Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  She was already a legend in 1810, notorious for her radical ideas about gender and spirituality. A tale was told of her that she had responded to a challenge to prove her divine power by walking on water. She came to the pond’s edge, the story went, and demanded of the crowd, “Do you have faith?” When they answered in the affirmative, she declared, “If ye have faith, ye need no other evidence.” In another version, the viewers were doubters and the Friend pronounced that “without thy faith I cannot do it.” An almost identical story would later be told about another divinely inspired prophet named Joseph Smith Jr.

  Commissioner Eddy reported that “her dress, countenance, and demeanor are masculine in a great degree.” She opposed war and did not favor marriage. “She veils herself in mystery,” he said, and “represents herself as a spirit from heaven.”

  After the commissioners returned from their expedition, they enthusiastically backed the idea of an inland canal across the state. Boats traveling such a waterway would proceed more safely than those on the lake. Propelled by reliable animal power, untroubled by storms, they could gather and distribute merchandise at towns along the route. Only a long, excavated channel, the members thought, would fit the bill.

  The commission recommended that the great project be funded, built, and operated by the government. “Too great a national interest is at stake,” they said, to entrust the undertaking to a private company, which, in seeking a profit, “would defeat the contemplated cheapness of transportation.” They asserted that “large expenditures can be made more economically under public authority.” They left open the question of whether the state or federal government should bear the cost.

  Gouverneur Morris, their senior member, wrote up the report they submitted in March 1811. A month later the state legislators passed the first canal act, allotting $15,000 to pay for the preliminary steps, the most important of which was to pin down a source of financing.

  The great project immediately stumbled. Years of conflict with Great Britain came to a head. War broke out. By the end of 1812, western New York was on the front line of the fighting. All thoughts of building a canal there were put on hold.

  Hair-hung

  The outdoor meeting that the canal commissioners had seen near Lyons was a sign of a tectonic spiritual change in America. The Great Awakening of the 1730s had encouraged the semi-mystical, born-again experience that became central to evangelical faith. It had fueled the spread of Methodist ideas, which emphasized zealous evangelizing of God’s Word. But during the latter half of the eighteenth century, religion had faded from national attention. The Enlightenment-influenced founders leaned toward secularism.

  Spiritual faith came roaring back during the first decades of the nineteenth century, a period that would be known as the Second Great Awakening. It was a prolonged spasm of enthusiasm and devotion far more intense than the First, and it would leave a permanent stamp on American Christianity.

  “Outbreaks occur,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of Americans after his 1831–32 tour, “when their souls seem suddenly to burst the bonds of matter by which they are restrained and to soar impetuously towards heaven.” He found this enthusiasm most often west of the Appalachians, where “there is nothing of tradition, family feeling, or example to restrain them.”

  Tireless Methodist preachers, who roamed the backlands spreading their message one household at a time, were prominent in this transformation. On the frontier, neither clergyman nor listener had time for contemplation or deep study. The message had to be simple, short, vivid, and heartfelt. Better for the clergyman to portray the torments of the damned, than to waste time with what was known as “velvet-mouth preaching.”

  Sometimes, a group of preachers joined forces and drew religious seekers to a single location. Because some participants traveled long distances, they had no choice but to camp near the revival. These “camp meetings” typically lasted through several days of sermonizing, emotional intensity, and exaltation.

  Pioneers’ lives were a relentless routine of hard work, isolation and anxiety. When they took time off, they wanted a peak experience, not the nuanced theology of sophisticated clergymen. They wanted lurid imagery and clear options. They judged ministers by their enthusiasm, their lung power, and their ability to stir the soul. If they were going to be saved, they wanted to crash through to the divine quickly before they had to journey home and return to their chores.

