SUSAN JUSTER

AHR Forum

Demagogues or Mystagogues? Gender and the Language of Prophecy in the Age of Democratic Revolutions

On May 19, 1780, all of New England was plunged into darkness. At mid-morning, the sky turned an eerie yellow. Within an hour, it had become so dark that people had to dine by candlelight. In the afternoon, the clouds took on a "higher and more brassy color" with occasional flashes that resembled the Northern Lights.¹ We now know that the "Dark Day" of 1780 was caused by the common New England practice of burning fields to clear the brush more effectively and provide a fertile coating of ashes, but to men and women living amid the dislocations of revolution, the event had supernatural meaning. For some, it heralded the imminent appearance of Christ in the Second Coming; for others less certain of their ability to read celestial signs with such precision, it was at least a warning that "these are the latter days."² The millennial expectations unleashed by the Dark Day can be traced in numerous pamphlets, newspaper articles, and almanacs, and have been read by historians as evidence of the pervasiveness of millennial thinking in revolutionary America among all classes of people, from learned divines to ordinary farmers. Far from being the preserve of a small number of biblical scholars and theologians, prophetic exegesis was a vernacular genre in eighteenth-century North America, a way of interpreting past, present, and future events according to the narratives of biblical history. A people as literate and as well versed in millennial lore as the New England Puritans could scarcely avoid interpreting the Dark Day of May 1780 as a prophetic "sign of the times." 1

     Thanks to the labors of intellectual historians like Ruth Bloch, James Davidson, and Nathan Hatch, we have a fairly good grasp of the extent and depth of millennial thinking (or at least of publications devoted to millennial themes) in North America during and after the revolutionary crisis. We know that, contrary to the situation in Great Britain, millennialism was a constant theme in religious literature from the early seventeenth through the eighteenth century; rather than spiking at specific moments in response to public crises, millennial expectations proved remarkably enduring through the ebb and flow of colonial politics. We know that, beginning with the Seven Years' War and escalating during the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, this tradition of millennial exegesis was increasingly politicized, though still consensual: the allegorical symbols of the prophetic scriptures (the four beasts, the seven vials, for example) came to represent concrete political figures and events, while sacred and human history were conflated in the eschatological drama of the Book of Revelation. We know that North American writers tended to favor a postmillennial (gradual progress) over a premillennial (cataclysmic collapse) interpretation of the Bible, even though the distinction between these two hermeneutic modes was less stark in the 1770s and 1780s than it would become a century later. Once independence was gained and Americans turned their attention from waging war to forming new governments, the political edge of millennial discourse was blunted and apocalyptic thinking declined. A kind of popular secular optimism, shorn of political urgency and latitudinarian in impulse, reigned as Americans looked benignly toward the future. Moments of doubt and despair certainly intruded on the national consciousness as Americans weathered the periodic economic and political crises of the 1780s and the partisan battles of the 1790s, but overall the prophetic scriptures were understood to herald the eventual triumph of the United States as the leader of the "free" and the Christian world, which were assumed to be one and the same thing.³ 2

     So subsumed into nationalist republican ideology was the millennial scenario in the revolutionary era that historians have tended to take for granted the intermingling of religious and political languages into a seamless discursive web in American culture, a web that stretches from John Winthrop to Billy Graham. Snared in this web were a multitude of competing biblical images of America (Canaan or Egypt?) and a multiplicity of voices, from nativist Indian prophets to visionary women to millenarian slaves (see Alida Metcalf's article in this issue). Disentangling these images and voices takes some doing, given the investment Americans have had—then and now—in the myth of our exceptional past and our privileged future, a sense of entitlement to prosperity and power that stems from our very identity as a chosen people. But the millennial promise has never meant the same thing to all Americans. 3

     The revolutionary crisis was a particularly fertile moment for millennial aspirations that could not be easily reconciled under the capacious umbrella of "Christian republicanism."⁴ For a slave facing a lifetime of servitude and the hardening of racial attitudes in the late eighteenth century, the millennium meant, literally, freedom. For nativist Indians, facing communal dislocation and the collapse of traditional folkways, the millennium meant a war of red against white and the rebirth of ancient traditions out of the ashes of European civilization.⁵ For the "black regiment," the legion of Congregational clergy who served the Continental Army in support of the rebellion, the millennium meant national independence and the rejection of European cultural and political arrogance.⁶ One man's heaven was another's hell: the slaveowning patriarchs who ruled the new republic and introduced their bondspeople to the promises of Christianity were horrified when slaves turned the Bible against them and preached the destruction of all whites, as Nat Turner did in 1831. 4

     For all its internal contradiction and apocalyptic potential, the millennial strand in revolutionary political culture did not (until 1860, at least) divide white Americans into lasting political or intellectual enmities. When viewed from abroad, revolutionary millennialism looks remarkably unrevolutionary. There were, outside Indian country, few inspired individuals preaching imminent death and destruction, no crowds of agitated citizens gathering en masse for the Apocalypse. Rather, millennial exegesis was primarily the preserve of writers—ministers and theologians, as well as literate lay people—not charismatic prophets. 5

     The contrast with Europe in the same time period is striking. If we look at the British political landscape in the 1790s, we see a parade of arresting public figures who proclaimed themselves to be prophets of God. From Richard Brothers, whose intemperate calls for the overthrow of the British monarchy landed him in an insane asylum in 1795, to Joanna Southcott, whose "mystical pregnancy" in 1814 captivated the London reading public, the history of millennialism in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century is dominated by inspired prophets and their popular followings. Learned publications on the finer points of biblical exegesis poured out of London's presses from the 1780s to the 1810s, to be sure, but this flood of printed matter was animated by the presence of living prophets who embodied the allegorical figures of the biblical texts in their very persons. While churchmen were busily speculating on the meaning of the mysterious "woman clothed with the sun" who appears in the twelfth chapter of Revelation, a host of female prophets were laying claim to that identity—Southcott, Mother Buchan, Dorothy Gott, Sarah Flaxmer, all proclaimed themselves the "Woman of Revelation" come to redeem a fallen nation. Southcott's followers numbered in the tens of thousands, testimony to the enormous popular interest in millenarianism that swept Britain in these years of political repression and continental war.⁷ In France, Catherine Theot declared herself to be the "New Eve" who was sent to deliver the world from the transgressions of the first Eve; her compatriot Suzette Labrouse boldly announced that the regeneration of the world would occur when she was miraculously elevated to heaven.⁸ 6

     Such charismatic figures are rare in the annals of eighteenth-century North American millenarianism. There were occasional sightings of the Messiah, as when one Nat Smith "proceeded to assume & declare himself to be the Most High God and wore a cap with the word GOD inscribed on its front," but few were taken seriously.⁹ The best-known prophet of the revolutionary era, Jemima Wilkinson, or the Publick Universal Friend, attracted a small following in her native New England but was largely unknown outside the region. Forsaking public acclaim after a brief but unsuccessful preaching tour, she retreated with a handful of followers in 1790 to western New York, where she established a community she called "New Jerusalem" and lived out the remainder of her life in relative obscurity. Not surprisingly, her prophetic career left few traces in the millennial projects of the postrevolutionary era.¹⁰ Dozens of local millenarian sects did spring up in the fertile soil of rural New England in the 1770s and 1780s, as Stephen Marini notes, but these tended to be short-lived religious communities that were unable to translate the inchoate anxieties and hopes of their impoverished followers into a national movement for millennial change. Out of these localized sects grew the Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing) and the Freewill Baptists, two of the most successful evangelical movements of the early nineteenth century, but in the process of institutional consolidation the charismatic powers of the sects' founders were diffused and ultimately transformed into theological abstractions.¹¹ 7

