Demagogues or mystagogues? gender and the language of prophecy in the age of democratic revolutions

American Historical Review

Volumn 104, Issue 5, 1999, Pages 1560-1581

  Juster, Susan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 37849186408     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2649351     Document Type: Article

References (110)

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);
4. Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty (New Haven, Conn., 1977);
5. James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought in Eighteenth-Century America (New Haven, 1977);
6. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
7. The phrase is Mark Noll's; see "The American Revolution and Protestant Evangelicalism," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 615-38.
8. For millenarian slaves, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park, Pa., 1982);
9. Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York, 1980).
10. For Indian prophets, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore, 1992);
11. Anthony F. C. Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York, 1969).
12. 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);
13. and Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England (New York, 1988).
14. W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland, 1978);
15. J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850 (London, 1979);
16. 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).
17. Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore, 1975).
18. Ezra Stiles, Extracts from the Itineraries, 418;
19. quoted in Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 85.
20. 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).
21. Stephen Marini, Radical Sects in Revolutionary America (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
22. 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."
23. As Lawrence Sweet observed in 1979, "Watching, waiting, and working for the millennium" is "America's favorite pastime." Quoted in Paul Boyer, Wlien 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).
24. David Austin, The Millennium (Elizabethtown, N.J., 1794), 393-94,
25. 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);
26. William Foster, True Fortitude Delineated (Philadelphia, 1776), 17;
27. [Wheeler Case], Poems, Occasioned by Several Circumstances... in the Present Grand Contest of America for Liberty (New Haven, Conn., 1778), 21.
28. 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;
29. 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;
30. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 113-19;
31. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 83.
32. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif., 1993);
33. Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
34. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Publi&Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, trans. (1962;
35. 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).
36. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 40.
37. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif., 1988);
38. and Pateman, Tlie Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford, 1989).
39. por "vulgar Mystagogue," sec Stafford Cleveland's description of Jemima Wilkinson in The History and Directory of Yates County (Penn Yann, N.Y., 1873), 1: 38;
40. 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;
41. see George Lavington, The Moravians Compared and Detected (London, 1755), iv, xiii.
42. Henry Drummond, False Prophets (London, 1834), 4, 6.
43. "Declaration of the Belfast Volunteers," rpt. in the Philadelphia periodical, The American Museum 10 (September 1791): 153.
44. >23 James Bicheno, The Fulfillment of Prophecy Farther Illustrated by the Signs of the Times (London, 1817), preface.
45. Bicheno, Fulfillment of Prophecy, vi.
46. 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.
47. Bicheno, Fulfillment of Prophecy, 6.
48. Richard Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times, Book the Second (London, 1794), iii.
49. Brothers, Revealed Knowledge, Book the First, 53.
50. Brothers, Revealed Knowledge, Book the First, 41; Book the Second, 7.
51. J. Crease, Prophecies Fulfilling; or, The Dawn of the Perfect Day (London, 1795), 29, 16.
52. William Sales, Tmlh or Not Tnith; or, A Discourse on Prophets (London, 1795), 3.
53. Henry Spencer, A Vindication of the Prophecies of Mr. Brothers and the Scripture Expositions of Mr. Halhcd (London, 1795), 28-29.
54. 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.
55. William Scales, The Confusion of Bable Discovered; or, An Answer to Jeremy Belknap's Discourse upon the Lawfulness of War (1780), v-vi.
56. David Austin, The Voice of God to the People of the United States, by a Messenger of Peace (Elizabethtown, N.J., 1796), 36, 49.
57. For two contemporary descriptions of Austin's prophetic career, see William Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit (New York, 1859-69), 2: 195-206.
58. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983),
59. 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).
60. Samuel Hopkins, A Treatise on the Millennium (Boston, 1793), 59, 75-77.
61. On the "elocutionary revolution" of the eighteenth century, see Fliegelman, Declaring Independence.
62. Simon Hough, The Sign of the Present Time; or, A Short Treatise Setting Forth Illicit Particular Prophecies arc Now Fulfilling in the Author's Judgment (Stockbridge, Mass., 1799).
63. Spencer, Vindication of the Prophecies, 19.
64. William H. Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis (London, 1800), iv-v, 2.
65. Bicheno, Fulfillment of Prophecy, 64, 69.
66. Scales, Confusion of Babel Discovered, vii-viii.
67. David Hudson, History of Jemima Wilkinson, A Preacliercss 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.
68. 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.
69. 4f> Reuben Rathbun, Reasons Offered for Leaving the Shakers (Pittsfield, Mass., 1800), 16, 24.
70. 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.
71. >s Bloch, Visionary Republic, 90.
72. Simon Hough, An Alarm to the World: Dedicated to All Ranks of Men (Stockbridge, Mass., 1792), 8-9, 23.
73. Gale, Brief Essay, 54.
74. 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 Sixteentli and Seventeenth Centuries, Michael B. Smith, trans. (Chicago, 1992).
75. 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), Iviii;
76. and Rathbun, Account of the Matter, Form, and Manner of a New and Strange Religion, 6.
77. Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations, and Doctrines of Our Ever Blessed Mother Ann Lee (Hancock, Mass., 1816), 26.
78. 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";
79. Satan's Delusions: A Poem on the Buchanites (London, 1784), 9.
80. Clarke Garrett, Spirit Possession and Popular Religion from the Camisards to the Shakers (Baltimore, 1987), 198.
81. The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing, Containing a General Statement of All Things Pertaining to the Faith and Practice of the Church of Cod in this Latter-Day (Lebanon, Ohio, 1808), 12.
82. [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.
83. 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., 19SO), chap. 7.
84. J. Hopkins, Woman to Deliver Her People, 84.
85. A Letter to T. P. Folcy (London, 1813), 36-38, 43, 45.
86. Harrison, Second Coming, 88, 229. James Hopkins documents widespread ownership, or at least possession, of Southcott's pamphlets among her followers;
87. 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.
88. 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.
89. Joanna Southcott,/! Dispute behveen 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.
90. See, for example, Joanna Southcott, Prophecies: A Warning to the World, from the Sealed Prophecies of Joanna Southcott (London, 1803), 53;
91. and Southcott, Explanation of the Parables Published in 1804 (London, 1806), 51.
92. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989; Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 42, 26-27.
93. Southcott, Explanation of Parable, 55.
94. Rev. T. P. Foley, IVliat Manner of Communications Are These! (London, 1804);
95. William Sharp, Sharp Answer to the World (London, 1806);
96. Joanna Southcott, On Parables (London, 1806), 59.
97. 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).
98. For a persuasive account of the authoritarian and coercive nature of charismatic religious figures, see Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith.
99. 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;
100. see also Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 107-11.
101. 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.
102. 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.
103. 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).
104. Boyer, Wlien Time Shall Be No More, 85.
105. David L. Rowe, "Millerites: A Shadow Portrait," in Tlie Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century, Ronald Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds. (1987; Knoxville, Tenn., 1993), 1-16.
106. John L. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (New York, 1996).
107. Paul Johnson and Scan Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-century America (New York, 1994);
108. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojonmer Tmth: A Life, a Symbol (New York, 1996).
109. 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.
110. lain McCalman, Radical Undenvorld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pomographers in London, 1795-1840 (Oxford, 1993).