Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism.

Abstract

Citizens of Zion: Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism. By Ellen Eslinger. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Pp. xxi, 306. Figures, maps, table. $38.00.) In this reassessment of camp meeting revivalism, Ellen Eslinger seeks to turn on their heads two commonly held assumptions regarding Kentucky-- style religion. Although Turner-minded historians have long posited that camp meetings were fundamentally products of frontier conditions, Eslinger argues that Kentucky was already a well-developed rural society by the time of the famous Cane Ridge encampment in Logan County in August 1801. And although scholars have more recently suggested that the basic ingredients of camp meetings were as old as Christianity itself, Eslinger believes that this innovative form of revivalism was instead a response to agrarian capitalist development. At a time when the organic, cohesive, cooperative ideal of age-old tradition was being supplanted by a new liberal, plural, and competitive reality, camp meetings, Eslinger writes, embodied a compelling if fleeting communal experience and a reaction to a frightening moral crisis. Although initially the religious outcome of the particular social of early Kentucky, encampments for the revival of religion were soon adopted throughout the Republic. Paraphrasing Durkheim, Eslinger argues that camp meetings thus served as an integrative force among new settlers struggling with the anxieties attendant on rapid socio-economic and political change (xiv-xvii). Ultimately, the first camp meetings had little to do with the exigencies of frontier life--in themselves too absorbing to permit much religious development--and everything to do with Americans' desire for collective experience in the face of liberal capitalist expansion. Citizens of is divided into three parts. In Part 1, Settlement, Eslinger describes the early years of white-Indian conflict in Kentucky as Virginians and other easterners laid claim to the Revolution's western legacy: vast new lands beyond the Appalachians. She recounts the grueling conditions at the various stations where most white settlers lived out their first years in the territory. In Part 2, Development, Eslinger describes in extraordinary detail the formation of early Kentucky society, from family farming and the building of mills, warehouses, dams, and small towns, to land speculation and the varying prospects for freeholdership, conflicts between cohees (Scottish or Scots-Irish settlers) and tuckahoes (English settlers), the establishment of judicial and political structures, the emergence of political leadership, the quest for statehood, and incorporation of Kentucky into the larger national military and political scene. Together with chapter 6, treating the arrival of and theological disputes among the major denominations--Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists--these chapters make up nearly two-thirds of the book's text. Finally, in Part 3 of her study, The Great Revival, Eslinger concludes with a close examination of the beginnings of the Second Great Awakening in Kentucky and, most specifically, the Cane Ridge meeting. Focusing chiefly on the involvement of ministers--ever the most articulate and published cohort among religious adherents--Eslinger describes the first encampments organized by James McGready, Barton Stone, and other Presbyterians familiar with eastern evangelical preaching. In the final pages, Eslinger concludes that the first camp meetings possessed political dimensions as well, closely resembling the republican social ideals of the new nation and with the power to transform the first Kentucky campers into new citizens of Zion (241). Throughout, Eslinger focuses consistently on social context and writes with great stylistic lucidity. She persuasively demonstrates the extraordinary speed with which Kentucky moved from killing fields to tobacco fields and the extent to which the territory and then state had advanced well beyond the frontier stage of development by the time of the first Presbyterian encampments. …