PROPHECY

The early Republic is something of an anomaly in American religious history. Until the Second Great Awakening arrived to revive America's flagging piety, the citizens of the early nation did not seem especially interested in religion: church attendance was at an all-time low; Anglican ministers had fled the colonies in large numbers during the Revolutionary War, and secular concerns—the formation of new governments, the explosive expansion of the market economy, unprecedented social and geographical mobility—seemed far more pressing than spiritual ones.

Yet judging by the popular interest in millennialism evident in publications, journals, and newspapers of the period, the revealed word continued to provide the yardstick by which Americans judged themselves and their new society. The United States was in the midst of a new "age of prophecy" in the 1790s and early 1800s, one which had its roots in the fears and hopes of the Revolutionary generation but which would outlast the crisis of war to become a fixed feature of public life in the new Republic. Millennialism was a legacy of the Puritan conquest of the New World, of course, but the Revolution brought long-standing millennial aspirations to a boil. Millennialism added the critical element of eschatological urgency to the Patriot cause and turned a war for national independence into a holy war against the British Antichrist. While a stream of publications prophesied doom for America's cities and the corrupt imperial establishment in the 1760s and 1770s, feeding Revolutionary demands for a greater popular voice and an end to aristocratic tyranny, a class-inflected millenarianism fueled the agrarian rebellions endemic in the backcountry until the 1820s.

Prophetic visions continued to thrive even after the heat of battle had passed. Though it is difficult to make a precise count, more than 120 men and women considered themselves, or were considered by others, to be prophets in the period from 1780 to 1815. Republican prophets tended to come in two varieties: the genteel and the vulgar. Primarily the preserve of ministers, genteel prophecy was the art of translating biblical metaphors of cataclysm and rebirth into republican analogues. Just as the American Republic promised to usher in a new age of expanded knowledge and enlightened citizenship, so too would the Second Coming of Christ inaugurate an era of universal religious enlightenment. As Samuel Hopkins described it in his Treatise on the Millennium (1793), the "conversation of friends and neighbors" will reform monarchical habits and create a universal brotherhood out of newly constituted citizens. This brotherhood will eventually transcend national and linguistic barriers, aided by the creation of a single universal language. "In the Millennium," he enthused, "all will probably speak one language." And in time, this "universality of language will tend to cement the world of mankind so as to make them one in a higher degree" (Juster, Doomsayers, p. 159). Hopkins and his fellow republicans were cosmic optimists, preferring to spin utopian visions of global fellowship rather than apocalyptic scenarios of universal destruction.

More common, perhaps, than these gentlemen scholars were the plebian prophets who combined traditional apocalyptic warnings with the language of social grievance. A typical plebian prophet is Nimrod Hughes, the scrappy ex-felon whose one publication, A Solemn Warning to all the Dwellers Upon Earth, published in 1811, was an instant best-seller. Federalist newspapers hailed what one called this "extraordinary prophet" who uncannily predicted the War of 1812 (even while denigrating the democratic tendency to trust the visions of ordinary men over the counsel of learned gentlemen), while republican newspapers dismissed Hughes as a "miserably dirty looking creature." Hughes's pamphlet is a fair representation of the social and economic woes of the underclasses in the early Republic. The violence, poverty, and oppression he saw all around him was caused by the machinations of "great men" (lawyers, legislators, judges, merchants, shopkeepers) who exploited the economic and political opportunities available in America's new democratic society. Christ will return in a blaze of glory (on 4 June 1812) to restore the common man to his rightful place, and when he does, the wicked will be destroyed along with the arbitrary and oppressive instruments of man's justice: "the laws shall be few, and those who compose them shall be few, and those who administer them shall be few." The voice of outraged populism that narrates A Solemn Warning would be heard even more loudly in the 1830s as prophets like Joseph Smith and Robert Mathews made this critique of America's new commercial and social order the cornerstone of their millenarian movements.

Disaffected Anglo-Americans were not the only ones envisioning a fiery end to the world in the early Republic. The flowering of Native America's "age of prophecy" in the 1790s and early 1800s also coincided with acute economic distress and political uncertainty in Indian country. Unlike Anglo-American millenarians, however, Indian prophets such as Handsome Lake and Tenskwatawa attached their visions to concrete political and social programs of reform; they told their followers not only to await the avenging Spirit, but to stop drinking, stop trading and intermarrying with whites, avoid intertribal violence, return to a subsistence economy, and shun all white ways. And their followers listened, creating pan-Indian alliances with other tribes in pursuit of these goals, even taking up arms in response to the prophets' calls for renewal. The fusion of visionary and military aims made the Indian age of prophecy a far more potent political force than any movement headed by a white American in these years.

However congruent their visions, there is little evidence that these various prophetic worlds overlapped in any meaningful way in the early Republic. Each spun in its own orbit around the sun of the new federal union, generating more heat than light in the wider public culture. But if men like Nimrod Hughes and Handsome Lake do not fit comfortably with our image of the early Republic as an aggressively modernizing era, prophets from a wide variety of social and racial positions did contribute to debates over how Americans should constitute themselves as a nation and what their role should be in the new democratic world taking shape around them—debates at the very heart of public life at the dawn of the new century.

See alsoAmerican Indians: American Indian Religions; Millennialism; Mormonism, Origins of .

bibliography

Bloch, Ruth. Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Davidson, James West. The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977.

Hatch, Nathan O. The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977.

Juster, Susan. Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Susan Juster