Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  By February 1838, Weld was contacting the spirited young woman on a different subject. “For a long time,” he wrote, “you have had my whole heart.” He was delighted when Angelina replied, “I feel my Theodore that we are the two halves of one whole.”

  Both were unconventional. Weld regarded courtship as “artificial and facetious . . . a misshapen compound of sentimentality.” But finding himself in love, he was hardly immune to poetic reverie—he could not decide whether a meeting with Angelina was “an actual reality or an Eden dream.” In May 1838, they were married in Philadelphia before a group of friends, with no minister or magistrate present. Six former slaves attended the vows.

  The day of their wedding, a large auditorium called Philadelphia Hall was dedicated as a center of abolitionist activity in that city. Two days later, a women’s antislavery convention there drew a crowd of three thousand. A mob gathered outside and began to smash the building’s windows. Angelina convinced the audience to remain for the speeches. On leaving, white women surrounded the few black attendees to protect them from a barrage of rocks. The next day, mobs burned the building to the ground.

  Theodore Dwight Weld was among the small group of Americans who had forced the nation to look its most dire sin square in the face. But the 1837 panic and depression had bankrupted the Tappans and forced the wealthy philanthropists to reduce their support. The American Anti-Slavery Society lacked the funds to pay its agents. The wind went out of the movement. For a while, anyway.

  Theodore and Angelina settled on a farm in New Jersey. Her sister Sarah, thirteen years older, lived with them. Angelina was briefly intrigued by the fashionable message of Millerism. Friends grew concerned about her “mental excitement” as she became fixated on the end of the world. She gradually regained her equilibrium and came to see Miller’s predictions in only a spiritual light. Yet the idea of the millennium still excited her, as it did all who were swept up in revivals and reforms. “A great and mighty revolution is at hand,” she wrote.

  Aided by Angelina and her sister, Weld began a new antislavery project, bringing to it his typical obsessive thoroughness. The three were determined to disprove the persistent claim that southern plantation owners treated their slaves humanely. To do so, they scoured twenty thousand southern newspapers, clipping stories that referred to the mistreatment of slaves. They added the testimony of those southerners who knew slavery intimately, including former slave owners and the Grimké sisters themselves.

  In 1839, the American Anti-Slavery Society published their resulting book, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. In the introduction, Weld stated, “Reader, you are empanelled as a juror to try a plain case and bring an honest verdict.” It was pure Charles Finney, simultaneously convincing the mind and moving the heart. No reasonable person could resist. The book catalogued unconscionable horrors. It detailed the baroque tortures that masters inflicted on men and women in bondage. It cited numerous instances of slaves poorly fed, overworked, forced to live in cramped quarters, severely beaten, and routinely treated as animals. The authors meticulously documented every charge. Angelina remembered from her childhood the sickening sight of a poor slave girl “stripped naked and whipped.”

  The Anti-Slavery Society published 100,000 copies of this groundbreaking book. Its lurid accounts shocked Lyman Beecher’s daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe. Thirteen years later, she published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which conveyed in fictional form the evidence laid out in Slavery As It Is. Stowe’s novel, the best-selling book of the century, helped reignite the abolition debate in the run-up to the Civil War.

  Theodore Weld had once told a fellow abolitionist, “I feel that I know the mind of God.” Moral certainty never left him. He worked for a while in Washington, helping former president, now congressman, John Quincy Adams in his efforts to oppose slavery. But Weld soon settled into farming and raising a family. He and Angelina set up a progressive school at their home, where they taught the children of well-known abolitionists, including those of Henry and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “There is a fighting era in everyone’s life,” Weld said. “While you feel it so, fight on.” But when the time passed, a man had to move to “another and a higher view.”

  Strong Meat

  Sometime in 1842, Mormon convert William Law put his arms on Joseph Smith’s shoulders and, with tears in his eyes, pleaded with the prophet to give up the teaching of polygamy. Joseph said that he could not. The doctrine was a command from God, not a personal whim. Law was not sure at the time that Smith and his inner circle had put the doctrine into practice. But he was convinced that if the rumors of multiple wives were confirmed, it would ruin the Church.

  Law and his wife Jane had converted to Mormonism in 1836 and came to Nauvoo three years later with a wagon caravan of new believers. William started a steam mill for grinding flour and sawing wood.

  Joseph was impressed by the sophisticated, pious young couple. William was noted for a “great suavity of manners and amiability of character.” William and his brother Wilson, who had accompanied him to Nauvoo, generously loaned money to the Church and to Joseph personally. In 1840, when Hyrum succeeded his late father as Patriarch, Joseph selected Law to take his place, making him counselor to the First Presidency, Joseph’s right-hand man.

  After pleading with the prophet, Law tried to ignore what was becoming common knowledge. He relied on the Book of Mormon, which explicitly condemned polygamy. Late in 1843, Hyrum showed William Law the original copy of Joseph’s revelation establishing plural marriages and admonishing his wife Emma. Law could no longer deny the rumors. He learned that the taking of additional wives was not just an option. No man could be sealed to his first wife for eternity who had not married others. The very idea of accepting the doctrine, Law wrote, “paralizes the nerves, chills the currents of the heart, and drives the brain almost to madness.”

