Interview on the History News Network

Elisabeth Pearson of the History News Network invited me to share some preliminary insights from my current research on frontier revivalism, anti-Shaker violence, and the pan-Indian religious movement associated with Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet. Check it out!

George Catlin, Ten-sqúat-a-way, The Open Door, Known as The Prophet, Brother of Tecumseh, 1830, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr., 1985.66.279.

George Catlin, Ten-sqúat-a-way, The Open Door, Known as The Prophet, Brother of Tecumseh, 1830, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr., 1985.66.279.

The “Strange Work” of Caleb Callaway (Logan County, Kentucky, 1811)

In my current research, I’ve been searching for sources that reveal how and why western settlers converted to Shakerism during the years following the Great Revival (1799–1805). The Shakers kept detailed records of all sorts, but most were written by the leaders of the sect. Few rank-and-file believers described their experiences, especially during the critical early years of the Shakers’ expansion into Kentucky and Ohio. Even fewer shared those experiences with the “world’s people”—the friends, neighbors, and family members they left behind.

Shaker convert Caleb Callaway scrawled his signature on this 1829 financial agreement. Caleb Callaway, deed of gift to John C. Callaway, June 30, 1829, box 1, Shakers—South Union, Ky., Business and Legal Papers, 1769–1893, MSS 154, Manuscripts and Folklife Archives, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Ky.

That’s what makes the following letter by Caleb Callaway (1761–1829) so valuable. Tucked away in one of the sprawling notebooks of John Dabney Shane, a nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister and amateur historian, is a brief note that Callaway penned to his brother-in-law, James French, during the summer of 1811. At the time, Callaway had been living for two years at the Gasper River (later South Union) Shaker village near Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Callaway provided a detailed exposition of the “faith and manner of life that I now live.” Like many western revivalers and recent Shaker converts, he believed he was living in an extraordinary new dispensation in which “Christ has made his 2nd and last appearance into the world.” Interestingly, Callaway did not associate Christ’s return with the figure of Shaker founder Ann Lee. But he did presume, as did all Shakers, that Christ was not a man but rather an inward principle, an “anointing of the Holy Ghost,” available to all of the “sons of God.” For those who crucified the flesh, gloried in the celibate “cross of Christ,” forsook all “natural relations,” and devoted themselves to the communal life of the Shakers, it was possible to “live a holy life” on earth “clear from sin, from day to day,” with a “peace & union the world knows nothing of.” And that choice was voluntary, as Callaway explained in the final lines of the letter. “Salvation is free for every soul,” he encouraged his brother-in-law, “they may choose or refuse it. All are free Agents as to that.” Utterly confident in the rightness of his new Shaker faith, Callaway proclaimed he would not “exchange my present situation, for the whole world.” He concluded the letter with an exhortation: “Come and see us, and know for yourself.”

Callaway’s crooked road to Shakerism began in what is now Bedford County, Virginia. He was born in 1761, the son of Richard and his first wife, Frances Walton. The elder Callaway had fought in the Seven Years War, and he later joined Daniel Boone in blazing the Wilderness Road to Kentucky. Caleb spent his early years at Fort Boonesborough, where he witnessed the capture of his sister and the death and mutilation of his father at the hands of the Shawnee. Early in the 1780s, Caleb sold his share in his father’s lands and lucrative ferry operation, returned to southwestern Virginia, and married Elizabeth Callaway, his first cousin once removed. He appeared regularly on the Virginia property tax rolls for Campbell County during the next two decades, slowly rising through the ranks of society as he accumulated material goods and enslaved servants. The Callaways had at least seven children between 1784 and 1802. Then, in 1804, Elizabeth died unexpectedly—“passed away to the Summerland,” according to later Shaker records—and Caleb vanished.

