Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  In 1830, Pratt felt the call to become a missionary himself. He and his wife took passage along the Erie Canal to visit her home in eastern New York. Along the way, Pratt was prompted, for what reason he did not know, to get off the canal boat near Palmyra. He sent his wife on to her people.

  He preached only once before a farmer alerted him to what he called “a very strange book.” He loaned Pratt a copy of the brand-new Book of Mormon. Pratt went to the Smith homestead and met Hyrum. The two men stayed up all night, talking about the new religion. Pratt read the book and was entranced. He walked twenty-five miles to Fayette, where Oliver Cowdery baptized him. He was immediately ordained an elder of the new Church. He met Joseph and was impressed by his affability and by “the serene and penetrating glance of his eye, as if he would penetrate the deepest abyss of the human heart.”

  In October, Joseph sent Cowdery and Peter Whitmer westward on a mission to the Lamanites, his term for Native Americans. Pratt went along. As they traveled through northeast Ohio, Pratt introduced his companions to his former pastor. At thirty-seven, Sidney Rigdon was a dynamic preacher, a self-taught scholar of history, and an expert on the Bible. He had become a Baptist minister in Pittsburgh, and soon gravitated to the ideas of Alexander Campbell, who advocated a return to the simple faith of the original Apostles. Rigdon’s oratory and his notion of a church cleansed of extraneous doctrines helped grow his Ohio congregation.

  With the zeal of a new convert, Pratt urged Rigdon to consider the Book of Mormon. The minister was impressed and devoted several weeks to studying the text. He could hardly believe that a twenty-four-year-old farmer had produced such a scripture, yet the authenticity of the story took hold of him. Smith’s idea of a pending millennium resonated with his own beliefs. So did the idea that believers were not to live in isolation but to gather together in a community they forged for themselves. Rigdon asked Pratt to baptize him into the new religion. He urged members of his congregation to convert as well. Many of them followed him into the Mormon faith.

  In the winter of 1830, as gray snow clouds descended on western New York and the revival fires burned brightly in Rochester, Joseph Smith received news of a development almost miraculous in its scope. Cowdery sent back word that an entirely new Mormon congregation had materialized in Ohio, nearly doubling Church membership overnight. Rigdon, he said, was eager to meet the young prophet.

  On December 10, Rigdon and his friend Edward Partridge arrived at the Whitmer farm looking for Joseph. Rigdon was thirteen years older than Smith and better educated than any of his rustic followers. He was a practiced orator, eager to turn his talents to the promotion of Mormonism. David Whitmer, although peeved by the warm embrace Smith offered to the new convert, called Rigdon “a great and mighty man.”

  Joseph was determined to keep a firm grip on the reins of the accelerating project. He assigned Rigdon to take over the role previously performed by Cowdery. He would act as a scribe and important assistant, but always secondary to Smith himself. Rigdon agreed. He and Joseph made the rounds of the tiny Mormon communities in New York State. When Rigdon rose to preach in Palmyra, “the people stood trembling and amazed, so powerful were his words.”

  Rigdon later remembered Church members meeting in a house twenty feet square. “We began to talk about the kingdom of God as if we had the world at our command,” he wrote. “We talked such big things that men could not bear them.”

  The church that Joseph was establishing, like many frontier congregations, favored the downtrodden. In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Nephi said that churches “rob the poor.” The learned and the rich “are puffed up in the pride of their hearts.” Almost all the early Mormons knew poverty and hard work intimately. Parley Pratt said that employers “treated a laborer as a machine; not as a human being.” The new religion would promote “an equality among all men.” It would eschew an idle clergy; preachers would work like everyone else.

  Facing opposition from nonbelievers both in the Palmyra area and along the Pennsylvania border, excited by the prospects farther west, Joseph received a stunning revelation. All members of the Church were to move to Ohio. They would have to sell or rent their farms at distressed prices, pack up, and get on the road as quickly as possible. The gathering was beginning.

