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chapter 7 The Prayer on the Sabine BeforetheycametoTexas,themenandwomenoftheAlabamaSettlement were swept up in a Methodist revival movement known as “the Methodist Excitement” or “the Second Great Awakening ,” which arrived in Tennessee at the beginning of the 1800s. The Methodist Excitement was inspired by Bishop Francis Asbury, who was sent to America in 1771, just before the American Revolution, by Englishman John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Asbury stayed through the American Revolution and eventually established a Methodist church on American soil. Known as the “horseback apostle of Methodism” because of his willingness to ride into Tennessee in search of new converts, he ended up in the Tennessee Valley early in the nineteenth century. The core of the Methodist revival movement was a massive gathering of people in spiritually inspired camp meetings.1 People from all over the Tennessee area gathered together their wagons at a revival site in the woods, which were cleared for the occasion. They spent the first day setting up tents. Everyone brought enough provisions to spend several days living on the grounds, visiting kinfolk, and expressing their religious feelings.2 The camp meetings opened and closed each day with family prayers in the individual tents, followed by a general prayer meeting at eight and then preaching at ten, two, and six o’clock, finishing at midnight.3 These were emotional “love fests” in which sinners would raise their hands to receive the grace of God and then “suddenly fall as if struck by a thunderbolt into an ecstasy of bliss.”4 There is little doubt that people at the prayer meetings were experiencing something close to a religious trance. The Sutherland and Menefee men and women were drawn to this movement and delivered into spiritual ecstasy by the inspired preaching of Francis Asbury. The women in particular voiced their convictions in loud shouts of joy, bursting into songs such as “How Great Thou Art.” John Menefee, the head of a large and influential east Tennessee family, most of whom were Methodist, became a trustee of the church that Bishop Asbury set up in the home of John Heyne. When the church moved to Knoxville in 1816, it was built on a lot given by Hugh Lawton White, a relative of John Menefee and John Sutherland, who were both church trustees.5 In 68 chapter 7 the 1820s Heyne and John Sutherland, along with George Sutherland and the Menefee brothers, Thomas and William, moved to Tuscumbia, Alabama , a frontier town in the southern part of the Tennessee Valley. Around the new communities of Tuscumbia and Decatur they farmed, set up banks, and brought their newfound religion. The Menefees built the first Methodist church in the area.6 When the Menefee, White, and Sutherland families decided to migrate to Texas, they knew that Mexican law prohibited the open practice of their religion. As the migration progressed and they reached the border with Texas, John Burruss, a traveling Methodist preacher, joined their camp on the Sabine . Burruss was well known along the frontier for “inspired praying.” Quietly the relatives all gathered in George Sutherland’s tent for their last camp meeting as an openly Methodist congregation. Aware that they were about to enter a foreign land where they would be required to swear allegiance to the Catholic Church, Burruss began by speaking of Jacob’s flight from his brother and his vision at Bethel. He then invoked the image of Abraham journeying to a strange land, and he asked God to direct these “pilgrims” to their new homes. Deeply moved, the women and men in Sutherland’s tent broke into exclamations of religious passion. Pausing to take a deep breath, Burruss then invoked God’s grace so that these Christians might eventually establish their own churches. For years afterward, Burruss’s prayer was one of their most vivid recollections, marking as it did the journey from their former lives into their new ones. Stories about the prayer, about crossing the Sabine River from their native country into a foreign one, and about going from one religion to another became fixed in the mythology of their migration.7 The camp meeting on the Sabine was the last time they all prayed together as one family. When they arrived and claimed their tracts of land from Stephen Austin, they spread out over a wide area. After four years in Texas, W. J. E. Heard, along with his mother, Jemima Menefee Heard, and grandmother Frances Menefee, moved to Egypt, a town...

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