Some evidence suggests that Callaway moved his family to North Carolina. Or he may have fallen on hard times and sought refuge with relatives. But when he resurfaced in Ohio County, Kentucky, five years later, Callaway was a changed man. Like so many of his contemporaries, he had passed through the fires of the Great Revival and been transformed. According to Shaker missionary Benjamin Seth Youngs, who encountered him for the first time on June 1, 1809, Callaway had joined the Halcyon Church, one of the most peculiar religious sects of the early American republic. Founded around 1806 in Marietta, Ohio, by a quixotic prophet named Abel Morgan Sargeant, the Halcyons renounced the traditional Christian doctrine of the trinity, rejected Calvinism, and advocated universal salvation. Denounced as an imposter by his opponents, Sargeant claimed to communicate with angels; he traveled throughout the Ohio Valley with a group of twelve female apostles; and he exhorted his small group of followers to live “without sin” and “become so holy as to work miracles, heal the sick and live without eating.”

Following his encounter with Youngs and the Shakers, Callaway abandoned the Halcyons and moved with family to the newly organized Shaker settlement at Gaspar River in Logan County, Kentucky. The following year he wrote to James French explaining his new faith.

Callaway’s two-decade life among a Shakers was uneventful, although not without challenges. In 1815, he indentured his three teenage sons, John Constant, Henry, and William, to the believers at South Union, who agreed to provide food, lodging, education, and trade skills until the boys turned twenty-one. John Constant remained with the Shakers until his death in 1830, as did a daughter, Matilda, who lived into the 1880s. Caleb’s other two sons, along with their two older brothers, Elijah and Elisha, left South Union in 1818. Callaway occasionally traveled on business for the believers and worked in their various mill complexes. In 1827, he was listed among the 75 brothers and sisters of the “Junior Order” who were living in the East Family dwelling house. Callaway died on the morning of July 8, 1829, and was buried the following day in an unmarked grave in the Shaker cemetery at South Union.

Callaway spent his last years in the East Section dwelling house at South Union Shaker village, near Bowling Green, Kentucky. Isaac N. Young and George Kendall, “Sketches of the various Societies of Belivers in the states of Ohio & Kentucky,” 18…

Callaway spent his last years in the East Section dwelling house at South Union Shaker village, near Bowling Green, Kentucky. Isaac N. Young and George Kendall, “Sketches of the various Societies of Belivers in the states of Ohio & Kentucky,” 1835, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

At the end of his transcription, Shane noted that Callaway’s “spelling, & division of sentences” were “miserable.” Judging from Caleb’s shaky signature on a South Union financial document, Shane was right!

John Dabney Shane transcribed Caleb Callaway’s July 11, 1811, letter to James French into the second volume of his “Historical Collections” notebooks, which are now among the Draper Manuscripts of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (12 CC 209–10). For Callaway’s life at South Union, see Harvey L. Eads, transcr., Shakers—South Union, Ky., “Record Book A (including Autobiography of John Rankin, Sr.),” 1805–1836, 102, 265, 452, Shakers of South Union, Kentucky, Collection, 1800–1916, MSS 597, Manuscripts and Folklife Archives, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green; “South Union Graveyard Book,” 1750–1881, 2­–3, typescript, III B:32, MS 3944, Shaker Manuscripts, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland. Information on Callaway’s notable father, Richard, is available in John E. Kleber, The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington, Ky., 1992), 152. Adam Jortner briefly discusses the Halcyon Church in his recent Blood from the Sky: Miracles and Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, Va., 2017), 164; see also C. E. Dickinson, A Century of Church Life, 1796–1896: A History of the First Congregational Church, Marietta, Ohio ([Marietta, Ohio], 1896), 31. On Shane and his “Historical Collections” notebooks, see Elizabeth A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 15–24.

Gaspar River, Logan Co.

