Barton W. Smith: Revivalist and Rethinking Denominationalism in Early American Christian Society
The Revivalist preacher Barton W. Stone was born into a once affluent slaveholding family in Port Tobacco, Maryland, alongside the Port Tobacco Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River, in 1772. Following his father’s death at age three, the Stone family soon moved to Virginia, into the heart of Appalachia, where he would spend the rest of his adolescents. In modern terms, Stone’s memory is considered somewhat controversial, but by and large, people remembered Stone as a “cheerful and sometimes even facetious” man of “considerable wit and humor.” [1] Stone was one of many revivalists of the “Restoration Movement,” whose aim was to restore Christian society through the renewal of Biblically-based beliefs and practices of the New Testament. [2] During the Revolutionary War and the early years of the new republic, Christianity declined, but “one of the practices that the American passion for liberty most affected was Bible reading ,” thereby reinvigorating Chris