Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist

by Robert Damon Schneck

  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

  The Mad Prophetess

  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

  City of Scholars and Guns

  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

  The Third Man of Sin

  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 s
eeing Dr. Chamberlain when her other physician, Dr. Gray, turned out to be an enchanter.

  Samuel reportedly took the uneaten food to Dr. Benjamin Silliman at Yale, a renowned chemist who apparently made himself available to the local eccentrics (a statue of him stands in front of the Sterling Chemistry Laboratory). According to Mrs. Wakeman, Silliman found enough poison in each cake to kill ten men, but before he identified it, the prophetess announced that the truth had been revealed to her.42

  God’s Messenger was immune to arsenic or other common substances that might sicken her followers, so food had to contain a magical poison made from the “brains of a man, the oil of men bones, the eyes of dogs, the eyes of roosters, garden basil, topaz stone, copper, zinc, platina [platinum] and the entrails of common toads.”43 It might have also been a simple case of E. coli (particularly if everyone got sick), but some believed that Hunt intentionally doctored Mrs. Wakeman’s dinner to see if she was “human and not divine.”44

  After ten years of Wakemaniteism, the “bad spirit” troubling him might have been doubt. Perhaps he suspected that Mrs. Wakeman and her various claims, including invulnerability, were not genuine; if so, then Hunt discovered the truth and paid a price for it.

  Eben Gould, the Man of Sin, had passed away, and “the power of death was scattered by Satan,” but it was obvious who was “next to take the power.”45 Hunt made “a league with the devil” and to “him was given all the power that was ever on the earth for sin”; this might have sounded ludicrous to outsiders but not to Wakemanites.46 When Sammy said that Hunt should be “given up as a living sacrifice to God,” whose “death will bring the redemption in the twinkling of an eye,” he was not speaking metaphorically, and Hunt offered them a cash settlement.47 Despite Hunt’s being an assassin, apostate, and Man of Sin, an arrangement was worked out so that Mrs. Wakeman’s lawyer and former governor of Connecticut, the Hon. Henry Dutton, accepted $500 on her behalf.

  As with the Cobbites before them, pressure was building on the Wakemanites. Beyond the continual threat of enchanters and evil spirits, Mrs. Wakeman was betrayed—almost murdered—by a trusted disciple and then accepted money from the Man of Sin. When Hunt sued to get it back, the prophetess declared that “should he gain his suit the world will irretrievably be destroyed and cast into the ‘outer darkness,’” and though she would not touch the money, by taking it “an evil influence fell on us.”48

  They had compromised with the devil, and redemption would require something extraordinary, for “it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.”49

  The Reluctant Antichrist

  By December 1855, Rhoda Wakeman and Samuel Sly were living in a small house, a story and a half tall, at Beaver Street (or possibly in an alley between Beaver Street and Dixwell). There is no mention of children being boarded there—Amos Hunt had used magic to “take the good influence and innocence from them”—but the rooms were crowded with Wakemanites, and at some point the Man of Sin’s spirit left Hunt and moved into Justus Washington Matthews.50

  Unlike earlier Men of Sin, one of whom opposed Mrs. Wakeman’s pretensions with violence, and another with poison, Matthews was an unremarkable thirty-seven-year-old who worked at a pistol factory. He attended meetings with his wife, Mehitable, and her sister, Polly Sanford, but was not an outstanding Wakemanite nor did he enjoy close contact with Mrs. Wakeman. There is no obvious reason why the evil spirit chose him, but its presence was revealed when Mehitable began experiencing convulsions; Mrs. Wakeman then fell sick, and in the hyper-vigilant atmosphere following the assassination attempt, that was apparently enough.

  Matthews was cooperative. He did not object when “members of the sect first attempted to drive out the evil spirit by giving the poor man copious amounts of tea brewed from the bark of witch hazel trees.”51 (Unlike Rowan trees, which “put the witches to their speed,” witch hazel is not a traditional apotropaic and belief in its power to drive off evil seems to have been one of Mrs. Wakeman’s personal crotchets.52 (The witch in witch hazel comes from the Old English wican, meaning “to bend.” Flexibility made witch hazel branches popular with dowsers for use as dowsing rods.) Etymology aside, the tea did not work, and the Wakemanites likely prayed over Matthews and begged him to give up the evil spirit.

  Around the twenty-first of the month he began a three-day fast while Sammy cut a long branch of witch hazel and put it in the cellar.

