The Biography of Eld. Barton Warren Stone, Written by Himself
The autobiography of Barton W. Stone, minister at Cane Ridge, written near the end of his life. It gives his eyewitness account of the Kentucky revival of 1801 and prints the Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery of 1804.
Stone wrote the narrative when, as he says in it, he was over seventy and almost all the other witnesses were dead. He writes to defend the revival against accounts by “enemies, or scorners” and to explain why he left the Presbyterian church, and he remembers the events of 1801 across more than forty years. His figure for the crowd at Cane Ridge is, in his own words, what military men on the ground judged it to be.
The book also preserves the text of The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, signed by Stone and five others on 28 June 1804. It is cited in the Second Great Awakening.
Cited in
- August 1801, firm date