Up to 20,000 people camped for six days at Cane Ridge in 1801
In August 1801, a Presbyterian communion gathering at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, swelled into what is often called America's first camp meeting. Perhaps 20,000 settlers came for six days of preaching, singing, shouting and dancing. It became the model for a revival wave historians call the Second Great Awakening.
The movement ran from the late 18th into the early 19th century, igniting first in Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s among Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists. It pushed back against the scepticism, deism and rationalism left over from the American Enlightenment, much as pietism and evangelicalism were surging in Germany and England. Historians named it in relation to a First Awakening of the 1730s to 1750s and a Third from the late 1850s.
Frontier conditions shaped its methods. A year before Cane Ridge, the Presbyterian minister James McGready hosted informal camp meetings in Logan County, and Barton W. Stone led the great gathering itself. For isolated settlers these multi-day outdoor meetings were often their first contact with organised religion and a rare social occasion. The Methodists sent circuit riders, travelling preachers drawn from ordinary people, to reach remote families. Preachers stressed each person's sin and choice to turn to Christ, a sharp break from the Calvinist teaching that only God's election could save. The Presbyterians eventually pulled back, put off by the noise and rowdiness.
Many revivalists believed in spiritual equality before God and recruited across classes and races, winning converts among slaves in parts of the Tidewater South. Theology also fed reform. Postmillennialists expected Christ to return after a long age of peace, so believers had a duty to improve society first, an idea linked to the era's surge of social reform, colleges and mission societies. New movements such as Adventism emerged too.
From the 1820s western New York saw such frequent revivals that it became known as the burned-over district. That label came later, from the evangelist Charles Finney's 1876 autobiography, where he dismissed an earlier revival there as spurious. In the late twentieth century, the historian Linda Pritchard used statistics to argue the region's religiosity was typical rather than exceptional, though newer studies insist its revivals left a lasting national mark.
Source: Second Great Awakening