     The clearest example of the fate of would-be prophets in revolutionary America is that of Ann Lee: proclaiming herself to be either the Second Coming of Christ in female form or the "Woman of Revelation" (depending on which sources one credits), Lee's status as a charismatic figure was uncertain and unstable. She published nothing in her own lifetime, so the Shaker community had to rely largely on memory and oral testimony about Lee's spiritual gifts until the society authorized a retrospective biography of its founder in 1816. Whatever her original aspirations may have been, it is clear that in the years following her death in 1782 her role as a prophet was deliberately suppressed by the Shaker leadership. Successive editions of Testimonies of the Life and Character of Mother Ann Lee downplayed Lee's charismatic powers (the gifts of healing, speaking in tongues, communing with the spirits of the dead) and emphasized instead her nurturing role as "Mother Ann." In the process, Lee's status as the female godhead was transposed into a theological principle of dual divinity. Not Lee herself but the principle of "female divinity" became the cornerstone of Shaker theology and practice as the sect entered the nineteenth century.¹² Here again, there was scant room for an inspired prophet (especially a female one) in the American millenarian tradition. 8

     In the absence of a charismatic figure to galvanize public emotion, millennial expectations remained fairly subdued, if immanent, in revolutionary America. When inspired messengers did come forward, reaction could be swift and violent: no one knew better than the Delaware, whose villages were turned upside down in the 1760s by the nativist preachings of Neolin, how quickly the embers of millenarian despair could be ignited into a full-blown conflagration by the presence of a real prophet. But with so many mainstream religious figures and periodicals eager to satisfy the public desire for eschatological narratives in their sermons and treatises, millenarian fever could be safely contained in the world of print rather than being transformed into action. The sheer printedness of so much millennial speculation in the 1780s and 1790s stripped apocalyptic predictions of much of their urgency and violence; Americans could read about the coming battle with the Anti-Christ and the establishment of the millennium without having to act on their fears or hopes, secure in the knowledge that others were being vigilant on their behalf. A kind of vicarious millenarianism thus lulled white Americans into the posture of complacent expectancy that has characterized the mainstream religious mood in this country ever since. Somehow, sometime, the millennium will come: and when it does, Americans as a nation and a people feel relatively confident that they will be among the Elect at the end of time.¹³ 9

     We can see this dynamic at work in the transformation of one of the most recognizable biblical figures, the "Woman of Revelation," into an allegory of American exceptionalism during the revolutionary era. While there were few American candidates for this mysterious character, in contrast to the European prophetic scene, the figure of the "Woman" appears with some frequency in millennial tracts—but not in reference to a flesh-and-blood female prophet. Rather, it is America itself that assumes this persona. David Austin's 1794 compendium of millennial texts offers a stirring image of America as the Woman of Revelation. "See, on the wings of a bounteous providence, how she is wafted across the Atlantic, and settled in these peaceful American abodes!" Victorious over the "Protestant Dragon," who "vomited forth for the destruction of the woman in the American wilderness" a "flood of troops, armies, and fleets," the Woman succeeds in fulfilling the scriptural prophecy by giving birth to the "Man-child"—the new republic. 10

Behold the regnum montis, the kingdom of the mountain, begun on the Fourth of July, 1776, when the birth of the MAN-CHILD—the hero of civil and religious liberty took place in these United States . . . Follow him, in his strides across the Atlantic!--See him, with his spear already in the heart of the beast!--See tyranny, civil and ecclesiastical, bleeding at every pore!¹⁴

Bombastic and patriotic, Austin's prose is typical of the kind of brisk, ready-to-hand millennial rhetoric that historians associate with the first, most optimistic phase of the American Revolution.

     Women served the visionary republic, then, more as literary tropes than as flesh-and-blood participants. Invoked to represent the vulnerability of the American revolutionary experiment, the figure of the "Woman of Revelation" served a number of rhetorical and political purposes for millennial writers. It added the emotional power of outraged femininity to the patriot cause and allowed revolutionaries to portray the English crown (the Beast) as a sexual as well as political predator. It drove home the message of secular political addresses that the soul of America was imperiled as much by its own effeminacy as by the brutal overtures of the British "dragon," and urged America to transform itself from the fragile woman of the wilderness to the sturdy "Man-child" she gives birth to. The dramatic plot of Revelation is telescoped in the American renditions of the millennial script, as America is portrayed as both the Woman and the Man-child, the former representing her colonial vulnerability and the latter her newfound strength as an independent nation. Politically, the rhetorical coupling of America with the Woman of Revelation accomplished the same ends as the secular impulse to portray Liberty as female: redefined as allegory, women's political usefulness could be safely contained in the realm of myth rather than action.¹⁵ Readers found such allegorical maneuverings very reassuring. 11

To grasp the place of millennialism, then, in revolutionary America, we have to understand the politics of reading and myth-making. American prophetic writers were engaged as much in an extended critique of the culture of print itself as in scriptural exegesis. In this, they have much to tell scholars who see the revolutionary era as a pivotal moment in the history of print culture, a moment when the acts of reading and writing became politicized to an unprecedented degree and the new nation itself was constructed along textual lines.¹⁶ Print was the medium of prophecy in the late eighteenth century, a fact of which prophets themselves were keenly aware as they sought to claim the privileges of authorship and instill the responsibilities of readership in their audience. For all their nationalist pride, American prophets were in fact following the lead of British millennialists, who elevated the art of textual prophecy to new heights during the last decades of the century. Differences of culture and politics notwithstanding, American and British millennialists shared a common conceptual vocabulary and hermeneutic position in the revolutionary era—one that locates them firmly within the orbit of the democratic public sphere as it was first described over thirty years ago by the political theorist Jürgen Habermas. 12

     The democratic or bourgeois public sphere that supposedly came into being in the reading rooms, coffeehouses, lyceums, and salons of eighteenth-century Europe and America was characterized above all by the qualities of transparency, universality, rationality, and negation of the self. Habermas contrasted the privatized authority of monarchical states, where sovereignty is maintained by "secrecy" and the suppression of ideas, to the impersonal rule of law in democratic societies, where the common good is promoted through public disclosure and the free circulation of opinions.¹⁷ The ethos of publicity that Habermas identified as the guiding principle of bourgeois civic life demanded widespread literacy and the establishment of a "republic of letters," where printed texts—shorn of the personalized traits of their authors—circulated widely among anonymous individuals who collectively imagined themselves part of a community of "unknown and in principle unknowable others," in Michael Warner's words.¹⁸ 13

     The ideal public man was thus one who rose above the entanglements of family and community to engage other men in the disinterested pursuit of universal principles through the medium of print. That such a vision of enlightened citizenship was encoded male in the gendered discourse of republican theory is now clear, thanks to the work of political theorists Joan Landes and Carole Pateman. The public sphere as it emerged in Britain and France in the eighteenth century was constructed via a series of ideological oppositions that associated the virtues of bourgeois civic life with manliness and the vices of aristocratic society with effeminacy.¹⁹ To be manly was to be open and sincere, to use language to elucidate rather than obscure truth, to create a society where abstract reason and impartial appeals to scientific knowledge determined right from wrong. To be effeminate was to conceal and equivocate, to use artifice to deceive, to rely on superstition and primitive attachments to override the public good. 14

     In such a semiotic universe, the world of religion was gendered female. Religious enthusiasm in general was derided by enlightened thinkers as a remnant of medieval superstition and fanaticism. Religious fanatics, like women, like the common people, were ruled more by their passions than their reason. If, in the republican critique, monarchies governed by the illicit powers of mystification and concealment, with the full complicity of their deluded and ignorant subjects, the same was true of populist preachers who used verbal trickery to gull their credulous followers. Enthusiasts were depicted as "vulgar Mystagogues" who seduced their ignorant followers into error by their "glib, deceitful Tongue[s]," their "cloudy, intricate, and Mysterious manner of writing."²⁰ The charge of "mystagoguery" has a certain irony, considering the general charge of democratic leveling that conservative churchmen often directed against dissenters who insisted that anyone with an inner call, regardless of special knowledge or formal training, could preach to the faithful. The powerful oratory of a John Wesley or a George Whitefield, both of whom were famed for reducing their audiences—men and women alike—to tears, was often decried as a form of demagoguery. Like radical democrats, evangelists in the Whitefieldian mode used simple but emotionally powerful words and images to elicit feelings of anger, disgust, and resentment against Satan's emissaries on earth (usually the standing clergy). 15

