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What Finley was witnessing was known as the falling exercise. It was a kind of violent fainting spell that would come over people at the height of their religious transports. The Reverend Barton Stone, who participated in many camp meetings, described it in his autobiography: “The falling exercise was very common among all classes, the saints and sinners of every age and of every grade, from the philosopher to the clown. The subject of this exercise would, generally, with a piercing scream, fall like a log on the floor, earth or mud, and appear as dead.” They might remain that way for minutes, or for hours; at some meetings, areas were set aside where the fallers could be laid out and not be trodden on. When they revived, they would often sob uncontrollably, or scream out for God and proclaim the glory of the gospel in what Stone described as “language almost superhuman.… I have heard them agonizing in tears and strong crying for mercy to be shown to sinners, and speaking like angels to all around.”

Those who didn’t become fallers might instead experience the jerks. This was a convulsive movement that would begin in the arms, shoulders, or legs and then spread through the whole body. “When the head alone was affected,” Stone said, “it would be jerked backward and forward, or from side to side, so quickly that the features of the face could not be distinguished. When the whole system was affected, I have seen the person stand in one place and jerk backward and forward in quick succession, their head nearly touching the floor behind and before.” The wandering preacher Lorenzo Dow wrote that he saw one camp meeting where they had prepared the ground ahead of time for the jerks: “Fifty to one hundred saplings left breast high … for the people to jerk by.… They had kicked up the earth as a horse stamping flies.” When people recovered from the jerks, Stone reported, they could not account for what had happened to them, “but some have told me that those were among the happiest seasons of their lives.”

Related to the jerks was the rolling exercise. People would start by twisting their heads from side to side and rapidly nodding and snapping their heads back. Then they would hurl themselves to the ground and begin rolling over and over in the mud and dirt like dogs. Sometimes they writhed and screamed as though they were being stabbed with hot pokers. Then they would bounce up and down and shake convulsively as if they were flying apart.

Others performed the dancing exercise, a weird, somber sequence of steps and retreats. While smiles of radiant supernatural bliss played across their faces, the dancers would keep it up for hours, sometimes very rapidly and sometimes with an unearthly slow-motion grace, until they dropped from exhaustion. There was also the laughing exercise (“The subject appeared rapturously solemn, and his laughter excited solemnity in saints and sinners”) and the singing exercise, which Stone said was “more unaccountable than anything else I ever saw. The subject in a very happy state of mind would sing most melodiously, not from the mouth or nose, but entirely in the breast, the sounds issuing thence. Such music silenced everything and attracted the attention of all. It was most heavenly.” Then there were those who would grunt and bark and howl like dogs. Others would, as Finley did, begin to run wildly, shoving people aside, trampling on the fallers, racing deep into the forest until they tripped or slid or dropped in exhaustion. Many in the crowd got roaring drunk—and the drunks at their most extreme were hard to tell apart from the fallers and the jerkers and the howlers. Others gave in to the general mood of riot and began fighting and beating each other up over nothing. But what made the camp meetings truly infamous were the orgies.

The meetings were always intensely erotic experiences. In the pervasive atmosphere of extreme excitement, people weren’t all that careful to make a distinction between religious ecstasy and sexual