Introduction
Nelson Reed witnessed the Lord’s power in the eighteenth-century South. After converting under the Methodist preacher William Watters in 1775, the Ann Arundel County, Maryland native devoted himself to nearly five decades of itinerant ministry in the American Tidewater and achieved “public veneration by his effective talents and his unblemished life.” Revered by contemporaries and later nineteenth-century Methodist antiquarians, the handsome traveling preacher and future presiding elder of the Baltimore District was known for his determined ministry, captivating preaching, and unswerving moral discipline.Footnote 1 However, Reed’s unpublished diary suggests that the traveling preacher was often far more likely to celebrate his audiences’ religious exercises than reflect on his own skills. While touring Virginia and Maryland in the late 1770s and early 1780s, he excitedly recorded how white and Black listeners responded to the Lord’s presence.
Written at the early, explosive rise of Southern Methodism and radical “evangelical” revivalism, Reed’s diary entries describe how numerous everyday people yearned for a sudden “new birth” that always seemed to prompt strange bodily effects and out-of-doors gatherings.Footnote 2 During an extended sermon session on Wednesday, July 22, 1778, a time in which he “found the Lord very present,” Reed saw “some falling on there knees and some on the floor”—a hitherto exceptional outpouring that left his spirit “much Refresh’d.” At a similar gathering just a couple weeks later, he saw a “Negro woman laying on the ground as if she was all but dead.” She apparently lay prostrate throughout the preaching and, by the meeting’s conclusion, had no ability to speak whatsoever. At other times in his diary, Reed witnessed men and women weeping, with tears falling “from almost all eyes.” Related outbursts often took place when, as on March 14, 1779, he was “oblig’d to preach out of doors”—a standard method of the South’s early revivalists. As Reed preached and saw listeners expel shrieks or fall to the ground, he felt the Lord’s message of saving grace arrive with greater “liberty and power” than ever before.Footnote 3
Outdoor devotion and shrill worship were more than entertaining calling cards of Protestant renewal in the eighteenth-century South. Instead, as this article argues, they represented the very means by which Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian believers democratized religion and manifested dissent from the established religious and social cultures structuring eighteenth-century Southern life. By drawing white and Black people from the discreet, orderly rhythm of Anglican divinity, awakeners presented ordinary men and women with opportunities for outward embrace and application of the democratizing spirituality embedded in new birth theology. Historians have often spoken of Southern revivalism’s populist nature, noting its early emphasis on cultural reformation, outspoken social protest, and individualistic spirituality—all of which continually reinforced and overlapped with one another.Footnote 4
For many scholars, the “new birth” provided Southern New Lights their strongest theological ingredient for a more populist Christianity.Footnote 5 The penultimate moment for every born-again believer, “Giting converted” represented a specific point in time when the Lord assured an individual of their salvation, relieved them of their past sins, and empowered them to pursue holy living alongside other awakened men and women—regardless of intellect or station.Footnote 6 As an intimate and sensed dispensation of God’s grace, the new birth did not depend upon gender, race, nuanced theological apprehension, routine church practice, or even clerical discernment. For the Maryland Methodist preacher Benjamin Lakin, neither “speculative divinity” nor “abstract reasonings” could ever unlock the Gospel’s lifesaving gifts. Christians could only receive salvation in an “experimental maner.” “We know not what repentance, faith, or the love of God is,” Lakin scrawled in his commonplace book, “untill we experience them.”Footnote 7 Early revivalists like Lakin and the Virginia-born Baptist David Barrow promoted a type of “inward and feeling religion” that hinged on everyday people’s interpretations of personal religious experiences and, consequently, diminished the authority of formally educated clergy and the esteemed theologians they cited.Footnote 8 As the South Carolina Baptist Edmund Botsford (d. 1819) put it in his private theological writings, “We have the bible in our own hands, & it is our duty & privilege to read & think for our selves & not suffer our selves to be imposed on by any man or set of men.”Footnote 9
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Botsford and other born-again Protestants engineered what Nathan Hatch famously dubbed the “democratization of American Christianity.” A work that still generates critical engagement, Hatch’s 1989 book argues that the American Revolution suddenly spawned a “democratic” temper that transformed Protestantism in the early republic. As with politics, a religious culture once anchored in deference, clerical authority, and local parish life crumbled under a torrent of firebrand preachers whose idiomatic exhortations, persuasive emotional appeals, and relentless popular publishing swayed people from their Congregationalist and Episcopal churches and swelled the ranks of insurgent Methodists, Baptists, and other populist groups. To Hatch, this emergent democratization chiefly flowed from the expansion of the country’s popular religious print culture. As the writings of figures like Lorenzo Dow, Alexander Campbell, and Elias Smith exploded across the new United States, Hatch holds, ordinary people exercised a newfound capacity for personal determination in their religious lives. Whereas the First Great Awakening saw an enduring clerical stranglehold on the “authority to speak and write” about religion, the new nation’s proliferation of antiestablishment Protestant movements and their “ephemeral, genuinely popular, and virtually uncontrolled” literature made every person a budding oracle, preacher, or theological visionary. All they had to do was read and think for themselves.Footnote 10
While I share some of Hatch’s opinions regarding Protestantism in the early American republic, theological opinions and the printed word alone only tell us so much about spiritual and cultural change in this period. If Christianity democratized in the new United States—if ordinary people remade religion in their own image—we must also account for the role of space, sound, and the body.Footnote 11 The men and women driving grassroots awakenings in the eighteenth-century South did not just describe what they read, thought, or inwardly reflected upon. As with the King and Queen County, Virginia native and future Baptist William Hickman, they also recalled what they “had seen and heard,” always chronicling their sensate observations of New Light “babblers” and the “numbers falling, some convulsed, others crying out” at their revivals.Footnote 12 With a tad more anxiety, the Maryland-based Moravian Joseph Powell—who ministered at Carroll’s Manor in the 1770s—perceived “awaken’d” Southerners in similar fashion. Rather than merely indexing their beliefs, his diary characterized Baptists as those who “ware perpetually Groaning, with lifting up Eyes & hands” and Methodism as “quite loud & attended with many, & various Gestures of the Boddy.”Footnote 13
These were the defining marks of awakened Protestantism in the American South, and they facilitated revivalists’ leveling thrust toward self-fashioned religion. As the historian Sarah Eyerly has recently written, early American sounds and spaces “possessed the power to unite and divide, to produce understandings and misunderstandings.”Footnote 14 In this sense, the ways in which people comported their bodies, exercised their voices, and used their physical spaces offer us fresh evidence for parsing out the distinctives of Southern born-again identity and measuring the region’s religious democratization. By centering the historical contexts and social definitions of the body, sound, and space in the story of Southern revivalism, we better recognize how the movement broadened religious authority and challenged many of the principles buttressing a slaveholding society.