     But whether described as demagogues or mystagogues, religious enthusiasts were condemned for using the unchecked power of language to lead true Christians (especially weak women) astray. In the essay False Prophets, the British author Henry Drummond castigated these enthusiasts for violating the ethos of publicity that was so essential to the maintenance of the public sphere. "They have come in secretly; they did not begin by proclaiming their doctrines publicly in the open streets, in the places of greatest concourse," he complained. Unlike "true preachers," who "proclaim from the house-tops, in the market-places, in the great assemblies, and concourse of the people," false prophets "creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts." In these secret spaces, false prophets speak the degraded language of courtiers. "This false teaching they effect by babbling; that is, waging a war of words, quibbling upon terms and expressions, instead of rightly dividing, dissecting the word of truth, so as to leave it open, and its very entrails exposed to the view of all."²¹ Drummond's tirade, characteristic of many written after the prophetic frenzy of the early 1800s, concisely summarized the anti-republican tendencies of radical religion. Even though he himself was no democrat, he recognized in the form and language of enthusiastic religion a serious threat to the conventions of reasoned public discourse that kept a free society from collapsing into anarchy. 16

     These, then, were the oppositions that structured the discourse of politics in the "age of revolution": reason versus mysticism, plain speaking versus "glib tongues," transparency versus concealment, enlightenment versus ignorance, manliness versus effeminacy. These were also the oppositions structuring the discourse of prophecy. Were prophets conservatives who reached backward to an archaic form of authority, to the "mystery" of monarchies with their secret societies and closed systems of knowledge, or democrats who shrewdly used the print culture of the new bourgeois public sphere to proclaim a message of spiritual equality? Did they speak in the arcane language of the Old Testament patriarchs or in the modern tones of enlightened republicanism? Were they, to use the terminology of the day, demagogues who manipulated the vulgar and uninformed by a glib appropriation of the language and symbols of democratic politics or mystagogues who seduced the weak and credulous through the exploitation of primitive religious passions? 17

     The answer depended largely on the gender of the prophet. Male and female prophets assumed different audiences for their texts, positioned themselves differently as divine oracles, and expounded radically different models of reading. Prophets and prophetesses, in other words, enacted different versions of spiritual "citizenship" that turned many conventional assumptions about the relationship between language and authority on their head. By making the act of interpretation itself a principal object of study, prophets and their followers contributed to broader political discussions about the rights of subjects to know and interpret the laws that bound them. The same question that animated prophetic discourse—who has access to truth?—was at the heart of the political controversies of the late eighteenth century in both Britain and America. These debates pitted reason against inspiration, literacy against experience, knowledge against secrecy, and—often—men against women. Male prophets tried to find an uneasy middle ground between secular republican politics and the mysteries of faith. Female prophets, by contrast, rejected wholeheartedly the linguistic and epistemological precepts of enlightened republicanism while insisting that they, too, spoke for the common people. 18

The ultimate symbol of democratic politics was, of course, Thomas Paine, whose writings introduced a new literary style to hundreds of thousands of readers. Paine's objective was to open up public life to all men by breaking down the linguistic barriers (the "bewitching bonds . . . of enticing eloquence," as one democrat put it) of class and custom.²² In England, Paine's direct counterpart in the world of religious prophecy, a "republican prophet" if such a thing could be said to exist, was James Bicheno, whose measured writings in the 1790s and early 1800s injected a degree of gentility and rationality into prophetic discourse. An enthusiastic supporter of both the American and the French revolutions, and of political reform at home, Bicheno was a consistent spokesman for the expansion of knowledge and learning throughout the European continent. Disclaiming any direct access to divine revelation ("I am no prophet," he declared),²³ he sought to provide a commonsense "translation" of the prophetic scriptures for his readers. "I make no pretensions to any extraordinary qualifications for the interpretation of Prophecy," he insisted; "If I have any true light, and be not deceived by the illusions of fancy, it is derived from the source which is open to all."²⁴ Through the use of natural reason, the "mazes of these wonderful visions may be treated with precision" and their predictions enlisted in the service of democratic reform.²⁵ The bulk of his writings consisted of simple translations of the arcane symbolism of the prophecies into concrete historical and contemporary referents. 19

     Bicheno was as disdainful of his more mystical counterparts as his republican allies, and he tried to distance himself from both the "dreams" of Joanna Southcott and the "visions" of Richard Brothers.²⁶ Yet he shared more with Brothers, in particular, than either man would perhaps have wished to admit. On most counts, Richard Brothers—certifiable lunatic and political cause célèbre of the 1790s—inhabited a world far removed from that of republican politics. Brothers' intemperate calls for a political revolution that would place him at the head of a reconstituted Hebrew nation as king and high priest inspired little confidence in republican circles, and his rabid hatred of the commercial classes made him an unreliable ally for those middling groups who favored a reformist agenda. Yet he drew unabashedly on the Painite tradition of plain speaking in disseminating his prophetic visions to the public. In the preface to his principal text, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times, Brothers spoke frankly of his status as the chosen one. "[W]hen I began to write, I believed it necessary to adopt the same language as the Scripture does, regularly imitating it in the words—ye, thee, and thou; but God spoke to me in a vision of the night, and said—'Write in the same manner as I always speak to you, write as other men do, write according to the Custom of the Country you live in: you will then be better attended to, and what you write will be more easily understood.'"²⁷ In blunt, simple language, Brothers' writings—like those of Bicheno—laid out a prophetic key to current events that any reader could understand. Promising to "remove the Covering of secrecy" that had hitherto prevented his fellow citizens from understanding the prophetic scriptures, Brothers' pamphlets constitute a catalogue of names, dates, places, and events that are unusually specific by the standards of the genre.²⁸ The "loud and unusual Thunder" heard in January 1791 was none other than "the voice of the Angel" of Revelation proclaiming destruction upon the city of London; the French Revolution was a direct fulfillment of the Book of Daniel.²⁹ 20

     Such frank language represented the triumph of reason over priestcraft for his many admirers. Whereas "the priests have, as it best suited their interests, opinions or inclination, introduced a set of dogmas and abstruse, metaphysical mysteries, which the people have been wont to imagine too sacred for their inquiry," argued John Crease, Brothers wrote "in all the familiarity of conversation"—as one man to another.³⁰ His testimony was, in William Sales's view, a "plain and honest language, void of equivocation," not the "FLATTERY and FALSEHOOD" of priests and magistrates.³¹ Critics, not surprisingly, ridiculed the prosaic quality of Brothers' "celestial compositions." "When the final sentence of destruction against London is sealed," sneered Henry Spencer, "then the following words will appear in the Heavens, written in gigantic characters: 'IT IS DONE.' How sublimely simple the expression! how tremendously laconic! 'It is all over, my boys! you are done up.'"³² 21

     Even more than their British counterparts, American male prophets articulated a radical political agenda to the dissemination of plain prophetic truths throughout the reading public. Benjamin Gale, for whom "the whole tenor of Divine Revelations appears to originate from one general contest and struggle between rulers, for an undue extension of power, and the ruled, in order to maintain their natural and constitutional rights," understood this eternal political struggle of liberty against power in linguistic terms as well, as a battle between allegorical and literal readings of the divine scriptures. "There has long been a strange disposition among men to convert some of the most plain and simple doctrines of revelation into allegory, metaphor and mystery . . . and from this source, the doctrines of revelation are often rendered dark, intricate, mysterious and unintelligible, to the great joy and sport of infidels." False prophets, like tyrannical rulers, use "unintelligible jargon" to lead the common people astray.³³ Another ardent republican prophet, William Scales, styled himself an American Jesus, of lowly origins and simple understanding. Disdaining the "flowery elevated stile" of the learned world, he urged his readers to "read this piece with candour . . . without quibbling, carping, or wrestling reason and scripture," for those who "are not pleased with plain language are in a state of spiritual death." Scales's pamphlet endorsed the revolutionary ideal of universal enlightenment: "I know indeed the arts of your spiritual task masters; they will, with their beguiling words . . . endeavour to keep you in ignorance. But let me beseech you to see for yourselves; don't give up your understandings to other men."³⁴ 22