Friend James,

I have taken the privilege of writing to you my faith and manner of life that I now live. We believe that Christ has made his 2nd and last appearance into the world; and his errand is to save his people from their sins, and to destroy that nature that is in man, that is not subject to the law of God, & to bring in everlasting righteousness. The greater part of mankind h[as] b[een] expecting Christ to come in the shape of a man. I answer nay; the Church of Xt had its foundation in the revelation of God; and that foundation is Christ. But who or what is Christ? The name of Christ signifies the anointed, and arose from that spiritual unction, or anointing of the Holy Ghost, w[ho] [with] Jesus was anointed to preach the Gospel of Salvation to the [poor]. And I, as well as many others, have read: Christ, and as many as recieve him, to them he gives power to become the sons of God.[1] And we [heed] him by honestly confessing our sins to God before God’s witnesses. This I have done, and I now live a holy life from day to day; taking up the cross of Christ, self-denial, working out my salvation, forsaking all natural relations, that is, that is, that spirit that they are of, that stands against God. I love their persons & their souls, but not that carnal nature. Neither does God love it. I do know that I live clear of sin, from day to day; And I have that peace & union that the world knows nothing of. Nor wo’d I exchange my present situation, for the whole world. I do know that I have peace with God, and I know I am not decieved. To know God, & Jesus Xt whom he has sent, is eternal life, and nothing short of this is Eternal life. We have the everlasting Gospel w[ith] us, that saves people from their sins. And the Tabernacle of God is with men, and the judgment is set. And I have sent my sins into judgment beforehand, and judgment is given to the saints. This is that work that God promised long ago to bring about, by the prophets and Apostles. A strange work, and strange it is. And I can say as Paul did, I am crucified to the world, and the world to me. And I glory in the cross.[2] And I die daily unto sin, and live to God, putting on the Lord Jesus Xt, and making no provision for the flesh to fulfil it in the lust therof.[3]

Come and see us, and know for yourself. By the fruits you are to know them.[4]

I suppose my old mother is gone out of the body, is she not?[5] Tell Keeza and all the children, that salvation is free for every souls on the earth: either in the body or out of it, all will have a chance to come in.[6] And they may choose or refuse it. All are free Agents as to that. I add no more at present, but remain your friend,

Caleb Calloway

July 11th 1811

 

To James French, Montgomery Co., Ky.

(Post-mark, “Frankfort, K. July 11th.”)

(The spelling, & division of sentences, miserable.)

[1] John 1:12.

[2] Cf. Gal 6:14.

[3] Cf. Rom. 13:14.

[4] Cf. Mat. 7:20.

[5] Callaway’s stepmother, Elizabeth (Jones Hoy) Calloway (1733–1813), lived with French and was still alive in 1811. She is buried in the French family cemetery near Mount Sterling, Ky.

[6] “Keeza” was Callaway’s sister, Keziah (Callaway) French (1768–1845), who married James French and lived in Montgomery County, Kentucky.

Shane_12CC209.jpg

John Dabney Shane’s transcription of Caleb Callaway’s 1811 letter to John French. Kentucky Papers, 12 CC 209–10, microfilm, Draper Manuscripts, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison.

Shakers & Jerkers (Greenville, Virginia, 1805)

The Journal of East Tennessee History recently published the first of a two-part series of articles in which I chronicle the Shakers’ epic “Long Walk” from New York to Ohio in 1805. Part travel narrative, part missionary report, Shaker letters from the Long Walk shed new light on the controversial “bodily exercises” that dominated accounts of the Great Revival (1799–1805). Centered in the Kentucky Bluegrass Country, this powerful succession of Presbyterian sacramental festivals and Methodist camp meetings played a formative role in the development of early American evangelicalism and the emergence of the southern Bible Belt. The Shakers were eyewitnesses to some of the most bizarre spectacles associated with the western revivals.

"The Jerks," Virginia Argus (October 24, 1804). Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia, Richmond.

"The Jerks," Virginia Argus (October 24, 1804). Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia, Richmond.

