became a cautionary figure to nineteenth-century American schoolchildren, his
afterlife in Native memory was complex. Indians seldom distinguished sharply between the
Prophet's inspiration of political resistance and his religious role. Yet the Prophet was first and
foremost a revivalist, channeling supernatural forces into his charisma. Admittedly, he was no
Christian, although he borrowed Christian forms that would have been recognizable to the
Shakers, including "public confessions, trembling, and cathartic weeping." 661 The Shakers'
encounter with the Prophet remains only obscurely understood by historians, but this encounter
between Indian refugees and soon-to-be-marginalized apocalyptic Christian sectarians is key to
unlocking the cross-cultural possibilities of the Great Revival.
Richard McNemar, perhaps the most controversial religious figure in the Ohio Valley,
had felt unusual empathy with the Indians since his childhood. Raised by pious Scotch-Irish
farmers, hardships and dangers surrounded his western Pennsylvania childhood. Around the
beginning of the War of Independence, Native warriors attacked and burned his family's
settlement to the ground, forcing them to flee to a neighboring valley. A few years later on a
solitary walk in the woods, according to one account, the young McNemar encountered an
elderly Indian man alone in "a tiny cabin," left behind by the Native people driven from that
region. The old man and the young boy were at first wary of each other, but as McNemar
returned to the spot more frequently "a secret friendship" developed. 662 McNemar would
eventually cement this bond by running errands and fetching supplies for the old Indian. Though
apparently far-fetched, this tale nicely evokes McNemar's peculiar sympathy for the oppressed
and despised, especially the Indians.
661
Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 128.
662
Hazel Spencer Phillips, Richard the Shaker (Oxford, Ohio: Typoprint, 1972), 2-3.
172
McNemar's later identification with the Prophet's followers was a reproach to his former
Presbyterian colleagues. Acknowledging his cultural distance from the Ohio Indians, he also
recognized their religious experiences in the same light as his own. McNemar conceded that the
"poor Shawnese have had no particular instruction, but what they received by the out-pouring of
the spirit. Yet in point of real light and understanding, as well as behavior, they shame the
Christian world." 663 Although the rude condition of the Indian encampment underscored their
apparently primitive religion, glimmers of grace shone through the Prophet's enthusiastic revival
meetings, exciting the aspirations of McNemar and his colleagues:
The people were all in their tents, some at the distance of fifteen or twenty rods, yet they
could all distinctly hear, and gave a solemn and loud assent which sounded from tent to
tent, at every pause. While we stood in his view at the end of the meeting house on rising
ground, from which we had a prospect of the surrounding wigwams, and the vast open
plain or prairie, to the south and east, and which looks over the big fort towards the north,
for the distance of two miles, we felt as if we were among the tribes of Israel on their
march to Canaan.
McNemar went on, praising the Indians' "simplicity and unaffected zeal for the increase of the
work of the Good Spirit – their ardent desires for the salvation of their unbelieving kindred …
[and] their willingness to undergo hunger, fatigue, hard labour and sufferings, for the sake of
those who came to learn the way of righteousness." 664 McNemar compared them to the Gentiles
among whom Paul founded the early church, contrasting the "false doctrines" and "vain
philosophy" taught by Stone and his colleagues, to "the trembling Shawnee … [who] confesses
and forsakes his wicked ways, and sets out, not merely in a new faith or a new doctrine; but in
newness of life and good works." 665
McNemar and his colleagues idealized the Ohio Indians through an evangelical lens.
Although their mission won no converts, they persisted in imagining the Prophet in their own
terms, as a man inspired by the Holy Ghost. The Shakers misread his indigenous revival, which
was in part "a reassertion of traditional religious practices," but more importantly, a development
of the Prophet and Tecumseh's personality cult, articulating militant resistance to the
encroachment of white culture. Unlike the pacifistic Shakers, the Shawnee and their allies
celebrated martial virtues, even disparaging Indians who shied away from battle as "women."
663
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 147.
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 143-144.
665
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 147-148.
664
173
While the presence of certain rituals such as confession of sins suggests syncretism with certain
Christian traditions – notably Roman Catholicism – no conclusive connections bind the Native
revival to its Christian counterpart in the Ohio Valley. Moreover, the Prophet's preaching was
decidedly un-Christian in its theological make-up. He emphasized, for example, the isolation of
Indian and white creation, subordinated to two distinct deities in the Shawnee pantheon. 666
The Indians showed only glimpses of curiosity in the Shaker faith, little understanding
what it entailed. The Shakers, meanwhile, "asked a number of questions" about the Indians'
religion, but such enquiries only emphasized mutual naivety. McNemar later wrote down some
of these questions, including the following stylized exchange:
Q. Do you believe that all mankind are gone away from the good spirit by wicked
works?
A. Yes: that is what we believe: And the prophet feels great pity for all.
Q. Do you believe that the Good Spirit once made himself known to the world, by a man
that was called Christ?
A. Yes: we believe it, and the Good Spirit has shewed our prophet what has been in many
generations, and he says he wants to talk with some white people about these things. 667
McNemar eventually invited the Prophet to his settlement at Turtle Creek in order to witness
Shaker life and worship first-hand. Although the Prophet declined the offer, twenty-three
members of his circle stayed for six days, attending a crowded Shaker religious service and
visiting the nearby town of Lebanon to trade furs. "Now brothers," wrote the Shakers,
afterwards "the good spirit has opened a way from our heart to your hearts … Brothers, we love
you, because the work of the good spirit is among you & among us is all one." 668
Although this visit pleased the Shakers, the envisioned spiritual harvest was elusive. The
Prophet's followers were less reflexively hostile to outsiders than most outsiders imagined, yet
they were not out to be proselytized either. German-speaking Moravians had only recently
attempted to convert some of the same Indians, and had been discouraged. Under the influence
of the Prophet, the Indians embraced a rejection of white culture, a religious stance which the
otherwise sympathetic Moravians as much as any other settlers, pietistic or otherwise, failed to
666
Clark, The Shawnee, 49-50.