This article treats the early American sensory world as fertile ground for historical analysis, where people’s contrasting ways of hearing, seeing, feeling, and moving formed peculiar bodies of knowledge that greatly influenced daily life.Footnote 15 Race is especially important in this respect. Though white, Black, and Indigenous people possessed the same sensory capacities and inhabited the same physical world, they each experienced and defined those senses and their surrounding environments in deeply different ways. At once a product and engine of culture, the senses have long “mediated and articulated” understandings of race in the American South. In Mark M. Smith’s view, the “sensory construction of race” has been particularly important for white Southern men and women for nearly two centuries. Combined with various theological rationales and “pseudoscientific” arguments, the experience of visual, tactile, and audial perception equipped white Southerners to “detect” race, classify races (especially through fabricated stereotypes), and, of course, “justify” structural racial subjugation. With discriminatory, value-laden interpretations of how non-white persons allegedly sounded, smelled, looked, and felt, white Southern people helped craft the region’s powerful racial hierarchy in the colonial and early republican periods.Footnote 16
In its assessment of awakened Protestantism’s “democratic” reach, this article foregrounds the ways in which white revivalists disrupted the South’s “intimate, uneven, sensory exchange between the races.”Footnote 17 We know that born-again Protestants constantly dissented from Anglican places, sounds, and times that sought strict social and spiritual stratification. From James City Parish, Virginia, to Goose Creek, South Carolina, Anglican church pews, Sunday dress, speech and silence, and liturgical worship always reinforced difference and deference.Footnote 18 By contrast, revivalists’ popular movement critiqued orderly prayer-book religion through noisy, protracted assemblies that paid little attention to Anglican buildings and behaviors. But new birthers also appealed to the “Spiritual necessities and wants of the humbler classes” by challenging the region’s racial and sensory stratification. Convinced that every would-be convert could personally encounter the “knowledge of the glory of God,” believers adopted a range of exercises that unsettled the sensory fabric of Southern religion and social life.Footnote 19
Shouting in the Backwoods
As a variety of spatial and sensory scholars have shown, historical actors interpreted space and sound in ways that defined communal boundaries, buttressed or dismantled local social structures, and shaped religious practice and belief. In early America, white, Black, and Indigenous populations understood themselves and their relationships to others through vocal and instrumental expressions, architectural spaces, and the natural landscape.Footnote 20 Specifically, upper-rung white Southern men and women often located superior religion, civilization, and sociability in church buildings, fenced-in and cultivated domestic properties, well-clothed bodies, and rational, controlled speech—the sensory cornerstones that distinguished proper British American lifeways from debased Indigenous and African peoples.Footnote 21
By the time that revival arrived in the region, white Southerners had developed a 150-year-old tradition of defining inarticulate expressions such as “screaming,” “shouting,” or “howling” as brutish, non-white behavior. Such “noise” represented the antithesis of propriety.Footnote 22 White writers took particular issue with Native American sounds. Captain John Smith’s earliest observations of Virginia’s Powhatan people included reference to their “hideous noise and shrieking” and their “most Hellish Shouts and Cries.” When the English explorer John Lawson visited Georgia and the Carolinas from 1700 to 1709, he likewise documented “howling like Wolves” and “hellish Cries” among the indigenous groups he encountered. While serving the Burke County, Georgia, militia in the 1780s, the future Baptist minister Norvell Robertson noted how some in his company joined Lawson in likening Native Americans to animals. In his autobiography, he recalled one evening in which “some wolves not far off set up a howling,” and many of the men “at first thought it was yelling of the Indians.”Footnote 23
White writers similarly described Africans and African Americans. This is apparent in Dutchman Willem Bosman’s Nauwkeurige Beschryving van de Guinese Goud-, Tand-en Slave-Kust (1702). Published in London as A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (1705), Bosman’s widely read pseudo-ethnography of indigenous West Africa resulted from his extensive experience there with the Dutch West India Company.Footnote 24 In his depiction of a “rich Negroes Funeral,” Bosman attached to Africans a sort of sonic frenzy. There was a “great Multitude of Men and Women” present, he wrote, “some being silent, others Crying and Shrieking as loud as possible, whilst others are laughing as loud.” Elsewhere, in his more general observations, the Dutchman outlined the myriad sonic deficiencies of West Africans. Their speech was largely a “very disagreeable brutal Sound,” their music a “horrid and barbarous shocking Sound.” In his novel The Life, Adventures and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720), the famous English writer Daniel Defoe portrayed Africans in similar ways. The tale’s protagonist, the English voyager Bob Singleton, cited instances in which indigenous Black people emitted a “screaming roaring Noise,” went “howling about like mad Creatures,” and “halloo’d in their screaming Way.” Almost regardless of occasion, white ears deemed Black sounds displeasing, disorienting, and debauched.Footnote 25
To be sure, white commoners were also subject to strict sonic scrutiny. In popular etiquette manuals like Antoine de Courtin’s The Rules of Civility (1671) and Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling (1673), generations of ambitious white Southern readers learned the social stakes of properly comporting their vocalizations. The former work implored every person to adopt bodily postures and practices that communicated “profound reverence” toward social superiors. Specifically, individuals were “troublesome and unsociable” when they could not “speak without bawling, and making a noise sufficient to give every one the Head-ach that hears them.” It was imperative, de Courtin wrote, that “great care is to be taken how you manage your voice, and your best way of raising it or depressing it.” Allestree’s guide, focusing particularly on female decorum, extensively argued for the importance of feminine voices. When women embraced their “native Softness and Gentleness” they mastered modest speech, carefully managing their words and the volume at which they spoke. A proper woman rid her conversations of all “indecency and rudeness, all insolent vauntings and supercilious disdains.” Further, she “modulates the tone and accent, admits no unhandsome earnestness or loudness of Discourse.” A “Womans tongue should indeed be like the imaginary Musick of the Spheres,” Allestree asserted, “sweet and charming, but not to be heard at distance.” Class and gender determined access to speech, and white Southern people—regardless of status—knew how their tongues related to their station.Footnote 26