Spurred by a newspaper report describing an outbreak of the strange somatic fits known as “the jerks” in the remote village of Abingdon, Virginia, Shaker leaders in New Lebanon, New York, dispatched three missionaries to investigate the Great Revival and gauge the prospects for evangelizing the western settlements. At the time, sectarian followers of British émigré Ann Lee, the “Elect Lady” and purported second coming of Christ in female form, had achieved widespread notoriety for their perfectionist theology, celibacy, pacifism, communal villages, and, especially, ecstatic dancing practices. Early descriptions of the Shakers “laboring” worship, as they called it, bore a striking resemblance to accounts of the bodily exercises of the western revivals.

Leading a packhorse encumbered by a large portmanteaux and bearing printed copies of a strident letter proclaiming the Shakers’ millennial new dispensation, John Meacham, Issachar Bates, and Benjamin Youngs set out on New Year’s Day, 1805. For more than two months they struggled through some of the worst winter weather of the nineteenth century. The Shaker missionaries traveled more than 1,200 miles south through New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, then up the Great Valley of Virginia, through East Tennessee, over Cumberland Gap, and into the Kentucky Bluegrass country—the heart of the Great Revival. By March 1805, the trio had reached the small settlement at Turtle Creek near Lebanon, Ohio.

Clover Mount (Robert Tate Homestead), Greenville, Virginia, ca. 1803. Image courtesy of the Virginia Department of Historical Resources, Richmond.

Clover Mount (Robert Tate Homestead), Greenville, Virginia, ca. 1803. Image courtesy of the Virginia Department of Historical Resources, Richmond.

Along the way, the Shaker missionaries were keen to meet with Scots-Irish Presbyterian “jerkers”—men and women who had experienced unusual somatic fits during powerful revival meetings. As they passed through Greenville, Virginia, Meacham and Youngs spent an afternoon interviewing members of the family of Robert Tate, a prosperous Presbyterian elder, Revolutionary War veteran, and slaveowner, about their experiences with the jerks. The record of that conversation, carefully recorded by Youngs in a letter, is arguably the most detailed account of the bodily exercises of the Great Revival ever written. Although the Shaker missionaries moved on from Greenville, they continued to encounter “jerkers” like the Tates throughout the western settlements. Within a few years, hundreds of these radical “revivalers” and their families had converted to Shakerism and gathered together in a network of five communal villages that the missionaries organized in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.

“Shakers & Jerkers, Part 1” presents an edited transcription of the missionaries’ January 31, 1805, letter, in which they narrated their progress from New York to Virginia and reported their encounter with the Tate family. Scheduled for publication in the 2018 volume of the Journal of East Tennessee History, the second installment in the series will cover the Shakers’ travels through Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as their early efforts to spread the gospel in southern Ohio. It also includes an unforgettable account of a Presbyterian society meeting in East Tennessee in which Meacham, Youngs, and Bates witnessed not only the jerks, but trance walking and other unusual somatic phenomena.

For colleagues seeking new readings for their courses on early American religious history, “Shakers & Jerkers” provides a vivid portrait of popular religion in the trans-Appalachian west. Graduate courses might effectively pair these edited Shaker texts with prominent studies of the Great Revival and southern evangelicalism: John Boles, The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt (1972; Lexington, Ky., 1996); Paul K. Conkin, Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost (Madison, WI, 1990); Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1998); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2001); or Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J., 1999). Readers interested in learning more about the Long Walk and western Shakerism should begin with Stephen J. Stein’s definitive Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven, Conn., 1992); see also Carol Medlicott’s excellent biography, Issachar Bates: A Shaker’s Journey (Hanover, N.H., 2013).

Exercised Bodies (Concord, Mass., 1742)

I recently discussed this intriguing manuscript (see transcription at end of post) during a public talk at the Congregational Library in Boston. Written by an unknown layman to an unspecified minister, the short missive provides a detailed description of religious events in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, in March 1742. The letter is noteworthy for its commentary on the somatic manifestations that attended the Whitefieldian revivals in New England.

