The story
It begins with one man being converted quietly. James McQuilkin, a young worker around Connor in County Antrim, came to faith in 1856 under a visiting Scottish evangelist, Mrs. Colville. Soon afterward he read George Muller's Narrative, the account of an orphanage in Bristol run on prayer and nothing else, and drew from it a simple and dangerous conclusion: God answers when people ask, and He would answer in Antrim.
In the autumn of 1857 McQuilkin and three friends, Jeremiah Meneely, John Wallace, and Robert Carlisle, began meeting in an old schoolhouse at Kells, near Connor. There was no plan and no audience. They prayed for their own townland, read Scripture, and came back and did it again the next week. News of the noon prayer meetings then filling New York reached them and steadied them; they kept going through all of 1858, when almost nothing visible happened.
Almost nothing is not nothing. Through 1858 conversions began in and around Connor, one at a time, and new prayer meetings opened where the converts lived. By the end of that year the district had dozens of them. The men who had started it were still working men; there was no evangelist, no campaign, and no collection.
The break came in the spring of 1859. On March 14 at Ahoghill, a meeting in the Presbyterian church grew so heavy that the building was cleared for fear the gallery would give way, and the crowd, thousands of them, knelt in the street in cold rain to hear a converted layman speak. That scene ran ahead of any preacher. Within weeks Ballymena, Coleraine, Portadown, Derry, and Belfast were holding meetings that would not close, and in June an open-air gathering in Belfast drew a crowd contemporaries put in the tens of thousands.
At Coleraine the schools were touched: a boy so weighed down that his teacher sent him home, another boy sent with him, and the two of them praying in the road, after which classes across the town dissolved into confession. Employers reported men asking forgiveness of one another. Stolen goods were returned. Long feuds, in a province that has never lacked them, were settled in public.
The hardest thing to report is what witnesses called being stricken. People under conviction fell where they stood, some rigid, some crying out for hours; there were cases of temporary blindness or loss of speech, and Belfast hospitals admitted some of them. Nobody at the time denied it happened; they argued furiously about what it was. William Gibson, Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly that very year, went out and looked and wrote The Year of Grace defending the work as the Spirit of God dealing with real guilt. Isaac Nelson of Belfast answered with The Year of Delusion, and William McIlwaine of the Church of Ireland with Revivalism Reviewed, both arguing that nervous excitement had been mistaken for grace.
This site takes the work as genuine, and thinks the honest reading is the one Gibson himself gave: the bodily part was not the revival, it was what some bodies did when the revival got to them. Jonathan Edwards had made the same distinction in New England a century earlier, outcry and collapse prove nothing either way, and the test is what the person is like a year later. Ulster's own ministers applied that test at the time, sifting professions before admitting anyone to the Lord's Table.
The traditional figure for Ulster is one hundred thousand converts. It comes from church leaders speaking in 1859 and 1860, not from any count, and it should be held loosely. What can be checked is steadier: Presbyterian communicant rolls in the province rose sharply and stayed up, public houses closed, whiskey sales fell, and the courts recorded fewer cases in the years immediately after, a drop later historians have confirmed while noting that it did not last forever and had other causes mixed in.
The chain is worth seeing whole. New York's noon meetings in 1857 were read about in Ulster in 1858; Ulster in 1859 was read about in Scotland, Wales, and England the same year. Ulster's own memory of 1859 stayed strong enough that Welsh and Irish believers were still praying against it as a standard half a century later, when the 1904 revival broke out over the water.