Presbyterian clergyman and church historian William Henry Foote outlines the history of the bodily exercises as they spread into the Carolina piedmont. Especially noteworthy is his description of Ebenezer Currie of Caswell County, one of only a handful of ministers who experienced the jerks during the Great Revival. Foote also includes a short from the published missionary journal of Kentucky minister John Lyle (click here). Click here for the complete text of Foote’s Sketches of North Carolina (1846).
As the attention to religion spread wider, and became more general, the variety and degree of the bodily exercises greatly increased in the Carolinas, and renewedly called the attention of the considerate and judicious. The extravagances of some parts of the West never found their way east of the Alleghanies, such as running back and forth, barking like a dog, and uttering inhuman sounds, like nothing imaginable. Some individuals, that had been affected with these extravagances, visited their friends east of the great mountains, and, during the meetings they attended, gave some specimens, apparently involuntary, of the manner of these peculiarities: happily the example was not contagious. Loss of strength, swoons, outcries, sobs, and groans, and violent spasmodic jerkings of the body, became in a degree common through the Carolinas.
A venerable clergyman now living (1846) was affected by the jerks a few times, and the account he gives will probably help to a right understanding of those singular affections. He was licensed in the spring of 1801, and went soon after to preach statedly at Bethany, in Caswell county, or Rattlesnake, as it was often called—(the congregation is not now known by either name, having been divided into Gilead and Yanceyville)—and with it associated Greers or Upper Hico. The interest on the subject of religion had been felt through Granville and Caswell. The bodily exercises were common, but had not gone to great excess or extravagance. He had attended a communion season at Bethany on a certain occasion with much enjoyment, and, on his way home to his residence, tarried a night at the house of Mr. James Greer. As the hour of evening worship approached, he felt deeply impressed with a sense of the presence of Almighty God in his holiness and majesty. God’s purity and grace appeared wonderful. This sense increased upon him during worship. After worship, the sense of the presence of a pure and holy God overawed him: it seemed to him he should sink under it. He felt astonished that God, such a God, should be so good to such an unworthy creature. He walked out to get by himself, and started to go across a little piece of corn to a small retired valley. Before he could reach the retirement he was seized in a most surprising manner. Suddenly he began leaping about, first forward, then sideways, and sometimes, standing still, would swing backward and forward “see-saw fashion.” This motion of his body was both involuntary and irresistible at the commencement; afterwards, there was scarcely a disposition to resist, and in itself the motion was neither painful nor unpleasant. The people in the house heard the noise, and came running to his relief, and carried him in their arms back to the dwelling. The fit lasted about an hour, during which time, if the attendants let go their hold, he would jerk about the room as he had done in the field. Gradually it passed away and he retired to rest, humbled at the exhibition he had made.
On the next day he felt more ashamed of the matter, as he had fully believed that, at the first outset at least, the jerks could be resisted. As he rode away, he felt mortified, and wished he had charged the people where he lodged to make no mention of the matter, believing that it would make against him, and that he could and would resist them for the future. But, on that very day, while visiting a neighbor, without any special excitement, talking about the meeting, he was suddenly seized again, and jerked across the room, and continued under the influence of the exercise for about fifteen minutes. He went home very much confounded.
He once afterwards had a return of the exercise in the pulpit at Hawfields. Mr. Hodge, who had once been the preacher there, and had been so prominent in the revival in the West, was visiting the congregation. After the services of public worship were concluded, sitting with him in the pulpit, he began to inquire of his old friend about the revival in the West. Suddenly the exercises came on, but soon passed away. He did not then believe them, nor has he since considered them, as being of the nature of true religion, or as having any necessary connection with it; but, judging from his own experience, and what he saw in others, he concluded there was no capability of resisting them, as they came on, nor any disposition to do so, after they had begun.
By degrees the bodily exercises lost their hold upon the public mind as being a part of religious experience; persons who had no sense of religion were seized by them both at places of public worship and while about their ordinary business, and sometimes were left as unconcerned as ever, and at other times appeared to be greatly irritated by them; and the preachers generally not only discountenanced them, but openly opposed; and long before the attention to religion ceased, these exercises were confined to a few neighborhoods in North Carolina, and became connected with irregularities that required the censure of the church, which in a few cases was inflicted, as appears from the records of the Synod of the Carolinas for the years 1809 and 1810.
