Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (3 page)

4 Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. [KJV; my italics]

From these passages, Mrs. Wakeman came to believe that the “Man of Sin,” or Antichrist, is an evil spirit that moves from one person to another in order to slay her and, by killing her, damn humanity and destroy the universe. Her husband was revealed as the Antichrist, and his unsuccessful attempt at murdering the prophetess demonstrated Mrs. Wakeman's immunity to earthly dangers such as a burning stick of wood thrust into the heart. (Had she been Roman Catholic, this incident might have been considered in terms of the “mystical piercing” or transverberation, described by saints like
Teresa of Avila, who was stabbed by an angel with a fiery arrow.) Mrs. Wakeman left home to live with a daughter and began her ministry by preaching from door to door.

When the prophetess next visited her husband, she had several devotees with her who tied him up. Mrs. Wakeman then “drew a knife or poniard, and with it made a most unnatural assault upon him, inflicting wounds of a very serious nature. The assault would doubtless then have proved fatal had it not been for the fear of some of her more responsible disciples, who becoming alarmed, put an end to the attack.”
¹⁶
The wounds reportedly hastened Ira Wakeman's death at Fairfield on March 8, 1833.

Samuel Sly said that “he was not killed by any of us, he came to his end when he was fifty years of age by the termination of his league with the Devil. I understood from the revelation given to my sister that his league with Satan was that he should live in health and comfort for fifty years, and during that time he was to work the deeds of wickedness.”
¹⁷
(That means Ira made a pact with the devil at age six.) In addition to trying to kill God's Messenger, he bewitched all the invalids in the area and she saw “streams of fire fly out of the eyes of her husband and had seen little devils about two feet high dance around him in the room.”
¹⁸

Wakeman's death, however, did not put the prophetess beyond the reach of the Man of Sin.

Little is known about Samuel Sly's and Mrs. Wakeman's activities from 1833 to 1840. On July 3, 1836, however, two of her future disciples, Justus Washington Matthews and Mehitable Sanford were married; also that year, at Worcester, Massachusetts, the “prim and precise” Thankful S. Hersey was teaching children to read at her infant school. In 1842, when Millerism was at its height, she closed the school, “much to the regret of parents in that part of the town,” to prepare for Christ's return.
¹⁹
At some point after the Great Disappointment she came into contact with Mrs. Wakeman and became a passionate disciple.

In 1840, Sly was living at Orange in New Haven County with an unnamed female between fifty and sixty years old—presumably Mrs. Wakeman—and a year later they were at Greenfield. There she did “all that lay in her power to promote the good of those around her,” and converted Samuel.
²⁰

He sometimes attended Methodist meetings, but one Sunday Mrs. Wakeman offered to explain her views of the Bible and an “unseen power” convinced him to remain. She read passages from Hebrews 2:14 (KJV), which refers to “him that hath the power of death, that is the devil,” the power that had been Ira Wakeman's but now belonged to the second Man of Sin, Eben Gould.

Sly accepted everything Rhoda Wakeman said and stated
that the “foundation of our faith” is “that the devil has the power of death, which I had thought before was a power of God . . .”
²¹
(Why Mrs. Wakeman thought Gould was the Antichrist, and even his identity, are unclear. Her daughter, Sarah, was married to an Alden Gould, and the census of 1840 lists an Eben Gould living in Fairfield, Connecticut, who was between fifty and sixty years old; was he Alden's father?) Samuel embraced the creed with enthusiasm, preaching to anyone who would listen and kneeling to pray anywhere.