Alongside sound, space helped dictate the social relationships, ideas, and behaviors crucial to Southern life.Footnote 27 The Southern landscape long perplexed white inhabitants. From the Crown’s earliest colonization efforts, English people like the clergyman Alexander Whitaker had commented on the region’s profitability. Residing in Jamestown and Henrico between 1611 and 1617, the Cambridge-trained minister excitedly promised in 1613 that the “commodity where of to those that shall inhabite this land is infinite.” The Lord had simply “inriched the bowells of the Country.”Footnote 28 This idea—that Southern land signified commercial potential—aggressively matured between the early seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries as slave-produced tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugar became increasingly integral to Southern life.Footnote 29 While passing through Maryland, one late eighteenth-century diarist commented on the land’s exceptional fecundity, noting the “luxuriant growth of a soil that had been fattening from time immemorial.”Footnote 30
But white Southerners also feared their unpredictable, dangerous land.Footnote 31 Residents of South Carolina’s coastline regularly spoke of the area’s treacherous tropical storms. Charlestonians endured “Typhones,” hurricanes, and violent rainstorms. In 1752, Henry Ravenel, a Berkeley County planter and enslaver, saw “very black Clouds with Thunder and Lightinangs.” The coming downpour “made the Earth so dark that I could scarce desern my Wife from the front porch.”Footnote 32 Beyond its vicious climate, many white people saw the Southern “wilderness” as a particularly formidable threat to personal well-being and genuine civilization. After traveling “thro’ the Wilderness” himself, the despondent Long Island native and Baptist Hezekiah Smith mourned the remote landscape’s irreligion. “It is enough to make ones Heart ake,” he wrote, “to consider how many Thousands are in the back Parts, without any one to break unto them the Bread of Life.” The region’s swamps, “impassable mountains,” and “thick woods” were far away from proper churches, homes, and farms and were described as teeming with Native American scalpers, boorish slaves, white roughnecks, and menacing wildlife. Raw forests and wetlands brimmed with crocodiles as long as tree trunks, “whooping and hallooing” Native Americans, Black runaways, and “lower Class” whites.Footnote 33
The Anglican itinerant Charles Woodmason vividly described his worries over the Carolina “Wild Woods” while visiting settlements like Lynch Creek, Pine Tree, and Granny Quarter Creek in the 1760s. Most Anglican parishioners were “thinly scatter’d” in the colony’s backwater villages, and they could hardly count on basic institutional protections against the New Light Methodists and Baptists flooding the region. The inland, lightly settled parts of the colony had limited churches, chapels, or schools, and the few believers who actually attended divine service were the “lowest Pack of Wretches” whom Woodmason had ever laid eyes on. The men, women, and children were often “barefooted and Bare legged,” “wild as the very Deer,” and entranced by the religious enthusiasm propounded by roving preachers. Without requisite edifices like worship spaces, the South Carolina backcountry remained “A Desert, and Forrest, overrun with Wild Beasts, and Men more Savage than they.” If, however, the church committed to filling the empty landscape with chapels, roads, bridges, and “other useful Works,” he and other ministers could fight backwoods impiety and help the “People become New Creatures.”Footnote 34
As we will see, awakeners did not wait for buildings. Nor did they carry a message that trained Southerners in the traditional soundways of established white Christianity and social life. Instead, they made outdoor spaces and unrestrained white and non-white bodies their harbor. Noisiness and natural landscapes—long racialized, gendered, and classed as Black, American Indian, feminine, and lowborn—became the nurseries of early Southern revivalism. In doing so, New Lights couched their movement in a radically new sensorium that distinguished them from entrenched ecclesial bodies and empowered would-be followers to “think & act for your selves.”Footnote 35
“The Power of God Was Upon the People”Footnote 36
Before looking at the particular ways in which Southern New Lights shaped their movement around space and sound, it is important to explain how they viewed the physical world around them. Much like their contemporaries and forebears in England, New England, Scotland, and Wales, born-again Southerners saw themselves as participants in an exceptional historical moment of revival. Though the timing of the Southern awakenings made it so that a Maryland Methodist or Georgia Baptist was likely to think of their “work” in regional (and perhaps even denominational) terms, they preserved the idea that God had initiated a unique period of numinous outpouring.Footnote 37 Because of this, every man, woman, and child could bear witness to the Holy Spirit’s everyday descent upon creation, as well as the subsequent convictions, conversions, and spiritual gifts evidenced upon bodies and spaces.Footnote 38
Born-again writers often illustrated the Spirit’s presence by documenting the “power of God” in worship gatherings. In his manuscript diary, the Georgia Baptist itinerant and physician John Newton observed on May 21, 1787, that the “power of God was present to heal” during one outdoor service. Methodist circuit riders like Jeremiah Norman and Stith Mead used almost identical language when recounting their various stops in Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. Throughout the fall of 1793, Norman claimed the “Lord came near & blest his children,” that the “Lord visited his People & made them rejoice,” and that the “power of God ran through the congregation.” On September 24, 1794, Mead similarly reported to his brother, Samuel, that the “Power of God” was present on Virginia’s Botetourt circuit. In all, it was common for revivalists like William McKendree to validate personal or group religious experiences with claims that the “power of God was manifestly present.”Footnote 39
The born-again worldview always welcomed intense individual conversions, spectral visitations, and spiritualized interpretations of the natural landscape—effectively expanding the times and places in which would-be awakeners could witness sacred eruptions.Footnote
40 This influenced the behaviors and perspectives of revivalist clergy and laypeople in numerous ways. We find that their idea of divine “power” turned the natural world into a theater of spiritual outbreaks, remaking persons’ view of the landscape and what was possible therein. In her missive to the prominent North Carolina Methodist Edward Dromgoole, Sally Eastland detailed how thin the division between spiritual and material appeared to be. “I love to be hearing of” Jesus, Eastland wrote, “and when I hear from Him, some times all my 
desolves in love.” During some of his “love visets,” as she put it, “He is left me as it ware helpless on the ground, oh sweet momentes, how fain woud I faint away in his arms.”Footnote
41
