Cane Ridge Revival Spreads

Pentecost to the Present – Book Two: Reformations and Awakenings: From Kentucky, the camp meetings soon spread into Tennessee, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and throughout the South. Some were as wild as the frontier itself. In North Carolina, yet another Presbyterian congregation held a similar series of meetings in 1801 in anticipation of revival, but nothing happened. Sorely disappointed, the pastor rose to conclude the last meeting when someone from the audience stood and shouted, ‘Stand still and see the salvation of God!’ Immediately, ‘a wave of emotion swept over the congregation like an electric shock.’ The physical manifestations and speaking in tongues reportedly made it ‘like the day of Pentecost and none was careless or indifferent.’ One University of Georgia student told of a meeting in which “they swooned away and lay for hours in the straw prepared for those ‘smitten of the Lord,’ or they started to flee away and fell prostrate as if shot down by a sniper, or they took suddenly to jerking with apparently every muscle in their body until it seemed they would be torn to pieces or converted into marble, or they shouted and talked in unknown tongues.’