As a specimen of the extent to which the exercises were carried in the West about the time the Presbyterian ministers set themselves in opposition, the following narrative or extract from a diary is presented, taken from the Virginia Religious Magazine for 1807, published in Lexington, Virginia. The narrative was drawn up by Rev. John Lyle, then living in Kentucky.
“Saturday, Nov. 6th, 1805.—I went to the Beach meetinghouse, where a meeting was appointed by the Presbyterians and Methodists, called in the country, the Union Meeting. There I heard a sermon delivered by a Mr. N—, who has lately been licensed by the Cumberland Presbytery, and is said to be a man of learning. There was nothing remarkable in his sermon except his pressing exhortations to the people to pray out, shout, dance, &c., in time of divine worship. He told them to shout, to pray aloud, or do whatever duty they felt an impression to do. Said he, ‘I believe it will not offend God, and I am sure it will not offend me.’ The people, though prior to this seemingly careless and inattentive, were roused to action,—shouted, prayed aloud, exhorted, and jerked till near the setting of the sun.”
“I am well aware that it is impossible to describe an assembly thus agitated, so as to give those who have never seen the like, a just and adequate idea of it; I would just observe that though I had been accustomed to seeing strong and indescribable bodily agitations in the upper counties of Kentucky, and had frequently seen the jerks, yet all this observation and experience did not prepare my mind to behold without trepidation and horror the awful scenes now exhibited before me. The jerks were by far the most violent and shocking I had ever seen. The heads of the jerking patients flew with wonderous quickness from side to side in various directions, and their necks doubled like a flail in the hands of a thresher. Their faces were distorted and black, as if they were strangling, and their eyes seemed to flash horror and distraction. Numbers of them roared out in sounds the most terrific. The people camped in wagons and tents round the stand. I returned to the Rev. William McGee’s.”
The like scenes were expected the next day. Mr. Stone, the leader of the New Lights, was there, but was not permitted to preach. Such scenes as these brought the bodily exercise into entire disrepute with the sober and sedate, and the Presbyterian Church generally; and the work of revival went on without these where they were vigorously opposed. Such scenes never prevailed in North Carolina; the nearest approach was in one neighborhood in Lincoln County, to which sufficient reference is made in the minutes of the Synod. These things are recorded, both as matters of historical fact, and as warning against yielding to irregularities, however specious their appearance. The revival in North Carolina, separated from all these objectionable things, was extensive and most salutary in its effects in reforming the life and elevating religious and moral principle, and promoting the domestic and civil welfare.
We have no written account of the progress of the revival in the lower part of the State, drawn up by the hand of one of the actors. In default of this account, which would have been highly prized, we are guided by the accounts from other sources, and particularly by the statements of Dr. Hall, the author of the pamphlet, which makes a part of this chapter. He visited the bounds of Fayetteville Presbytery, and made report to Synod in the year 1810. From these sources it appears that the revival spread rapidly and most extensively through the Scotch settlements; that the bodily exercises prevailed to some degree for a time, but never reached the objectionable height they did in some places in the West, and were probably more circumscribed than in the upper country. The ministers that were living in that section of the State at that time, were Samuel Stanford, who is reported in the records of Synod for 1799, as preaching on Black River, and Brown, Marsh, Angus, M’Diarmid, at Barbacue Bluff and McCoy’s; John Gillespie, at Centre, Laurel Hill and Raft Swamp; Robert Tate, South Washington and Rockfish. Murdoch McMillan and Malcolm M’Nair were licensed in 1801, and reported as ordained in 1803. Nearly all of these were young men; and Mr. Hall testifies that they were active, laborious and successful in their Master’s work. The existing churches were greatly enlarged, and new ones formed, so that previous to 1812, the ministers and churches of the Scotch settlements, and those between them and the Ocean, were sufficiently numerous to form a Presbytery. Some eminently useful ministers in this work had but comparatively a short race, as M’Nair; others are living to this day, as the venerable Robert Tate.
As the fruits of the revival, many ministers of the gospel were raised up; two men in the middle age left their occupations and prepared for the ministry, and became eminently useful. One of them, Mr. Peacock, died in the year 1830; the other, Mr. Mclntyre, who commenced his preparations for the ministry in his forty-fifth year, still lives, and is able occasionally to preach, having continued his most active ministerial life till within a few years. This is noticed by Mr. Hall in an honorable manner.
Source
William Henry Foote, Sketches of North Carolina, Historical and Biographical, Illustrative of the Principles of a Portion of Her Early Settlers (New York: Robert Carter, 1846), 409–413.