After his new birth, the Chesterfield County, Virginia native and Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Trabue saw a new world around him. Still reeling from a Baptist awakening he attended in August of 1785, Trabue “went away in the woods to a private place” and begged the Lord to advise his next steps. His spiritual struggle went on for days, leading to another venture into the woods. But before he even reached his sylvan retreat his “emagination” brought forth a vivid image of Christ’s offer of salvation. “I stood a while in this field and moved on towards the woods,” Trabue recalled, “and everything I saw, like the Field, the herbage, and Trees, looked to me more beautyfull than I had ever beheld them.” Every piece of foliage appeared to add “glorry and praise to the lamb of God that wrought out this great and mighty salvation.” Likewise, the Irish-born Methodist missionary William Hammett thought numinous presence brimmed across everyday life. On February 26, 1793, the minister noted that a woman unexpectedly arrived at his home and asked to speak with him in private. “After she was seated,” Hammett remembered, “she said ‘she was fighting with the Devil all night.’” The woman assured him that she did not see Satan in bodily form, but “‘heard a voice speaking’”—sometimes in her hallway, other times in her bedroom, telling her that “there was no mercy for her” and that “she should be hanged, and he would get her.”Footnote 42
Thus, when awakened men and women claimed to see “Souls visibly Converted,” they often meant it quite literally. The “outpouring of Spirit” so frequently reported across the South was something witnessed on land and upon bodies. The new birth came with a new world, where God and the Devil turned every home, field, and church into their playhouse.Footnote 43
“Horrid Vociferations and Obstreperous Commotions”Footnote 44
In a world brimming with numinous potential, sound defined born-again experience across the late eighteenth-century South.Footnote 45 Most often, enthusiastic Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians witnessed the Spirit’s presence, articulated inward convictions, and interpreted the spiritual state of others by closely monitoring the acoustic traits of revival. Unlike their tranquil Anglican neighbors, Southern born-again Christians marked their meetings with loud, animated outbursts that announced the descent of the Holy Spirit and confirmed authentic new birth. From Maryland to Georgia, awakened men and women connected strict conversionism with raucous revivalism and, in turn, distinguished themselves from the local established church.Footnote 46
Southern Old Lights criticized new birthers’ clangor from the movement’s earliest stages. Alexander Garden, a prominent Anglican rector from Charleston, South Carolina, hinted at this in his sermon Regeneration, and the Testimony of the Spirit (1740). A consistent nemesis of George Whitefield, Garden took great umbrage at New Lights’ conversionism. “They conceive and insist upon Regeneration, to be an immediate, instantaneous Work of the Holy Spirit,” Garden complained, “wrought inwardly on the Hearts or Souls of Men.” Such emphasis on swift redemption turned believers away from pious activity and faithful practice, making charity, worship, and personal devotion almost meaningless. Instead, Whitefield and his “brethren Methodists” excited men’s and women’s passions and reduced Christian life to “crude Enthusiastick Notions.” In the decades following Garden’s anti-Whitefieldian polemic, other Southern ministers expanded on his criticism of early revivalism’s “inchanting Sound.”Footnote 47
In the August 18, 1768 issue of The Virginia Gazette, the Richmond County Anglican parson Isaac William Giberne published an impassioned censure of James Waddell—a pro-revival Presbyterian itinerant stirring controversy in Lunenburg Parish. Known throughout the colony for preaching outdoors, Waddell thought many of Virginia’s clergymen and laypeople were bereft of genuine religion. His efforts to fight the perceived “torrent of impiety” drew sharp disapproval from Giberne. Crazed dissenters like Waddell and his followers, the parson wrote, sought the “consecration of every whim” and surrendered rationality for the gifts of a “lying spirit.” As a result, their meetinghouses seemed to always bellow with the “woes and cries” of believers responding to their preachers’ “babbling, like a bad hound.”Footnote 48
Other non-revivalists continued making such observations through the eighteenth century. In a journal left behind by one Episcopal priest—known only as Reverend Lovebury—we find that Southerners continually understood revivalism through its sonic peculiarities. As Lovebury traveled through the Southern “Back-woods” in 1789, he repeatedly cataloged born-again clamor. When the minister stopped just outside of Fredericktown, Maryland, on July 8, he quickly noticed how the “noise and tumult of the Methodist meetings frequently become the subject of conversation.” Late next month, as he neared Annapolis, Lovebury jotted down an almost identical note: “noise and confusion of the Methodist Meetings are every where spoken.” As one unnamed critic put it, early America’s Methodists were widely known for their “frantic gestures” and “crying out.”Footnote 49
Nonverbal utterances mentioned above—babbling, cries, screeching, and so on—represented the sonic trademarks of revival. Depending on one’s personal convictions toward the movement, these sounds—and awakeners’ concerted harnessing of them—could hold divergent meanings. To critics, New Light hollering embodied the fraudulent, graceless, and nearly inhuman nature of born-again religion. To supporters, bodily noises were individualized, incarnated testimonies of new birth and numinous presence. Before the rise of awakened Protestantism, most white Southerners could hardly fathom how such expressions could ever exhibit true religion. They most often understood loud, inarticulate sounds as signals of deception, danger, or misbehavior on the part of lowborn whites, women, and non-whites. In 1755, on the eve of the coming Seven Years’ War, Southern colonists knew that French and Native invasion would engender the “Shrieks of Women, the Wailings of Children, the hideous Shouts of Savages, and the dreadful Din of Arms.” On May 18, 1773, Charleston’s Court of General Sessions presented a grievance against officers of the “Charles-Town Watch Company”—the city’s fugitive slave patrol force. The group received criticism for failing to incarcerate groups of “impudent, noisy and troublesome Negroes” walking the streets. Likewise, one 1798 visitor to Knoxville, Tennessee, admitted his horror at hearing the townspeople “profainly Sware,” express “horrid oaths & dreadful Indignities,” and dance and sing on the Sabbath.Footnote 50
Despite many whites’ historic and intense distrust toward these soundways, Southern new birthers routinely invited others to couple them with their conversion experience. In a basic sense, Southern revivalists gladly treated loud vocal expressions as evidence of the new birth, pointing to crying, howling, and shouting as fruits of the Holy Spirit’s converting power. One of the earliest Southern examples of this comes from the manuscript diary of Oliver Hart—Charleston, South Carolina’s leading awakened Baptist. Before shepherding future Baptists like Richard Furman and Evan Pugh, the Warminster, Pennsylvania native converted during the height of America’s First Great Awakening. Living within earshot of Philadelphia’s well-known Tennent family and occasionally witnessing George Whitefield preach, Hart turned toward new birth religion as a teenager in the early 1740s. After preaching for a few years under the authority of the Baptist Philadelphia Association, he accepted a call from Charleston Baptist Church and began his twenty-five-year pastorate during the winter of 1750. Hart’s lengthy tenure earned him a level of adoration among many Southern Baptists. When one of his pupils, Edmund Botsford, heard George Whitefield preach on December 1, 1769, he admitted he greatly enjoyed the famous itinerant’s sermon. However, “lay a side Oratory & Mr Whitefield’s discourse will not do to compare with Mr Hart’s.”Footnote 51
