war had been especially cruel. One nineteenth-century chronicler blamed “the march of armies” for leaving plunder, vice, “dissipation and immorality” in its wake." Within this post-war setting McGready took part in several sporadic revivals, first in Virginia, at Hampden-Sydney College (1787-9), and then in Guilford County in 1791, in conjunction with a school where several of his future colleagues, including Barton Stone, studied for a career in politics under Presbyterian David Caldwell. McGready’s hard-hitting sermons on the sinfulness of people and their need for conversion demanded a response to the tenets of Christianity that was beyond intellectual assent; McGready advocated a heartfelt and “sensible” religion centered on the doctrine of regeneration, or the new birth. McGready’s preaching, however, was not without controversy. His appeals were convincing to Stone in regard to his sinfulness, but were no source of relief for the state of his tortured soul. Calvinist doctrine, as taught by the Scots-Irish Presbyterians, espoused limited atonement, that is, the belief that Christ’s sacrifice for sin was available only to those who were predestined for salvation. Years later, Stone would reflect that he had “anticipated a long and painful struggle before I should…get religion. … For one year I was tossed on the waves of uncertainty…sometimes desponding and almost despairing.” Stone eventually responded, with a sense of his own conversion, to the appeals of one of McGready’s associates, William Hodge, who spoke not of the flames of hell, but of the love of God for sinners. Others in the community responded to McGready, not with contrition, but threats. One Sunday, McGready arrived at his church to discover a bloody note, accompanying his burned-out pulpit, demanding that he leave the area or face the consequences. Responding to an invitation to minister in Logan County, Kentucky, McGready soon left North Carolina. Several ministers with whom he had worked in Guilford County, including William Hodge, John Rankin, William McAdow, and the brothers John and William McGee, would eventually join him to minister in various congregations in the Cumberland frontier of middle Tennessee and southwestern Kentucky. Kentucky in the 1790s Many of the socio-religious conditions in Kentucky mirrored those of the country in general in post-revolutionary America. McGready complained that Kentuckians were worldly people whose conversations were “of corn and tobacco, or land and stock…. the name of Jesus has no charms; and it is rarely mentioned unless to be profaned." The rush for