Cane Ridge 1801 and the Second Great Awakening: Circuit Riders to Reform

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In August 1801 about 20,000 people gathered for six days and nights at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, where ministers preached from stumps and wagon beds while crowds wept, sang and collapsed. The camp meeting became the epicenter of the Second Great Awakening, a revival that ran from the 1790s through the 1840s. It reacted against the cool rationalism of the American Enlightenment and against Calvinist predestination, the belief that God had already chosen the saved and the damned. Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist revivalists in Kentucky and Tennessee preached instead that anyone could choose salvation, a message that suited self-reliant frontier settlers. Camp meetings, rooted in Scottish communion seasons, gave isolated families their great social event of the year, and Methodist circuit riders carried the message on horseback in plain language, helping Methodist and Baptist membership soar past the older colonial churches.

Postmillennialism taught that Christians had to purify society before a thousand years of peace could begin, a mandate that burned hottest in western New York, which Charles Grandison Finney called the Burned Over District. About two thirds of converts were women, and in places like Utica they formed societies with officers, constitutions and treasuries that grew into female moral reform societies campaigning for temperance, prison reform and care of the mentally ill. The message of spiritual equality also reached Black Americans, though Methodist leaders denied Harry Hosier a vote and ordination, and white legislatures moved to police Black worship.

• Historians call the shift toward Christ's humility, forgiveness and benevolence in revival preaching the feminization of Christianity.
• Harry Hosier, a freed man who could not read, memorized long Bible passages and was preaching to white congregations as early as 1784.
• Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1816, the first independent Black denomination in the United States.
• In 1800 Gabriel Prosser planned a large slave rebellion that grew out of Black revival meetings in Virginia and was discovered and crushed.
• Some state legislatures required a white man to be present at independent Black worship meetings.