According to his unpublished journal, Hart’s Charleston congregation enjoyed a season of great awakenings in the fall of 1754. Through the course of the month, the Baptist preacher reported affecting sermons followed by protracted, fervent house gatherings where young men and women came to know “what the New Birth Means!” And as Charleston’s youth flocked to his home for extended instruction, Hart repeatedly cataloged the sounds of their conversion experiences. The most vivid example came during an impromptu meeting on August 26. On this Monday night, he hosted an enslaved woman, Margaret, and an additional “five Young Women.” Foregoing the “Gentle Sighs” typically expected of them, the “much Affected” women came under such strong spiritual convictions that they “Could no Longer Contain but Crying out.” Unable to control themselves, the frenzied group “got up and went out of the House to Vent their Grief.” Just as the young women exited, a “Number of Young Men” entered Hart’s home to talk about their ongoing “Soul Affairs.” “Oh, what an Evening we had,” Hart wrote, as “Some Complain’d, and Cry’d out under a sense of Desperate Wickedness, & Corruption of their own Hearts.” It seemed as if the whole house wept, with some “Crying out under a sense of sin” and others “Crying out for Jesus Christ.” The crowd’s loud sobs—their “Groans, and Sighs”—“penetrated Heavens Gates.” These were the marks of the spiritual “Vigour and Life” that visited the Charleston Baptist congregation.Footnote 52
As more awakened Baptists and Methodists filled the South between the 1760s and 1790s, many attendees left behind similar sonic accounts of their exuberant meetings.Footnote 53 A New Kent native, Devereux Jarratt, an enslaver and Virginia’s preeminent Anglican revivalist, produced some of the most important writings on this facet of the early Southern awakenings. In his posthumously published autobiography, Jarratt claimed that a “great many souls” started practicing vital religion between 1764 and 1772. From his Dinwiddie County Parish to the rest of Virginia, traveling ministers (himself included) preached the new birth to audiences “in the open air, under trees, arbors or booths.” The clergyman later reported more of the same in the winter of 1776. Believers saw “signal instances of Divine Power” throughout Virginia, especially in the area’s earliest Methodist class meetings. “The shaking among the dry bones was increased from week to week,” Jarratt wrote, with many men and women “scarce able to make any reply, but by weeping and falling on their knees.” During Virginia’s season of great awakenings, swooning participants commonly “cried aloud for mercy,” “wept for grief,” and “shouted for joy” so stridently they could “be heard afar off.” Jarratt affirmed his relative skepticism toward such expressions, but also admitted their legitimacy. Where the “greatest work was,” he confessed, “there have been the most outcries, tremblings, convulsions, and all sorts of external signs.”Footnote 54
Throughout the second half of the century, Southern New Lights continually abandoned the advice of Samuel Peyre (d. 1758), a Berkeley County, South Carolina Anglican planter, to “Speak little and retire soon.” Instead of regulating their voices according to station, race, or gender, born-again Christians forged an unrestrained, accessible religious soundscape that prized noisiness and bodily agitation instead of physical poise or composure.Footnote 55 By couching their movement in non-white and improper sounds, white new birthers embraced a kind of religious experience that often abandoned the sensory criteria underpinning social deference, racial division, and “proper” religion in the South. Circuit riders such as Reuben Ellis, John Kobler, and Stith Mead have left behind some of the more lucid examples of this.
Ellis, a North Carolina native, worked nearly two decades as a wandering preacher. From 1777 until his death in 1796, he rode circuits throughout Maryland and the Carolinas. As his surviving manuscript correspondence shows, his time travelling about the South’s “very rough part of the Country” sometimes resulted in fervid spiritual harvests. In a 1790 letter to his North Carolina friend and colleague Edward Dromgoole, Ellis gladly shared news of a “glorious work” breaking out in Charleston, South Carolina. Some recent worship meetings had featured “such power as I believe was never seen here before.” One evening, after a penetrating exhortation from Francis Asbury, hearers could barely withhold vocal responses. “A cry arose throughout the Church,” Ellis recounted, and in almost every pew “Mourners were crying for mercy, till near 10 O Clock.” When preaching on the Clinch circuit in November of 1793, Kobler likewise claimed to have never seen “tears run so freely … Sinners tremble & Backsliders Crying out to God.” In an awakening he stirred on the New River circuit, the preacher observed that the “dispensation of the power of God” brought “one of the loudest shouts, that I heard for 6 Months past.” During a separate stop on the New River beat, Kobler rejoiced at the pious cries he heard from white and Black congregants, who were “shouting from Morning … till Bed time.” “Glory to God for liberty to shout,” Kobler boasted. He yearned to hear every believer bellow “high praises of God, for he is worthy—The louder I can shout the happier I am.”Footnote 56
Mead tracked similar instances of outburst. In one March 1795 letter to his colleague Kobler, the itinerant celebrated how “S[h]rieking Sinners” were “brought to the floor.” There were “loud Cries for many.” The following month, in another letter to Kobler, Mead wrote of a “prospect of a great Revival” within the Cumberland circuit. Beginning on Easter Sunday and running through the rest of the coming week, he and others claimed evidence of a momentous outpouring. There was a “time of heaven to my own Soul and others,” Mead reported, and “sinners Cried for mercy & Christians Shouted aloud for joy.” The awakening continued into the subsequent evenings. On Monday, men, women, and children swarmed the home of one “Brother H. Brown” and filled it with a “a great out Cry.” Complaining that there was “too much noise for him,” one disgruntled congregant removed himself and his family from the revival. “I telled him,” Mead quipped, “he would find worse in Hell if he did not repent.” The Cumberland’s Easter awakening survived into Thursday night, with “Awfulness & tears” brimming throughout the crowds. One “Modest Delicate young man,” Mead recalled, “Cried out for mercy … & Shouted about 2 hours in the most feeling manner.” Encouraged by the noisy revival he experienced during his stay, Mead excitedly “took a match of the Heavenly flame” to “set them on fire in many other places.”Footnote 57
Southern New Lights rooted their movement in controversial sounds, but they were not merely noisy. As born-again believers screamed, howled, and cried during their experiences of new birth, they exploited sonic behaviors long thought of as anathema to white propriety. By adopting Black screaming, uncouth bawling, and Native American howling, Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians expanded the acceptable soundways of Christianity and, as a result, resolutely challenged the structures underpinning Southern life.
