James McGready

Rev. James McGready (1763–1817) was a Presbyterian minister and a revivalist during the Second Great Awakening in the United States of America. He was one of the most important figures of the Second Great Awakening in the American frontier.

McGready was of Scots-Irish descent, and was born in Pennsylvania. When he was quite young, his father moved from Pennsylvania, and settled in Guilford County, North Carolina. An uncle, who was on a visit to his father's family, from Pennsylvania, thought that the boy's character fitted him to be educated for the ministry, and asked his parents to allow their son to accompany him back to Pennsylvania.

About the time of his commencing his studies preparatory to the work of the ministry, he was convinced by a sermon of a certain Reverend Smith, of the unsoundness of his previous religious convictions. Smith, in his history of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, says that his religious awakening was attributable to a conversation of two friends, overheard by McGready, in which they expressed their fears that he was not a truly converted man. Foote, in his Sketches of North Carolina, confirms the latter account.

In the fall of 1785, Mr. Smith, who, according to the first tradition, was the means of his awakening, opened a school for the purpose of assisting young men in preparing for the ministry, and young McGready immediately became one of his pupils. He remained here for some time, and then entered a school recently opened by Rev. Dr. John McMillan, with whom he had spent some time after his arrival with his uncle from North Carolina. Dr. McMillan's school grew into what is now Washington & Jefferson College.

When McGready had completed his literary and theological studies, he was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Redstone, on August 13, 1788, when he was about thirty years of age. In the following autumn or winter, he returned to North Carolina, and on his way spent some time with Dr. John Blair Smith, at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Dr. Smith had been connected with a powerful religious revival that occurred in his neighborhood about that time, and McGready seems to have been deeply affected by what he saw and heard of that revival.

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