  Smith was demanding a radical commitment. Leave behind familiar surroundings, friends, and economic prospects. Head toward the western frontier. It was more than a test of faith. He was turning his Church into a community. The Latter Day Saints would not exist in isolated congregations like members of most churches. They would come together, live together, share their property, establish a holy nation in the American interior. Speaking with the voice of God, Joseph told his followers to go out from among the wicked. “Hear my voice and follow me and you shall be free people, and ye shall have no laws, but my laws.”

  The revelation was ratified at a Church conference in early January 1831. By the end of the month, Joseph and Emma were ready to leave. Like so many Americans in those days, the Mormons were heading west.

  Work of God

  During a revival service in Rochester, Charles Finney asked congregants to rise if they could accept the conditions of salvation. “Simultaneously hundreds arose from all parts of the house.” It was an evangelist’s dream.

  Converts were pouring into Rochester churches. All denominations saw increases in membership. The Methodists had to build a large new church to accommodate the influx. Two nondenominational churches were created to house those not inclined to affiliation. Conversions and satellite revivals broke out up and down the canal and began to spread to nearby states.

  What did conversion mean? It always began with a split. A person believed in a benevolent God worthy of love and obedience, yet he saw in himself a sinner. He wanted to be close to the divine, yet he keenly felt his distance from the holy presence. William James, analyzing the phenomenon later in the century, would call this “the divided self.” Such a condition created unbearable anguish.

  The evangelist’s role, Finney felt, was to make this dual state as clear and as painful as possible. His goal was not to soothe, but to trouble his listeners, to make them uncomfortable in their own skin. “All sin consists in selfishness,” Finney insisted. What was needed for conversion was a spiritual sleight of hand in which the self chose to relinquish the self.

  As the Rochester revival proceeded, the opposition to Finney’s new methods faded. Lyman Beecher, once his staunchest enemy, admitted that the transformation Finney effected in Rochester “was the greatest work of God, and the greatest revival of religion, that the world has ever seen in so short a time.”

  Basking in his own success, Finney began to envision something truly grand emerging from the revival. If Christians made the effort, if they gave up sin, embraced the Bible, devoted themselves to good works, spread the Word to the unsaved, something magical could happen on earth. They could bring on the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ’s terrestrial kingdom. It was a hope that went back to Jonathan Edwards, the great Puritan clergyman prominent during the first Christian “awakening,” the Great Awakening of the 1740s. He too had looked forward to the coming millennium.

  If a new order was about to engulf the earth, it was only natural to imagine that it would have its origin in the New World. Edwards had thought it probable that “this work will begin in America.” Finney agreed. Lyman Beecher envisioned a time when “nation after nation, cheered by our example, will follow in our footsteps till the whole earth is freed.”

  The evangelical millennium was not William Miller’s catastrophic view of the end times. Finney, like most Protestants, believed the thousand years of peace on earth would be a preparation for Christ’s arrival. The world would enter a state of spiritual perfection. Believers could hurry the millennium by erasing sin from the world: drinking, cursing, violence, slave-driving, desecration of the Sabbath—it all held back God
’s glorious plan.

  The possibility of living to experience the enchanted world of the millennium gave Christians a gleaming hope. All they needed to do was to reform the world. Conversions, Finney saw, especially mass conversions, were the first step. Newly active Christians then had to fight against sin. The spirit of the saved, he asserted, is “necessarily that of the reformer.” Believers must go beyond individual virtue. They must make others virtuous. The reform impulse predated the Rochester revival, but in Rochester it became increasingly central to evangelical doctrine. The initial target was an obvious one: whiskey.

  In March 1830, four months after Sam Patch had dared the devil by jumping over the Genesee Falls, a workman watering horses near the mouth of the river broke the ice and discovered Sam’s frozen body, still dressed in white. Over his grave, someone mounted a wooden plaque that read: “Sam Patch, Such is Fame.” In death, Sam had entered the national consciousness. “Why do we call him a madman or a fool?” Nathaniel Hawthorne asked. “Was the leaper of cataracts more mad or foolish than other men who throw away life?”

