Excerpt from the Autobiography of Mary Morris Smith (ca. 1811)

In this short excerpt from her autobiography, Tennessee settler Mary Morriss Smith dismissed the jerks as a “diabolic sympathy” and associated their emergence with the devastating New Madrid earthquakes of 1811. Click here for the complete text of Smith’s autobiograph (ca. 1890).

In 1811 and 1812 the people were greatly excited and alarmed. They were on the eve of war with England. Then [came] the earthquakes…. The houses, the trees, the whole earth shook. Some thought … time would be no more. As though in diabolical sympathy there broke out in our meetings a spasmodic exercize called the “jerks.” It affected both men and women but not all alike. Some jerked, some jumped, others danced…. I recollect seeing two young ladies of my acquaintance have it. One was a little delicate lady. I did not see her in the crowd till she was on her feet jumping up and down, up and down, her body erect, not a muscle distorted, only that up and down movement, that was very much like little girls playing at jumping rope, except her arms hung motionless down her sides. She jumped till exhausted and sank down to the floor.

There were skeptics who thought they could keep from jerking if they wished, but if any one made sport of it, they were sure to have it the next time they were in a crowd. A young man from Lebanon for curiosity or sport came to a country church where they often had the jerks. After the service was over he started to walk home with a young lady who lived nearby. Along the road they had to pass a little pool of foul water (a hog wallow). As they got opposite the pool the young man took the jerks and fell prostrate with his nice clothes in the muddy water.

Source

Virginia G. Lawlor, ed., “I, Mary Morriss Smith, Do Recollect…,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 29 (1970): 81–82.