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 142.
668
Anonymous, to "The Shawnee Prophet and Brothers," 1807, Dawn E. Bakken, "Putting the Shakers 'In Place':
Union Village, Ohio, 1805-1815," (PhD Dissertation, Indiana University, 1998), 355-356.
667
174
appreciate. One of the church's chief missionaries in Indiana dismissed them as being "so carried
away with their heathen teachers, that they do not want to hear anything but their foolish
teaching." 669 The Shaker missionaries enjoyed warmer relations with the Prophet and his
followers than had the Moravians, yet they too misunderstood the nature of Indian religious
revival.
While most Indians were lukewarm about Shakerism, they welcomed Shaker charity,
leading critics to raise alarm at sectarian support of allegedly hostile Indians. William Wells, an
Indian agent for the federal government, noted as early as July 1807 that the Prophet was
"supported by a society of white people called Shaking Quakers … I have not as yet received any
Documents that would authorize me to prosecute them." 670 Shaker support was indeed generous,
but only reflected the relatively modest means of the fledgling sect, while the Indians' needs
were staggering. Far from being self-sufficient, the Prophet's community – dubbed
"Prophetstown" by neighboring Ohioans – was a refugee camp, embodying the fragmented ruins
of Indian society in the Midwest. During their first encounter with the Prophet, the Shakers
donated $10 for his followers to purchase corn, while the Indians visiting Turtle Creek were
given surplus food to carry back on their horses. McNemar confessed: "this act of charity,
however small, did not long escape the censorious reflections of some hard-hearted mortals; but
even furnished a pretext for implications the most monstrous and unreasonable." 671 While the
Shakers willingly assisted Prophetstown, most local citizens decried its continuing existence.
Although the settlement endured until William Henry Harrison's 1811 military campaign against
Tecumseh, its population suffered hideous privations. Cut off from effective means of provision,
several hundred Indians starved during the cruel winter of 1808-1809. 672
Though largely overlooked today, the Shaker encounter with the Indians seeped into
early western opposition to the sect, imbuing it with particular vitriol. Shaker missionaries
flourished among Ohio Valley evangelicals (securing more than 1,200 converts by 1810) but the
669
J.P. Kluge to George Loskiel, August 5, 1806, Lawrence H. Gipson, ed., The Moravian Indian Mission on White
River: Diaries and Letters, May 5, 1799, to November 12, 1806 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1938),
571.
670
Tom Kanon, "Seduced, Bewildered, and Lost: Anti-Shakerism on the Early Nineteenth Century Frontier," Ohio
Valley History, vol. 7., no. 2 (summer 2007), 21.
671
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 145.
672
Alfred A. Cave, "The Shawnee Prophet, Tecumseh, and Tippecanoe: A Case Study of Historical Myth Making,"
Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 22, no. 4 (winter 2002), 646.
175
failure of their gospel message to translate across racial lines did not prevent critics from
tarnishing them with stereotypical associations of Native savagery. 673 Popular ignorance of
Shaker belief and practice fueled lurid anti-Shaker rhetoric, matched in the United States only by
the credulous tide of anti-Mormon polemic later that century, when the followers of Joseph
Smith were harried from one refuge to the next. Eunice Chapman, an outraged wife and mother
estranged from her Shaker convert family, wrote a scathing account of the sect, alleging to
expose sinister practices including sexual depravity, child abduction, and brainwashing. She
went on to assert, as a matter of fact, "half of the Shakers in the state of OHIO are Indians." 674 A
wide American readership eagerly digested such assertions, primed by the popular, femalenarrated captivity literature long established as a popular genre. Historian Jean Humez argued:
"It was Chapman who first saw the appropriateness of adopting formulas from the Indian
captivity narrative to the anti-Shaker narrative." Nevertheless, the Shaker transformation into
sectarian grotesques – half-white, half-Indian, hell-bent on destroying families and imprisoning
hapless women and children – can be traced more directly to earlier published literature in the
Ohio Valley, at the tail-end of the Great Revival.
Shakerism's challenge to family relationships was its Achilles' heel, sparking conflict
with the broader community. Most Shaker conversions were family-based, expressing some
level of collective religious conviction. Relations between husbands and wives and parents and
children were temporally acknowledged among converts, yet celibacy and gender segregation
were strictly enforced, intended to "re-form" families from carnal households into heavenly
communion. 675 In practice, however, few families converted entirely, and estrangement and
generational splintering typically resulted instead. As an unintended consequence of Shaker
millenarianism, sectarian destruction of families impinged upon the material welfare of excluded
family members, especially elderly dependents. Moreover, the isolated Shaker lifestyle lent
weight to the accusations of Barton Stone and others who suspected the sect was in fact "earthly,
sensual and devilish," behind its chaste façade. 676
673
Kanon, "Seduced, Bewildered, and Lost," 25 n. 10.
Eunice Chapman, No. 2, Being an Additional Account of the Shakers, In the Case of Eunice Chapman and her
Children (Albany: I.W. Clark, 1818), 77.
675
Andrews, The People Called Shakers, 57.
676
Williams, Barton Stone, 126.