  By the time of Finney’s revival, it was no longer disputed that Sam was drunk when he leapt the Rochester falls. Strong drink had literally killed him. Anyone could see that the national predilection for the jug generated crime, lust, poverty, illness, insanity, and death. It generated sin. Seen as a booster of productivity during canal construction, whiskey drinking now was depicted as an extravagant waste of time. It clouded a man’s mind and eroded his moral judgment. The tide of American drinking, after years of rising, was about to go out with a rush.

  Emotionally exhausted by the end of December, Finney decided to briefly make temperance the focus of the revival. He called on the young man he had converted in Utica four years earlier, Theodore Dwight Weld.

  Weld was a born fanatic. After his encounter with the evangelist in Utica and a period in which he helped Finney engineer revivals, the younger man had continued his education at the Oneida Academy in central New York, still hoping to become a minister of Christ. The unusual school he attended was overseen by Finney’s old pastor, George Gale, now an advocate of Finney’s revival methods. Gale felt that manual labor must be part of education. The regime he imposed was designed to promote health, and it also connected the seminarians to the lives of working men and women. It suited the hyperactive Weld. “Whether in exercise or in study,” he noted, “I felt continually hurried. Every nerve was strained.”

  The young men at Oneida were Christian revolutionaries. They identified with the Jacksonian common man; they were preparing for the millennium by pursuing a primitive Christianity. They dressed like peasants, rose at four in the morning, milked cows before breakfast. They studied Latin and Greek, cut wood, memorized orations, dug ditches.

  With the millennium shining in his mind, Weld understood the urgency of reform. Alcohol killed the body and set the soul on the road to hell. He recognized that a corrupt and changing society drove men to drink by creating a “universal insecurity of life and property.” His answer was to induce drinkers to shun the bottle entirely.

  Weld agreed to put his studies aside once again and went to work for the cause. In Rochester, with Finney’s encouragement, he began to hold meetings promoting temperance. On New Year’s Eve he mounted the pulpit of the packed Third Presbyterian church and launched into a four-hour oration that electrified his audience. Those who had made a decision for Christ must not touch a drop of whiskey, must not do business with any merchant who traded in the stuff, must not even sell grain to a distiller. A local minister, caught up in Weld’s plea, rose during his sermon to demand that all alcohol vendors cease dealing in the devil’s brew. Ten liquor dealers stood to take the pledge. In the morning, Albert and Elijah Smith, who ran the city’s largest grocery, ordered their clerks to move casks of whiskey into Exchange Street. Church members applauded as the barrels were opened and the liquor gurgled into the gutters. Others were astonished at the waste.

  It did not stop there. Some wealthy converts went to groceries and grog shops, bought out the merchants’ entire stock of booze, and destroyed it. Repentant liquor dealers poured their wares into the canal. Only a few retailers dared defy the mania and continue in the trade. With the scent of spilled whiskey tinting the winter air, Weld, Finney, and many a pious Rochesterian could taste the millennium.

  Finney had formed a bridge from stale orthodox Calvinism to a new, dynamic, hopeful faith that would become a mainstay of American religion. He drew energy from the frontier. He created a religion of can-do self-reliance, of hope and good works. His eyes shining, Finney declared: “If the church will do all her duty, the millennium may come in this country in three years.”

  Sharp Sickle

  William Miller was preaching a message far more ominous than Finney’s hopeful tidings. He began to receive invitations from ministers in the surrounding area, usually from Baptists, sometimes from Methodists or Congregationalists. Like Finney, he was sure his news transcended denominations. At both regular services and revivals, his grim prediction served as a lash to encourage congregants to convert.

