The Revival of 1800, also known as the Red River Revival, was a series of evangelical Christian meetings which began in Logan County, Kentucky. These ignited the subsequent events and influenced several of the leaders of the Second Great Awakening. The events represented a transition from British traditions to innovations arising from the unique needs and culture of Americans in the new century, especially on the frontier. The startling manifestations of revival fervor that first occurred in June 1800 at the Red River Meeting House, a small Presbyterian congregation led by James McGready, began as a Scottish sacrament service, but led to the important innovation of serial religious services later known as camp meetings.
These multi-day gatherings hosted people from great distances for outdoor services focused on arousing the heart-felt conversion and religious enthusiasm that came to characterize especially rural evangelicalism throughout the nineteenth century. The Logan County revival quickly spread into the larger Cumberland region of southwestern Kentucky and middle Tennessee. It expanded outward in all directions, attracting the attention of evangelical leaders such as Presbyterian-turned-Disciples of Christ leader, Barton Stone, and Methodists Francis Asbury and Peter Cartwright, as well as leaders in the Shaker and Cumberland Presbyterian movements, all of whom attended the revival meetings in their initial year-long period, beginning in June 1800 and continuing through May 1801.
Background
North Carolina James McGready arrived in Logan County in 1797, but he had become a seasoned revivalist in North Carolina. His first congregation had been in Guilford County, a center of evangelical Presbyterian revivals in the late 1780s and early 1790s. The churches were recovering from the cultural readjustment of post-revolutionary America that, in many cases, left institutional religion in a weakened state. As states disestablished their churches following the war, the Anglican Church in the South was particularly affected, having fallen out of favor during the Revolution because of its association with Great Britain. More than this, the country showed a general lack of interest in religion, focusing instead on populating the western frontier, regaining economic footing, and creating a new nation. In addition, well publicized attacks on Christianity were made by deists Ethan Allen, the hero of Fort Ticonderoga, and Thomas Paine, the famous author of Common Sense. In 1794, Paine published The Age of Reason, which attacked supernatural elements of Christianity in favor of rationalist philosophy. In Guilford County, and in the Carolinas generally, the war had been especially cruel. One nineteenth-century chronicler blamed "the march of armies" for leaving plunder, vice, "dissipation and immorality" in its wake."
Within this post-war setting McGready took part in several sporadic revivals, first in Virginia, at Hampden-Sydney College (1787-9), and then in Guilford County in 1791, in conjunction with a school where several of his future colleagues, including Barton Stone, studied for a career in politics under Presbyterian David Caldwell. McGready's hard-hitting sermons on the sinfulness of people and their need for conversion demanded a response to the tenets of Christianity that was beyond intellectual assent; McGready advocated a heartfelt and "sensible" religion centered on the doctrine of regeneration, or the new birth. McGready's preaching, however, was not without controversy. His appeals were convincing to Stone in regard to his sinfulness, but were no source of relief for the state of his tortured soul. Calvinist doctrine, as taught by the Scots-Irish Presbyterians, espoused limited atonement, that is, the belief that Christ's sacrifice for sin was available only to those who were predestined for salvation. Years later, Stone would reflect that he had "anticipated a long and painful struggle before I should…get religion. … For one year I was tossed on the waves of uncertainty…sometimes desponding and almost despairing." Stone eventually responded, with a sense of his own conversion, to the appeals of one of McGready's associates, William Hodge, who spoke not of the flames of hell, but of the love of God for sinners.
Others in the community responded to McGready, not with contrition, but threats. One Sunday, McGready arrived at his church to discover a bloody note, accompanying his burned-out pulpit, demanding that he leave the area or face the consequences. Responding to an invitation to minister in Logan County, Kentucky, McGready soon left North Carolina. Several ministers with whom he had worked in Guilford County, including William Hodge, John Rankin, William McAdow, and the brothers John and William McGee, would eventually join him to minister in various congregations in the Cumberland frontier of middle Tennessee and southwestern Kentucky.
Kentucky in the 1790s Many of the socio-religious conditions in Kentucky mirrored those of the country in general in post-revolutionary America. McGready complained that Kentuckians were worldly people whose conversations were "of corn and tobacco, or land and stock…. the name of Jesus has no charms; and it is rarely mentioned unless to be profaned." The rush for land produced a change in post-war demographics that were perhaps nowhere as dramatic as in Kentucky. In 1790, the population was about 73,000, roughly sixteen percent of whom were slaves, with most of the population concentrated in the central Bluegrass area near Lexington. By 1800, the population had almost tripled to 221,000, and had expanded farther west, spurred by the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. This defeat of confederated Indian tribes near Toledo, Ohio, by General Anthony Wayne, effectively ended the threat of Indian attack in Kentucky by the middle of the decade. Though people of all classes came to Kentucky, the influx of large numbers of the poor in search of land produced a dramatic effect on the country as a whole. The 1800 United States census revealed that seven percent of the U. S. population lived west of the Alleghenies in what is now Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio. By 1810, the population in Kentucky had swelled to almost double that of 1800, to 406,000.