674
176
On August 27 1810, some two thousand angry citizens, led by five hundred men
brandishing muskets and pikes, descended on Union Village, the largest of the western Shaker
settlements. Anti-Shaker articles in the local newspaper The Western Star were soon republished
in the Kentucky Gazette, and triggered a wave of popular revulsion throughout the Ohio Valley.
Colonel James Smith, an elderly Kentucky landowner, enraged by his son's recent conversion
depicted Shakers teaching "that it is a virtue to be without natural affection," and claimed that
"children under the terror of the lash must kneel and dance to the Shaker idol, Anne Lee." Smith
accused the sect of ripping his own grandchildren away from the bosom of his family, after his
son James Smith, Jr. went to Union Village, taking them with him. Such dereliction left "the
tender mother in deep distress ... not knowing whether she should ever see them again." 677 Other
relatives of Shaker converts forwarded similar allegations, building impressions of the Shaker
settlement as a virtual prison compound. The protestors demanded the release of the children,
recalled Shaker elder Benjamin Youngs, "and, by a committee of about twelve men, appointed
for the purpose, demanded of us that we should renounce our faith and practice, our public
preaching and mode of worship, or quit the country." 678
Bloodshed was averted at Union Village, but only just. Several Shaker elders met with
representatives of the aggrieved families, requesting their complaints be put into writing. This
request was declined, resulting in a tense standoff. According to Youngs, the Shaker settlement
was soon overrun by:
a vast and promiscuous concourse of armed men and spectators, some disputing, some
inquiring, others railing out against, and endeavoring to scatter falsehood, and urging the
propriety of banishing us out of the country by violence. Women of the baser sort, who
were in fellowship with the riot, had placed themselves within sight of the buildings, on
the edge of the woods, waiting to see the destruction of the Shakers; others, of the same
cast, were taking an active part in urging on parties of the mob to take away by force,
children of their connections. 679
Despite the specter of mayhem, the Union Village confrontation dissipated peacefully,
thanks in part to the redoubtable local magistrate, Francis Dunlavy. Judge Dunlavy – brother of
677
Kentucky Gazette, July 17, 1810.
Benjamin S. Youngs, "An Expedition Against the Shakers," Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications,
Vol. xxi (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1912), 403.
679
Youngs, "An Expedition," 410-411.
678
177
Shaker convert John Dunlavy – directed the protesting committee, threatening the full force of
the law against anyone harming the Shakers or even damaging their property. The transparent
appeals and ready assurances from Shaker elders underlined disparities between their image as
cruel fanatics and the humane, if morally complicated, society at Union Village. The party
descending on Union Village was not a lynching mob – though stirred by accusations against the
Shakers, most protestors simply wanted to see for themselves how the sect conducted its private
affairs. Their committee interviewed the Shaker convert children, who seemed healthy and good
spirits, expressing strong desires to remain with Shaker family members and declining reunion
with their estranged relatives. Having conducted a thorough search of the Shaker houses, the
committee members "drank generously of cold coffee," before retiring to disperse the milling
crowds. 680
Historian Edward Deming Andrews characterized the Union Village incident as a
"culminating act of mob rule" – yet this episode was neither a simple instance of mob
persecution, nor the end of Shaker woes in the Ohio Valley. 681 Attacks on the Shakers
continued, but for the time being, the sect was delivered from destruction. "That no evil or
cruelty" was inflicted, despite "such formidable preparations of design, can be assigned to no
other cause than the interposing hand of Divine Providence," wrote Elder Youngs. Perhaps more
to the point, family and social connections with the local population shielded Union Village
Shakers from indiscriminate violence. Several facts highlight the complicated relationship
between the local Shaker and non-Shaker communities, notably the latter's deference to a local
magistrate whose own brother was a vocal Shaker apologist, not to mention the apparent
distinction many outsiders drew between "old Believers" (Shakers originating from the original
New York settlements) and "young Believers," or Shaker converts. 682 Critics of Shakerism
regarded the New York missionaries as cunning interlopers; by contrast, the sect's Kentucky and
Ohio converts were mere dupes of enthusiasm.
Over the following years, toleration towards Shakerism dwindled as prejudices hardened
and the strange sectarians became an alien Other. Union Village breathed relief in 1810, yet
relations with non-Shaker neighbors soon deteriorated. Violence against Shakers violence
680
Youngs, "An Expedition," 413.
Andrews, The People Called Shakers, 91.
682
Youngs, "An Expedition," 415, 406.
681
178
reflected a campaign of intimidation, alongside a flourishing growth in anti-Shaker pamphlets
and newspaper editorials. The Kentucky Gazette and other regional newspapers played a key
role in fanning this opposition, publishing and re-publishing numerous anti-Shaker pamphlets.
This orchestrated press campaign contrasted markedly with John Bradford's silent opposition to
the recent Great Revival. A comment by the editor of The Western Star, that the Shaker
challenge "be considered wholly in a political view," suggests the extent to which the sect was
now perceived as dangerously, not merely eccentrically, counter-cultural. 683 Seismic shifts in
the religious landscape of the Ohio Valley created a conservative backlash against expressions of
religious enthusiasm – a backlash not limited to polemic. Mob violence flared up again in 1813,
1817, 1819, and 1824, each time in reaction to kidnapping allegations. Widespread acts of
vandalism, including destruction of fences and crops, mutilation of horses, and arson against
farms and meetinghouses accompanied physical violence against the Shakers themselves. 684
Colonel James Smith became a key spokesman of militant anti-Shakerism in the region.