  Distraught, Law again went to Joseph to point out that the revelation about polygamy directly contradicted other revelations. Joseph said the previous teaching “was given when the church was in its infancy, then it was all right to feed the people on milk, but now it is necessary to give them strong meat.”

  Joseph sensed correctly that Law could become an enemy. The first week in January 1844, he removed Law from his high Church position. Law did not bend. He and other dissenters in Nauvoo raised questions about Smith’s alleged self-dealing in city real estate, as well as about polygamy. Jane Law admitted to her husband that Joseph Smith had tried to seduce her, “by preaching the spiritual wife system to her.” Law and Smith traded accusations. In April 1844, William and Jane Law were excommunicated from the Church for “unchristianlike conduct.”

  That same month, Smith agreed to give a commemorative address in honor of an elder named King Follett. A stonemason, Follett had been killed while digging a well, work that Joseph knew from his youth. The sermon was a highlight of the spring Church conference. Ten thousand Mormons attended the outdoor event. They strained to hear as a stiff wind kept tearing Smith’s words to shreds. Four scribes in the audience took notes for an official version of the sermon. Yelling into a mighty wind for more than two hours, Joseph unfolded for his people the supreme mystery of the universe.

  “God himself,” he said, “was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret.”

  God was once a man? “God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth,” he said. What was more, there were many gods. A council of “Gods came together & concocked the plan of making the world & the inhabitants.”

  To any orthodox Christian, this was rank blasphemy. The prophet was leaping far beyond the teachings of even the most eccentric religious visionaries of the time. Those who heard his words were stunned.

  “You have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves,” he declared, “the same as all Gods have done before you.” Each believer had to move �
��from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation . . . until you arrive at the station of a God.” Saints today, Gods tomorrow. It was too wonderful.

  Finally he spoke of himself. “You don’t know me,” he told his listeners, “you never knew my heart.” His spiritual journey had left him alone among men. “When I am called by the trump of the archangel,” he concluded, “you will all know me then. I add no more. God bless you all. Amen.”

  The dissenters whom Joseph had excommunicated had not gone away. William Law and his brother still operated their milling business and exerted a contentious influence in Nauvoo. At the same time, the Illinois citizens who surrounded Nauvoo were growing more and more hostile. Rumors of mob action ignited memories of the violence that had taken lives and driven the Mormons from Missouri.

  “The Lord has constituted me so curiously that I glory in persecution,” Joseph boasted from the pulpit in May 1844. “I will come out on top at last.”

  William Law said that when he met Emma in the street “she used to complain especially because of the girls whom Joseph kept in the house, devoting his attention to them.” Law decided to publicly accuse Joseph of adultery for living with Maria Lawrence, who was now twenty-one. He brought the charge not in Nauvoo, but in Carthage, the county seat. A grand jury indicted the prophet for perjury and polygamy.

  The Law brothers bought a printing business in Nauvoo and planned to publish a newspaper. They advocated for a repeal of the Nauvoo city charter, which rested so much power in the hands of Joseph Smith. They railed against “gross moral imperfections wherever they may be found.”

  Their paper, the Nauvoo Expositor, would aim to restore the religion “originally taught by Joseph Smith,” which the editors acclaimed as the truth. The Nauvoo dissenters, like those in Kirtland, wanted to return to the simpler message of the Book of Mormon. They were determined to oppose the pernicious doctrines “taught secretly and denied openly.” They rejected Joseph’s idea “that there are innumerable Gods.”

  On June 7, the Law brothers published a thousand copies of the first issue of the Expositor, more a broadside than a newspaper. A long “Preamble” laid out their case against the prophet. “We are earnestly seeking to explode the vicious principles of Joseph Smith,” they wrote, “and those who practice the same abominations and whoredoms.” They included a melodramatic depiction of how innocent girls were ensnared in the net of polygamy by “some individual feigning to be a God.”

  Joseph declared the publication to be “a greater nuisance than a dead carcass.” He ordered city marshals to act. A posse of a hundred men broke into the offices on June 10 and “removed the press, type, and printed papers, and fixtures into the street, and fired them.” Smith declared that, in spite of the action, he was for freedom of the press for any newspaper that would print the truth.

  Although he enjoyed virtually limitless power in Nauvoo, Smith was still subject to state law. The mob action and the trampling on one of Americans’ most revered rights struck a nerve in the larger community. The day after the suppression of the Expositor, attendees at a public meeting in Carthage vowed “to exterminate—UTTERLY EXTERMINATE, the wicked and abominable Mormon leaders.”

  Smoldering animosity burst into flames. On June 21, Illinois governor Thomas Ford, generally a reasonable man, declared that Smith’s destruction of the dissidents’ press “was a very gross outrage upon the laws and liberties of the people.” Even if the Expositor had been full of libels, he told Smith, “this did not authorise you to destroy it.” Joseph said he was willing to comply with Ford’s orders and to appear “before any legal tribunal in the state.” But he refused to submit to a court where witnesses would be intimidated by a “blood thirsty mob.”

