The Kentucky Revival

An eyewitness to the Kentucky revival of the early 1800s describes how it started and how it progressed and what the people believed and the strange manifestations that were present in their services. It was the beginning of the Second Great Awakening.

Preface to the Modern Edition

I have edited this book to update it to modern English; I changed the spelling of words like “pow’rs” to “powers” and changed a few words we no longer use, to the modern equivalent, while other words I have given the meaning in brackets [**]. I have also improved the punctuation slightly, but I have done NO rewriting; only editing. The original page numbers, corresponding to the page numbers on the 1808 edition at the top of each page, are included in brackets, such as [1].

The information in this book is very enlightening because history books tell us the Second Great Awakening started about 1820 with camp-meetings in the Northeast, but this book shows that great revival camp-meetings started in 1799 and went on continuously up to and including the period given for the Second Great Awakening, so it actually started sooner and lasted longer than you may be aware of.

One of the reasons these early camp-meetings have not received the attention they deserve is because unusual manifestations of the Spirit were seen throughout, not just in a few places, or for a few years. And it was opposition to these manifestations that ultimately brought the Second Great Awakening to a close, as seen in other books. This book was written in 1807 and printed in 1808.

Read, and be amazed,
Michael D. Fortner