The Real History of the End of the World (26 page)

Other than his certainty that the world was about to end, there was little new or radical in Miller's teaching. This may have been part of his appeal.

For complicated reasons, April 23, 1843, was the eventual date that many Millerites believed would bring the end. As the day approached, Miller and his followers preached to huge crowds. Even conservative newspapers became concerned, feeling that many people were failing to plant crops or provide for a future they didn't believe in.
¹⁵

When the world didn't end on April 23, Miller was disappointed but not daunted. He went back to the Bible and recalculated. He believed he had made a mistake in using the Christian year instead of the Jewish one. Therefore, his new end date was revised to the spring of 1844.

As the new date approached, the number of faithful continued to grow. The Millerites bought an enormous tent that could accommodate over two thousand people. They took this through upstate New York and out to Ohio. The newspapers, which had lost interest after the failure of the 1843 Apocalypse, began to take notice of the Millerites once again. One topic that fascinated them was the rumor that Miller's followers were preparing “ascension robes,” long white gowns to wear as they were assumed into heaven. “Some . . . persons, . . . were up all night, with their ‘ascension robes' on, and their lamps trimmed and burning—ready, at a moment's warning, to be ‘taken up.' ”
¹⁶
These robes were considered a mark of the lunacy of the Millerites, and later Adventist historians and others have doubted that they ever existed. After reviewing the literature, I believe that Miller never suggested that his followers wear anything specific for their ascension. However, the idea of the robes was so widespread that I think many believers could have assumed that it was part of the ceremony and made them for themselves and their families.
¹⁷

However, March 21, 1844, came and went with no Second Coming. Miller refused to be discouraged. He wrote to Himes, “The time, as I have calculated it, is now filled up, and I expect every moment to see Our Savior descend from heaven.”
¹⁸

Miller thought that perhaps the day of reckoning would finally occur in the fall, but he set no firm date. At a camp meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire, in August, it was suggested, by S. S. Snow that Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, was “a day of judgment for Israel, in which the sanctuary was cleansed.”
¹⁹
The next Yom Kippur, the tenth day of the seventh month, according to the Hebrew calendar, would be October 22, 1844.

This date was seized upon by the Millerites, although William Miller had his doubts. He eventually was convinced that Snow was right and wrote Himes, “I see a glory in the seventh month which I never saw before.”
²⁰

During this period, many of the churches that had opened their doors to Miller's preaching shut them again. Part of this is because many Millerites felt that one reason for the first disappointments was the resistance of the Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists to joining the movement.
²¹
They never considered converting Catholics or Episcopalians, assuming that they were too far gone to save except by a miracle.

The absolute faith of the Millerites might have caused even the most skeptical to feel a twinge of nervousness on the eve of the twenty-second. But, sadly, Jesus did not appear that day, either.

This was the final Great Disappointment. Most of the Millerites went home and pieced their lives together. Miller and Himes undertook to raise money to support farmers who hadn't harvested and workers who had left their jobs and given away all their possessions. Some followers proposed that the date was, again, wrong. Others thought that Jesus had come, but secretly. There were many explanations but, in essence that was the end of the Millerites.

It was not the end of the millennial movement, though. Some Millerite Adventists came to believe that they had misunderstood the message. The sanctuary was not on earth, but in heaven, and it was being cleansed for the faithful. This belief, coupled with a realization that Christians had been ignoring the fourth commandment of the Decalogue by observing the Sabbath on Sunday rather than Saturday, led to the establishment of what was to become the Seventh Day Adventists.
²²

William Miller, although devastated, continued to believe that the Second Coming would happen any moment until his death on December 20, 1849. The year before, he had lost his sight, and it was only then that he gave up preaching.
²³

Joshua Himes is really the more interesting of the two leaders of the Millerites. It was his determination to publish newspapers, articles, books, and tracts and get them to the largest possible audience that spread the prophecy of William Miller. He was the object of the more vitriolic of the attacks in the press. Many assumed that he was embezzling donations from gullible followers.
²⁴
He defended himself in his journals and his finances don't indicate an elaborate lifestyle. Most of the money donated probably went to the cost of the voluminous printings, the majority of which were given away to those who attended meetings or were mailed to be handed out as far away as England and Hawaii.

Himes lived well into his nineties. He continued with the Adventist movement, listing himself in the 1860 census as an Adventist clergyman. Like many after the Civil War, he moved west. In 1870, he was in Buchanan Village, Michigan, where he and his son, William, published an Adventist paper, the
Advent Christian Times
.
²⁵
But, sometime around 1880, Himes decided to return to the Episcopal Church. He was ordained a minister and given a parish in Elk Point, South Dakota, where he lived the remainder of his days.
²⁶

It is useless to speculate as to why Himes left the Adventists. He seems not to have regretted his time as a Millerite. He met and corresponded with James and Ellen White, among the founders of the Seventh Day Adventists, until shortly before his death from cancer in 1896.

The Millerites remain the most dramatic of the many millennial groups of the early nineteenth century. They also have had the longest echo in American literature and popular culture. In Miller's own time, Nathaniel Hawthorne mentioned him in several stories. In one, “The New Adam and Eve,” he records “good Father Miller's interpretations of the prophecies to have proved true. The Day of Doom has burst upon the globe and swept away the whole race of men.”
²⁷
Several other writers of the time commented on the Millerites, usually in serious tones, as opposed to the sensationalism of the papers. Late-nineteenth-century novelists generally used the Millerites for comic relief or as a warning against fanaticism.