He not only stirred up anti-Shaker sentiment; he also shaped it into a literary genre, following his
initial articles with two crudely persuasive pamphlets against the Shakers in the wake of the
Union Village incident. A prominent Bourbon County farmer and former congregant of Barton
Stone, Smith had attended the Cane Ridge revival, and later became a lay leader in the Stoneite
Christian movement, before eventually returning to Presbyterianism. The Colonel also lived
briefly among the Union Village Shakers following his son's conversion, but he never converted,
rapidly discovering his animosity for the rigid Shaker lifestyle and demanding theology.
Smith had a violent past. During the run up to the War of Independence, he fought
among the "Black Boys," a Regulator outfit targeting Indian populations. He maintained his
bloody career as an anti-British vigilante in revolutionary Pennsylvania, harrying suspected
Loyalists. 685 Yet these episodes pale beside his earlier experience as a militiaman during the
French and Indian War. Captured by Indians after the bloody 1755 defeat of General Edward
Braddock's wilderness expedition, Smith spent five years living among the Mohawks before
escaping back home to Pennsylvania. After some time in captivity, Smith was formally adopted
683
Quoted in Kanon, "Seduced, Bewildered, and Lost," 10.
Andrews, The People Called Shakers, 91-92.
685
Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 100, 265 n. 61. Curiously, a young John Wayne portrayed Colonel Smith during the
War of Independence in the Hollywood melodrama Allegheny Uprising. Allegheny Uprising, dir. William A. Seiter,
81 min. R.K.O., 1939. DVD.
684
179
into the Mohawk Caughnawaga nation, a process involving body painting, nose and ear piercing,
presentation of ceremonial artifacts, tobacco smoking and ritual oratory. He found this initiation
strange, yet adoption ceremonies were in fact commonplace among Indian nations, binding new
blood into tribes that had suffered wartime fatalities. Smith eventually comprehended his
newfound identity, expressing surprise that from the day of his adoption, "I never knew them to
make any distinction between me and themselves in any respect whatever until I left them."
Despite the apparent fellowship, however, Smith continued to despise his captors long
afterwards, recalling the "barbarity" they inflicted on many of his injured comrades at the time of
his capture. 686
The Colonel regarded the Shakers as equally alien and infinitely more loathsome than the
Mohawks whose company he had endured. He blamed them for the loss of his family, for the
loss of his comfort in old age, and for his daughter-in-law's humiliation. They were morally
repugnant, toxic to society. "Might not fire and water as well dwell together," he wrote, "as
shaker bondage and American liberty?" Smith decried the "shocking effects" of "infallibility and
implicit faith," but noted, "shakerism far exceeds popish bondage, or anything that ever was
known in the world." He enumerated the sect's evils at length:
it disturbs the peace of families; separates husbands and wives; robs women of their
tender offspring; destroys natural affection; dissolves the marriage covenant, which is the
main pillar of any state or kingdom; it prevents propagation, takes people's money
without any compensation; and perhaps murders infants; (but this I cannot yet prove) it is
raising a young generation systamatically [sic] enemies to American liberty, it enslaves
mankind, and if it predominates will finally de-populate America. 687
Smith's 1810 polemics, Shakerism Detected and Remarkable Occurrences, Lately
Discovered Among A People Called Shakers, equated Indian savagery with Shaker slavery.
Smith's actual knowledge of Shaker religion was relatively slight, however, and his attitudes
toward Indian culture surprisingly conventional, notwithstanding his personal history.
Moreover, his experience of Indian captivity was far from unique, and he was forced to excerpt
686
James Smith, Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Col. James Smith (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke,
1870), 16, 40.
687
Smith, Shakerism Detected, 35.
180
legal depositions in anti-Shaker child custody suits to carry his parallels between Indian and
Shaker forms of brutality. Smith especially drew upon the deposition of Stephen Ruddle, a
Baptist preacher and Indian missionary formerly held captive by Shawnee warriors, to build his
case. Ruddle informed the Bourbon County magistrate that he had personally interviewed the
Prophet and his brother Tecumseh in the September following the Shaker's first contact, and
found them much confused. "[A]fter some conversation," the Prophet and his brother told
Ruddle "that they knew very much about religion; but … what do you know about it?"
According to Col. Smith, Ruddle then responded:
that he had the word of God, and shewed them his Bible. They said, you white people
use that book only to deceive red people, to which he answered that if the white people
had wronged them it was not the book's fault, for no good man that adhered to that book
would wrong them or do them any injury. Well, said they, what is the reason that the
white people are always cheating red people out of their country and land … if white
people would give us back their country, then we would believe them. But yet, they said,
they believed there were still some good white people that loved red people … there are
our friends, the shakers; they are honest; for, said they, Richard McNamar [sic] told us
that the white people had cheated us of our land … but as for them, that is the shakers,
they did not consider the land as their own, but only as rented … and not to mind the
white people when they come to you with their book which they call the word of God, as
that book is good for nothing now – it was once good, but bad men had changed it and
made it bad. – But the Great Spirit had now revealed to Indians the same that he had to
Shakers; and now they were brothers. 688
By prolonged association with their Indian neighbors, the Shakers soon assumed the visage of
savagery, estranged from civilization in the imagination of many Ohio Valley settlers.
As a postscript, the fate of Polly Smith and her children highlights the complexities of
Shakerism, and the contesting claims of marriage, family and religion faced by many relatives of
Shaker converts. A January 1811 letter by Shaker Elder David Darrow revealed an unexpected
turn of events:
Likely Thee has heard what a great fuss has been made about James Smith's
children … Polly Smith, the mother of the children has returned to her husband & made
her confession, and taken her suit out of Court which she had commenced against him,
688
James Smith, Shakerism Detected: Their Erroneous and Treasonous Proceedings, and False Publications
Contained in Different News-Papers, Exposed to Public View by the Depositions of Ten Different Persons Living in
Various Parts of Kentucky and Ohio (Paris, Kentucky: R. Lyle, 1810), 27-28.
