by Jack Kelly
On close nights, the deck provides little relief, the ruffling of air not enough to keep off the clouds of mosquitoes. Hawthorne peered into the dark and saw an eerie land “whither dreams betake themselves when they quit the slumberer’s brain.”
But each day holds promise of new sights. Once the boat passes the settled Mohawk Valley, passengers are seeing the real western part of the state. Travelers from crowded eastern cities are amazed by the emptiness. Here Europeans encounter the novelty of virgin forests, trees that seem to scrape the sky. Tocqueville referred to the majesty of New World forests that “fills the soul with a sort of religious terror.”
The boat glides over the towering embankment at Irondequoit. Passengers look down at trees and people below, virtually sailing through the sky. The Rochester aqueduct never fails to impress. The magnificent stairway of lifts at Lockport inspires awe. Navigating the man-made canyon of the Deep Cut, passengers stare in wonder at the sheer rock sides, which leave the boat in shade at the bottom. “You are actually sailing through a mountain,” a traveler noted.
The five-day trip to Buffalo cuts the stagecoach time in half, and the fares are “so low that no man who consults economy, can afford to go on foot!” The cost averages four cents a mile with board, three without, fourteen dollars from Schenectady to Buffalo. Competition among packet companies will drive the price to $6.50 by the mid-1830s. With three meals a day it is “cheaper than staying at home,” one company boasts.
Line boats, which carry a combination of freight and passengers, charge travelers a third less than the packets. Although slower, they offer immigrants a cheap way to reach new homes in the west. Package deals let them travel for as little as a penny a mile. Buffalo is inundated by a tidal wave of pioneers. In 1826, nearly twelve hundred, all headed west, arrived in a single day, clogging the city’s hotels. They arrange for steamboat passage up Lake Erie and onward as far as Michigan Territory, present-day Minnesota.
Before the transportation breakthrough, those who ventured beyond the Appalachians were true pioneers. The move put them out of touch with family and friends in the East. The canal made it much easier for the venturer to return for a visit. Mail service westward became more reliable. Regular letters were a comfort that broke the isolation. The Erie Canal gave settlers courage. It facilitated a mobility that was to become a permanent characteristic of the American population.
Unutterable Magnitude
In 1835, a former newspaper editor and shopkeeper invested a thousand dollars in the rights to a theatrical exhibit. Phineas Taylor Barnum became the manager of Joice Heth, a black woman who was both slave and experienced stage performer. Barnum took her to concert halls, taverns, pleasure gardens, and saloons, charging customers to see “the greatest curiosity in the world.”
Heth had been born in Madagascar in 1674. Kidnapped into slavery, she had become the property of a Virginia planter named Augustine Washington. When Washington’s wife gave birth to a baby boy in 1732, Joice served as nurse to “little Georgy.” She practically raised the lad, she said, and taught him to sing hymns. All these years later she could relate many intimate stories about the youth who went on to become the father of his country.
Heth was 161 years old, toothless, remarkably wizened, paralyzed in both legs, and blind. Her long curving fingernails resembled claws. Yet she was bright, could hear perfectly, and was able to answer questions with practiced eloquence. In Barnum’s promotional pamphlets, he mentioned that her pipe and tobacco were her greatest pleasure—she had been smoking for 120 years. Her pulse, he notified the curious, was between sixty-five and seventy, “full, strong, and perfectly regular.”
Barnum and a partner reportedly made $30,000 by exhibiting Heth six days a week. When business lagged, Barnum sent a letter to a newspaper under a pseudonym, claiming that Heth was a fraud. She was not General Washington’s nurse. She was not even human—she was an automaton constructed by “some of those cunning fellows who deal in gum elastick overshoes.” Previous customers hurried back to see if they had been hornswoggled by a machine.
Heth died barely a year after Barnum acquired her. He charged fifty cents a head to watch a prominent New York doctor conduct her autopsy. When the doctor pronounced her to be about eighty years old, Barnum offered an exclusive interview to the New York Herald in which he explained that the corpse was a ringer; the real, ancient Joice was still alive. It was all pure humbug.