  Miller’s intricate proof of Christ’s second coming took time to explain. In a series of lectures, he walked his listeners through the Biblical prophecies and the complex calculations that proved his conclusion. Proved it—this was not guesswork or speculation. His certainty was based on centuries of prophecy. Like Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon, Miller’s story reached back in time to bring a potent message to the present. It kept churchgoers coming back for more. Little by little, interest in Miller’s startling news grew. “There is an increasing anxiety on the subject in this quarter,” Miller noted with satisfaction. His reputation spread. The term Millerites entered the language. Preachers came to his farm to “talk Bible.”

  Miller was tapping into a widespread millennial fever that would peak in the coming decade. A woman in Oswego, New York, said in 1831 that she only waited “to hear the cry ‘Behold the bridegroom cometh!’” All kinds of natural phenomena—the cholera epidemic of 1832, a pyrotechnic meteor display in 1833, comets, eclipses, storms—were seen as harbingers. Almost all Christians sensed that something was going to happen.

  Short and squat, his round face ruddy with outdoor work, Miller was not an imposing figure in the pulpit. The doubts that had induced him to hold his tongue stayed with him. His habitual self-deprecation helped deflect the criticisms that learned clergy and scholars inevitably directed at him. He referred to himself as a “dry old stick,” and described his performance in the pulpit as “cold, dull & lifeless.”

  In fact, he was a fluid speaker, able to lay out his ideas in a logical, easy-to-follow manner. But he did feel a burden. “I sometimes feel as though I can do all things through Christ,” he said, “and sometimes the shaking of a leaf is a terror to me.” His popularity as a preacher surprised him and boosted his confidence. Some might scoff at the “end-of-the-world man” or label him a monomaniac, but many others listened, drawn to his urgent pleading.

  He jolted over bad roads in stagecoaches, negotiated muddy lanes on horseback, slept two to a bed in remote inns, occupied tents at camp meetings. He addressed country people who knew that life was precarious. Babies routinely died, epidemics swept like scythes, eternity was always hovering.

  At an evening service, amid the flicker of candlelight, with the wind sighing through fir trees outside and rain tap-tapping at windows, Miller rose to speak. In a very orderly progression—he had a passion for numbering each of his points—he unfolded the danger that was marching toward every inhabitant of the planet.

  He did not assert that a single calculation proved his case. He had found more than a dozen Biblical formulas, all of them pointing to the same conclusion. For example, from the decree of Artaxerxes I in 457 b.c., count 2,300 days—that is, years—and you find that Daniel’s vision ends in 1843. Or extract numbers from Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. Se
ven times seven times fifty gives 2,450 years until the great Jubilee of Jubilees. Start from 607 b.c., the close of Josiah’s reign, when the Jews stopped keeping God’s Sabbath. Take 607 from 2,450, it leaves 1843. And so forth.

  All of this required careful listening over several sessions. He supplemented Biblical verses with references to “profane history,” events in the world that corresponded to and proved the validity of ancient prophecies. The “fall of the Western Empire,” the Napoleonic wars, Joan of Arc, the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in France, the decline of the Ottomans—it all made sense in the grand scheme. It all fit with the hallucinatory imagery of the Book of Revelation.

  Miller had enough of a showman’s instinct to know that he had to make the numbers real. He described Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. The king had seen a creature whose “head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.” These, Miller said, were the various ages of celestial history. He explained each one. He spoke of the ram and the goat, interpreted the significance of the four-faced beast: lion and sheep, man and eagle.

  “See,” he whispered, “see, the angel with his sharp sickle is about to take the field.” Listeners could indeed see “victims fall before his pestilential breath.” Miller awakened the senses of people whose lives included so much that was monotonous and drab. “Hark, hear those dreadfull bellowings of the angry nations,” he shouted. He painted for them the “horrid and terrific war.” He made “carnivorous fowls fly screeming through the air.” He pointed to the pale moon, the hail, the “stream of sulphros flames.” And just as the horror reached a crescendo, Jesus appeared. The “great white throne’s in sight. Amazement fills the universe with awe—he comes.”