181
and peaceably settled all matters & given him a final acquittance, and has lived with the
Believers since the first of October last; and the old man, James Smith, & his party are
terrible mad about it; and he threatens to take away all the children from both their
parents.
A story that seemed resolved with Polly Smith's submission to her Shaker husband took a further
twist, however. By 1818, Polly was reportedly divorced from James and reunited with her
children in Kentucky, having turned her back irrevocably on Shakerism. Col. Smith, meanwhile,
had died a bitter old man in 1812. 689
Originating at the grass roots of settler society, the backlash begun by Smith and other
anti-Shaker activists checked the perceived excesses of enthusiasm in the wake of the Great
Revival far more effectively than enlightenment critique of John Bradford and other, more
socially elite critics. Shakerism upset the precarious balance between prophetic religion and
social equilibrium, inviting political, as well as religious criticism. The sect's practices and
beliefs, both real and imagined, enabled the unashamedly populist political leadership emerging
in the Ohio Valley to flex its legislative muscle. In 1811 and 1812, Kentucky and Ohio enacted
legal discrimination against the Shakers. The Ohio legislature empowered court action to deny
family custody and property rights to husbands who "violated" their marriage contracts by
joining the sect. In Kentucky, meanwhile, women were granted grounds for divorce from Shaker
husbands, guaranteeing them all property and child custody into the bargain. 690 These acts
reflected the perception that Shakerism imperiled female honor and domestic dignity, yet they
empowered former wives of Shaker converts with otherwise unobtainable legal rights. Such
legislation also marked the incursion of state legislation into church affairs. Anti-Shaker
legislation pales beside subsequent state-sponsored American religious persecution – Missouri
Governor Lilburn Boggs's "extermination order" against the Mormons perhaps the prime
example. 691 Ironically, the religious groups most relentlessly persecuted in the United States –
those most alienated and reviled – were also the most indigenous to the political and religious
climate of the nation.
689
Kanon, "Seduced, Bewildered, and Lost," 14.
Andrews, The People Called Shakers, 207-208; Neal, Kentucky Shakers, 58.
691
In October 1838, Gov. Boggs instructed the Missouri state militia that "[t]he Mormons must be treated as
enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary."
<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Extermination_Order_(Mormonism)> (accessed February 20, 2010)
690
182
CONCLUSION
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye.
William Blake
While many historians have followed Nathan Hatch in connecting the increasingly
democratic political climate of the early republic with the emotional upheavals of the Great
Revival, the roots of evangelical culture were in fact largely distinguishable from the
revolutionary ideology of the early American republic. The Great Revival did, however,
catalyze the emerging separation of faith and polity, confirming a new religious landscape, in
which religion was increasingly voluntaristic and rooted more in personal experience than in
denominational heritage. The emergence of a strong evangelical culture also had political
consequences, largely unforeseen by evangelicals themselves. The grass roots vitality of
evangelical culture undermined elite-oriented attempts to impose a secular republican social
order, a worldview flowing from the anti-clericism and religious skepticism of enlightenment
currents. In the variety and abundance of its religious growth, Kentucky anticipated the rest of
the United States, although its development was unstable. The local persecution of new sects
such as the Shakers demonstrates that the most ardent expressions of faith often met strident,
sometimes violent resistance. Such resistance in turn encouraged many religious groups to
retreat behind walls of voluntary separation, further segregating themselves from secular culture.
The careers of Bradford, McGready, and Stone in relation to the evangelical culture and
volatile politics of the Ohio Valley complicate depictions of religious democratization and
political populism as mutual catalysts. The reality was far more complex than Hatch and other
historians have credited. The Great Revival fatally undermined the secular, republican society
that the deistic Bradford envisioned. At the same time, the very success of revivalists' gospel
message posed problems for the evangelical clergy. For McGready, the Great Revival was the
work of the Holy Ghost, yet its consequences were fraught. Its splintering effect tore McGready
between his loyalty to the Presbyterian Church and his emotional identification with an
183
evangelical movement increasingly divorced from denominational origins. Politics impinged
upon McGready at the most basic level, expressed in the conservative demands of ecclesiological
order. To McGready's erstwhile colleague Stone, by contrast, the Great Revival was an
opportunity to transcend theological and ecclesiastic limitations. Abandoning the Presbyterian
ministry, Stone asserted his leadership among a new network of churches; churches bound by
increasingly deliberate cultural isolation and shared Christian primitivism rather than formal
creed. For Stone, McGready, and Bradford, the definitions of politics and religion were
personal, their influences intersecting haphazardly.
As Stone's experience shows, even the lives of saints are woven in the fabric of everyday
experience. In old age, the otherworldly preacher struggled with the afterglow of boyhood
passions, drawing him back to revolutionary Virginia. "From my earliest recollection," he wrote,
"I drank deeply into the spirit of liberty, and was so warmed by the soul-inspiring draughts, that I
could not hear the name of British, or tories, without feeling a rush of blood through the whole
system." He admitted: "Such prejudices, formed in youth, are with difficulty ever removed. I
confess their magic influence to this advanced day of my life, especially when the name tory is
mentioned – so many injuries, fresh in my recollection, attach to that name." 692
Stone understood the emotional gravity of the American Revolution, yet he recoiled from
patriotic enthusiasm. The spirit of 1776, as historian Alan Heimert put it, "was not so much the
result of reasoned thought as an emotional outburst similar to a religious revival." 693 The turmoil
of the Revolutionary War and the challenges of the new nation were metaphysically significant
for many Americans, whether evangelical Christians such as Stone, or secular republicans such
as John Bradford. Drawing on Robert Bellah's idea of civil religion, Nathan Hatch coined the
term "civil millennialism" to describe the hybridization of apocalyptic Christian eschatology and
revolutionary republican ideology. Hatch employed this neologism to describe an "amalgam," of
"themes [which] were directed by the society's political consciousness." 694 Even accepting the
legitimacy of Hatch's term, such political direction of religious thought would have struck Stone
and his evangelical colleagues as perversely chimerical.
