Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ellen Eslinger's social history of camp meetings in early nineteenth-century Kentucky challenges two interpretations of the celebrated revival at Cane Ridge. First, while recent works have questioned the revivals' frontier origins and character, she notes that textbooks continue to depict them as individualistic and democratic pioneer responses to inadequate social and religious structures. Second, Eslinger worries that revisionists who have attacked the frontier interpretation have also stripped the camp meetings of their originality by presenting them as just one more expression of religious awakenings among British emigrants that predate the planting of American colonies. In this carefully researched monograph, Eslinger is successful in clarifying the revival's setting but is less convincing in her analysis of the originality and nature of the event.

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Eslinger first explores the context that gave rise to the camp meetings, devoting seven of the book's nine chapters to a painstaking analysis of Kentucky's first quarter century. She carefully describes early social, economic, and political development in Kentucky from the initial settlement in 1775 to the Cane Ridge camp meeting near Lexington in the summer of 1801. She convincingly argues that by the latter date, Kentucky, at least the area where revival occurred, was no longer a frontier. It had evolved from a series of isolated, self-contained stations, or stockaded trading posts housing a few families, to a thriving agricultural community with stable political institutions that in 1792 became the fifteenth state. She concludes that by 1800, "Kentucky bore a greater resemblance to the rest of rural America than to its frontier beginnings" (p. xv).

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