  The archetype of the camp meeting had taken place at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August 1801. Barton W. Stone, a twenty-nine-year-old Presbyterian minister, led a week-long meeting that created a sensation in the backcountry. At least ten thousand seekers attended, maybe as many as twenty-five thousand. They camped in the forest and slept under tents or in wagons. Dozens of preachers proclaimed the Word simultaneously, sermonizing for hours in different parts of the camp, each competing to attract listeners. Participants were dazed by a crowd larger than any they had ever seen. They sang hymns. They shivered to preachers’ warnings, threats, and vivid depictions of eternal damnation. They were “hair-hung and breeze-shaken over the pit of hell.” Some began to tremble all over. Some danced, shouted, laughed hysterically. “The noise was like the roar of Niagara,” a participant reported.

  Those touched by the electric fervor that shot through the crowd often dropped to the ground, “slain in the spirit.” They moaned, screamed, wept, fell into trances. Egged on by cries of “Sic Satan, sic ’em!,” they dropped to all fours and barked the devil up a tree. Crowds rushed to gawk at the latest outbreak, to encourage and join manifestations of divine rapture. Amen! was the shout. Hallelujah! At night, lamps and torches turned the scene into an infernal spectacle.

  These hysterical conclaves were criticized and caricatured. Those who embraced Christ in a minute, said orthodox churchmen, would turn away from Him just as quickly. “Must a man draw his mouth out of all shape, and bellow like a bull, in order to become a Christian?” a critic demanded. With so many young, sex-starved men and women caught in prayerful passion, cynics hooted, there were “more souls begot than saved.”

  Yet the meetings represented the genuine yearning of pioneers. They did not want to be told that divine election had already decided their eternal fate. They wanted to tackle salvation barehanded, the same way they grappled with nature. They burned with the desire to feel, to be alive in the bosom of God. When Reverend Stone was successful in driving home his message, “the people appeared as just awakened from the sleep of ages.”

  Eternity

  Anticipation is hell in war. For days the thud of distant artillery worried the dreams of the American troops at Plattsburgh, New York. It was 1814 and the British army was invading America. The red-coated soldiers had marched from Canada down the western shore of Lake Champlain. They outnumbered the defenders, almost all of whom were new to the terror of armed conflict.

  The War of 1812 had not gone well for the Americans. Their efforts to invade Canada and perhaps add that territory to the union had failed. The British had crossed New York’s western frontier and captured Fort Niagara. They had marched into the nation’s capital in August and burned government buildings, including the president’s mansion; First Lady Dolley Madison had barely managed to save a full-length portrait of George Washington. In a few days, the bursting of bombs and the rockets’ red glare would challenge Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor.

  William Miller, waiting at Plattsburgh, was unsure of how he would perform when the crisis came. He had volunteered for the army when the war broke out, but he was by profession a farmer. At thirty-two, he was married and raising a crop of children. Unlike some of the men around him, Captain Miller did not murmur prayers as the British approached. He was a deist and doubted that God interfered in human affairs.

  Miller straddled two worlds. He had grown up when the humanist Enlightenment, with its high regard for knowledge and rationality, was in fashion. He had watched the
country enter the romantic age marked by sentiment and visionary speculation. Born in 1782 in the rural New York village of Low Hampton on the Vermont border, he was the son of a devout mother and a skeptical father. Although taught to fear the Lord, young Bill also read Thomas Paine’s 1794 essay The Age of Reason, an attack on romanticism and the “priestcraft” of organized religion. Paine said the Bible was “a history of wickedness.” Miller sided with the skeptics. “While I was a Deist,” he would later remember, “I could not, as I thought, believe the Bible was the word of God.”

  Like Joseph Smith Jr., William Miller grew up on a rented farm. He longed for an education “with an intensity of feeling that approached to agony.” He borrowed books from a subscription library in his hometown. A passionate reader, he soaked up pirate tales, Robinson Crusoe, and Captain James Cook’s account of his voyage to the South Seas.

  At fifteen, he finally began to attend the new school that had opened near his home. Having outpaced the other students in reading, he wrote letters for them and composed poetry. He learned arithmetic, a discipline that he would put to a unique use later in his life.