692
Stone, "Life," 33.
Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 21.
694
Nathan Hatch, "The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War With France, and
the Revolution," The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 31, no. 3, (July 1974), 408.
693
184
The Great Revival was more than what Hatch dubbed "the unleashing of democratic
religion" in the wake of the American Revolution. 695 To be sure, the revolution unshackled
religious conscience from civil coercion, yet evangelical culture had substantially emerged in the
southern backcountry before the outbreak of anticolonial resistance. The Great Revival did not
suddenly break through a tear in the fabric of the British Empire. It was a radically spiritual
moment, in which converts experienced revelations of the Holy Ghost, hearing the voice of God.
It was a time in which the gospel was not only preached, but also animated in the conversion
process. James McGready described the Great Revival as a time "of feasting and soul
refreshment to Gods children." Converts experienced the world anew, he noted; speaking "the
very language of the heavenly paradise," they changed utterly. 696 It is to this "language of the
heavenly paradise" that historians of early evangelicalism must turn, heeding what Leigh Eric
Schmidt has called "the aliveness of sounds, the power of scriptures to speak, the capacity of
music to heal or inspire ecstasy… doubled voices within." 697
The millenarian fervor spawned by the Great Revival led to increasingly strident
denunciations of fallen humanity, at odds with the assertive nationalism of the United States.
Stone eventually predicted: "the lawful King Jesus Christ, will shortly … reign with his Saints on
earth a thousand years, without a rival … Then shall all man made laws and governments be
burned up forever. These are the seat of the beast." 698 To Richard McNemar, the nation was: "A
great Christian camp, divided into a thousand little kingdoms, all inclosed in the bowels of a
great republic; and each contending for the mastery. America exulting in her health, the liberty
and equality of her members, and yet full of worms, biting and devouring one another." 699
The proliferation of religious authority was the Great Revival's most striking impact on
the religious landscape. The Presbyterian Church was eighteenth-century Kentucky's most
prestigious and influential denomination, with an established tradition of revivalism stretching
back centuries. As Leigh Eric Schmidt has noted, the evangelicalism of James McGready and
his revivalist colleagues “developed seamlessly out of Old World Presbyterian sacramental
695
Hatch, Democratization, 221.
James McGready to John McMillan, November 18, 1801 (transcript). Special Collections and Archives,
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
697
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 35.
698
Barton Stone, "Reflections of Old Age," Christian Messenger 13 (August 1843), 123.
699
McNemar, Kentucky Revival, 129.
696
185
occasions.” 700 New Light ministers and their congregations blended the spoken word of the
gospel with what one Scottish devotional writer called the "visible Gospel" of the sacrament. 701
The growing appeal and accessibility of such forms of worship, however, later enabled rival
Baptist and Methodist preachers to compete successfully against the Presbyterians, transforming
traditional Presbyterian forms into Methodist preaching circuits and Baptist camp meeting
revivals.
Kentucky's growing market economy paralleled – but did not necessarily complement –
the boom in its religious economy. Rapid growth transformed the Bluegrass from a pre-market
to a proto-capitalist economy, tying the agricultural hinterlands to the national economy of the
early republic. By 1806, one English visitor to Lexington marveled "at the profusion and variety
of most of the necessaries and many of the luxuries of life" available in the local market. 702
Civic leaders such as John Bradford spurred urban development, sponsoring such innovations as
Lexington's first indoor markethouse in the 1790s, a visible indication of the Bluegrass's
burgeoning capitalism. 703 While Kentucky prospered, however, some religious leaders
condemned materialist excess. Spokesmen such as David Rice, the patriarch of Kentucky
Presbyterianism, warned against the emasculating effects of luxury, though his ultimate
objection was creeping secularization. "By adopting and acting upon the principles & maxims of
this world," he wrote, "Christians & ministers contribute more to the spread of infidelity &
impiety than all the infidel writers of Europe and America." 704
The formidable John Lyle became the Presbyterian Church's superintendent-at-large,
enforcing clerical orthodoxy in the face of Methodists and other sectarians who "cunningly
proselyted" [sic] the faithful. 705 Such attempts to police denominational boundaries proved
futile, however. Membership of the Presbyterian Church in Kentucky – strange to say, no
700
Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Time, Celebration, and the Christian Year in Eighteenth Century Evangelicalism,” in Mark
A. Noll et al, eds, Evangelicalism in Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British
Isles and Beyond, 1700-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 96.
701
John Willison's 1720 work, Sacramental Catechism, quoted in: Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 69.
702
Fortesque Cuming, Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country, Through the States of Ohio and Kentucky
(Pittsburgh: Cramer Spear, & Eichbaum 1810), 161.
703
Craig Thompson Friend, "Merchants and Markethouses: Reflections on Moral Economy in Early Kentucky,"
Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 17, no. 4 (winter 1997), 565.
704
David Rice to Ashbel Green, March 4, 1796, in: Boles, The Great Revival, 18.
