Tracking And Following
The Kentucky Jerks

by George M. Apperson

A surge of religious enthusiasm in the South, called “The Great Awakening in Virginia,” came to life just after 1740. Fueled by small groups of Christians, whose needs were ignored by the Anglican Church, and a tide of Scotch Irish Presbyterians moving into western Virginia, detached from their traditional roots, it promoted the idea that resistance to unjust authority was sanctioned by God.

Presbyterians had achieved a national organization in 1706 under the leadership of an emigrant to Virginia, Francis Makemie, but at his death in 1708 many churches were without ministerial leadership or spiritual guidance. The task of sending missionaries to the frontiers, especially in the South, was daunting, as was the need to recruit and educate ministers.

In Hanover County, Virginia, a small group came together spontaneously for religious instruction, while to the west, rude places for worship were sometimes built with the hope that an itinerant preacher might appear. Missionaries to Virginia found an atmosphere of official hostility to non-Anglicans but when Samuel Davies came to Hanover in 1747, he secured a decision from the colonial government, admitting that the Act of Toleration of 1689 in Great Britain applied also to Virginia and that Presbyterians were entitled to licensed preaching places.

Davies was a brilliant preacher whose ministry was based on evangelical Calvinism and he initiated an awakening that had both social and political consequences. His eloquence and patriotism won over Virginia aristocrats but quite as remarkable was his concern for the spiritual needs of African slaves who, he believed, ought to be taught to read and admitted to church membership. He knew that education was vital to the growth of the church, so he took young men into his home to be trained for the ministry. Two of these, Henry Pattillo and David Rice, became leaders in promoting Christian understanding of race and the need to abolish slavery, eventually or immediately.

Davies went to England to raise funds for the College of New Jersey (Princeton), and was elected its president in 1759. But he made Virginia education-conscious. Later in the eighteenth century two schools were established that would carry on his ideals of evangelism and learning among Presbyterians. They were Liberty Hall (now Washington and Lee University) and Hampden-Sydney College.

It was at Hampden-Sydney that the Second Great Awakening in Virginia began in 1787. John Blair Smith, its president, was joined by William Graham, rector of Liberty Hall, in promoting a revival that would expand to North Carolina and Kentucky. The evangelical zeal generated by this movement is illustrated by the education of the first African American Presbyterian minister. It was John Blair Smith who first “brought forward” John Chavis and the Virginia Presbytery of Lexington that sent him to Liberty Hall for a ministerial education.

Returning from his theological schooling in Pennsylvania, James McGready visited Hampden-Sydney, where he encountered a powerful new approach to religion in the preaching of John Blair Smith. McGready was destined to initiate the Great Revival of 1800 in Kentucky but he would venture far beyond the controlled emotionalism of Smith and the Hampden-Sydney revivalists.

McGready, whose North Carolina parish was formerly served by the energetic Henry Pattillo, preached with fiery zeal, denouncing sinners and gaining many converts. When he migrated to Kentucky, he continued his highly emotional sermons with dramatic results. At his Red River Church in 1800 a great crowd assembled for a sacramental meeting. Presbyterians believed that church members should be prepared for celebrating the Lord’s Supper and on the frontier when large crowds gathered for communion, preachers often cooperated in joint services.

Customarily, worship began on Friday, culminating on Sunday with the administration of the sacrament. At Red River, three Presbyterian ministers were joined by the McGee brothers, who were reared in the same North Carolina congregation as McGready and received their early education from John Caldwell, a devoutly evangelical Presbyterian schoolmaster and minister. John McGee had converted to Methodism in Maryland, while his brother William was McGready’s convert. Taking advantage of an intermission in the long services, John, in Methodist fashion, “went through the house shouting and exhorting with all possible ecstasy and energy.” This highly emotional technique was not known among Presbyterians but the impact at Red River was violent and soon “their screams for mercy pierced the heavens.”