  Knife, Fork, and Stick

  On December 23 the Wakemanites began conducting Sabbath worship at two P.M. in an upstairs room of the house. Mrs. Wakeman had about fifteen followers at the time, and since there was a full moon that night they were able to come and go until early Monday morning.53 (If traditional beliefs about the full moon are true, its influence may have contributed to subsequent events.) Rhoda Wakeman, Samuel Sly, Thankful S. Hersey, Abigail Sables, and Julia Davis were already living at the house, while those attending services included Polly and Almeron Sanford, Israel Wooding, Betsy Keeler, farmers from Hamden, and Josiah Jackson, a gray-haired black man who worked as a porter at the train station; he was a familiar figure around New Haven and “moved within the group on a basis of complete social equality.”54 Jackson used a witch hazel walking stick given to him by Sammy “to keep enchantment away.” (He later said, “Some persons think that colored people have a kind of conjuration power, but I got this idea [for the witch hazel stick] from white folks.”)55

  “It was generally understood that Matthews would be there that night, and it was expected that a special effort would be made to get the evil spirit out of him.”56 Sammy built a fire in the stove of the front room at around ten that evening and Justus Matthews arrived soon after. He sat down, removed his boots, and was warming his feet when the evil spirit began tormenting Mrs. Wakeman. The gaze of the Man of Sin was capable of causing harm, so Polly Sanford blindfolded her brother with a black silk handkerchief, “because silk would keep off his evil power.”57 She asked him if he was willing to be bound with a cord, and Matthews said he would “if it would bring the millennium, or subdue the evil power in him.”58 Polly Sanford then tied his wrists together behind his back, saying, “I do this for the Glory of God, and in the fear of the Lord.”59 When the exorcism began, Matthews was on a day bed; he later moved to a rocking chair and ended up on the floor.

  For two hours, the Wakemanites alternated between the upper floor, where they prayed for the devil to be driven out of Matthews, and the front room, in order to badger and beg him to renounce the evil spirit. Josiah Jackson “told Matthews he was killing the old woman, and that I would not let him into my house sooner than I would a mad dog.”60 Almeron Sanford and Israel Wooding said that he was “drawing away her [Mrs. Wakeman’s] spirit with his evil powers” as well as harming his own wife, and that it was better to have him die than to have Mrs. Wakeman and the whole world die.61 There was a general agreement that it would be better if Matthews died, and he was reportedly willing, if it would “quench the evil spirit.”62

  The prophetess spent the night upstairs experiencing bizarre and excruciating torments. Around midnight “she was in great distress and could hardly breathe,” then “[l]aid down to keep from fainting.”63 An hour later she claimed to be dying from creatures crawling around inside her; Josiah Jackson later testified, “She said she had three live creatures in her, which were crawling up her throat and choking her. Put my hand on her chest and stomach, and I felt them!” Sly, Hersey, and Wooding rushed downstairs saying, “He’s killing the messenger, he’s killing the messenger!” And with a billion unredeemed souls poised to drop into hell, Samuel acted.64

  Sly claimed that Matthews said, “You had better kill me,” to which Sammy replied, “No Mr. Matthews, we will not do that,” and went to retrieve the witch hazel branch, a piece of wood one inch in diameter and two and a half feet long, to “knock this evil spirit out of him.”65 As Matthews sat bound and blindfolded, Sly drew the curtains, secured the door by putting woode
n wedges into the latches, and struck the helpless man a blow to the right temple, knocking him to the ground. He hit him several more times, then, feeling “urged on by some influence,” cut Matthews’s throat with a small pocketknife.66 There was a fork in the room used for lifting the stove lid, and he plunged it into Matthews’s chest twelve times (one source claims the punctures were done in the shape of a cross to release the evil spirit).67 “Uncle Sammy,” who was clearly not harmless, said of the murder, “The influence I was under led me to do this: I was influenced by a wrong spirit to go further than I had anticipated, or had any idea of.”68

  Matthews’s brother-in-law, Almeron Sanford, heard a gurgling sound coming from the front room and pounded on the door, but the others held him back, saying, “If he’s killing himself he’ll be raised.” There was another gurgling noise, the sound of blows, and cries of “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Unsure what to do next, some left for home or went back upstairs to pray. By two o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Wakeman felt well enough to notice strange noises coming from downstairs and told Betsey Keeler that “all was not right below.”69

  A half hour later Sammy opened the door. He went to the back room, where Thankful Hersey used a basin of water to wash the blood from his clothing. The shirtsleeves must have been too saturated to save, for they were torn off and burned, which suggests that cutting a throat with a two-inch blade is close and messy work. Sly’s witch hazel stick, with Matthews’s blood and hair still adhering to it, was dropped through the hole of the privy and the knife placed next to Matthews’s body to make it look like he committed suicide. Sammy then wiped at the blood on the floor and went upstairs to pray while Matthews cooled and coagulated.