Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [56]
A typical meeting began in a low-key, almost solemn way. A preacher gave a sermon of welcome and led a prayer for peace and community. This was followed by the singing of several hymns. Then there would be more sermons. Gradually, as the hours went by, the atmosphere changed. The preachers became more lively; the audience grew more excited. One attendee recalled that “the order of preaching was for the first speaker to be somewhat logical, and to show forth to the listening audience his great learning and wisdom; for the last speaker was left the sensational. He would ‘get happy,’ clap his hands, froth at the mouth; the congregation responding, some groaning, some crying loudly, ‘Amen,’ some calling ‘glory, glory, glory to God!’ ” The sermonizing went on past sunset, and when it ended, everyone broke off with the sense of a day well spent.
The next day, and the day following, the sermons grew increasingly sensational and impassioned, and the excited response of the crowd grew more prolonged. By the second or third day, people were crying out during the sermons, and shouting prayers, and bursting into loud lamentations; they began grabbing at their neighbors and desperately pleading with them to repent; they sobbed uncontrollably and ran in terror through the crowd, shoving aside everybody in their path. Many of the preachers were famous for their hysterical intensity—none more so than the Reverend James McGready, who gave at tent meetings a sermon called “The Character, History, and End of the Fool” (the fool being the one who said in his heart that there was no God). The character and history of the fool were scanted; all of the reverend’s fury was devoted to evoking the fool’s end:
He died accursed of God and the black, flaming vultures of hell began to encircle him on every side! His conscience woke from its long sleep, and roared like ten thousand peals of thunder! When the fiends of hell dragged him into the eternal gulf, he roared and screamed and yelled like a devil! When, while Indians, Pagans, and Mohammedans stood amazed and upbraided him, falling like Lucifer, from the meridian blaze of the Gospel and the threshold of heaven, sinking into the liquid, boiling waves of hell, the accursed sinners of Tyre and Sidon and Sodom and Gomorrah sprang to the right and left and made way for him to pass them and fall lower down even to the deepest cavern in the flaming abyss!
The response of the crowd to this sermon, one witness wrote, “was like the roar of Niagara.”
As the days passed, the crowds got so big and clamorous that the preacher couldn’t be heard across the whole assembly, so multiple preachers began sermonizing simultaneously at different points on the meeting grounds. At one camp meeting James Finley counted seven ministers at one time haranguing everyone in earshot—“some on stumps, others in wagons, and one … was standing on a tree which had, in falling, lodged against another.” As the preachers ranted without letup, the crowd was driven into a kind of collective ecstasy. In the night, as the torches and bonfires flared around the meeting ground and the darkness of the trackless forests closed in, people behaved as if possessed by something new and unfathomable. As Finley wrote: “A strange supernatural power seemed to pervade the entire mass of mind there collected.” Finley felt it happening to him: “My heart beat tumultuously, my knees trembled, my lip quivered, and I felt as though I must fall to the ground.” His immediate response was to run away. He found himself racing frantically off from the campground and stumbling alone deep in the forest. There, he wrote, “I strove to rally and man up my courage.” He returned to find that the scene was growing even more frenzied; that same power, the irresistible urge to fall to the ground, was overtaking