enter into the kingdom of God.… The tempest sometimes ceases, the sky is clear,
and the prospect is desirable, but by the by the gathering clouds threaten a new
storm; here we must watch, and labor, and fight, expecting rest with Christ in
glory, not on the way to it.”
The providential worldview and the notion that God granted spiritual prog-
ress only through affliction came directly into play when a member of a poor
Protestant family died. Country Baptists and working-class Methodists mourned
their dead but took care not to “murmur” against God. In a world governed by
providence, the death of a loved one was a test of faith. The death of children in particular called for heroic acts of submission to God’s will. Parents mourned the loss but stopped short of displaying grief that would suggest selfishness and lack of faith. Poor families washed and dressed the dead body themselves and buried it in a churchyard or on a hilltop plot on the family farm. Whereas the urban middle class preferred formal funerals and carefully tended cemeteries, humbler people regarded death as a lesson in the futility of pursuing worldly goals and in the need to submit to God’s will.
Child’s Gravestone.
Below the weeping willow
on this baby girl’s
gravestone is an
inscription affirming that
death has set the child
“free from trouble and
pain” and has ushered
her into a better life.
The Plain People of the North
353
Popular
Middle-class evangelicals were postmillennialists. They be-
Millennialism
lieved that Christ’s Second Coming would occur at the end
of 1,000 years of social perfection brought about by the
missionary conversion of the world. Ordinary Baptists, Methodists, and Disciples
of Christ, however, assumed that the millennium would arrive with world-
destroying violence, followed by 1,000 years of Christ’s rule on earth. Few,
however, dwelled on this terrifying premillennialism and assumed that God
would end the world in his own time. Now and then, however, the ordinary
evangelicals of the North predicted the fiery end of the world. Prophets rose and fell, and thousands of people looked for signs of the approaching millennium in
thunderstorms, shooting stars, eclipses, economic panics and depressions, and—
especially—in hints that God had placed in the Bible.
One avid student of those hints was William Miller, a Vermont Baptist who,
after years of systematic study, concluded that God would destroy the world dur-
ing the year following March 1843. Miller publicized his predictions throughout
the 1830s, and near the end of the decade the Millerites (as his followers were
called) accumulated thousands of believers—most of them conservative Baptists,
Methodists, and Disciples in hill-country New England and in poor neighbor-
hoods in New York, Ohio, and Michigan. As the end approached, the believers
read the Bible, prayed, and attended meeting after meeting. A publicist named
Henry Jones reported that a shower of meat and blood had fallen on Jersey
City, and newspapers published stories alleging that the Millerites were insane
and sexually licentious. Some, the press reported, were sewing “ascension robes”
in which they would rise straight to heaven without passing through death.
When the end of the year—March 23, 1844—came and went, most of the
believers quietly returned to their churches. A committed remnant, however, kept
the faith, and by the 1860s founded the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The Mil-
lerite movement was a reminder that hundreds of thousands of northern Protes-
tants continued to believe that the God of the Old Testament governed
everything from bee stings to the course of human history, and that one day he
would destroy the world in fire and blood.
Family and
Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and the smaller
Society
popular sects evangelized primarily among persons who
had been bypassed or hurt by the Market Revolution.
Many had been reduced to dependent, wage-earning status. Others had become
market farmers or urban storekeepers or master workmen; few had become rich.
Their churches taught them that the temptations of market society were at the
center of the world they must reject.
Often their rhetoric turned to criticism of market society, its institutions, and its centers of power. The Quaker schismatic Elias Hicks, a Long Island farmer who fought the worldliness and pride of wealthy urban Quakers, listed the following
among the mistakes of the early 19th century: railroads, the Erie Canal, fancy
food and other luxuries, banks and the credit system, the city of Philadelphia,
and the study of chemistry. The Baptist millenarian William Miller expressed his
hatred of banks, insurance companies, stock jobbing, chartered monopolies, per-
sonal greed, and the city of New York. In short, what the evangelical middle class 354