The stories of white-robed Millerites standing on hilltops, waiting to be beamed up to heaven, had a much longer lifespan than the actual movement. In the end, Miller may have been doomed by his own publicity. In his attempt to convert as many people as possible before the coming advent, he set himself up for ridicule. When the world neither ended nor changed in any appreciable manner, William Miller was relegated to the realm of crackpot millenarians, even though his was far from being the most unusual movement of that decade of religious fervor. The movement continued sporadically for many years. In 1875, William C. Thurman, a Millerite Adventist from Boston, apparently announced that the world would end on April 19. A number of Millerites gathered in Chicago to prepare for the Rapture. A newspaper report on April 20 stated that “they now acknowledge that they have no way of determining when the world will come to an end.”
²⁸

1
Quoted in, F.. M. Wilcox,
Testimony of Jesus: A Review of the Work and Teachings of Mrs. Ellen Gould White
(Peekskill, NY: Review & Herald Publishing, 1934), 76.

2
Jerome L. Clark,
1844: Religious Movements.
(Nashville: Southern Publishing, 1968), 18.

3
Paul A. Gordon,
Herald of the Midnight Cry
(Boise, ID: Pacific Press Publishing, 1990), 14-22.

4
Sylvester Bliss,
Memoirs of William Miller
(1853), 67.

5
Clark, 22. Note that this is much the same idea as that of the Fifth Monarchists, although it's doubtful that Miller ever heard of them.

6
Joshua V. Himes,
Views of the Prophecies and Prophetic Chronology Selected from Manuscripts of William Miller with a Memoir of His Life
(Boston: Dow, 1841).

7
Ibid.

8
King James version.

9
Gary Scharnhorst, “Images of the Millerites in American Literature,”
American Quarterly
32, no. 1 (1980): 25.

10
Clark, 30-31.

11
A. Spencer Braham, “The Philadelphia Press and the Millerites,”
The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
78, no. 2 (1954): 194.

12
Braham, 195.

13
The New York Times,
March 7, 1880. The article was a retrospective on the comet, and the expert interviewed stated that the comet had been expelled from the sun.

14
Himes, 25-31; Clark, 40.

15
Braham, 195.

16
Bay State Democrat
(Boston), March 17, 1843, quoted in Ira V. Brown, “The Millerites and the Boston Press,”
The New England Quarterly
16, no. 4 (1943): 593.

17
Frances D. Nichol, “The Growth of the Millerite Legend,”
Church History
21, no. 4 (1952): 298, notes that this is mentioned in a New Hampshire paper.

18
Quoted in Gordon, 87.

19
Clark, 46.

20
Quoted in ibid., 48.

21
Nichol, 297.

22
Clark, 66-71.

23
Gordon, 112.

24
Brown, 610-613.

25
U.S. Census 1870, Berrien County, MI, 23; B. Cowles,
Berrien County Directory and History
(Niles, MI, 1871), 266.

26
US Census 1880, Union County, SD, 48; Doane Robinson,
Encyclopedia of South Dakota
(Pierre, SD, 1923), 352-353.

27
Quoted in Gary Scharnhorst,: 22-23.

28
The Milwaukee News,
April 20, 1875, 1.

The Angels are sounding on their golden trumpets
They sound and resound from the heavenly shore.
Inviting all nations, all kindred and people
To come, come to Zion and wander no more.

—Maria Butler, Shaker hymn (1846)

 

 

 

 

T
he Shakers today are known for their meticulous craftsmanship, which has made antique Shaker boxes and furniture highly sought after, and for their music, some of which was used by Aaron Copeland in his symphony
Appalachian Spring.
But in the first half of the nineteenth century, they were considered a radical and possibly dangerous sect that broke up families and preached the equality of women.

The Shakers had their origin in 1847 in Manchester, England, where a couple, Jane and James Wardley, had left their own churches and formed a group in which the worship consisted of prayer and personal revelation. This took the form of trances, “singing, shouting and shaking.”
¹
They were dubbed the “Shaking Quakers” although it's not clear that they were ever affiliated with the Quakers.

The sect remained small and relatively unknown until 1758, when they were joined by a young woman, Ann Lee. Lee was born on February 29, 1736, in Manchester. She was the daughter of a blacksmith and may have been working in a textile factory at the time of her conversion.
²
She was then married to a blacksmith named Abraham Standerin (often mistakenly listed as “Abraham Stanley”).
³

During her time with the Shaking Quakers, Lee expressed serious doubts about sex. She came to believe that all sex was sinful, even in marriage. The deaths of her four children, either stillborn or in infancy, confirmed this conviction. After the death of the fourth child, in 1766, Jane Wardley advised Lee to give up relations with her husband.
⁴
Ann apparently followed this advice. Whatever Abraham thought about this, he stayed with her for several more years and came with her to America.

During the 1770s Lee's theology was beginning to develop, aided by a number of dreams and prophetic visions. The renunciation of sex and marriage was the starting point in her belief. This would free women, particularly, to have more time to contemplate the nature of God. In a series of revelations, Ann Lee came to understand that god-hood was made up of God the father and God the mother. “They were one in essence but possessed two natures—masculine and feminine, each of which was distinct in function yet one in being.”
⁵

This concept was far from new, but it was also far from popular. When she began to publicly preach, Ann Lee was mocked, attacked, and eventually jailed for disorderly conduct when she tried to break up services at Christ Church in Manchester.
⁶
While imprisoned, she received a vision telling her to go to America. Upon her release, she made preparations to emigrate. She arrived with her husband, brother, niece, and five other followers, on August 6, 1774.
⁷

This was not the best time to come from England with news of a radical new religion. Lee and her party were sometimes suspected of being British spies. At best, they were considered oddities. They made few converts. It was not until after the American Revolution ended in 1781 that people had the energy to look into alternative religions.