The Real History of the End of the World (24 page)

21
White, 159-161.

22
Mandelbrote, 299.

23
Joseph Priestley, “Various Experiments on the Force of Electrical Explosions,”
Philosophical Transactions 1763-1775
59 (1763): 67. Franklin spent several years in London and attended Royal Society meetings. I love the idea of being able to ask Ben what he thought of electricity.

24
Seiwert, 28.

25
Quoted in John Mee, “Millenarian Visions and Utopian Speculations,” in
The Enlightenment,
ed. Martin Fitzpatirck et al. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 369.

26
Clarke Garrett, “Joseph Priestley, the Millennium and the French Revolution,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
34, no. 1 (1973): 51.

27
Ibid., 57.

28
Quoted fin Garrett, 58. From a letter to Edmund Burke.

29
Ibid., 59-66.

The Bible is in free circulation—the Missionary to explain
it—the Sunday schools and tract Societies are the mighty
bolts of heaven. . . . Such are certain tokens, that a brighter son
will soon arise to set no more, till a thousand years of holy rest
to the saints shall complete the great week of time.

—Josiah Priest,
A View of the Expected Christian Millennium,
1829
¹

 

 

 

 

L
ike many in America in the early 1800s, Josiah Priest saw the new century and new nation in a hopeful, almost ecstatic, light. The success of the American Revolution had convinced many Christians that this was where the Second Coming would occur. For many, the Revolution itself was Armageddon, with the Antichrist, King George III, defeated and chained.

Most American Christians of the time were postmillennialists. They believed that they were in the thousand years of bliss of Revelation 20. This was the time when all things were possible to people of good will. Poverty would be ended as would slavery. The world would be converted to Protestant Christianity. Some wildly exuberant people even thought that women might someday have equal rights with men. Progress was almost a tenet of early nineteenth-century religion. “History would spiral upward by the orderly continuation of the same forces that had promoted revivals, made America the model republic, and increased material prosperity.”
²

In the first half of the century, millennial and utopian communities sprang up like mushrooms, particularly in New York State and on the frontier of Indiana. They ranged from the Millerites, who were decidedly premillennarian, to the Oneida Colony, whose founder John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) preached that the Second Coming had occurred in 70 C.E. and therefore people had already been saved. He taught that the job now was to become as perfect as possible before the general resurrection.

Noyes was an archetypal charismatic leader. He made it clear that God spoke to him alone, and he passed the word along to the faithful. That meant his word was divine law. His colony of Oneida was unusual not only for its unorthodox practices but in that it survived over thirty years. They practiced total communism, believing that property led to selfishness and crime. They also abolished marriage. As Noyes put it, “When the will of god is done on earth, as in heaven,
there will be no marriage
. . . . In a holy community there is no reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be. . . . I call a certain woman my wife—she is yours, she is Christ's and in him she is the bride of all the saints.”
³

The debate about the position of women in the Oneida colony is ongoing. In some ways it was egalitarian. Women could chose their own partners and men were responsible for birth control. Women cut their hair short, wore bloomer costumes, and participated on an equal footing in all decision making. On the other hand, they weren't given an option to let their hair grow and wear skirts if they felt like it. The ideal was to make them look as much like men as possible. Also children were born on a policy of eugenics. Women and men were told when and with whom to procreate.
⁴

While sex and communism were the most commented on aspects of Oneida, their primary goal was still attaining perfection as they saw it. They had meetings to admit to their own faults and discuss ways of correcting them. However unusual the lifestyle seemed to the outside world, the community was at a height of about three hundred people when disputes over authority started that led to its eventual dissolution.

The Oneidans were not the only group of the early nineteenth century to practice nontraditional familial patterns. For instance, the Mormon practice of polygamy was frowned on by the Oneidans as demeaning to women.
⁵

Unlike the Oneidans, the Mormons or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, survived the loss of their founder and leader. Joseph Smith was a visionary prophet who provided his followers with a new testament, the Book of Mormon, which he received on tablets from heaven and translated. While Smith taught that the millennium was at hand, he also expected his followers to work to “build a premillennial kingdom, to transform history, to usher in the millennium.”
⁶
Having a clear task at hand may have been one of the reasons that the Oneidans have vanished and the Mormons continue to grow.

There were also many utopian communities in early America. Most of them had a religious base but not all expected the millennium any time soon. This sense that more work needed doing before the Second Advent is an updating of the medieval concept. The revivalist and educator Charles Finney (1792-1875) put it most succinctly, “The earth must not be destroyed till its work is fully done.”
⁷

In Europe, the outlook was not so cheerful. The Continent was overwhelmed in the first part of the century by Napoleon, one of the prime candidates for the Antichrist.

 

 

COINCIDENTALLY, or perhaps not, 1844, the year predicted by William Miller for the end, was a millennial year for Shi'ite Muslims. It had been a thousand years since the occultation of the Twelfth Imam. The reappearance of the imam was eagerly anticipated throughout the Shi'ite communities.