When he asked permission to pray at Mrs. Mary Ann Wharton's house, she agreed but added, “‘pray short, Sammy,' for he was very tedious—he would pray all day.”
²²
Sly was considered a “very good, harmless, prayerful man,” though he “acted and spoke like a child” and was always poor. He often worked as a farmhand but would neither slaughter livestock nor step on a beetle, and he seems to have been regarded with the kind of good-humored exasperation reserved for children and harmless eccentrics. (“Once when he called at my house to get a chicken, and wanted me to kill it because he was afraid to do so, but I did not. Some time after, I saw the chicken in his yard and asked him why he had not killed it, and he said he would not do so for all the world.”
²³
)

After Sly's conversion he stopped walking past the houses of people with the “power,” and upon learning that Mary Ann Wharton was a “great enchanter,” he would run across the street to avoid meeting her. (It might be reading too
much into a statement nearly 150 years old, but the situation seemed to amuse Mrs. Wharton.) In addition to enchanters, Sly believed the neighbors were conspiring to kill him and set out across Connecticut to escape them and preach Mrs. Wakeman's gospel.

He met some Mormons and tried converting them while they tried converting him, endured what he considered persecution, and sold items that his half sister wove on a loom (she “tried by excessive work at a loom to support herself”).
²⁴
After work on Sundays, Sammy rode many miles for the “privilege of seeing her, and of hearing her expound the prophecies and tell of the revelations to her, guiding us in our career, was a good reward.”
²⁵

Newspaper illustrations were rare in the 1850s, and no description of Samuel Sly or Mrs. Wakeman has turned up beyond a journalist calling her “the very personification of the wonderful women that lived in Salem in the sixteenth [
sic
] century.”
²⁶

Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with witches, yet the Nutmeg State has some claim to being the most hag-ridden place in New England. Connecticut executed its first witch in 1647, put the last one on trial fifty years later, and hanged ten more in between. Mrs. Wakeman certainly
believed in all the appurtenances of
maleficia
, including demonic pacts and magical poisons, yet she always used the word
enchanter
and, despite looking the part, was not a witch but a lunatic.

She struck some as a “naturally pretty clever sort of woman” and, though her beliefs were often absurd, no one doubted the sincerity with which she held them.
²⁷
Mrs. Wakeman's daughter, Caroline Lane, considered her illuminated by “light from heaven” and accepted her teachings, while agreeing with her sister Selina that Ira Wakeman's cruelty left their mother unhinged.

The prophetess's behavior was certainly odd. She wept at the sight of people walking to churches that believed God had the power of death and not the devil (“she could find it in the Bible”), spirits appeared to Mrs. Wakeman at night begging her to preach, and Caroline often found her mother sobbing at two or three in the morning.
²⁸
Evil enchanters were everywhere, and many of her relationships followed a distinct pattern.

She apparently held people in the highest regard until they said or did something critical of the prophetess; doing that exposed them as wizards, possessed by an evil spirit, or it meant they were the Antichrist. Moreover, the better her opinion, the further they fell; “Hurld” like Lucifer “headlong flaming from the Ethereal Skie / With hideous ruine and combustion down/to bottomless perdition . . .” (Theology
aside,
Paradise Lost
probably appealed to Mrs. Wakeman's sense of drama). The experience of Ephraim Lane, Caroline's husband, is typical.

According to Ephraim, “There was nobody like me with Mrs. Wakeman,” until 1852, when he said, “‘Mother, there's nothing in your doctrines—it's all a delusion.'” With that, she became afraid of Ephraim and decided that he had “a bad spirit that wanted to kill the good spirit in her.”
²⁹
(What “having a bad spirit” meant is unclear. It might refer to Leviticus 20:27 [KJV], “A man also or a woman that hath
a familiar spirit
, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death . . .” [my italics]). Caroline's turn came on March 31, 1854, when the Wakemanites were excommunicating Charles Willoughby, who was another one of Mrs. Wakeman's sons-in-law. They accused him of causing all the storms that winter and covering Sammy with a thousand little devils that crawled over his head and back, but Caroline expressed doubts and that frightened Mrs. Wakeman, who said, “‘Don't call me Mother—anybody that wants to kill me needn't call me Mother.'”
³⁰
This reaction might explain why her closest associates included Thankful Hersey, described as Mrs. Wakeman's “echo,” and a brain-damaged half brother who made her paranoia his own.

