Jennings - Paradise now : the story of American utopianism

The sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.

REVELATION 6:12

A t noon, darkness spread across the sky. It was the nineteenth of May 1780, a Friday. On the rolling pastureland of western New England, sheep and cows lay down one by one in the damp grass. As the darkness became total, finches and warblers quieted and returned to their roosts. Above the white pines and budding oaks, bats stirred. Mistaking day for night, they took wing.

The fratricidal war for American independence was grinding into its fifth year. A week earlier, the Continental army had surrendered the smoldering port of Charleston to the British navy after more than a month of heavy shelling. In New England, with so many young men off fighting, gardens went unplanted and the wheat grew thin.

For many colonists the war with Great Britain aroused a stolid nationalist piety, a consoling faith in the sacred cause of libertythe belief that providence would guide the rebels to victory and that the fighting itself constituted an appeal to heaven. But in the hilly borderland between New York and Massachusetts, the anxiety and austerity of the long conflict inspired frenzied revival meetings. This was the New Light Stir, an aftershock of the Great Awakening of radical Protestantism that had coursed through New England in the 1740s. From makeshift pulpits, the New Light evangelists shouted an urgent millenarian message: These are the Latter Days; the Kingdom is at hand.

Standing at the crack of American independence, these backwoods Yankees believed that they were living the final hours of history. It is written: He will come back and the righteous will be delivered from sin for a thousand years of earthly peace and happiness. The New Lights believed that the time had come and that their small revivals, held in fields and cowsheds, would trigger the return of Christ and the millennium of heaven on earth. Looking up from their plows and their milking stools, these hill-country farmers scanned the horizon for signs of His approach.

In this atmosphere of millennial anticipationdays of war and rumors of warthe sudden midday blackness was an indisputable sign of the times. As New England and eastern New York were plunged into total darkness, nervous farmers lit smoky, fat-smelling candles just to eat their lunch or read a few lines of scripture. Lacking telegraphy, they were left to assume that the unnatural darkness had enveloped the whole globe. People [came] out wringing their hands and howling, the Day of Judgment is come, recalled a young rebel fifer. Nobody could say for sure when or if the blackness would pass and the light return.

A doctor in New Hampshire tried to get an empirical grip on the situation. Even in the rational precincts of the Connecticut legislature, the sudden blackness stirred apocalyptic thinking. When the darkness forced the House of Representatives in Hartford to adjourn, Colonel Abraham Davenport stayed at his desk and asked that candles be brought into the statehouse. If the Day of Judgment was at hand, he said, he wished to be found at his work.

Near dawn the next day, the moon finally came out. A day past full, it shone red.

A month before the darkness, Talmadge Bishop and Reuben Wright, a pair of New Light revivalists from New Lebanon, New York, were walking west along a wooded footpath just north of Albany. Passing through a remote territory known as Niskeyuna, they happened upon a low, boggy homestead. Hoping to rest their feet and cadge some food, they knocked on the door of the rough, two-story cabin. Inside, they were surprised to discover a crowd: five men and seven women, living together in the small building. These were the Shaking Quakers, a raggedy sect from Manchester, England, gathered around a short, forty-four-year-old mystic named Ann Lee.

Lee, whom her followers addressed as Mother, invited the travelers in. Bishop and Wright lived nearby, but they had never heard any mention of these people. The Shakers had been in the area for six years, but they had maintained a low profile. They had good reason. The Hudson River, which linked British-controlled Canada and the forts of the Adirondacks to the vital port in New York City, was of great strategic importance. The surrounding Hudson Valley was a hotbed of royalist counterrevolution. Improvised rebel militias were on hair-trigger guard against Tory sabotage. It was a dangerous place to have your commitment to the Revolution questioned. In this paranoid atmosphere, Lee and her followers had kept their eccentric faith and Mancunian accents to themselves.

The Shakers fed the two travelers while Mother Ann explained her unusual gospel. She told the men that the millennium they and other New Lights had been furiously calling down from heaven had already begun. Its promised life of sinless perfection was free for the taking.

The next morning, Bishop and Wright hurried back across the Hudson to New Lebanon. They brought their tale of an ethereal, blue-eyed woman living in the wilderness to their minister, a popular New Light revivalist named Joseph Meacham. Meacham, a tall, grave young man who had left the Baptist Church to preach the new millenarian faith, had been leading revival meetings in New Lebanon for most of the past year. In the barn of a wealthy convert, he would whip his congregation to great heights of spiritual excitement. As he called out the good news of the coming paradise and the need for immediate surrender to the Holy Spirit, his audience trembled, stamped their feet in the straw, and let loose flurries of glossolalia.

The kinetic enthusiasm of Meachams revival could not hold. His message, like the message of other revivalists throughout New York and New England, was one of bated anticipation: Paradise or Apocalypse is imminent. But nothing happened. The fall of 1779 closed into winter; winter opened onto spring; and still the world had not ended. The New Lights had been primed for cataclysm: fire from the sky, the Son of Man swinging a golden sword, the descent of the holy city of New Jerusalem. Instead, the long, hard days of spring planting started up again. Having screamed their millenarian faith until they were hoarse, many New Lights felt adrift.