Excerpt from the Journal of Learner Blackman (October 20–21, 1804)

Traveling with Lorenzo Dow to Natchez in the Mississippi Territory, Methodist circuit rider Learner Blackman desribes an outbreak of the jerks near Nashville, Tennessee. Click here for Dow’s account of this incident in History of Cosmopolite. Contextual notes appear in square brackets.

The 20 of October [1804] we met with L. Garrett and Lorenzo Dow at a meeting at Liberty Hill on Nashville. There I saw much of the dancing and jerking exercises among those of the best standing in society. This was and still is in many respects an unaccountable exercise to me. It looks more like a judgment than otherwise. Hence I think we should humble ourselves and pray that God would deliver his church from such exercises. On Sunday morning the 21 I preached with some degree of liberty, before I was done there were several dancing, before persons of undoubted piety. I noticed that they would first begin to jerk as if their limbs were to be dislocated in a few minutes and it increased upon them till they would begin to dance and then they jerked but little. One that I saw dancing has since died in the faith and gone to Heaven.

Doctor Tooley at that meeting preached a very ingenious discourse to prove that the jerks could not be from the Devil, that they could proceed from any natural cause. Of course his conclusion was that they must be from the Lord. He took much pains to prove that the dancing exercise was right from Scripture. I am not for encouraging such exercises if they come upon us as an affliction from God we must endure them. For dancing and jerking seemed as unavoidable in those that I saw the subjects of it as pulsation in the body. Yet if preachers were to preach the consistency and excellency of that exercise we might see it as a voluntary thing in our congregations, and people moving as formerly into that exercise as to the exercise of singing and prayer. O how much wisdom and grace it takes to make a preacher of the Gospel of peace. To direct wandering mortals in the right road to the Kingdom, to keep the sheep of Christ from straying from the fold.

Source

Learner Blackman, “Learner Blackman’s Journal (Written from Memory after the First Journal Was Lost),” 1800–1813, typescript, 13, J. B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism, College Archives, Millsaps-Wilson Library, Millsaps College, Jackson, Miss.