     The best example of this fusion of republican and millennial language can be found in the writings of David Austin, perhaps the closest thing America had to a charismatic prophet in the topsy-turvy decade of the 1790s. Recovering from a near fatal bout with scarlet fever in 1796, Austin—then a well-respected Presbyterian preacher in Elizabethtown, New Jersey—heard the voice of God calling him to the prophetic office. "I beheld the blessed Jesus as our elder brother," he recounted in his journal; "Here I seemed to stand, stripped of myself, and of all self-dependence, looking faintly at the blood which seemed to have issued from the Saviour's side." In this vision, he was directed to read the third chapter of Zechariah, which "sent faintness into my soul and weakness into my bones . . . So powerful was the impression of that chapter upon my mind . . . that it dropped me to the floor, and produced the self-abasement of which the journal hath spoken. The character and standing of Joshua was presented as my own."³⁵ What did it mean for Austin to take on the role of Joshua to the American people? As he describes his prophetic "office," his responsibilities were largely those of a republican publicist rather than a charismatic seer: he initiated a project to collect and publish the sermons of various evangelical clergymen (the first four volumes of The American Preacher) in order to disseminate Christian literature more widely throughout the country; he founded a magazine, The Christian Herald, or the Union Magazine, which became the leading periodical of millennial thought in the early 1800s; and he circulated a proposal for a national "concert of prayer" in which Americans in their individual homes and communities would pray as one at a designated hour—a perfect expression of the anonymous public sphere. Austin's claims to prophetic status thus rested on his efforts to circulate national texts and to create an imagined community of Christians via collective reading and prayer.³⁶ 23

     No more stirring rendition of the "visionary republic" as a Habermasian public sphere can be found than in Samuel Hopkins's learned Treatise on the Millennium, which was published three years before David Austin had his near encounter with death. In Hopkins's vision of the millennium, learning and print combine to create a universally enlightened society. "Those things which now appear intricate and unintelligible, will then appear plain and easy. Then public teachers will be eminently burning and shining lights . . . And the conversation of friends and neighbors, when they meet, will be full of instruction and they will assist each other in their inquiries after the truth, and in pursuit of knowledge." Everyone will have "sufficient leisure to pursue and acquire learning of every kind that will be beneficial to themselves and to society." Universal brotherhood will be facilitated by the creation of a single universal language; "In the Millennium, all will probably speak one language . . . And that language will be taught in all schools, and used in public writings, and books shall be printed; and in a few years will become the common language, understood and spoken by all." The withering away of national and linguistic differences will have the happy effect of "render[ing] books very cheap, and easy to be obtained by all." In time, this "universality of language will tend to cement the world of mankind so as to make them one in a higher degree."³⁷ Thomas Paine could not have said it better. 24

     If the emphasis on plain language was particularly pronounced among American male prophets, it was also more closely tied to a robust tradition of oral address that persisted in America well into the nineteenth century. The "Prophet Nathan" spoke for many American writers when he issued a simple plea to his readers: "Will you suffer me, as a friend, to converse with you (if not personally, yet with my pen), about your difficulties?" The art of conversation, however encoded in print, was still the paramount ideal of communication in revolutionary and postrevolutionary America, and writers strove to simulate spoken conventions as closely as possible in their written texts.³⁸ Simon Hough addressed his audience through a series of imagined dialogues between himself and a "hireling" minister, enlisting both their moral and political sympathies on behalf of liberty of conscience.³⁹ David Austin published numerous pamphlets in the form of epistolary exchanges, which enabled him to carry on conversations with real and imagined correspondents over the finer points of prophetic interpretation. 25

     In contrast, British writers in the tradition of Brothers and Bicheno were much more self-consciously immersed in the expanding world of print culture, which formed not only the medium but the message of their republican brand of prophecy. As much as the simple language of Brothers' writings, his reliance on new modes of dissemination ("the penny-post!" marveled Henry Spencer⁴⁰) angered his many detractors. Circulating first among the highest echelons of state power and spiraling outward to the very margins of British political culture, Brothers' texts were intended for the same public then being courted by the London Corresponding Society and other radical organizations. As scribe to the Lord, Brothers translated the oral tradition of revealed Christianity into print in the same way that the corresponding societies translated an inchoate popular radicalism into literate form. Such a creative appropriation of republican print culture was not unique to the lunatic fringe of British prophecy. Indeed, one could say that late eighteenth-century prophecy was itself the product of an expanded print culture; William Reid, for one, blamed the spread of both infidelity and religious heresy on the widespread availability of cheap print. "We have seen the principles of Infidelity transferred from books to men; from dead characters to living subjects," and the result was a flood of blasphemous literature. "Prophecies . . . teem from the British press, some of them in weekly numbers, till government, perfectly aware of these inflammatory means, prudently transferred the prince of prophets [Brothers] to a mad-house."⁴¹ James Bicheno penned an extensive peon to the liberating effects of the print revolution in his final pamphlet, which appeared in 1817. He chose as his main text the tenth chapter of Revelation, in which an angel descends to earth holding a "little book open in his hand." For Bicheno, the book the angel held represented the "invention of printing," making this "one of the most sublime visions in all the Apocalypse."⁴² 26

     No wonder, then, that so many male prophetic writers in England and America embraced the idea of revolution with such enthusiasm. Their vision of the millennium corresponded so closely with the vision of republican liberty espoused by political radicals that we can speak of a shared sensibility uniting men across the political and religious spectrum regardless of denomination. Deists and evangelicals made common cause to defend the emerging public sphere against its numerous enemies, political and spiritual, who would reduce the republic of letters to the Tower of Babel. William Scales, in his millenarian manifesto The Confusion of Babel Discovered, turned the tricks of these false prophets against themselves, and in the process offers us a wonderfully wicked counter-image to contrast to the millennial hopes of Samuel Hopkins. "I know that I have as good a right to form words as others; especially when the words I form are expressive of the tricks of the deceivers," he argued cleverly. "The word bamboozlement I formed from the verb to bamboozle, which word means to deceive a man out of common sense by much fair speeches, by much insinuation, much sophistical argumentation and pretensions of friendship . . . By the word cajolement, I mean the fair, the beguiling, the enchanting speeches and conversation of false teachers."⁴³ Not a universal language but a confusion of tongues was the fruit of false teachers. 27

This anti-republican vision was not a mere abstraction or a clever play on words, but was embodied in the practices and beliefs of female prophets. While less visible as public personages than their European counterparts, female prophets and their sects did serve the new American republic in another way: as negative images of the idealized public sphere that male prophets and male republicans were busily erecting in the aftermath of revolution. David Hudson accused Jemima Wilkinson of fleeing into the wilderness of upstate New York in order to isolate her deluded followers from the virtues of enlightened society. "To emigrate with her followers into an entire wilderness, where, as she supposed, they would remain for a long time without the means of ordinary instruction, and in a great measure cut off from a constant intercourse with an enlightened community," he argued, "seemed more likely to perpetuate her dominion."⁴⁴ But it was Ann Lee in particular who was the prime target of patriot writers seeking to discredit the anti-republican world of female mystagoguery. Lee's fault (according to her numerous critics) was that she was, first of all, not American but British and hence of suspect political affiliation; and second, that she instituted a very authoritarian mode of spiritual leadership by her claims to special charismatic powers. "To be a body of more than two thousand people, having no will of their own, but governed by a few Europeans conquering their adherents into the most unreserved subjection, argues some infatuating power; some deep, very deep design at bottom," warned Amos Taylor. "The Mother, it is said, obeys God through Christ; European elders obey her; American laborers obey them."⁴⁵ Another apostate, Reuben Rathbun, explained that he was freed from Mother Ann's dominion only when he took up the Bible and read it for himself. "I was astonished with myself that ever I imbibed such absurd ideas; but the reason was, I never searched the scriptures to see if these things were so, but believed and received everything I heard without giving myself liberty to doubt the truth of it." Because the Shaker Elders forbade their followers from reading any books, Rathbun charged, the Believers were "vicious in their natures and ungovernable."⁴⁶ 28