Students of American religious history have long been familiar with the so-called “bodily exercises” of the Second Great Awakening—the fits of falling, laughing, barking, and jerking that dominated accounts of frontier camp meetings and sacramental festivals during the first decade of the nineteenth century. I’ve been tracking the most notorious of these innovative practices—the jerks—in my current research. But what about the Whitefieldian revivals of the mid-eighteenth century? What role did exercised bodies play during this earlier period?

The Congregational Library letter provides crucial evidence. According to the author, more than 300 people “were suddenly struck, & drop’d down like persons in fits” during a series of protracted revival meetings led by itinerant preacher Samuel Buell and town minister Daniel Bliss. Lasting deep into the night, these gatherings featured a welter of noise and unseemly actions. Buell and Bliss welcomed the chaos. “They esteem’d those truly converted, who had these Joys,” the anonymous author noted with scorn. Many lay men and women agreed, for “those Under concern, imagined that the louder they screem’d the sooner they should be converted.”

Samuel Buell (1716–1798), the central figure in the letter, is one of the least understood, but perhaps most influential figures of New England’s era of great awakenings. Born in Coventry, Connecticut, he graduated from Yale College and was licensed to preach by the East Fairfield ministerial association in 1741. Never as popular as George Whitefield or Jonathan Edwards, Buell was neither as controversial as Gilbert Tennent or James Davenport nor as skilled in polemics as Andrew Croswell. And unlike other prominent Whitefieldarians, including Daniel Rogers and Eleazar Wheelock, Buell did not chronicle his extensive itinerant labors in a journal.

But during the peak months of the New England revivals, the “famous Mr. Buell” ranked among the foremost evangelists of his generation. The meetings in Concord were part of a nine-month itinerant tour that carried the young firebrand more than 300 miles from Connecticut to Maine. Buell’s barnstorming circuit began in Northampton, Massachusetts, in March 1742, where his potent sermons famously propelled Sarah Edwards to heights of mystical ecstasy. From there, he set off through the sparsely settled villages of central Massachusetts, preaching daily with “great power.” After pausing for a fortnight in Concord, he journeyed to Charlestown and Boston, where he teamed up with fellow itinerants Andrew Croswell and Daniel Rogers. By mid-summer, he had reached Falmouth, Maine.

Inciting bodily exercises appears to have been a planned strategy. Everywhere he went, Buell attempted to raise the passions of his audience “to the highest pitch.” Yale classmate Samuel Hopkins, who accompanied Buell through central Massachusetts, described whole congregations “struck” and “bowed down” by the evangelist’s sermons. To him, somatic fits of falling, shaking, and crying signaled the descent of God’s Holy Spirit. But to others, including the anonymous Concord correspondent and diarist Nathan Bowen, such unseemly displays were a “Disgrace to the Christian Scheme!”

Abraham G. D. Tuthill, Reverend Samuel Buell, 1798, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Historical Society, New York.

Abraham G. D. Tuthill, Reverend Samuel Buell, 1798, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Historical Society, New York.

Following his return to Connecticut during the fall of 1742, Buell was ordained as an itinerant preacher with no settled pastorate—the second such figure in the history of New England Congregationalism. While traveling to preach in Virginia several years later, he was called to the pulpit of Easthampton, New York. Buell remained on Long Island for the next three decades. He achieved enduring fame during a powerful revival that struck the region in 1764 and emerged as a stalwart supporter of the Mohegan Indian minister, Samson Occom.