“On Any Unconsecrated Ground”Footnote 58
Southern New Lights also revised the spatial conditions of Christian experience and took believers to spaces outside the traditional settings of religious practice. By drawing people to fields, riversides, and tree lines, revivalists dismissed the traditional distinction assigned to parish churches and relocated worship to places largely described as Black or Indigenous. North America’s earliest English colonists tried to tame its “woods and wildernesses”—undomesticated lands plagued with violent, godless Native Americans. Readers of John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) learned of Native Americans who “lay hid in the Corne fields,” conducted waterside sacrifices with “hellish outcryes,” and came “singing and dauncing out of the woods.”Footnote 59
From Smith’s Historie to the end of the eighteenth century, white Americans viewed the Southern “wilderness” as any outdoor space lacking civilization and infected with Indigenous savagery. We find numerous examples of this as white migrants became increasingly interested in the trans-Appalachian west. The Norwich Packet and the Country Journal reported that white people traveling to western settlements like Kentucky and Tennessee faced “horrid murders and depredations committed by the Indians.” During his tenure as governor of Tennessee, John Sevier made similar claims regarding the new state’s wilderness. In a 1797 letter to the Secretary of War, James McHenry, Sevier mentioned that, when traveling “through the Wilderness,” several white families “had their horses stolen and waggons plundered by the indians.”Footnote 60 To many white men and women, much of the American Southeast—especially western territories opening after the Revolution—was imagined as a landscape of barbarous crime and indigenous cruelty.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century whites primarily associated “unimproved” natural spaces with “wild” Native Americans, but they also found the terrain filled with Black people. African and African American occupation of outdoor spaces like swamps, fields, forests, roads, and waterways could signal terrifying carnage. When the bonded Angolan Jemmy and twenty other South Carolina enslaved people led the Stono Rebellion in September 1739, they did so in a variety of open-air sites. After gathering and obtaining “many small Arms and Powder,” the Black insurgents killed a white family, burned down their house, and “marched southward along Pons Pons, which is the Road through Georgia to Augustine.” With shouts of “Liberty,” this militia continued their procession and destroyed multiple white homes “lying upon the Pons Pons Road.” Some eyewitnesses saw the insurrection grow to over one hundred enslaved people, with the swelling assembly eventually stopping “in a field, and set to dancing, Singing and beating Drums, to draw more Negroes to them.” White militiamen eventually arrived to squash the revolt, but not before a small group of the rebels successfully “concealed in the Woods.”Footnote 61
Compared to their Northern neighbors, colonial Southerners were particularly concerned with the location of enslaved people. Throughout the colonial South, local law strictly regulated enslaved persons’ mobility and tried to limit opportunities for them to “go or depart from off his Masters Ground.” To maintain societal order and protect white superiority, enslaved people had to be prevented from “lurking in obscure places, committing injuries to the Inhabitants.” Despite clear efforts to impede Black presence in unauthorized spaces, we know that whites increasingly interpreted the Southern wilderness as Black space. Eighteenth-century accounts constantly refer to Black people’s familiarity with the natural landscape. In 1708, a Charleston militia heard rumors of an impending Spanish and French encroachment. However, they were confident they would stymie their Catholic enemies with the help of “1000 good Negroes that knows the Swamps and Woods.” In a more fearful tone, we hear in 1722 that “200 Negroes” almost rose against white Virginians. Once the plot fell apart, however, the rebels “made their escapes into the Woods.”Footnote 62
When revivalists rushed to Virginia fields to hear well-known itinerants like Joseph Pilmore, or when North Carolina crowds spilled into the “Road & Woods” to hear exhortations from circuit riders like William Ormond, they repurposed Black and Indigenous spaces into breeding grounds of awakened religion. As large groups and lone believers strolled in forests and fields to meditate on “Spiritual things,” they traded the traditional, white religious space of the organized church for the ominous, open-air arena of Black and Indigenous life. As one observer of Virginia’s 1785 awakenings put it, you could see and hear born-again Christians worshipping “in the fields, in the shops and houses,” and by the “water side.”Footnote 63 Southern revivalists almost always combined their message with spatial transgression, by pulling men, women, and children out of the appointed time and place of established religion. In doing so, they radically stretched the implications of the new birth.
This became increasingly frustrating to Old Lights and local governments. In the early spring of 1772, Virginia’s House of Burgesses proposed a religious toleration bill that intended to clarify the legal standing of the colony’s swelling population of dissenting Protestants. Publicly printed for readers of The Virginia Gazette, the amendment would guarantee protection to believers disassociating from the Church of England and promised that every local Christian would “have and enjoy the full and free Exercise of their Religion.” But dissenters’ religious freedom came with architectural and temporal restrictions. Any believing community had to “build or agree on any House for public Worship” and provide their county courts with documentation regarding their occupancy. Moreover, they must “be confined, as to their public Worship, to such Houses so built or set apart for the purpose aforesaid.” Virginia’s dissenting congregations—which comprised nearly all of its awakeners—had to meet in prescribed, state-sanctioned buildings, and would have to do so “in the Day Time only.” Similar restrictions extended to the personal ministries of dissenting preachers, forbidding them from exhorting “in any other House, or in or at any other Place … in the Night Time.”Footnote 64 As an array of diaries, letters, and newspaper reports show, there was no slowing the open-air routines of Southern new birthers.