     Critics reserved their sharpest attacks for the distinctive Shaker mode of worship, however, in which chaos and impropriety prevailed. "When they meet together for their worship," another apostate wrote, "some will be singing, each one his own tune; some without words, in an Indian tone, some sing jigg tunes, some tunes of their own making, in an unknown mutter, which they call new tongues . . . till the different tunes, groaning, jumping, dancing, drumming, laughing, talking, and fluttering, shouting, and hissing, makes a perfect bedlam; this they call the worship of God."⁴⁷ Shaker worship thus presented itself as the perfect antithesis of Hopkins's well-ordered millennium—despotic, singular, and unintelligible. It is not surprising that Lee and her closest disciples were briefly imprisoned for treason in 1780, and that charges of loyalism continued to dog the sect throughout its early years. 29

     In retrospect, it is easy to see why these female-headed millenarian sects were accused of harboring anti-republican sentiments. After all, as Ruth Bloch argues, in many respects the ideas and practices of the Shakers and the Universal Friends were diametrically opposed to those of the American revolutionary movement. Both sects rejected history and reason, even (in the case of Lee) the Bible itself, as guides to the future in favor of the word of inspired prophets who claimed to be reincarnations of Christ. Both rejected traditional family and gender roles, although here the androgynous persona of Jemima Wilkinson and the Shaker conception of the dual-gendered godhead complicates any straightforward association of these two sects with antipatriarchal goals. Most damning of all, both groups portrayed themselves as "otherworldly," owing allegiance to no state but to the kingdom of God.⁴⁸ 30

     Yet it seems to me that this characterization of female millenarianism as apolitical and authoritarian is only a partial truth. The point is not that male prophets had fully made the transition to the Enlightenment, with its elevation of reason as the supreme human virtue and the denigration of intuition, superstition, and blind faith, while women prophets remained somehow caught in an older, pre-political moment. Rather, we need to question the assumption that mysticism was an archaic hermeneutic practice, unsuited to democratic political discourse. Female prophets enacted a very different version of the "visionary republic" in their sectarian movements, one that located spiritual and political authority not in the masculine rule of reason but in the feminine realm of mystical power. In so doing, they provide historians with an alternative model of democratic politics that may, in the long run, have been more appealing to a certain sector of American women (those, for instance, who would find in Spiritualism a powerful means of combating social and political ills by the mid-nineteenth century). We can see this by examining more closely the value of literacy, surely the democratic virtue par excellence, in the writings and practices of male and female millenarians. 31

     Most prophets, male and female, spoke proudly of their humble beginnings and rudimentary literary achievements, distancing themselves from the world of learned discourse even while they made effective use of the possibilities offered by the expansion of print culture. Illiteracy could be a badge of spiritual superiority for charismatic seers who spurned the world of men and human knowledge. But illiteracy had a different meaning for millenarian men and women. Simon Hough, a fiery lay millennialist from western Massachusetts, published several tirades against those "wavering, college learnt merchants of the gospel" who were leading good Christians down the path to spiritual death. The learned clergy tell men they cannot understand the prophetic scriptures because they are illiterate; "because men cannot go to college, and by human learning obtain this spirit of discernment, and for fear of losing their lucrative employment, [the clergy] teach the world that they cannot be understood." Acknowledging the impossibility of understanding the Book of Revelation without the "dictates of the same spirit which dictated the penning of it," that is, without an internal spiritual guide, Hough insisted that this "spirit of discernment" could be obtained by human learning. All that is needed is for men to read the Bible for themselves. "O my brethren of the laity," he pleaded, "take heed to yourselves, put no trust in man, but read your Bibles."⁴⁹ The virtue of illiteracy, in other words, does not reside in forsaking the Bible in favor of direct inspiration but rather in rejecting the tutelage of learned men who pretend to have special knowledge of divine laws. The act of reading is, for male prophets, the supreme act of self-enlightenment, that which frees ordinary men from the dead hand of tradition and the sophistry of "hireling" ministers. "Blessed is he that READETH," Benjamin Gale proclaimed.⁵⁰ 32

     The "illiteracy" of female sectarian movements was of a very different order. Here, American and British prophetesses diverged on one crucial point: in the United States, women like Wilkinson and Lee rejected the presuppositions of print culture altogether in reaching for a spiritual power beyond the written word, while in England women like Joanna Southcott and Sarah Flaxmer cleverly exploited the technologies of print to proclaim a new Word, one rooted more in the medieval and Renaissance traditions of mystical writing than in the linguistic conventions of a Habermasian public sphere.⁵¹ For American female sectarians, reading—divine texts or even the words of the founder—was discouraged and at times actively suppressed; the emphasis in these movements was on oral communication, on spiritual conversation between individuals who could see and touch one another. Those who were divinely inspired had special verbal powers (Ann Lee, though unable to read, was said to be able to speak fluently as many as seventy-two languages) that both set them apart from ordinary believers and allowed them to translate the spirit's message to their audiences.⁵² The ability to "speak in tongues" became a hallmark of Shaker worship after Lee's death, a form of supernatural communication that was understood to supersede more conventional modes of access to God's word, including the Bible. For the Shakers, all printed texts were false representations of the true "word" of God, which could be known only in the hearts of believers. Lee herself became a kind of "living Bible" to her followers ("I am Ann the Word," she declared), and she called her disciples "my epistles, read and known of all men."⁵³ Refusing for years to contaminate the society's tenets and practices by committing them to print, Lee initiated a crusade in 1782–1783 against formal learning that ultimately led to book burning.⁵⁴ Only in 1808, more than half a century after the founding of the society in England, did the Shakers agree to issue a public statement of their faith. As the preface of this work stated, "in all this time of sixty years, the testimony [of the saints] hath been verbal . . . without any written creed or form of government relating to ourselves." Even now, the Shakers insisted, "we are far from expecting, or even wishing any of our writings to supersede the necessity of a living testimony . . . for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."⁵⁵ In like manner, Jemima Wilkinson in her one published work condemned all who are "begotten out of the letter" as unclean scribes and Pharisees, and promised to redeem America in the same manner as Jesus redeemed the Apostles: by the spirit rather than by the "book."⁵⁶ 33

     This wholesale rejection of books and reading in favor of immediate inspiration set the Shakers and the Universal Friends apart from their male sectarian counterparts. However much they scorned college-educated ministers, no male millenarian ever extended this critique of book-learning to the Bible itself. In an age when women generally had much lower literacy rates than men, and in which debates over the benefits of female education still took place under the shadow of a longstanding association of learned women with sexual and moral deviance, it makes sense that some female millenarians would offer a vision of the "New Jerusalem" in which literacy was irrelevant and even harmful.⁵⁷ 34