  In 1803, at the age of twenty-one, Miller married and settled near the home of his wife, Lucy, in Poultney, Vermont. He distanced himself from his pious mother and preacher grandfather. He continued to farm, but he had higher ambitions. He joined the enlightened Freemasons and dabbled in politics, winning a position as constable, then county sheriff.

  Deists—President Jefferson was one—believed that God was the prime cause of reality. But after the creation, they reasoned, the Almighty stepped back and allowed the world to operate according to natural laws. They viewed the world as a rational place. Miller agreed with them that the Bible was filled with “many contradictions and inconsistencies.” He thought that clerics used its complexity to monopolize religion.

  Miller joined the Vermont militia in 1810 and transferred to the regular army when war broke out two years later. In the late summer of 1814, his company hurried to Plattsburgh. They joined three thousand American troops to face the eight thousand British soldiers bearing down on them. A small fleet of American ships and gunboats stood guard over the town’s harbor.

  On September 11, 1814, the attack came. “What a scene!” Miller wrote in a letter home. British rockets and cannon fire slammed into the town. Sulfur stained the air. A shell burst within two feet of him, lacerating three men. He listened to “the shrieks of the dying, the groans of the wounded.” The din of guns, the bursting of bombs and the deadly whizzing of musket and cannon balls dazzled him.

  The American naval gunners bested their British counterparts and forced the enemy fleet to withdraw. Unable to hold the town without naval support, enemy commanders pulled their land forces back. The seemingly miraculous victory, along with the stubborn resistance at Fort McHenry and the Americans’ triumph at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, provided a balm for national pride in the wake of a pointless war and the desecration of their capital.

  The experience left Miller troubled. He had seen his fill of death. In addition to the slaughter of war, he had lately endured the passing of a brother and sister, then of his father and another sister. In the best of times, he was a moody man. Now he grew “moross and ill natured,” plagued by melancholy—what we would call depression.

  Deism, which reserved judgment on an afterlife, offered no solace. “To go out like an extinguished taper,” Miller wrote, “is unsupportable.” He summed up his desolation by paraphrasing Deuteronomy: “The heavens were as brass over my head and the earth as iron under my feet.”

  A spiritual change came over him. He purchased the farm his father had rented, built the house that he would occupy for the rest of his life, and encouraged his mother to give his five children religious guidance. At thirty-three, he became a patron of the local Baptist church.

  He continued to suffer the dread of death. He wanted to “cling to that hope which warrants a never ending existence.” Annihilation was a chilling thought. “Eternity, what was it? And death, why was it?”

  One Sunday in 1816, when the local pastor was absent, elders asked Miller to preach the sermon. He began to speak on “the importance of Parental Duties.” Suddenly he was overcome with emotion. The Holy Spirit entered his heart. It was not the earthshaking, heaven-opening shock experienced by Charles Finney and so many others, but his experience that day transformed Bill Miller.

  “God by his Holy Spirit opened my eyes,” he later recorded. Jesus became “my friend, and my only help,” the Bible “the lamp to my feet and light to my path.” His mind “became settled and satisfied.”

  Because he had been a notorious deist, Miller’s conversion made local news and influenced others to reconsider their unbelief. He urged his friends to save their souls by accepting Christ.

  Having become an “ornament and pillar in the church,” Miller found the religious world he reentered more chaotic than the one he remembered. Believers now felt they could and must take responsibility for their own spiritual lives. They were looking for a new God, an approachable, merciful deity, a God of the heart.

  To Miller, these yearnings were too modern. He believed in the stern, judging God of his boyhood. He believed in a God of reason. A Christian should not approach Jesus with blind faith. “To believe in such a Saviour without evidence,” he asserted, “would be visionary in the extreme.”

  Miller was no visionary. He needed proof for his beliefs. His solution was to return to the Bible. “There never was a book written,” he asserted, “that has a better connection and harmony than the Bible.” Losing taste for all other reading, he studied Scripture endlessly. “I wondered why I had not seen its beauty and glory before,” he wrote. He put aside all suppositions, commentaries, and interpretations. The Bible was “its own interpreter.” Armed with a concordance, he studied the context of each word wherever it occurred. He was determined to “harmonize all these apparent contradictions.”