705
Lyle, "Missionary Tour," 6.
186
accurate numbers exist – probably did increase slightly in the first decade of the nineteenthcentury. Nevertheless, many members left the church as a result of various schisms and
throughout the Great Revival, Presbyterianism lost ground to more emphatically evangelical
denominations and sects. 706 From 1800 to 1805, membership of the Elkhorn Baptist Association
(the largest Baptist association in Kentucky) rose from little more than 1,000 to over 5,000
people, with similar sustained growth among Methodists in Kentucky as a whole. 707 Between
1800 and 1802, Kentucky Baptist membership shot up from 4,766 to 13,569. 708 According to
one contemporary estimate, Stone's Christian Churches already boasted as many as 20,000
members in the United States by 1808. 709 Many of these members – as with the western
Shakers, forming the nuclei of entire congregations – were former Presbyterians. The
Presbyterian Church hemorrhaged authority even among those who still adhered to Presbyterian
polity. The Cumberland Presbyterians, inspired by the sacramental spirit of James McGready,
numbered an impressive 75,000 members by 1850. 710
The Presbyterian Church retained a core membership of middle and upper class
worshipers during the nineteenth-century, its clergy continuing to exert disproportionate literary
and educational influence, despite their diminished profile on the religious landscape.
Presbyterian ministers such as Robert Davidson, while extoling the Calvinist piety of James
McGready, denounced the enthusiastic influences of Arminian preachers during the Great
Revival. Davidson described Methodist influence during the revival as a "contagion… [which]
completely outgrew the control of the clergy." 711 Such criticisms reflected genteel sensibilities,
little different from those leveled at evangelicals during the colonial Great Awakening. Critics
of the camp-meeting style of revival bridged the enlightenment emphasis on rational harmony
and nineteenth-century emphases on middle-class self-restraint. By focusing disproportionately
on the physical manifestations of the spiritually distressed, however, they reified the behavioral
markers that excluded evangelical converts from genteel society, while diminishing the actual
experience of conversion itself.
706
In addition to incomplete records, noted John Boles, "various [Presbyterian] churches defined their members in
different ways," dependent on age, baptismal status, etc. Boles, The Great Revival, 185.
707
Elsinger, Citizens of Zion, 182.
708
Boles, Religion in Antebellum Kentucky, 29.
709
Garrison and DeGroot, The Disciples of Christ, 115.
710
Boles, Religion in Antebellum Kentucky, 50.
711
Davidson, History of the Presbyterian Church, 140.
187
Kentucky's economic growth, eventually bolstered by the War of 1812, confirmed "the
triumph of the middle class" – at least by material standards. 712 Early settlers often paid for the
land with their lives, but the market for real estate in the Ohio Valley soon taught those who
survived the true value of capitalism. According to Nile's Weekly Register in 1815, Lexington's
“town lots sell nearly as high as in Boston, New York, Philadelphia or Baltimore, which shows
that this is not a place in the wilderness, as some people [still] suppose it to be.” 713 A
burgeoning public sphere complemented Kentucky's growing middle class, although an
increasingly diverse newspaper market circumscribed the political influence of pioneer printers
such as John Bradford. In 1805, Bradford attempted to organize the first "Association of
Printers" to regulate and promote printing and bookselling in Lexington; this obscure society
died a death after its first meeting, when Bradford was elected its president. 714 Bradford's
secular vision was less successful than his commercial boosterism. Despite his sometimes shaky
patriotism, Bradford promulgated the idea of the western country as the moral heart of the early
republic. In his eyes, the Great Revival threatened republican virtue, substituting personal
religious experience for disinterested notions of the commonweal. Bradford's republicanism was
essentially conservative, however. Celebrating "the cause of Freedom, and the happiness of the
human race" in such events as the French Revolution, his journalistic worldview nevertheless
aligned Kentucky's happiness with resolutely material ends. 715 Whether or not Bradford
recognized the irony, the republican gospel of wealth sowed the seeds of its own demise.
Paradoxically, his state's economic growth generated unprecedented social friction, eroding the
fraternal hegemony of the Bluegrass gentry while paving the way for the Jacksonian
demagoguery of Joseph Desha and others.
Evangelical culture soon became conflated with the social upheavals of the era,
provoking much sour complaining. In the wake of the revivals, outsiders such as Pennsylvanian
Josiah Espy readily stereotyped the Ohio Valley's diverse but chaotic religious landscape. In
1805, Espy predicted that settlers would rise to obtain great prosperity through "habits of
industry and labor, and … that respect for the Christian religion which generally prevails." He
712
Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 217.
Allen J. Sharpe, Cities in the Commonwealth: Two Centuries of Urban Life in Kentucky (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 1982), 12.
714
Coleman, John Bradford, Esq., 16.
715
Lexington Democratic Society, "Letter to a Citizen," n.d., The Democratic-Republican Societies, ed. Link, 369.
713
188
worried in light of recent upheavals, however, that "The great body of the people will … be a
party for some years to priestcraft, fanaticism and religious enthusiasm." 716 Episodes such as the
Holley case only confirmed the worst fears of anti-revivalist critics of Kentucky society. Such
anxieties anticipated the emergence of the southern Bible Belt in the national imagination: the
realization of John Bradford's nightmares.
