Camp Meeting Signs

Topic: Early Versions
Religious movements define appropriate and inappropriate ways for individuals to express themselves.  Today, speaking in tongues is the only method accepted by the Assembly of God, but other Pentecostal groups acknowledge hearing voices and being healed by faith as signs of grace.

In 1801, the Cane Ridge Revival used the same exercises [1] that Barton Warren Stone observed at a Logan County, Kentucky, Presbyterian camp meeting earlier that year:

“Many, very many fell down, as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state—sometimes for a few moments reviving, and exhibiting symptoms of life by a deep groan, or piercing shriek, or by a prayer for mercy most fervently uttered.  After lying thus for hours, they obtained deliverance.  The gloomy cloud, which had covered their faces, seemed gradually and visibly to disappear, and hope in smiles brightened into joy—they would rise     deliverance, and then would address the surrounding multitude in language truly eloquent and impressive.” [2]

Thirty years after Cane Ridge trance-like states still occurred in Methodist camp meetings in areas settled by the Scots Irish in the 1820s.  Francis Lieber visited a camp meeting in 1834 held in Chester County, Pennsylvania, where many first had landed. [3]  He advised a friend in Germany that “the peculiar trait” of Methodists

“distinguishing it from all other protestant denominations, is what they would term an excitement of feeling; they would call it an agitation produced by the power of God, or the powerful effect of the divine spirit, or would characterize it by an expression of this kind.

“Camp-meetings, if I have properly understood the explanations, given me by methodists themselves, are held, for the purpose of promoting this powerful effect, with the followers of this creed, and thereby of strengthening religion in their souls, as also, in order to excite in persons not yet converted, that state of overwhelming contrition, which according to methodism, must generally precede conversion and regeneration.” [4]

He noted many types of agitation including some “lying on the ground, distended as if in a swoon, some sitting in a state of perfect exhaustion and inanity, with pale cheeks and vacant eyes, which bore traces of many tears.” [5]

Lieber was a Prussian emigrant who then was advising Girard College on curriculum. [6]  After looking more closely at two young women, he commented to his friend:

“Indeed, any physician will tell you whether it be possible, that an individual can lie for two or three hours together in a state of real exhaustion and unconsciousness, deprived of all the power of volition, without laboring under a serious affliction of the nervous system and experiencing the evil consequences of such a fit for several weeks.  Yet these individuals appear a few hours after, in a comparatively sound state of health.” [7]

Stone and Lieber mentioned other physical manifestations, but most occurred in the time before an individual fell into the trance-like state and were actions that accompanied or contributed to the final result.  The most interesting term in contemporary accounts was “shouting.”

The official historian of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church claimed:

“Presbyterians generally condemned shouting, and this feature of McGready’s meetings, after McGee’s visits, was one of the grounds of their bitter complaints.  So it is probable that the ‘shouting,’ once so common, now so rare, among Cumberland Presbyterians was of Methodist parentage.” [8]
 
Peter Cartwright described his mother’s conversion in 1793 in Logan County when he was nine years old.

“Jacob Lurton was a real son of thunder.  He preached with tremendous power, and the congregation were almost all melted to tears; some cried aloud for mercy, and my mother shouted aloud for joy.” [9]

Francis Asbury, who organized the Methodist Church in Baltimore after the Revolution, used the term in a number of ways in his journal in those years.  In October 1800, he used it to separate people who became interested from those who had become members at a meeting held immediately after the one in Logan County.

“We began our quarterly meeting at Elmour Douglas’s.  Brother Whatcoat preached; brothers M’Kendree and M’Gee exhorted.  At the evening meeting there were more shouters than converts; nevertheless the Lord was in the midst.” [10]

A couple times he used the word to describe responses of people who attended meetings.   In October 1801, he noted “On Friday and Saturday evenings, and on Sabbath morning there was the noise of praise and shouting in the meetinghouse.” [11]  A month later, he “spoke in the woods at a small distance from the chapel” and remarked “I was often interrupted by singing and shouting.” [12]

He used the term as an adjective in 1803 to summarize a meeting in western Pennsylvania.  By then, it had come to mean a particular kind of event.