Barnum was one of the earliest Americans to fully grasp the dynamics of publicity, advertising, ballyhoo, and hype. Citizens were just beginning to amalgamate into a mass society and Barnum helped foster the national addiction to fame and spectacle.
The religious and political leaders of the era did not deal in humbug. They were sincere in their convictions. But many of them understood that to reach a large audience effectively required what Charles Finney called “methods.” Joseph Smith’s golden plates, Thurlow Weed’s drowned corpse, William Miller’s lurid predictions, all contained a hint of Barnumesque promotional hoopla.
Like Lorenzo Dow, successful preachers and politicians were “cosmopolites.” They had the capacity to believe wholeheartedly in their message even as they dressed it in glad rags to appeal to simple-minded listeners. Like Barnum, they knew the elements of ballyhoo: Spectacle never fails. Hyperbole pays. Details stymie skeptics. Controversy creates newspaper stories. If caught out, up the ante. Welcome attacks. Offer documentation, however dubious. Give the people exactly what they want: fantasy, novelty, the unusual, the miraculous.
William Miller, prompted by his new partner Joshua Himes, put many of these maxims to work to spread the news of the coming end. Miller’s claim that the entire world would go up in flames in a few short years was more unthinkable than anything Barnum ever promoted, yet he convinced tens of thousands of its literal truth.
Miller had been a voice crying in the wilderness for eight years when he met Himes in 1839. Himes was a veteran of the reforms that grew out of the revivals. He had worked tirelessly for temperance and against slavery. He threw himself into promoting Miller’s message because he saw that it injected urgent excitement into religion.
Miller learned from Himes that successful promotion required people and money. Himes invested his own funds in the cause, rounded up wealthy donors, and organized a campaign to elicit contributions. Miller’s Advent message aided fund-raising. If his predictions were correct, all wealth would soon be superfluous. To hold on to your money was a sign you doubted Christ’s imminent coming.
Himes had connections. He recruited a number of prominent preachers to help spread the word. In the manner of the Anti-Masons, he organized conferences where followers—increasingly called Adventists rather than Millerites—could meet, share experiences, and encourage one another. Scheduled to take place every six months, these meetings offered a chance to educate new cohorts of Adventist preachers. In 1842, devotees formed the Second Adventist Association.
To drum up attention, Himes turned to a familiar revival feature: the camp meeting. The Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier remembered observing one of these gatherings on a lovely summer morning. He was impressed by “the white circle of tents . . . the upturned earnest faces” listening to preachers warn of the nearness of the end. “How was it possible,” he wondered, “in the midst of so much life, in that sunrise light . . . that the idea of the death of nature—the baptism of the world in fire—could take such a practical shape?”
Himes encouraged the use of images to depict the horrors of the last days. Whittier saw a painted “Apocalyptic vision” that included beasts, dragons, and “the scarlet woman.” Elaborate charts made Miller’s complex calculations easier to understand. He had the Adventist motto “The bridegroom cometh” printed on sheets of paper seals so that believers could cut them out and paste them on letters and envelopes.
Adventists tried to bar fanaticism from their meetings. Himes and Miller
were staunch opponents of faith healing, wanton prophecy, speaking in tongues, and sexual escapades. Young people, tempted to taste forbidden fruits before it was too late, were thought vulnerable. Strict decorum was enforced at Adventist gatherings.
In a Barnum-like move, the Adventist leaders commissioned the largest tent in North America. As high as a five-story building, 120 feet in diameter, the enormous canvas enclosure could hold up to six thousand congregants. Circus tents were a novelty at the time, and the Great Tent drew crowds.
Taking another page from the Anti-Masonic campaign, Himes started Adventist newspapers. He invested his own money in Signs of the Times, the movement’s flagship publication. When Miller appeared in New York City, the Adventists handed out thousands of copies of another paper, The Midnight Cry, which continued as a weekly. When the road-show traveled to Rochester, local Adventist Joseph Marsh published the Glad Tidings of the Kingdom to Come, which he announced in the first issue would run for thirteen weeks, “if time continues.”