  For two years, he spent “whole nights as well as days” turning pages and mulling over the verses. The more the Scriptures came into focus, the more he was able to see through the symbolic surface into the certainties at the book’s core. What he discovered astounded him. He read and reread, calculated, pondered. There was no avoiding it. The holy Word of Almighty God was pointing toward a truth of terrifying importance.

  Visionary

  Snow! Surveyors tracing the route of the hoped-for canal through the western New York Finger Lakes looked up amazed. It was June 7, 1816, and snow was falling from the summer sky. William Miller, poring over his Bible in Low Hampton, felt the unseasonable cold and wondered if it was a sign. To members of the Joseph Smith family, struggling to grow enough to eat in Vermont, the chill was the last straw. Everyone in northeastern America would remember the “year without a summer” for the rest of their lives. Temperatures varied wildly, crops failed, ice grinned from the shores of lakes.

  Half a world away and a year earlier, a British naval officer assigned to the Dutch East Indies had heard the sound of distant artillery. Suspecting pirates, he sent a ship to investigate. After a few days of sailing, the captain of that ship encountered darkening skies. Soon, noonday turned to midnight.

  Mount Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa, had exploded in April 1815 with a roar heard more than nine hundred miles away, the distance from Philadelphia to St. Louis. The explosion, ten times as violent as the later one at Mount Krakatoa, set off “one of the most frightful eruptions recorded in history.” Of the twelve thousand inhabitants of the island, only twenty-six survived. In all, the disaster took the lives of fifty thousand humans.

  The cataclysm blew a staggering quantity of ash and sulfurous gas into the stratosphere. The following year, residents of New York City noticed a dry haze in the air. The reduction in sunlight cooled the earth and disrupted weather patterns around the globe. New England was particularly hard-hit. Sixt
een inches of snow fell in Vermont in June. During July, farmers lifted ice “thick as window glass” from troughs in Maine. Killing frosts swept the region in August. “Our teeth chattered in our heads,” a woman wrote in her diary that summer. A minister reported that because of the widespread anxiety “almost all the newspapers now publish religious intelligence.” Lucy Smith stoically described the cold as an “untimely frost.” But having lost most of their crop during the two previous years, “eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death” was a grievous blow to her hungry family.

  That summer, Joe Smith Sr. joined the caravan of discouraged farmers headed west, leaving Lucy to settle their affairs. The trek to the hinterlands was not for the fainthearted. A traveler would describe the area around Syracuse as “so desolate it would make an owl weep to fly over it.” Joe kept going, stopping at Palmyra, a larger and more prosperous village than the one he had left. At age forty-five, he prepared to start again from scratch.

  Fertile land and an influx of savvy Yankees were building the area’s prosperity. Wheat thrived there. The plan for the canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson, if it materialized, would bring the ditch right through Palmyra. Land prices were already soaring in anticipation of canal prosperity. Smith hoped to catch hold of the galloping opportunity. But the Smith family was, as one historian put it, “the visionary rather than . . . the acquisitive Yankee type.” They would spend the next fifteen years in Palmyra watching the lucky and the canny prosper around them.

  That winter, Lucy extracted herself from the grip of creditors and started from Vermont with hardly enough cash to buy food along the way. Ten-year-old Joe Jr. was forced to walk much of the way through the snow in spite of his throbbing leg. His mother was nursing an infant of eight months named Don Carlos and herding seven other children. At one point on the month-long trip, a hired driver tried to throw the family out of their own wagon. Lucy wrenched the reins from his hands, denounced him loudly and declared she would drive the wagon herself. She arrived in Palmyra with nine cents, having traded her daughter Sophronia’s eardrops to cover their bill at the last inn. With joy and tears, she threw herself into the arms of her husband.