The anonymous letter reproduced below may be found in Jonas Bowen Clarke’s Collection of Papers, 1742, at the Congregational Library in Boston and is reproduced by permission. For a brief biography of Samuel Buell, see Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College: With Annals of the College History, 6 vols. (New York, 1885–1912), 1:664–669. Additional accounts of Buell’s 1742 itinerant tour of New England include Sue Lane McCulley and Dorothy Z. Baker, ed., The Silent and Soft Communion: The Spiritual Narratives of Sarah Pierpont Edwards and Sarah Prince Gill (Knoxville, Tenn., 2005), 4–8, 11, 14–15; Samuel Hopkins, journal, 1741–1744, 27–34, box 322, Simon Gratz Autograph Collections, 1518–1925, Collection 250B, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield (1842; Edinburgh, 1976), 206; Boston Weekly Post-Boy, April 5, 1742; “Extracts from the Interleaved Almanacs of Nathan Bowen, 1742–1799,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 91 (1955): 167–171; Daniel Rogers, diary, 1740–175[3], April 1–April 29, 1742, Rogers Family Papers, 1614–1950, Ser. II, box 5B, New-York Historical Society; William Kidder, [ed.], “The Diary of Nicholas Gilman” (M.A. thesis, University of New Hampshire, 1972), 279–281; and William Willis, Journals of the Rev. Thomas Smith, and the Rev. Samuel Deane (Portland, Maine, 1849), 103. I discuss the Buell’s itinerant career in Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, 220–230; see also Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, Conn., 2007), 134–137, 267–287. On the bodily exercises of the Great Revival during the early nineteenth century, see, especially, Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2001), xi–xxviii.

Reverend Sir,

Mr. Beuel came to Concord March the 20. They had a publick exercise every day, & for nine nights Successively (which was the time, he continued, there). Great numbers, of the people, tarried the greatest part of the night, in the Meeting-house, & Mr. Beuel with them, sometimes, til two a-clock in the Morning.

The effects, Upon the Minds, or rather, bodies of the people, Were, sighing, groaning, crying out, fainting, falling down, praying, exhorting, singing, laughing, congratulation, (or wishing each other Joy as they expres’d it) by shaking hands together, & by imbraceing each other, which was practic’d by different sexes, as well as others; & these all at the same time. And by the fifth day of his being there, about 300 were thus visibly affected, so that the noise, & confusion in the meeting-house was inexpressibly great, And Amidst such disorder, & a vast croud of people, it was impossible to make a just observation upon all that hap’ned. But yet I evidently found:

1. That all these disorders were encouraged by Mr. Beuel, & the Reverend Pastor of the town, for they endeavoured to raise these different passions, to the highest pitch.

2. That they esteem’d those truly converted, who had these Joys, & that the others were in a damnable state. This appear’d by all their addresses to them.

3. That the greatest part, could give No rational Account, of their distresses, or Joys.

4. That many were suddenly struck, & drop’d down like persons in fits.

5. That those Under concern, imagined that the louder they screem’d the sooner they should be converted, and that these expressions of sorrow & Joy were generally affected, or voluntary. This appear’d by several instances, where there was the greatest probability of the contrary; for the persons were immediately silent, Upon Mr. Beuels speaking to them for that perpose, As he was several times forc’d to do, that he Might be heard himself.

6. That ye persons were generally Women, & children.

7. That they were indifferently affected, whatever their past conduct had been.

8. That ye continuance of their distress, was various, some remain’d under it for days, others only a few hours, or minutes.

9. That these effects Never happen’d, to any considerable degree, til the darkness of the night came on.

These are the principle facts that, fell within My observation, & I think you May depend Upon the certainty of every one of them, & in Making what Use of them, you see fit, you will not disoblige

Your very humble servant

[Mss torn]

[Mss torn] 1, 1742

Jailing the Jerkers (Rockbridge County, Va., 1805)

Through the generous support of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Richmond, I spent the spring 2017 semester as a residential fellow at the Library of Virginia. Here's a sneak peak at what I discovered in my new research: a court case from Rockbridge County, Virginia, involving the jerks, a controversial new bodily practice that developed among Scots-Irish Presbyterian new lights during the frontier revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Many thanks to John Deal for inviting me to contribute to the Library's "Out of the Box" blog!