Eighteenth-century Southerners’ fondness for extra-church devotion stemmed somewhat naturally from the region’s dispersed population and frail institutional church.Footnote 65 Anglicanism was the predominant Protestant tradition in the early South, but its infrastructure was notoriously underwhelming. Clergy frequently wrote to London to voice their dissatisfaction with the church’s meager backing, often connecting the woeful lack of local parish church buildings with their own failures in welcoming new parishioners. Writing in 1743, the Anglican missionary Thomas Thompson complained about the absence of churches in South Carolina’s St. Bartholomew’s Parish—a rural outpost southwest of Charleston: “The division amongst the People about the place where a parish-Church shall be erected has ended at last in a resolution to build no Parish-Church at all.” Lacking a permanent worship space, he estimated that only one-third of the parish’s white men—living at “such a distance from one another”—could be called members of the Church of England. In March 1751, William Langhorne, another missionary to St. Bartholomew’s, reported “more Dissenters than Churchmen” and a “very indecent and inconvenient” parish church that could barely hold half his congregation.Footnote 66
Anglican grievances about the unchurched landscape appear justified. Existing published and manuscript sources indicate that new birthers embraced individual and small-group devotional practices that carried them outdoors—both early in the morning and late at night.Footnote 67 In his unpublished journal, the South Carolina Baptist Edmund Botsford repeatedly wrote of his Sunday morning, on-foot meditations. On June 25, 1769, he recalled how he “arose about 3/5 past 4 & walked with a friend with Whom I had much sattisfaction on Discourseing on faith and other Spiritual things.” He did the same precisely a week later, when he “arose a little after four & whent to walk with a friend.” Botsford and his friend were “very hearty & dull at first,” but after their contemplative stroll were “both deliver’d from that slothful frame.” Later, on Sunday, August 13, he again rose early in the morning, walked with a friend, and devoted the ramble to holy conversation that left him “some what effected.”Footnote 68
Private, pious wanderings became a hallmark of Southern New Light devotionalism. The Prince George County Methodist Jesse Lee practiced much of the same. In the days following his father’s conversion in 1772, Lee became consumed by his parents’ constant talk about “being born again.” He could not shake it. One day, “when alone in the field,” Lee realized his lack of spiritual certainty. According to his memoirs, he “went off into a large branch, which was surrounded with thick bushes” to pray for peace. The Presbyterian Thomas Cleland had similar memories from his youth in the Kentucky backwoods. Methodist itinerants regularly visited him and other children in the remote territory, and in the early 1790s one circuit rider taught with particular “vehemence and effervescence.” The minister’s exhortations were so effective that the young girls present entered a “perfect uproar, crying for mercy, exhorting careless brothers and some others of the male sex to repent.” Cleland recalled that these schoolhouse awakenings became commonplace and only “increased in noise and vehemence.” Though his father forbade him and his sister from attending, a group of local girls became especially enthralled by the revivalism imported from the Methodist preacher. No longer interested in “playtime,” the young devotees held “religious meetings in the woods, sometimes in one place and sometimes in another.” The girls’ small-group revivals became so boisterous, Cleland claimed, that one “might hear them at the top of their voices [from] nearly a mile.”Footnote 69
Perhaps the greatest testimony to Southerners’ pious sauntering comes from the diary of Sarah Anderson Jones. Best known for her controversial relationship with the Methodist circuit rider Jeremiah Minter, Sarah was born and raised in Mecklenburg County, Virginia. We have little source material pertaining to her early life, but records show she married the wealthy enslaver and plantation owner Tignal Jones, Sr. in 1767. By 1790 the Joneses’ boasted ownership of over 1,300 acres of land, worked by nearly eighty enslaved people. The timing of Sarah’s conversion to Methodism is difficult to confirm, but a recent study has estimated that her new birth came during the sect’s explosive growth in Virginia in the mid-1770s. As the group continued expanding its Southern foothold over the next couple decades, Sarah became a regular auditor and penpal of Methodist preachers such as Edward Dromgoole, James O’Kelly, and Francis Asbury. Her devotion to the movement steadily grew, and Tignal—at first an ardent critic of the Methodists—threatened to shoot her if she kept consorting with the revivalists. His ultimatum was unsuccessful.Footnote 70
Sarah Jones’s lengthy and detailed journal shows that she leapt into the feverish mysticism characteristic of early Southern Methodism.Footnote 71 Many entries include her striking reflections on the flimsy cleavage between the spiritual and material worlds, demonstrating various instances where she was “Swalowed up in God.” After breakfast on April 5, 1792, for example, Jones meditated in a “private room where the glory of God passes before me,” making her “tremble in flames of Burning Love Spreading Sweling crushing Love to God that he will Let me converse with him.” And, in her efforts to “consecrate my Days and Nights and hours to God,” she devoted much of her time to outdoor prayer.Footnote 72
It is clear from her journal that Jones viewed the natural landscape as some type of stage, or pulpit, for divine activity. “Natture helped to Solemnize my powers,” she put it one entry, “Spreading a Mantle of beauty.” Elsewhere we find where, as she struggled to “get ingaged,” she leaned on the spiritual prompting of the environment. “Natures beautiful Landscape,” Jones wrote in relief, “Strove to help me it apeared.” With this numinous view of the land, she frequently withdrew to nearby fields, groves, and tree bottoms for protracted sessions of prayer. Despite a cold and rainy morning on April 22, 1792, Jones took a “Long walk” to “converse with God.” Later that day, at “about 12 o clock,” she strolled over a mile to an abandoned home where she could seek “more true religion.” Even after returning home and finishing dinner, she again wandered outside—at about ten o’clock—for private worship. She was glad to be “walking and singing and praying in corispondance with Sacred Spirits,” she wrote, “adoring in Blazes the father and Son.” Jones experienced much of the same on September 18. Before dawn, as all others remained asleep, she was in the property’s garden “Singing the Sweet praises of Jesus” for over three hours. At noon, she relocated to an “adjacent grove.” She continued praying and found it was “really Enough to move heaven and Earth.” Her spiritual communion became so intense that her “Eyes flowed in pensive tears” and “Sweet transporting veiws disolved my heart away.”Footnote 73