Miller was taken aback by the frenzy that was building around him. Himes, “a radical and an enthusiast by temperament,” ordered him around quite imperiously. “I am coming on,” he wrote to Miller in 1840, “and when I come—look out.”
Himes, like Barnum, understood the power of celebrity. The crowds who attended Adventist services wanted more than ideas. They wanted Miller. They needed to see the humble farmer who had made the astounding discovery. To enhance the personality cult, Himes hired Nathaniel Currier, the preeminent lithographic artist of the day (he later became half of Currier & Ives), to create a portrait of Miller that could be reproduced by the thousands.
As unlikely as it seemed, Miller developed charisma. His very diffidence attracted attention. He was “distinct in his utterance, and frequently quaint in his expressions,” a Maine reporter wrote. Miller sometimes produced a smile from his listeners with his homespun wit. Himes and others could explain the millennial ideas adequately, but it was Miller’s presence that mattered. “You can have no idea of the thrill of joy it produced when I told them you would come,” Himes wrote Miller about a scheduled appearance.
Unused to strict schedules, Miller frustrated Himes by arriving late at engagements or failing to show. Miller was plagued by a painful skin condition, by worsening dropsy, and by the aches and ills that attend any sixty-year-old. His ailments sometimes sidelined him for months. Himes, who had genuine affection for Miller, grew concerned about his mentor’s health.
Miller’s unorthodox views generated a backlash of criticism. Anti-Miller preaching became rife. One pamphlet proclaimed The End of the World Not Yet. Another was titled The Theory of William Miller, Utterly Exploded. Millerism, preachers insisted, was the work of Satan, and Miller was amassing a fortune from sales of his books. Churchmen blasted Miller’s theories as “a new edition of Mormonism.” Opponents sent spies to Miller’s home. They reported that his children were living in luxury and that he had bought a new stove and erected new stone walls, curious behavior for a man who asserted the world was about to end.
The mild-mannered farmer had another side to his personality, which further fueled the criticism. A Portland reporter said that Miller was “disposed to make but little allowance for those who think differently from him.” He freely denounced his opponents as “dumb dogs,” “wiseacres,” or “Priestly dandies.”
In 1842, Charles Finney attended several Adventist lectures in Boston and met privately with Miller, who was ten years his senior. His purpose was to “convince him that he was in error.” Miller nodded his head in agreement as Finney listed the ways he had misread Scripture. But when they were finished, Miller presented the famous clergyman with an autographed copy of his book. He assured Finney that if he read it, he would see the truth of the matter.
Many Adventists were “come-outers,” who rejected fellowship with any church that denied the validity of the prediction. A Millerite preacher proclaimed: “If you intend to be found a Christian when Christ appears . . . come out Now!” Adventists took their worship to private homes and camp meetings. They formed breakaway congregations. In the process, they drew even more venom from churchgoing neighbors.
The more the Millerite excitement spread, the more its adherents were scoffed at and criticized. Newspapers called them deluded, ignorant, ridiculous, illiterate, blind, fanatical, and weak-minded. They were assuredly humbugs. William Lloyd Garrison in the Liberator said the frenzy was “an event scarcely paralleled in the history of popular excitements,” but one soon to be “ignominiously exploded.”
Like Barnum, Miller saw that opposition fueled the fire. When a clergyman traveled to Newark to preach against him, Miller said he had “done us so much good that I’d cheerfully pay all his expenses if he’d come again. We want the people aroused.”
Miller had begun by saying the curtain would fall “about 1843.” For most of his preaching career, he resisted making the date more specific. But the engine of the movement was the countdown. In May 1842, a conference of the Adventist Society in Boston endorsed the notion, first, that God had revealed the end time in the Bible, and, second, that it would come in 1843. Miller went along.
In August 1842, Himes too embraced the date. He declared, “I am confirmed in the doctrine of Christ’s personal descent to this earth, to destroy the wicked and glorify the righteous some time in the year 1843.” Three months later, Miller refined his computations. Taking into account the Hebrew ecclesiastical year, which began in the spring, he said that the end would come between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844.
