Can I Get an Amen?

The great majority of frontier settlers were sober, industrious and law-abiding people.  They were also no strangers to religion.  The large number of Scotch-Irish brought Presbyterianism in the early days.  There also were also many Catholics and those who adhered to the Reformed Dutch and German churches, even a few Episcopalians.

Around the beginning of the 19th century, the majority of settlers had become Methodists or Baptists, recruited by a backwoods institution,  "the camp revival."  The years 1799 and 1800 brought the first of several great waves of religious excitement by which the Old Northwest - especially Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee - was converted.

Camp meetings were usually planned and managed by Methodist circuit riders or Baptist itinerant preachers who carried their work into the remotest and most dangerous parts of the back country.  People came from near and far by wagon, horse, or on foot.  Pious men and women came for the sake of religious fellowship and inspiration - judging those who were there because of religious curiosity.

Camp meetings lasted days, even weeks.  Preaching, singing, praying and testifying and exhorting went on almost non-stop.  Preachers became so frantic that men, women and children fell from their seats in exhaustion.  Shouts, incoherent singing, even "barking" filled the air.  Convulsive leaps and dancing were common.  "Jerking" - where stakes were driven into the ground which the person having  a religious fit, grasped the stake as they writhed and grimaced in their contortions was common.

Whole communities would profess conversion.  It was a particularly a good day when notoriously bad person or "hard bats" as they were called, succumbed to the faith.  Gangs of young rowdies came for one purpose, to commit acts of lawlessness and sometimes they too, heard the call of the preacher.

This kind of religion was filled with wild emotional outbursts and sheer hysteria.  Backsliders were numerous and those that "fell from grace" were likely to revert to their early "wicked ways" and be shunned by the general community.  Religion was an increasingly dominant way of life in the wilderness.  It gave pioneers a feeling of protection and belonging.

Next time...Frontier Education
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On April 26, 1719, Robinson Crusoe is published by Daniel DeFoe.  The book is based on the experiences of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish shipwrecked sailor who spent four years on a small island off the coast of South America in the early 1700s.