     The alternative was to redefine literacy itself, to use the advantages of print culture to undermine the very presuppositions on which that culture supposedly rested. This was the path that British female millenarians pursued, with vigor and creativity. Ann Lee's closest British counterpart—the woman who embodied anti-republican license and linguistic impropriety at its most pernicious—was Joanna Southcott. Southcott is perhaps most distinguished among her British and American counterparts by her sheer prolixity. The author of sixty-five pamphlets (and thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts), Southcott constituted a one-woman cottage industry in the world of British publishing from the time her first tract appeared in 1801 until her death in 1814. A conservative estimate puts the number of copies of her writings published between 1801 and 1816 at 108,000—a figure below that of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man but well above most other religious and political literature.⁵⁸ Her output was not only prodigious but also represented an extended reflection on the act of reading itself that placed texts and their relationship to readers at the very heart of her prophetic mission. 35

     The contemporary and historical verdicts on Joanna Southcott converge on one score: her writings are tedious, circuitous, and maddeningly opaque. Written half in verse and half in prose, her "communications" are a crazy quilt of voices (first, second, and third person), images, and phrases that manage to be repetitive and obscure at the same time. These "rhapsodies of ignorance, vulgarity, indecency, and impiety" represented to the literary and ecclesiastical establishment not the true language of the "Spirit" (who "always speaks in good grammar and good sense") but a "farrago of nonsense."⁵⁹ Even those scholars who accord the Southcottian movement some measure of intellectual respectability find Southcott's writings, and her peculiar relationship to the world of print culture in general, an enigma. Clearly, as J. F. C. Harrison notes, the fact that her prophecies circulated largely in print had "momentous consequences" for the success of the movement and for broader questions of popular literacy in an age of restricted educational opportunities. The available evidence suggests that access to her printed works was remarkably broad, and the laborious work of copying, recopying, and indexing Southcott's manuscripts that her followers undertook in her lifetime and beyond constituted "a form of pseudo-learning" for the mostly poor farmers and artisans who made up the backbone of the movement.⁶⁰ 36

     But precisely how Southcott's writings were read by her followers is a question of considerable more complexity. For woven into the very substance of her prophecies was a highly systematic if idiosyncratic discourse on the practice of reading that demands closer attention. The image of the Bible as a "sealed" book whose contents can only be understood by those who have access to the prophetess's words was the dominant motif in Southcott's writings. The Bible, Southcott told her readers, was composed of "types" and "shadows," parables whose meaning could never be discerned by human reason or scholarly investigation. The "substance" of these shadows was revealed in Southcott's communications, and in the events these writings predicted would come to pass. Rather than urging men and women to read the scriptures in light of their natural reason, as male prophets from Brothers to Austin had done, Southcott insisted that the scriptures were and must remain a "mystery." Her deliberate obscurantism infuriated men like Robert Hann, for whom her writings were an "opium" that led readers to "prostitute their judgment, and give themselves up as willing sacrifices to delusion and imposture."⁶¹ 37

     Such charges of female mystagoguery had a long provenance in the history of Anglo-American dissent, but in the case of Joanna Southcott the accusation seems more than justified. Her communications were intended to confuse and unsettle—to "stumble," in her words—those who read them.⁶² If believers could not arrive at spiritual truth through the usual means of enlightened reading, how, then, were they to be saved? Given the Southcottians' insistence that only those who had read Joanna's writings were worthy of being "sealed" for all time, an alternative practice of reading had to be devised, one that would retain the mysterious quality of the sacred texts while allowing believers some access to the divine truths contained therein. Southcott devised multiple strategies for this purpose, most prominently the age-old method of "promiscuous" reading—the random selection of passages without any order or sequence. As generations of Christians had done before her, she read the Bible by randomly opening the book and reading the first passage that appeared.⁶³ As David Hall has described, such a mode of reading was commonplace in the early modern world of reformed Protestantism, where "intensive" reading—the rereading of certain key texts, "not once or twice, but '100 and 100 times'"—was still practiced. In advocating the intensive and promiscuous reading of scripture, however, Southcott violated another central tenet of the reformed Protestant tradition—the belief that, in Hall's words, "the meaning of the Bible was self-evident. It was a book that made its message felt without there being any mediation—no intermediaries, no gloss, no message that called for interpretation. In the root sense of the word, the Bible was immediately available."⁶⁴ In Southcott's world, sacred texts (scripture and her own writings) were always and complexly mediated. 38

     Her use of highly metaphorical forms of argumentation (the vocabulary of types, shadows, parables, dreams, visions) placed her squarely in the mystical tradition of early modern dissent, yet she also invented new methods for confounding her readers that relied heavily on manipulating the technologies of print. One of the most effective, and most provocative, was her practice of deliberately scrambling texts. She admitted in her reply to a critic, Louis Mayer, that she had reprinted his accusations not as a single block of text but broken into pieces, dispersed throughout some fifty pages of print, in order to impress upon her readers the idiosyncratic placement of truth in the scriptures.⁶⁵ On another occasion, at the Spirit's express command, Southcott ordered that the explanation of certain parables be published separately: a parable of the adulterous nation introduced by Rev. Thomas Foley (in What Manner of Communication Are These?) was explained in William Sharp's tract, Sharp Answer to the World, while Sharp's parables were explained in Foley's pamphlet. The Spirit explained: "I now tell thee, these two books that I ordered to be printed in this manner, that you could not understand one without going to the other . . . perfectly so, I tell thee, stand the Scriptures of Truth!"⁶⁶ 39

     Southcott thus offered a very archaic, and very authoritarian, understanding of literacy to the British public. Her method confounds all the tenets of a Habermasian print culture: that language is transparent, that it is impersonal—that the relationship of signs to signifiers is not secured by the personal attributes or resources of any individual or social group but by the universal recognition of "rational" correspondences—and that knowledge is equally distributed throughout the population and not the special preserve of any one person or class. Whereas republican prophets like James Bicheno believed that the language of scripture was readily accessible to people across the social and political spectrum without specialized training, Southcott insisted that only true believers could understand the Word of God, and then only after it had been channeled through the interpretive faculties of an inspired prophet.⁶⁷ 40

     How "democratic" is such an approach to language? The labels "radical" and "conservative" are not particularly helpful in trying to understand Southcottian prophecy in the context of the political struggles of the age of revolution. On the one hand, her mission was extremely autocratic. She was clearly jealous of her prophetic standing and refused to acknowledge any rivals or alternative routes to salvation save through her own writings. She was equally firm in her rejection of political radicalism, arguing that the only revolution needed or possible was a spiritual one. Above all, she resurrected an archaic form of Old Testament prophecy in which authority is rooted in the charismatic appeal of a single individual rather than in the collective worship of believers.⁶⁸ On the other hand, Southcott portrayed herself as the defender of the underprivileged classes—women (especially single women) and the poor, and offered them a vision of redemption through the agency of a "poor illiterate woman."⁶⁹ She, like the Methodist clergy she so bitterly resented, was scornful of "learning" and "civilized" society, and preached the standard anti-clerical message of the day—that ministers are nothing but "hirelings" and hypocrites who know less about true Christianity than their humble followers. In a strange way, it may also be that her peculiar brand of obscurantist language was a mark of rebellion: after all, women who tried to adopt the prevailing discourses of political radicalism (such as appeals to reason and the "universal" rights of mankind) were not particularly successful in articulating a feminist vision of the polity in the 1790s.⁷⁰ Her retrieval of the archaic language of prophecy may, in the end, have constituted a far more effective challenge to democratic politics than the reasoned discourses of Mary Wollstonecraft or Hannah More. 41

     A "mystical republic" thus offered powerful support to women whose inferior mental capacities and cultural "illiteracy" did not entitle them to civic or political standing.⁷¹ What would become of the female millenarian tradition represented by Ann Lee and Joanna Southcott after the political storms of the revolutionary era had subsided? Ironically, it was republican prophets who found themselves pushed to the margins of Anglo-American political culture after 1815 rather than the mystagogues they scorned. 42

