"at times more than one thousand persons broke into loud shouting all at once and the shouts could be heard for miles."

Elder Stone's personal account discloses the oneness of mind that prevailed in this great emotional togetherness, saying:

"The roads were crowded with wagons, horses and footmen moving to the solemn camp. It was judged by military men on the ground that between twenty and thirty thousand assembled. Four or five preachers spoke at the same time in different parts of the encampment without confusion. The Methodist and Baptist preachers aided in the work, and all appeared cordially united in it. They were of one mind and soul: the salvation of sinners was the one object.

"We all engaged in singing the same songs, all united in prayer, all preached the same things. The numbers converted will be known only in eternity. Many things transpired which were so much like miracles that they had the same effect as miracles on unbelievers.

"This meeting continued six or seven days and nights and would have continued longer but food for the sustenance of such a multitude failed. Many had come from Ohio and other distant points. These returned home and diffused the same spirit in their neighborhoods. Similar results followed."

It is clear that the power of suggestion was rampant, that imitation was inescapable. The drama of Cane Ridge depended upon these elements. Flanked by campfires blazing against the forest gloom, with the exhortations of the preachers rising in impassioned fervor as the night progressed, the serried rows of people rhythmically swayed together in concerted song, sob, and shout. And with the

dawn they joined hands by the hundreds in a final “singing ecstasy."

During the day the crowd would shift from one preaching stand to another as the word sped that prophecy was here or a miracle was there, that an epidemic of the "jerks" was on or fresh converts were emerging from their fits to tell of their experiences. Now the frenzy would momentarily subside, but a piercing shriek yonder on the other side of the clearing would bring a rush to that spot and soon the shaking, leaping, laughing, weeping, swooning tumult would be resumed. Little children, caught up in the furor, "preached" from the shoulders of their parents, repeating the lurid cant of their elders till they lapsed into incoherence and senselessness. It was computed that about one in six fell with the "slain" at Cane Ridge.

After this the camp meeting system of revivalling was well-established. By 1803 the zeal abated but the excitement had not wholly died down in 1805 when Lorenzo Dow, the Methodist itinerant, bore witness to the "jerks" under the effect of his preaching in Knoxville, Tennessee. Poor old "Crazy" Dow, for all his eccentricity, was a shrewd observer and was well aware that these gyrations were produced by gospel incendiaries like himself.

"I have seen all denominations of religion exercised with the jerks," he said, "gentleman and lady, black and white, young and old. I have passed a meeting house where I observed the undergrowth had been cut for a camp meeting and from fifty to a hundred saplings were left, breasthigh, for the people who jerked to hold on by. I observed where they held on they had kicked up the earth as a horse stamping flies.

"I believe it [the jerking exercise] does not affect those naturalists who wished to try to get to philosophize upon

it, and rarely those who are most pious, but the lukewarm, lazy professor [of religion] is subject to it. The wicked are more afraid of it than of smallpox or yellow fever and are subject to it; but the persecutors are more subject to it than any and they have sometimes cursed and swore and damned it while jerking."

Among the naïve backwoodsmen the agitations were counted valuable and essential to soul salvation. Even Peter Cartwright at first attributed the "jerks" to the judgment of God though later he realized that conversions obtained by such means were often spurious and that the impressions under them, mistaken for perceptions of truth, might be delusive.

The whole species of Americana horribilis probably started with genuine religious feeling. Then the vivid imagery of personal sin and its desert of eternal damnation took possession of the subliminal consciousness and induced a psychic storm. The subsequent contortions and falling into rigidity were pure hysteria. Involuntary imitation was responsible for the spread of the devotional delirium into orgies of nervous excitement. And the suppressed fear of yielding was doubtless the most potent cause for the seizure of resistants.

The preachers, on their side, were carried along with the current. They were exhilarated like actors in a play that is evoking an emotional response from its audience. They could justify to themselves their course as availing against hardness of heart and as producing manifest results. In fact, they did declare that the morals and religion of the new West improved following the revival. But this does not condone the gamut of excesses that was finally checked by the limit of endurance, a fear of bedevilment and some rationalized opposition.

The revival that had come from East to West and run wild now took the reverse direction and, strong and stirring in spirit but bereft of its morbid phenomena, it touched nearly every State in the Union. In New England, for instance, mild and simple measures were employed in emphasizing the immutability of the moral law and the necessity of regeneration. And in the West the camp meeting, now a permanent national institution for religious renewal, settled down to straight preaching of balanced men, the rugged, earnest, honest circuiteers of such stuff as brought out Cartwright, Finley, and Finis Ewing.

The fate of the promoters of the sound and fury is what might be expected with the return to more normal ways of getting religion. McGready of the hypnotic eyes and awful voice spent himself with his effort and died in 1817 at the age of about fifty-seven. The others repudiated their churches and became schismatics. Their teachings had been subversive of ecclesiastical authority, a phase of one type of evangelism that still prevails, in claiming for each convert an inner light which interpreted the Scriptures and directed worship regardless of accepted interpretation and prescribed forms. Separatism was the consequence and more "New Lights."

McNemar was tried for anti-Calvinism and suspended from the Presbyterian Church together with Thompson, Marshall, Stone and John Dunlevy, who joined with him in forming a new presbytery. The sect incorporated the worst features of the late revival, introducing voluntary leaping, dancing, skipping, jerking, rolling and barking, holding prayer matches to decide controversies and making much of visions. Grasping one another by the hand, the devotees would indulge in a general holy shaking till their church edifices rocked with them. This was the "right

hand of fellowship" to increase the working of the spirit in accordance with their basic belief that God abiding in the soul of man was magnified by such exercise of the inward feelings.

The New Lights suffered considerable persecution, some of which might be traced to a suspicion that in trying to perpetuate these aspects of the camp meeting they were endangering the morals of the community. It is true that unbridled passions were loosed in the utter lapse of selfcontrol at some of the camp meetings. The human and the spiritual love motives have always been closely akin. And precautions finally had to be taken to protect the chastity of the young. Even so it is recorded that "bastardy increased" in the aftermath of camp meetings.

Their absolute freedom of worship disrupted the schismatics in June, 1804. Marshall and Thompson returned to the Presbyterian fold. McNemar and Dunlevy joined the Shakers, "Mother Ann" Lee's "United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing." And Elder Stone alone remained steadfast, till in 1832 he took the remnant of the New Lights over into the Christian Church organized by Alexander Campbell.

The Shakers had come into Kentucky from Watervliet, near Albany, New York, in 1805 proclaiming that the revival there was the culmination of their millennial hope. Their name was derived from the violent tremblings that overtook them under strong religious emotion. Pledged to lives of celibacy and severe simplicity in dress and conduct, they dwelt in agricultural colonies on a communistic basis of labor. Ann Lee was the "first mother, or spiritual parent, in the line of the female." To this day the sect are known for their frugality, temperance, industry and honesty.