Outside of personal piety, Southern awakeners commonly gathered in unorthodox places for public worship. After repeatedly reading of it in local papers like The South Carolina Gazette and The Virginia Gazette, they made unconsecrated “out of Doors” spaces—as the South Carolina Baptist Oliver Hart put it in 1769—the staple settings of awakened Christianity in the South.Footnote 74 Joseph Pilmore made this a trademark of his American ministry. Pilmore was born in North Yorkshire, England, and worked as a farmhand in Muscoates. After converting and coming to new birth Methodism as a teenager, around 1759, he was sent by the Wesley brothers to their Kingswood boarding school for clerical training and education. In the early 1760s, Pilmore served as a lay itinerant in England and Wales, until John Wesley authorized him as one of the British colonies’ earliest permanent Methodist ministers. He landed in America in October 1769 and quickly established intercolonial popularity for his successful revivals.Footnote 75
The English-born Wesleyan began his American work in New York and Philadelphia, but his surviving diary shows that he tirelessly devoted much of his early colonial ministry to various settlements in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas.Footnote 76 Pilmore was especially active in the South throughout the summer and fall of 1772, and we find that he routinely convened believers in irregular spaces. Before leaving Annapolis, Maryland, on July 12, he gathered with a “few people in the field at eight in the morning.” Later in the day, Pilmore and a “vast multitude of people” met once more for preaching and worship “under the tree in the field.” Before sleeping, he and a few others ended the day with “prayer in the Coffee-house.” Two weeks later, on July 26, the traveling Methodist perched “under a fine shady tree” in Portsmouth, Virginia, as he exhorted men and women on the “One thing needful.” In the same month, Pilmore preached in Norfolk, Virginia, with great success. As one observer attested in The Virginia Gazette, “All the Ladies, and almost every Order of people here, are become Proselytes to Methodism.” As churches sat empty, over “three Thousand People” rushed to hear Pilmore “in the Fields” and implored him to preach in nearby towns. “The Women,” the writer noted, “call him The dear divine Man.”Footnote 77
Pilmore was one of many who re-placed corporate worship beyond traditional church spaces. The Georgia Baptist John Newton recorded similar events in his travel diary. Buried within his myriad mundane entries, Newton noted on May 21, 1787 that “Several Ministers preached to the people in the woods.” The young Methodist William Ormond, known for his time itinerating in Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia throughout the 1790s, added kindred accounts in his journal. After converting in December 1787, the Dobbs County, North Carolina native started travel-preaching in 1791. From then until 1803, when he died prematurely of yellow fever, Ormond exhorted crowds within numerous Southern circuits, including Tar River (1791, 1800), Sussex (1795), and Portsmouth (1798, 1803). By the time of his passing, the industrious preacher had earned a reputation for hosting heated revival meetings across the South.Footnote 78
Ormond exploited a number of locales for his ministry. His surviving diary shows he preached to Black and white audiences in private homes, graveyards, and “School-House[s].”Footnote 79 One of his more animated services came during his time on Virginia’s prominent Sussex circuit. On Sunday, August 20, 1795, Ormond remembered, many “felt the Presence of the Lord.”’ Attending believers responded to his preaching with “such a Shouting no articulate Sounds could be heard,” and the congregation was “so large we quite the House & took the Road & Woods.” At the very same time, Ormond reported, “black people held Worship out in the Woods & several professed to get Convirted.” Throughout the fall of 1795, Ormond continued drawing awakened men and women outside of church buildings. Touring North Carolina from September to November, the itinerant favored barns for his work. On September 26, he “Went to [Edward] Dromgooles Barn & Preached from Rev. iii, 20.” Later, in November, Ormond came again to “bro. Dromgoles barn & preached.”Footnote 80 Privately and corporately, preaching and practice went everywhere.
Conclusion
At the heart of eighteenth-century Southern revivalism was an impulse to reshape Protestant piety outside of sanctioned spaces and authorized behaviors. Trusting that the Holy Ghost had come and filled every field, garden, riverbed, home, and body, awakened believers loudly accepted the new birth—and annoyingly urged their neighbors to follow suit—on unhallowed ground. Put simply, Southern born-again Christianity was a noisy, unpredictable religion that broke out in strange places.
Born-again behaviors and practices countered white Anglicanism and crafted a separate revivalist culture rooted in personal religious experience. If analyzing the sensory world and its context helps us understand major historical developments, social structures, and personal self-understandings, then new birthers’ controversial uses of space, sound, and the body offer us a fresh lens for gauging “religious democratization” in the late eighteenth-century South. It has been my argument that born-again believers embraced exercises that perceptibly signaled a new religious community where any man, woman, or child could make their body and landscape an authoritative scene of numinous intervention. If a new form of populist Protestantism emerged in the early republic, it was not just because people gravitated toward novel theologies or dove into a new, sprawling religious print culture. We must acknowledge other ways in which democratization might have emerged.
Of course, we know that revivalist leaders did not succeed in permanently dismantling racial and sexual inequity. Many had no desire to do so as they continued enslaving Black people or reserving ordained clerical positions for men. However, the movement’s truncated social reformation efforts cannot obscure the spatial and sonic methods by which numerous awakened men and women came to realize an increased sense of personal and public empowerment. Writing during the heat of America’s revolutionary moment, and the explosive growth of Southern revivalism, the Virginia Anglican priest and loyalist Jonathan Boucher complained of the democratic mood spreading throughout the colonies. The infectious “republican Spirit” bouncing along the coastline, Boucher noted, was “every where so fostered by Dissenters.” And awakened dissenters promoted this “republican Spirit” through space and sound just as they did theology.Footnote 81
The same born-again beliefs that filled born-again sermons and prayers, encouraging every individual to immediately seek spiritual baptism and redemption, shaped how awakened men and women engaged the material world around themselves. Just as their core, unshaking espousal of the new birth led Methodists like Stith Mead to state “O Father, Mother, Brothers, Sisters, Black-People, my soul is Expanded towards you,” so did it prompt white and non-white people to stand shoulder to shoulder, or fall trembling and screaming, next to one another “in the open air, and in the chapel, and in the barn.”Footnote 82
