The revivals of the early nineteenth century were longer, wider and different in temper from those of the 1740s. Their characteristic setting was the camp meeting, a gathering of several days in the open air, of which the most famous was at Cane Ridge in Kentucky in 1801, where crowds estimated in the thousands assembled and where the physical phenomena that accompanied the preaching, falling, weeping, crying out, were reported at length and argued over.
The theology had shifted. Where Edwards had held a Calvinism in which conversion is God's sovereign work, the dominant revivalism of this period increasingly held that anyone might accept salvation and that the preacher's task was to press for a decision now. Charles Finney, its most systematic exponent, treated revival as something that could be produced by the right means rather than awaited, and defended the new measures he used to produce it.
The organisational consequence was a transformation of American religious demography. The Methodists, with itinerant circuit riders who could follow a moving population, and the Baptists, with farmer-preachers who needed no salary or seminary, overtook the colonial establishments to become the largest Protestant bodies in the country, a position the older churches never recovered.