  Ford guaranteed Smith’s safety, but declared that if the prophet did not give himself up, he would have to call out the militia. “I have great fears that your city will be destroyed and your people many of them exterminated.”

  Joseph Smith was not about to buckle. “I have got all the truth which the Christian world possessed and an independent revelation in the bargain,” he declared, “and God will bear me off triumphant.”

  Awful Forebodings

  While William Miller and his colleagues were touring the Middle West during the summer of 1844, eastern Adventists were journeying to a huge camp meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire, by way of the new Boston and Maine Railroad. Preachers unrolled their charts. They began their explanations of the calculations that proved the imminent end. But the audience was bored. They had heard it before.

  Mrs. John Couch stood up in the middle of a sermon, interrupted the preacher, and voiced the feelings of the crowd: “It is too late to spend our time upon these truths, with which we are familiar.” She said there was one speaker there, whom few had heard, who had a new, fresh message for the believers.

  The man was thirty-eight-year-old Samuel S. Snow. Raised in the orthodox Congregational Church, Snow had lost his faith and for a time edited the Boston Investigator, a skeptical newspaper. He had proclaimed the Bible to be “nothing but gross absurdities.” In 1839, he purchased one of Miller’s books from a peddler, expecting it to be “moonshine.” But it inspired him to search the Scriptures. After three months of study, he converted to Christianity and accepted “the soon-coming Saviour.”

  Snow was, like Miller, a self-taught Bible scholar. He dove into the great prophetic morass, trying to discern the hidden meanings. When he emerged, he too had determined the date of the end. He did not qualify it with words like “if” or “about.” He insisted that “God is an exact time keeper.” And Snow knew the exact time. The end would come on the Hebrew day of atonement, the tenth day of the seventh month of the Jewish calendar. That day fell on October 22, 1844.

  Snow’s message was a lighted match tossed into dry grass. It “worked like leaven throughout the whole camp,” a Millerite said. In one tent, prayer continued all night, “attended with great excitement.” The believers shouted until their voices gave out and clapped until their hands were raw with blisters. The participants went home, intent on conveying their enthusiasm to the world. Snow started his own periodical, The True Midnight Cry. The day he had named was only eight weeks away.

  Joshua Himes and other leaders were wary of setting yet another date. They knew that disappointment could discourage believers. But George Storrs, an associate of Miller and editor of the magazine The Bible Examiner, latched on to the prediction and began to preach it with gusto. Miller’s message had been “but the alarm,” he said. Now the true cry was sounding.

  “We are then within a few days of the event,” Storrs said on September 24. It was an awful moment for those who were unprepared, a glorious one for those who were ready. On September 30, Himes noted that “this thing has gone over the country like lightning.” It must come from God, he thought, so strongly had it encouraged believers, so thoroughly had it reduced them to a sober state of mind. “I dare not oppose it.”

  Adventists all over the country waited to see what Miller would say. On October 6, a bit more than two weeks before the day, he finally sent a letter to Himes. “I see a glory in the seventh month which I never saw before,” he wrote.

  The fact was that the Adventist devotees, although many still called them Millerites, had sprinted past Father Miller. The movement he had led was now leading him. He dropped all doubts and all fears and proclaimed, “God’s word is true.” He became as close to ebullient as his modesty allowed. “Oh, how I wish I could shout,” he wrote. An old-school Calvinist at heart, he did not believe in any such outward displays of excitement. When the King of Kings came, then he would shout.

  Miller was sure the Lord would not tarry a second time. He was delighted to see among his followers “a forsaking of the world, an unconcern for the wants of life.” When he next wrote to Himes, he concluded, “I do not expect to see you again in life.”

  It was October 12
. Ten days left.

  Adventist editors worked four presses pumping out publicity. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the final issue of The Midnight Cry were thrust into the hands of believers and skeptics alike. A reporter for the Philadelphia Public Ledger wrote that a Millerite had shuttered his store and hung out a sign: “This shop is closed in honor of the King of kings, who will appear about the 20th of Oct. Get ready, friends, to crown him Lord of all.”

  A prosperous hatter in Rochester threw open his doors, a newspaper reported, and invited the crowd to “help themselves to hats, umbrellas, etc., which they naturally did.” Many Adventists pulled their children out of school. Why prepare for a future that would not come? The Cleveland Herald reported that “many have suspended their usual avocations, and now devote their whole time and substance to the work of proselytizing.”

  That was October 19. Three days to go.

  Scoffers reported bizarre activities among Miller’s followers. Most of the stories were fabricated, but they made for juicy gossip. Insane asylums, it was said, were crammed with deluded Adventists. The Millerites were providing themselves with “ascension robes,” white garments appropriate for strolling the sidewalks of heaven. Mills were operating overtime to produce the fabric. Zealots planned to gather in cemeteries to welcome the dead who would be rising. They would climb atop barns or haystacks to make their heavenward journey shorter.