McGready, who was himself a “hell-fire preacher,” accepted this new phenomenon. He later wrote that in this approach to evangelism, “Little children, young men and women, and old gray headed people, persons of every description, white and black, were found in every part of the multitude…crying out for mercy in the most extreme distress.”

A climactic event in Kentucky took place at the Cane Ridge Presbyterian Church in August 1801. The minister, Barton W. Stone, had known McGready from his student days in North Carolina and visited his churches as the revival began. Never having witnessed the exaggerated emotional impact where participants fell trance-like and women and children shouted in ecstasy, he was convinced that it was the work of God. He returned to his churches to prepare for a widely-advertised revival. As many as twenty-five thousand were said to have gathered for the meeting, with fifteen Presbyterian ministers participating, joined by numbers of Baptists and Methodists.

A frontier sacramental meeting, circa 1801. Tables for
serving the Lord’s Supper are seen in the background.
From Joseph Smith, Old Redstone, (Philadelphia, 1854).

The preaching continued day and night, and listeners were warned to consider the terrors of hell and the bliss of heaven. Participants fell, seemingly unconscious, while others rolled on the ground, barked like dogs, sang, danced, and laughed, but a noted physical manifestation was called the “Kentucky jerks,” with the head and body moving in uncontrolled spasms. By letter, traveler and messenger the news spread across the South and revivals in a similar pattern sprang up in several Southern states. In staid Lexington, Virginia, religious fervor gave way at times to the “Kentucky jerks.” In Tennessee, Princeton graduate Hezekiah Balch, president of Greeneville College, wrote to Charles Coffin, later president of the University of Tennessee, describing local revival participants whose antics he considered vulgar and disreputable.

Special emissaries were sent to North Carolina and at Cross Roads Church, where McGready once ministered, a young man from Tennessee described the extraordinary events in Kentucky, kindling and emotional intensity. Quoting a favorite verse from Exodus, he cried out, “Stand still and see the salvation of God.” The silence was broken by sobs and groans, continuing with prayers, exhortations and hymns until midnight. The young man appears to have been William McGee, or perhaps his Methodist brother, both born, reared and educated nearby.

John Chavis, who was appointed a missionary by the General Assembly, arrived in North Carolina and became active in the revivals. A friend of Chavis’s wrote that “Ministers are sometimes so overpowered as to loose (sic) use of their limbs and speech.” But Chavis duly informed one of his Hampden-Sydney mentors that, “he never expected to see the spirit of God poured out in so miraculous a manner upon the guilty sons of men.”

The phenomenon persisted in a less exaggerated form for generations, particularly in camp meetings. Revivals became a standard feature of church life among Presbyterians and even more urgently among Methodists and Baptists. At the same time, they produced divisiveness, schism and heresy. Fraternal cooperation of the early years gave way to bitter rivalry, theological denunciation and aggressive proselytism. In Tennessee, the Methodist Parson William Brownlow made a career of attacking Presbyterians in pulpit, press and political arena and climaxed his career by becoming governor of the state. Several Presbyterian ministers broke from the church and formed their own denominations. Barton W. Stone became a “Christian,” denouncing Calvinist doctrine and fathering the Disciples of Christ. James O’Kelley organized the Republican Methodists. There were defections to the Shakers, whose founder, Ann Lee, claimed to be Jesus Christ returned as a woman. Cumberland Presbyterians split away, adopting ideas that were largely Methodist.

The Calvinist foundations of the Second Great Awakening in Virginia were primary ideals as the revivals in the West began. Presbyterians predominated but Methodists, Baptists, Disciples of Christ and Cumberland Presbyterians were soon the winners in numerical growth. In the seaboard states, the picture was scarcely better despite Presbyterian dominance in higher education, personal wealth and ministerial training. Conservation Protestantism tended to shape the mind of the South in the rising generations, creating an ethos known as the “Bible Belt.” Sectional rivalry promoted political confrontation, shaping the loyalty of churches, and the warm intellectualism of John Blair Smith was lost in a welter of conflicting sectarian ideas, oft-times generated by revivalism and revival preachers.