The flowering of millenarian sects in antebellum America (from the Millerites to the Mormons) represented a defiant resurgence of the mystical strand of eighteenth-century millennialism. Republican prophecy did not so much disappear as become absorbed into a potent populist brew. Paul Boyer argues that the fusion of democratic and millenarian beliefs reached its zenith in the Millerite movement of the 1840s. "Just as the Jacksonians claimed that any (white male) citizen could perform the duties of government, so the Millerites insisted that untutored believers could unravel the apocalyptic mysteries. Millerism heralded the full democratization of prophetic belief in the United States," he argues.⁷² If Millerism represents the apogee of the republican tradition of biblical exegesis, in which Every Man could read and interpret the prophetic passages for himself,⁷³ it was eclipsed in importance by the stunning success of Joseph Smith and the Mormons. Drawing on diverse intellectual resonances ranging from medieval heremeticism to eighteenth-century mesmerism and Swedenborgianism, Smith's fantastic tale of buried treasure and "lost" scriptures written in ancient hieroglyphics reached an audience eager to recapture the power of the mystical word from a disenchanted world.⁷⁴ Other prophets would follow his lead, some (like the Prophet Matthias) for their own aggrandizement and some (like Matthias's most famous convert, the ex-slave Isabella Van Wagenen, who would become the abolitionist Sojourner Truth) out of genuine concern for spiritual renewal.⁷⁵ In England, the dramatic and well-publicized death of Joanna Southcott in 1814 from what she believed to be a "mystical pregnancy" dealt a serious blow to the millennial hopes of thousands of English men and women, but despite the ridicule heaped on her believers by churchmen and journalists, would-be successors to her prophetic mantle carried her message to a new generation of British millenarians. Well into the 1830s and 1840s, new prophets like John Wroe and "Zion" Ward claimed to be Southcott's true "heir," the Man-child she had promised to produce in her dying days.⁷⁶ 43

     The mystical tradition of millennial interpretation was thus carried into a new age by a "radical underworld" of prophets and visionaries, to paraphrase Iain McCalman, despite the best efforts of republican prophets and political radicals alike in the waning decades of the eighteenth century.⁷⁷ And there it would remain, for better or worse, to vex historians to the present day. 44

Susan Juster is an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. Her previous publications include Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (1994) and (with Lisa MacFarlane) A Mighty Baptism: Race, Gender, and the Creation of American Protestantism (1996). She is currently working on a study of radical prophecy in Britain and North America during the period 1760 to 1820.