In time, Sammy collected enough money to free Mrs. Wakeman from the “hard bondage of weaving,” and moved into a series of rented houses at New Haven where they were able to hold regular meetings.
³¹

New Haven is an old city by American standards. Founded by Puritans in 1638, it has the full complement of stories appropriate to New England's ancient settlements, including a phantom ship that sailed into the harbor sometime in the 1640s, broke apart, and vanished in a “smoky cloud.” The Rev. Cotton Mather told the story in his
Magnalia Christi Americana
(1702), and Longfellow published a poem about it in 1858:

And the masts, with all their rigging,

Fell slowly, one by one,

And the hulk dilated and vanished,

As a sea-mist in the sun!
³²

The city is best known, however, for Yale University, which was established in 1701 to educate the Puritan theocracy, as well as Broadway previews and firearms. Eli Whitney opened a rifle factory there at the end of the eighteenth century, and by the middle of the nineteenth, so much weaponry was produced at New Haven that it was called “the Arsenal of America.” Mrs. Wakeman's preaching attracted workers and farmers from the surrounding areas.

They met every Sunday and once again during the week. Sammy described their worship as “prayer and singing by the faithful believers, and then my sister would select
quotations from the Bible, and explain them, and then the spirit of the Almighty would descend on her, and she would reveal to us the sayings of the Deity, and guide us in our temporal as well as spiritual doings.”
³³
There were also two important developments in 1845.

First, Mehitable Matthews's nephew, Charles Sanford, was released from the Hartford Retreat for the Insane. He began attending their services, and numerous prayer meetings were held on Sanford's account, presumably to cure his insanity.
³⁴
In addition, a seventeen-year-old named Amos Hunt joined the group.

In 1850, Mrs. Wakeman and Samuel were living in a small house on Ashmun Street by the wall of the Grove Street Cemetery, almost under the eaves of Yale. They supported themselves in various ways: boarding children and selling fruits, berries, and “decoctions of syrups and herbal medicines” that Mrs. Wakeman distilled from plants gathered by Sammy.
³⁵
These proved popular, and the widow acquired a reputation as a healer or quack doctor whose clients reportedly included an old farmer from Woodbridge named Sperry; he played an unfortunate role in Wakemanite history. Caroline persuaded her mother to charge something for the remedies, but the prophetess “was not sent for money” and gave away most of what she earned.
³⁶

Over the next few years, the Wakemanites went quietly about their business while Amos Hunt came to hold an honored position among them.
³⁷
Sammy described him as “a firm believer in our doctrines and for his deeds of goodness was looked upon as a mainstay of our body. He held continual meetings, and induced many to join us. We looked upon him as almost sanctified. . . .”
³⁸
Demons, however, are notorious for harassing the devout; St. Jerome was troubled by phantom dancing girls, Martin Luther had to throw an ink pot at the devil, and Hunt used to visit Samuel's house “pretending to come that he might be relieved [of] the bad spirit. . . .”
³⁹
He eventually fell and, when it happened, “his fall was the greater.”
⁴⁰

According to Mrs. Wakeman, it happened after she and her followers met for regular Sabbath worship on November 29, 1855 (her recollection is faulty since November 29, 1855, was a Thursday). They apparently brought food to meetings, and Amos Hunt and his wife arrived with a pie wrapped in paper and seven cakes carried in a tin pail. Sammy put the food on the kitchen table and when they sat down to potluck dinner, Mrs. Wakeman ate a slice of pie and one and a half cakes, then became violently ill. She later described what happened, saying:

I had a dreadful pain in my stomach and chest, and [whispering very confidentially as she leaned over her large Bible] I don't tell it often, but I puked. I was dreadful sick, and I put my thumb and finger in my mouth and pulled out something—, about so long [two or three inches], and then I puked again and pulled out another, and they was the sperits he put into the pizen to kill my sperit while the pizen killed my body.
⁴¹

The prophetess claimed that her followers almost died from the poison—Samuel and a female Wakemanite reportedly felt sick—but she spent two days in agony before visiting Dr. E. C. Chamberlain, who was Mrs. Wakeman's doctor for six years and considered her insane. She began seeing Dr. Chamberlain when her other physician, Dr. Gray, turned out to be an enchanter.