Islam had other apocalyptic warnings, some reflecting the uncertainty of contact with the outside world and its inventions. In 1877, a letter circulated, supposedly from a Shaykh Ahmad in Medina. In Egypt it was received as a telegram. It described a dream vision that warned Muslims that they had been neglecting their duties, drinking wine, refusing to give alms and not praying five times daily. The letter promised that “the last day, when the sun would rise from the west, was fast approaching.”
⁸

As the century waned, optimism began to fade. In the United States, the Civil War was a shock to all who had believed in an easy Manifest Destiny in which an Eden-like America stretched across the continent spreading Christian ideals as it went. In Europe, after Napoleon, there was the Crimean War and then the Franco-Prussian conflict. By the 1890s the feeling was that perhaps people had been too hasty when they thought they were living in the millennium. Maybe the Apocalypse was yet to come.

The twentieth century would confirm their worst nightmares.

1
Josiah Priest,
A View of the Expected Christian Millennium
(Albany: Loomis Press, 1829),. 85.

2
James H. Moorhead, “Between Progress and Apocalypse: A Reassessment of Millennialism in American Religious Thought 1800-1880,”
The Journal of American History
71, no. 3 (1984): 525.

3
Spencer C. Olin Jr., “The Oneida Community and the Instability of Charismatic Authority,”
The Journal of American History
67, no. 2 (1980): 291.

4
Lawrence Foster, “Free Love and Feminism: John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community,”
Journal of the Early Republic
1, no. 2 (1981): 181-184.

5
Olin, 292.

6
Robert Flanders, “To Transform History: Early Mormon Culture and the Concept of Time and Space,”
Church History
40, no. 1 (1973): 112.

7
Moorhead, 529.

8
Jonathan D. Katz, “Shaykh Ahmad's Dream: A 19th-century Eschatological Vision,”
Studia Islamica
79 (1994) 160.

 

 

 

 

T
he Cherokee confederation of the U.S. Southeast was both autonomous, with their own loose ties between communities, and slowly being integrated into British/American culture. From the early eighteenth century, they were pressured by the government and their white neighbors to assimilate into colonial society or move farther west. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Cherokee were divided between the Upper Towns of what are now North Carolina and Alabama and the Lower Towns of Georgia and Tennessee.

The Cherokee social structure was made up of matrilineal clan groups. Political decisions were made by each village independently, and financial matters were taken care of by each extended family. Leadership was divided among priests, warriors, and tribal headmen according to the situation.
¹
In order to accommodate the colonial government, the Lower Towns tended to adopt European ways, establishing farms and even plantations, using iron tools, dressing in the European style, and intermarrying with the settlers. Some Cherokee also established the British form of representative government and legal system.
²

Many of the Cherokee of the Upper Towns were uneasy about the loss of their lands and cultural identity. In 1808 about two thousand of them moved west of the Mississippi River to establish traditional villages removed from colonial influence. For those who remained there was continued pressure from the American government along with the uncertainty about the worsening relationship between Britain and the United States and which side to support should there be war.
³

It was in this unsettled state that, in February 1811, a mixed-blood Cherokee named Charlie, along with two unnamed women, received a vision near Rocky Mountain in northwest Georgia. Charlie reported this vision at a council held at Oostenally on February 7, 1811.
⁴

The vision has been reported in several sources, mostly through Indian agents, missionaries, or those who heard the story from their elders. The one most quoted comes from the diaries of German Moravian missionaries, who heard it on February 10 from Chief Keychzaetel, who had been at the council. He told them that Charlie and the women had just made camp when they heard a “violent noise in the air, as if a storm was brewing.” They went out to find out what was happening and saw:

Many of those attending the council believed in the vision and went home to tell others about it. In response, some villages reinstituted traditional ceremonies although they had never been completely abandoned, particularly the spring corn ceremony and festival.
⁶
This was known as the
Ahtawhhungnah
ceremony, in which a new fire was kindled, and the Cherokee were ritually purged of uncleanliness through dance and ritual purification in streams.
⁷

This vision was not apocalyptic but, because of what came later, it has been included in the sequence that historians at the end of the nineteenth century called a Ghost Dance. As will be seen, the term is not accurate, but the apocalyptic feeling was part of the movement.

The next event to occur was the arrival of the Shawnees Tecumseh and his brother, shaman and visionary, Tenskwatawa. Tecumseh was attempting to create a coalition of Native Americans to form a united front to drive the settlers out of Indian Territory, if not back to Europe.
⁸
Convincing tribes that had long been enemies to work together was a daunting task, and it is amazing that Tecumseh succeeded as much as he did. In late 1811 he arrived in the south, where the Creeks had just learned that the United States planned to build a road through their land whether they liked it or not.
⁹
This governmental audacity helped Tecumseh's cause.