Pagans
The Erie Canal stimulated in Americans a new view of nature. Romanticism was steering sensibilities toward a greater awareness of the sublime. God and nature became nearly synonymous. Through God’s “undefiled works,” the artist Thomas Cole observed, “the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.” Theodore Weld was convinced that God had furnished every human with a revelation. “It is written in the language of nature,” he said, “and can be understood without a commentary.”
The canal made wilderness and natural wonders conveniently available to middle-class travelers. A tourist at Little Falls said, “such scenery is too sublime for my dull pen.” The actress Fanny Kemble wrote that the canal was “beautiful from end to end.”
But the works of man were challenging and replacing God’s creation. A “vulgar and worldly throng,” Hawthorne thought, was encroaching on the wilderness. He imagined of the canal that “in time, the wondrous stream may flow between two continuous lines of buildings, through one thronged street, from Buffalo to Albany.”
“Nature is fairly routed, and driven from the field,” Frances Trollope wrote. The factory, “the rattling, crackling, hissing, spitting demon,” had taken possession of the land. Cole expressed regret that the “sublimity of the wilderness should pass away.”
In the canal era, it was easier to reconcile these conflicting views. The wild would always be with us. Man’s works, too, could invoke wonder. A Lockport visitor wrote that “as Niagara Falls are the greatest natural wonder, so Lockport, its Locks, and the portion of the Canal adjacent, are considered to be the greatest artificial curiosity in this part of America.”
The vast majority of those who lived along the canal cared little about nature or sublime sights. Their interest was gold and the getting of it. So anxious were they to turn a profit, an observer noted of the residents of early Syracuse, that “every man moved as though he had just heard that his house was on fire.” In Brockport, just west of Rochester, merchants toasted, “Pork and Flour coming down—Tea and Sugar coming up!” Commerce was exploding along the great waterway, which had brought the market to remote villages. Writer Walter Edmonds referred to the scene along the Erie’s banks as “the bowels of the nation . . . the whole shebang of life!”
Passengers on the canal saw barge after barge loaded with barrels of flour headed eas
t. Farmers were growing wheat to their doorsteps. Pork and beef, raw whiskey, lumber, potatoes, ashes, wool, dried fruit, cheese, lard—it all flowed cheaply down the Erie. Transportation costs dropped to one-tenth of what they had been. Consumer demand for tea and sugar, silk and perfume, fresh oysters and fine furniture fueled westward traffic.
Tolls on the canal exceeded debt interest in the very first year of operation. By 1837, the construction loan had been entirely repaid. Except for maintenance and operating costs, the rest would be gravy for the state. Even the most optimistic canal proponents had not dared to imagine such success.
If the canal brought a dynamic market to the interior, it also brought a risky one. A profit could turn to a loss overnight. Many businessmen took the terrifying plunge from prosperity to sudden failure. A young man named Lyman Spalding left Canandaigua to seek his fortune in Lockport while the canal was under construction. “I think for us young folks,” a friend wrote to him, “we shall find a little better pickings on the confines of the great ditch!” In a few years, Spalding owned a flour mill. He went into debt to build another. It burned down, the market fluctuated, and Spalding was ruined. It took him years to climb back into the middle class.
The canal gave permanent employment to tens of thousands of workers. Entrepreneurs and their families lived on and operated freight barges. Farmers and small businessmen set up groceries and grog shops along the canal’s banks. Poor folks, like the Smith family, hawked birch beer and cakes. Blacksmiths shoed the thousands of draft animals. Along-shore-men, or “longshoremen,” worked the wharfs. Gamblers and confidence men sniffed for opportunities among the gullible.
The captains of packet boats contracted for teams of mules or horses, which were kept in barns about fifteen miles apart. Cargo boats were most often pulled by a pair of mules while a second pair rested on board, the animals working in shifts. Mule handlers, among the roughest of the canal workers, routinely mistreated the animals and sometimes worked them to death.