Historians have too eagerly imposed the cultural assumptions of their own times upon the
transformation of America's religious landscape in the early-nineteenth century. For Nathan
Hatch, evangelical populism was anti-intellectual, representing a "new faith in public opinion as
an arbiter of truth." 717 It would, however, be dangerous to pressupose "an anti-intellectual
impulse" in evangelical culture, however temptingly the prospect suggests itself. 718 A second
look at the antagonists of the Holley controversy suggests the battle lines were anything but
straightforward. The Methodist and Baptist insurgents were not necessarily natural allies with
the Presbyterian conservatives on the Transylvania Board of Trustees, the majority of whom –
such as Robert Hamilton Bishop – had ultimately deplored the emotional excesses of the Great
Revival. Another of Holley's key critics, the Rev. James Fishback, was a heterodox Baptist
minister – an outspoken critic of natural religion and infidelity, who nevertheless derived many
of his religious insights from enlightenment sources. In one anti-deistical treatise, Fishback
bemoaned the corruption of the early church "by the Platonic christians, with whom ...
originated scholastic theology, and mystic divinity." He considered such dogmatic corruptions
the product of human imagination over the foundations of revealed religion. With some irony,
he approvingly quoted the Scottish religious skeptic David Hume to illustrate the pitfalls of
theological speculation, stating that "this creative power of the mind, amounts to nothing more
than the faculty of combining, transposing, augmenting, and diminishing the materials afforded
us by sense, and experience." 719 In Fishback's emphasis on experience over sophistry, his
religious thought resembled that of Barton Stone. Unlike Fishback, however, Stone disdained
commenting upon the collegiate strife at Transylvania, which he presumably took as further
evidence of fallen humanity.
716
Espy, "A Tour," 25.
Hatch, Democratization, 162. Emphasis added.
718
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 55.
719
James Fishback, The Philosophy of the Human Mind, In Respect of Religion; or, A Demonstration, From the
Necessity of Things, That Religion Came Into the World by Revelation (Lexington: Thomas Skillman, 1813), 5.
717
189
Stone's faith, like that of many evangelicals, rested upon scripture; it was not, however,
necesarily hostile to the intellect. Scripture was understood as the revealed word of God, resting
upon a more secure empirical footing than fallible human reason. Where theological opinion
strayed into error, deference to human reason became its own form of enthusiasm; the selfintoxicated worship of the mind an idolatrous substitute for revealed religion. Evangelical
individualism thus challenged the authority of philosophical idealism, resonating with a new
nation in the process of self-discovery. To a large degree, however, evangelical Biblical
heuristics derived from the Scottish enlightenment school of Common Sense philosophy,
introduced to America via Princeton and more widely disseminated through the Log College
seminaries. The Common Sense school anticipated the pragmatic turn of later American
thought, emphasizing the intuitive basis of knowledge. Originating in part as a reaction to the
religious skepticism of the enlightenment, Common Sense thought placed "the learned and the
unlearned, the philosopher and the day-labourer … upon a level," regarding the innate capacity
of reason, if not finished intellect. 720
Barton Stone and John Bradford were worlds apart in their religious and political
worldviews, yet they shared in common a mutual rejection of creedal belief systems – a rejection
grounded in empirical conviction. As David Holmes has noted, enlightenment deism shared
many similarities with primitive Christianity, not least in their mutual drive against the
excrescences of theology. Deism (and Unitarianism) in fact "tended towards restorationism, in
that many of the movement's adherents believed that some combination of external forces had
added false doctrines to the original teachings of Jesus." 721 These similarities did not in
themselves, of course, lead to identical conclusions. As Henry May noted, even at the
enlightenment's peak, "revelation was still the alphabet" by which many Americans deciphered
their world. 722 Stone recognized and approved of Tom Paine's anti-dogmatic stance towards
creedal religion, though deploring Paine's religious infidelity. Without the animating spark of
the Holy Ghost, he recognized, religion might quickly dissolve into arid formality. While it
might seem far-fetched to cast Stone as an enlightenment empiricist, he embodied an important
720
Thomas Reid, quoted in: Fred J. Hood, Reformed America: The Middle and Southern States, 1783-1837
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 13.
721
Holmes, Faiths of the Founding Fathers, 82.
722
Henry F. May, "The Problem of the American Enlightenment," New Literary History, vol.1, no. 2 (winter 1970),
203.
190
cultural turn within evangelical Christianity. This return to the ideal of sola scriptura, influenced
by Common Sense ideology, modeled faith on the experience of the apostolic church and an
assertion of the fundamental capacity of all Christians to interpret scripture by their own lights.
Given today's political climate in the United States, it is all too easy to imagine that
evangelicalism has always been reflexively anti-intellectual, diametrically opposed to the values
of the enlightenment, and inclined to swaddle itself in the American flag. Whatever grains of
truth these stereotypes hold is the result of historical development, not historical inevitability.
Both the evangelical culture and the surrounding enlightenment climate of the early American
republic embodied dizzying complexities. In its origins, evangelicalism in the United States
must be seen in the broader historical context of Christian thought; yet in its development, it was
as much a sympathetic response to currents within the enlightenment as it was a last ditch against
the tide. Evangelicals experienced the cultural catharsis of the Great Revival as a supernatural
outpouring of grace, a spiritual rebirth transcending the politically and materialistically
interpretive frameworks that future historians of the phenomenon would superimpose. While the
American Revolution provided the theoretical structure that provided for freedom of religious
conscience, the core of the Great Revival was its luminescent manifestation of revelation, an
existential phenomenon often alienating and perturbing to its bemused critics. Evangelical
revival promised to secure gospel liberty on its own terms against the demands of civil religion at
the turn of the nineteenth-century. In embracing revival, evangelicals aspired to sweep a way the
bulwark of political coercion in the religious sphere. As yet, however, the struggle between
political power and religious conscience is a perennial tension of American history, unresolved
by any teleological conclusion.
191
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