“On Saturday I came to the quarterly meeting; I preached, and we had an open time: at the night meeting it was a shouting time.” [13]

I haven’t seen enough accounts to judge if the use of the word “shout” developed independently among slaves and their owners, or if whites used a word for decibel level to generalize about Black behavior that then became an accepted common term.  The underlying physiological behaviors were probably the same, but driven by different cultural patterns.

One of Asbury’s earliest uses of the term after hearing about McGready appeared in a journal entry made when he was visiting old friends on the Gunpowder River in Maryland.

“I came on to Perry-Hall.  Here were things to arrest my attention—out of sixty or seventy servants, many shouting and praising God.” [14]

Asbury was describing an event on a plantation where white owners may have been in the same room as their slaves.  In camp meetings, like Cane Ridge, [15] Blacks tended to congregate in separate areas.  As mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018, Fredrika Bremer visited a camp meeting in Macon, Georgia, in May 1850 that had separate services for slaves and whites.

At the 1834 Pennsylvania meeting, Lieber observed: “There was, also, a considerable number of negroes at the camp-meeting of Westchester: a separate place had been assigned to them, nor had they any tent.” [16]  More important, in what was essentially a venue controlled by whites some of whom may have been their owners and some the employers of free men

“They seemed to me to behave very quietly here; it is not so in the meeting-houses of the colored people.  There, their boisterous violence is greater in proportion to their greater ignorance.  Some years ago I went into one of the principal methodist meetinghouses of colored people in Philadelphia, and I never shall forget the impression made upon me by the unbounded excitement and passion of the congregation.” [17]

End Notes
The word “shouting” has been bolded in quotations.

1.  “Exercises” was the contemporary term for religious manifestations.

2.  Barton Warren Stone.  The Biography of Eld. Barton Warren Stone.  Cincinnati: American Christian Publication Society, 1853 edition.  34-35.  He was describing the 1801 Gasper River meeting held by James McGready, mentioned in the post for 8 November 2020, that inspired Stone to hold his revival at Cane Ridge.

3.  James G. Leyburn.  The Scotch-Irish.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962.  196–197.

4.  Francis Lieber.  Letters to a Gentleman in Germany, Written after a Trip from Philadelphia to Niagara.  Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1834.  303.

5.  Lieber.  315.

6.  Albert Bernhardt Faust.  The German Element in the United States.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909 2:166.

7.  Lieber.  317.

8.  B. W. McDonnold.  History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.  Nashville: Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Board of Publication, 1899.  18.  For more on James McGready and John McGee, see the post for 8 November 2020.

9.  Autobiography of Peter Cartwright.  Edited by W. P. Strickland.  Cincinnati: L. Swormstedt and A. Poe, 1859.  23.  Cartwright was mentioned in the post for 8 November 2020.  Lurton was a Methodist preacher.

10.  Francis Asbury.  The Journal of the Rev. Francis Asbury.  New York: N. Bangs and T. Mason, 1821.  2:397.  Entry for 23 October 1800 in Tennessee.

11.  Asbury.  3:38.  Entry for 30 October 1801.
12.  Asbury.  3:38.  Entry for 29 November 1801.
13.  Asbury.  3:112.  Entry for 11 August 1803.

14.  Asbury.  3:32.   Entry for 3 August 1801.  The servants no doubt were the slaves of Harry Gough and his wife Prudence Ridgely. [18]

15.  For more on Blacks at Cane Ridge, see the post for 8 November 2020.
16.  Lieber.  327.
17.  Lieber.  327.

18.  “A History of Camp Chapel United Methodist Church.”  Perry Hall, Maryland.  Its website.