Wendell Garrett - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 1999 by Wendell Garrett

Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day. Time's noblest offspring is the last.

George Berkeley, On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America, 1752

Before and after the Protestant Reformation, Christian sects have anxiously awaited the second coming of Christ with peace and plenty to follow. Millennialism--the idea that Christ, the Christian Messiah, will come a second time and reign on earth during a thousand-year millennium of peace and redemption, abundance and wealth, justice and happiness--is one of the most potent in Western civilization. Preparations for the event have encouraged a proliferation of blueprints for communal societies under divine guidance. Among the earliest of these in America was the Ephrata Cloister of Seventh Day Baptists in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1735 by Conrad Beissel, who emigrated from Germany, and it thrived for decades thereafter. The group was known for calligraphy, manuscript illumination, and choral music. Another group, the Moravian Brethren, following Nicolas Ludwig, Graf von Zinzendorf from Saxony, developed a successful plan for settling their converts in America in communal towns in Bethl ehem, Pennsylvania, and Old Salem (today Winston-Salem), North Carolina. With conscientious workers, careful administrators, and spiritual encouragement, the Moravians soon became renowned for their bountiful fields, well-kept livestock, and modern farming methods.

One of the best-known religious movements that adopted communal living as an article of faith during the nineteenth century in the United States was Shakerism. Originating in a small revivalistic English sect that its leader, Ann Lee, brought to America in 1774, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing (which also called itself the Millennial Church) had attracted some four thousand members by the 1830s. They lived in more than sixty celibate "families" in nearly twenty agricultural settlements from Maine to Indiana. The "families" held goods in common, avoided tobacco and alcohol, and monitored relations between the sexes in the belief that the refusal to procreate would yield more regenerate saints in preparation for the millennium. The disciplined industry of the Shaker settlements produced furniture, baskets, seeds, and other goods to sell or barter in the outside world.

The largest and most successful of the millennial movements is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormons. After it was started by Joseph Smith, a Vermont-born farm boy, in 1830 the group was violently attacked because of its distinctive theology, binding communal commitments, and the practice of polygamy.

Far smaller, but even more unorthodox, were the Perfectionists led by John Humphrey Noyes, also born in Vermont. For more than thirty years at the Oneida Community in upstate New York they practiced a form of selective breeding that so scandalized the public that Noyes was forced to flee to Canada. The Perfectionists then reorganized in 1881 into a company that still produces the well-known Oneida silverware.

New England and western New York State were full of visionaries who wanted to confront the forces of evil and make war on them. Only some believed it possible to establish heaven on earth. Others, placing their faith in sudden divine intervention, sought a haven from sin and gloom until the second coming. A baffled Ralph Waldo Emerson attempted a brief listing: "Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-Outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians and Philosophers." The country was drunk on millenarianism.

Wendell Garrett