Notes

A version of this essay was presented to the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, as part of the seminar "Millenarianism and Revolution," April 1998. I am grateful to the center for the opportunity to participate in this stimulating workshop, and to Ruth H. Bloch, Michael Meranze, Jeremy Popkin, Michael Barkun, and the other participants for their helpful comments. Thanks also to Don Herzog, Susan Thorne, Valerie Kivelson, Kenneth Lockridge, and the anonymous readers of the journal for their careful criticism of earlier drafts.
¹ Boston Gazette, May 22 and 29, 1780.
² "A Farmer in the State of Massachusetts-Bay," Some Remarks on the Great and Unusual Darkness, that appeared on Friday, May 19, 1780 (Danvers, Mass., 1780), 6.
³ This paragraph is drawn from the following studies: Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (New York, 1985); Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty (New Haven, Conn., 1977); James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought in Eighteenth-Century America (New Haven, 1977); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
⁴ The phrase is Mark Noll's; see "The American Revolution and Protestant Evangelicalism," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 615–38.
⁵ For millenarian slaves, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park, Pa., 1982); Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York, 1980). For Indian prophets, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, 1992); Anthony F. C. Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York, 1969).
⁶ For accounts of the "black regiment," see Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, 1986); and Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England (New York, 1988).
⁷ W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland, 1978); J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (London, 1979); on Southcott, see James K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin, Tex., 1982).
⁸ Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore, 1975).
⁹ Ezra Stiles, Extracts from the Itineraries, 418; quoted in Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 85.
¹⁰ For two recent accounts of Wilkinson's career, see Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims, chap. 2; and Susan Juster, "'Neither Male nor Female': Jemima Wilkinson and the Politics of Gender in Revolutionary America," in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., forthcoming).
¹¹ Stephen Marini, Radical Sects in Revolutionary America (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
¹² See Jean Humez's introduction to Mother's First-Born Daughters: Early Shaker Writings on Women and Religion (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), for a discussion of how the character of Lee became transformed into the theological principle of "Holy Mother Wisdom."
¹³ As Lawrence Sweet observed in 1979, "Watching, waiting, and working for the millennium" is "America's favorite pastime." Quoted in Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 12. Most Americans watch and wait, even while a vigorous subculture of prophecy devotees actively works to prepare for the millennium. Boyer describes the culture of prophecy belief in contemporary America as a series of concentric circles, with an energetic core of true believers, a larger circle of nominal believers whose knowledge of biblical eschatology is hazy but who nevertheless believe that the millennium will come some day, and an even larger circle of secularists who disdain the doomsayers of the evangelical fringe but are shaped by that very culture in ways they scarcely recognize (12–13).
¹⁴ David Austin, The Millennium (Elizabethtown, N.J., 1794), 393–94, 413. For other examples of this metaphorical association of America with the Woman of Revelation, see Samuel Sherwood, Church's Flight into the Wilderness (New York, 1776); William Foster, True Fortitude Delineated (Philadelphia, 1776), 17; [Wheeler Case], Poems, Occasioned by Several Circumstances . . . in the Present Grand Contest of America for Liberty (New Haven, Conn., 1778), 21.
¹⁵ On the use of female allegory in the early republic, see John Higham, "Indian Princess and Roman Goddess: The First Female Symbols of America," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 100 (1990), 45–79; Jan Lewis, "'Of Every Age Sex and Condition': The Representation of Women in the Constitution," Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 359–88. As Lynn Hunt and Joan Landes have shown in the context of the French Revolution, the iconic presence of women in the symbols of revolution was a graphic reminder of their marginality in the political culture of the new republic; Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 113–19; Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 83.
¹⁶ Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif., 1993); Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
¹⁷ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, trans. (1962; Cambridge, Mass., 1989). As Habermas notes, the specific form of the "public" in Britain was "the bourgeois reading public of the eighteenth century. This public remained rooted in the world of letters even as it assumed political functions" (p. 85). For a recent study of the discursive institutions that shaped the public sphere in eighteenth-century America, see David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997).
¹⁸ Warner, Letters of the Republic, 40.
¹⁹ Landes, Women and the Public Sphere; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif., 1988); and Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford, 1989).
²⁰ For "vulgar Mystagogue," see Stafford Cleveland's description of Jemima Wilkinson in The History and Directory of Yates County (Penn Yann, N.Y., 1873), 1: 38; and the satirical poem on the Methodists, Fanatical Conversion; or, Methodism Displayed (London, 1779), vii. Methodists and Moravians were considered two of the worst offenders of the art of "mystagoguery" according to Anglican churchmen; see George Lavington, The Moravians Compared and Detected (London, 1755), iv, xiii.
²¹ Henry Drummond, False Prophets (London, 1834), 4, 6.
²² "Declaration of the Belfast Volunteers," rpt. in the Philadelphia periodical, The American Museum 10 (September 1791): 153.
²³ James Bicheno, The Fulfillment of Prophecy Farther Illustrated by the Signs of the Times (London, 1817), preface.
²⁴ Bicheno, Fulfillment of Prophecy, vi.
²⁵ James Bicheno, The Signs of the Times; or, The Overthrow of Papal Tyranny in France, the Prelude of Destruction to Popery and Despotism; but of Peace to Mankind (London, 1793), n.p.
²⁶ Bicheno, Fulfillment of Prophecy, 6.
²⁷ Richard Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times, Book the Second (London, 1794), iii.
²⁸ Brothers, Revealed Knowledge, Book the First, 53.
²⁹ Brothers, Revealed Knowledge, Book the First, 41; Book the Second, 7.
³⁰ J. Crease, Prophecies Fulfilling; or, The Dawn of the Perfect Day (London, 1795), 29, 16.
³¹ William Sales, Truth or Not Truth; or, A Discourse on Prophets (London, 1795), 3.
³² Henry Spencer, A Vindication of the Prophecies of Mr. Brothers and the Scripture Expositions of Mr. Halhed (London, 1795), 28–29.
³³ Benjamin Gale, A Brief Essay; or, An Attempt to Prove from the Prophetick Writings of the Old and New Testament, what Period of Prophecy the Church of God is now under (New Haven, Conn., 1788), 23, 56.
³⁴ William Scales, The Confusion of Bable Discovered; or, An Answer to Jeremy Belknap's Discourse upon the Lawfulness of War (1780), v–vi.
³⁵ David Austin, The Voice of God to the People of the United States, by a Messenger of Peace (Elizabethtown, N.J., 1796), 36, 49. For two contemporary descriptions of Austin's prophetic career, see William Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit (New York, 1859–69), 2: 195–206.
³⁶ See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), for a discussion of the role of print in forging a sense of national identity. The "concert of prayer" is described by Timothy Hall in his study of eighteenth-century itinerancy as an expression of the new community brought into being by the spread of commerce and print culture; Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, N.C., 1994).
³⁷ Samuel Hopkins, A Treatise on the Millennium (Boston, 1793), 59, 75–77.
³⁸ On the "elocutionary revolution" of the eighteenth century, see Fliegelman, Declaring Independence.
³⁹ Simon Hough, The Sign of the Present Time; or, A Short Treatise Setting Forth What Particular Prophecies are Now Fulfilling in the Author's Judgment (Stockbridge, Mass., 1799).
⁴⁰ Spencer, Vindication of the Prophecies, 19.
⁴¹ William H. Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis (London, 1800), iv–v, 2.
⁴² Bicheno, Fulfillment of Prophecy, 64, 69.
⁴³ Scales, Confusion of Babel Discovered, vii–viii.
⁴⁴ David Hudson, History of Jemima Wilkinson, A Preacheress of the Eighteenth Century; Containing an Authentic Narrative of Her Life and Character, and of the Rise, Progress, and Conclusions of Her Ministry (Geneva, N.Y., 1821), 50.
⁴⁵ Amos Taylor, A Narrative of the Strange Principles, Conduct, and Character of the People Known by the Name of Shakers (Worcester, Mass., 1782), 3–5.
⁴⁶ Reuben Rathbun, Reasons Offered for Leaving the Shakers (Pittsfield, Mass., 1800), 16, 24.
⁴⁷ Valentine Rathbun, An Account of the Matter, Form, and Manner of a New and Strange Religion Taught and Propagated by a Number of EUROPEANS . . . (Providence, R.I., 1781), 11–12.
⁴⁸ Bloch, Visionary Republic, 90.
⁴⁹ Simon Hough, An Alarm to the World: Dedicated to All Ranks of Men (Stockbridge, Mass., 1792), 8–9, 23.
⁵⁰ Gale, Brief Essay, 54.
⁵¹ For a discussion of the "baroque" tradition of visionary writing and its reformulation in the seventeenth century, see Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Michael B. Smith, trans. (Chicago, 1992).
⁵² Hannah Adams, An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects which have Appeared in the World from the beginning of the Christian Era to the present Day (Boston, 1784), lviii; and Rathbun, Account of the Matter, Form, and Manner of a New and Strange Religion, 6.
⁵³ Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations, and Doctrines of Our Ever Blessed Mother Ann Lee (Hancock, Mass., 1816), 26. In similar fashion, the millenarian movement headed by Mother Buchan in England substituted the "living book of life, which is the love of God displaying itself through the body of a saint" for the "dead letter" of the Bible; James Purves, Eight Letters between the People Called Buchanites and a Teacher near Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1785), 49. Mother Buchan herself was also described as a "living bible"; Satan's Delusions: A Poem on the Buchanites (London, 1784), 9.
⁵⁴ Clarke Garrett, Spirit Possession and Popular Religion from the Camisards to the Shakers (Baltimore, 1987), 198.
⁵⁵ The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing, Containing a General Statement of All Things Pertaining to the Faith and Practice of the Church of God in this Latter-Day (Lebanon, Ohio, 1808), 12.
⁵⁶ [Jemima Wilkinson], Some Considerations, Propounded to the several Sorts and Sects of PROFESSORS of this Age . . . by a Universal Friend of Mankind (Providence, R.I., 1779), 42, 44.
⁵⁷ For debates over the wisdom of educating women, see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980), chap. 7.
⁵⁸ J. Hopkins, Woman to Deliver Her People, 84.
⁵⁹ A Letter to T. P. Foley (London, 1813), 36–38, 43, 45.
⁶⁰ Harrison, Second Coming, 88, 229. James Hopkins documents widespread ownership, or at least possession, of Southcott's pamphlets among her followers; in one congregation, for instance, the 123 believers possessed more than 1,400 copies of her works—an average of twelve per member. Hopkins, Woman to Deliver Her People, 115–16.
⁶¹ R. Hann, A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of London concerning the Heresy and Imposture of Joanna Southcott (London, 1810), 13, 7.
⁶² Joanna Southcott, A Dispute between the Woman and the Powers of Darkness (London, 1802), 4; and the communication of July 12, 1802, in the Notebook of Divine Communications and Letters (item 327), Joanna Southcott Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
⁶³ See, for example, Joanna Southcott, Prophecies: A Warning to the World, from the Sealed Prophecies of Joanna Southcott (London, 1803), 53; and Southcott, Explanation of the Parables Published in 1804 (London, 1806), 51.
⁶⁴ David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989; Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 42, 26–27.
⁶⁵ Southcott, Explanation of Parable, 55.
⁶⁶ Rev. T. P. Foley, What Manner of Communications Are These? (London, 1804); William Sharp, Sharp Answer to the World (London, 1806); Joanna Southcott, On Parables (London, 1806), 59.
⁶⁷ In this, she departed from the linguistic practices of female Methodist preachers, who—like male prophets—adopted an "ethos of simplicity" in their spoken and written performances that affirmed Methodism's theological message of universal redemption; Christine L. Krueger, The Reader's Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse (Chicago, 1992).
⁶⁸ For a persuasive account of the authoritarian and coercive nature of charismatic religious figures, see Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith.
⁶⁹ Anna Clark provides a good reading of the "feminist" implications of Southcott's theology in "The Sexual Crisis and Popular Religion in London, 1770–1820," International Labor and Working Class History 34 (1988): 56–69; see also Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 107–11.
⁷⁰ The fate of Mary Wollstonecraft's writings is a good case in point; for her reception in the United States, see Kerber, Women of the Republic, 222–31.
⁷¹ We can find evidence of a similar repudiation of enlightenment practices in the worship of African-American slaves and their descendants well into the nineteenth century. Though the desire for literacy was an important stimulus to conversion for African-American slaves in the late eighteenth century, who rightly saw in evangelical Protestantism an opportunity to capture the power of the written word for themselves, direct inspiration remained the paramount source of spiritual authority among Christianized slaves. As Albert Raboteau notes, slaves "valued the experience of God's power as the norm of Christian truth rather than the Bible"; African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture, Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, eds. (New York, 1997), 97. For a recent overview of the place of literacy in slave Christianity, see Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998).
⁷² Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 85.
⁷³ David L. Rowe, "Millerites: A Shadow Portrait," in The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century, Ronald Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds. (1987; Knoxville, Tenn., 1993), 1–16.
⁷⁴ John L. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (New York, 1996).
⁷⁵ Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America (New York, 1994); Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York, 1996).
⁷⁶ On Southcott's pregnancy and death, see Susan Juster, "Mystical Pregnancy and Holy Bleeding: Visionary Experience in Early Modern Britain and America," forthcoming in William and Mary Quarterly; on her successors, see Harrison, Second Coming.
⁷⁷ Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford, 1993).

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