Early settlers were fiercely independent and egalitarian; skilled with the long rifle; and fond of fighting, gambling, tobacco chewing, and horse racing. Church attendance was sparse even in settled areas, largely because few ministers were called to the area until after 1794. By 1799, there were only twenty-six licensed Presbyterian ministers in Kentucky. Sectarian controversies were common among the churches in the more settled areas. In the backcountry where few churches existed, early Methodist itinerant ministers such as the English missionary Francis Asbury rode on horseback thousands of miles yearly to establish circuits to reach remote settlements. In 1796, the same year McGready came to Kentucky, Asbury quoted in his journal the dismal prediction he had heard about the region: "The ministers in Kentucky will be a curse to each other, and the people too; good religion and good land are not so easily matched together."
Scottish sacrament season When McGready came to Logan County, he brought with him a long tradition known as the Scottish sacrament season, which was still being practiced regularly by Presbyterian congregations. Begun in Scotland after the tumultuous changes of the Scottish Reformation in the mid-seventeenth century, the sacrament season replaced Catholic Corpus Christi festivals. It served as a response to fears that Protestant religion had lost its communal expression, making religion an increasingly privatized affair.
The sacrament season was conducted over several days, in warm weather months. It included outdoor preaching, large numbers of attendees, who had often traveled long distances, long vigils of prayer, and often dramatic conversion experiences. One of the largest of these observances took place in 1742 in Cambuslang, outside Glasgow, Scotland, where upwards of 30,000 people came to hear the preaching of George Whitefield. Sacrament observances such as Cambuslang, whose timing coincided with the Great Awakening in England, Ireland, and the American Colonies throughout the 1740s, had become associated with revivalism. Both clergy and lay people had the expectation that the communion season would bring "the most intense religious experiences, the most agonizing despair and the most ecstatic joy."
Scottish sacrament observances were recreated in America in the early eighteenth century when large numbers of Ulster Scots immigrated to the colonies. During the Great Awakening in the American colonies, Irish Presbyterian revivalists William and Gilbert Tennent presided over the communion festivals, while Congregationalist David Brainerd also followed the Scottish pattern in his missionary work among American Indians. The four-day pattern was common: Friday was designated as a day of fasting and prayer. On Saturday, further inward preparation continued with preaching, usually by several ministers. Sunday was the observance of the Lord's Supper, and Monday was a day of thanksgiving.
The focus of the sacrament season was participation in the Lord's Supper. For Scots-Irish Presbyterians, inclusion in this ritual was guarded closely and accompanied by several symbols of exclusivity. First, preparation was necessary on the part of the communicant as well as the ministers charged with interviewing each person in advance and approving his sincerity and worthiness. Communion tokens, small emblems made usually from lead and stamped with the date, and sometimes the initials of the minister, were required for admission to communion. These were given only to those approved by the minister, and had to be surrendered to an elder by every person approaching the communion table. A second symbol of exclusivity was the fencing of the tables. Set apart from the rest of the congregation, these tables were often covered with the best and finest linens available and sometimes "fenced" with a rail as the minister described the qualifications of communicants as a further barrier against those who had not been formally invited and approved.
Once admitted to the table, the exclusivity ended. All participants—male and female, young and old, cleric and lay person- served one another common bread and wine, representing the body and blood of Christ. The often intense preparation and elements of exclusivity meant that only a fraction of those who attended these events were able to participate in the communion ritual. Non-participants included children and observers who were unsure of their status as among the converted, and many were curious bystanders and irreligious people who had come for social, rather than religious reasons. As in the later nineteenth-century revivals, the spectacle of the sacrament season, both inside and outside the meeting house, and the large influx of people coming for diverse reasons from considerable distances, sometimes produced a carnival-like atmosphere.
It is clear that McGready saw a connection between the sacrament season and revival. In his written account of the events of 1800, sixteen of seventeen revival meetings were connected to sacrament observances. McGready also revealed his openness to innovations associated with distinctly American influences as well, and he promoted the introduction of the camp meeting into the sacrament tradition in pioneer Kentucky.
Logan County in 1797