Kingdom of Matthias Study Guide

Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz are both historians with prolific academic careers. Johnson was born in Los Angeles in 1942, during World War Two. Nine years later, Wilentz was born in New York City in 1942, to a family that owned a bookshop in Greenwich Village. Both studied history in prestigious institutions and took up academic posts, with Johnson at the University of South Carolina and Wilentz at Princeton in New Jersey. They became friends through their work in the academic community. While conducting separate research on 19th-century religious revivals, each scholar independently came across the curious story of Robert Matthews and the press scandal over his cult, “The Kingdom of Matthias.” They decided to put their heads together and collaborate. The project took almost a decade, as Johnson and Wilentz painstakingly researched historical records and sources to bring the scandalous story of Robert Matthews’s 1830s-era cult to life. In doing so, Johnson and Wilentz weave together a telling picture of economics, gender, race, and religion during a time when American society was rapidly evolving. Johnson has since retired, while Wilentz continues his professorship at the University of South Carolina. Wilentz has also engaged with politics as a public figure, speaking out in 2006 against George W. Bush’s presidency and again in 2008, to endorse Hilary Clinton’s presidential candidacy.

Johnson and Wilentz offer a picture of the social landscape of the northeastern United States between 1800 and 1850, during a time of radical social upheaval. Around this time, the economic focus of United States shifted increasingly from farming to trade. A substantive urban middle class emerged, and their progressive values began to displace more traditional values of rural farming communities. A lot of religious reform took place during this period as well, gradually displacing strict Calvinist values (centered on obedience, fear, and paternal authority) with evangelical values (focusing on individual freedom, charity, modesty, and motherly love). Such religious reform ushered in an era when women (and especially mothers) had more visibility in the United States for the first time. The story also takes place during the decades in which American politicians begin eradicating slavery in the North. Shortly after the story ends, the Civil War erupted in 1861, in part due to the rift between progressive urban middle classes (predominantly in the north) and more traditional agricultural communities that relied on slavery (predominantly in the south). President Abraham Lincoln released the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, which freed all enslaved people in the United States. The war ended in 1865, with the North winning. The story’s single Black character, Isabella Van Wagenen, went on to become an infamous public activist Sojourner Truth.

Johnson and Wilentz cite several literary works in their account. Several prominent 19th-century writers were inspired by sinister penny press tabloid scandals like the one that Matthias’s cult caused. Nathaniel Hawthorne references similar scandals in his 1851 novel The House of the Seven Gables. Herman Melville (who personally met some of the people involved it the scandal) makes subtle references to Matthias’s cult in Moby Dick or the Whale (1850) and The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade (1857). Other historical nonfiction books about scandalous 19th-century religious cults include Hubert Wolf’s The Nuns of Sant’ Ambrogio: the True Story of a Convent in Scandal (2015). Like Johnson and Wilentz, Wolf offers an explosive story about a 19th-century religious cult (in a convent, this time). Judith M. Buddenbaum similarly offers an anthology of religious scandals in United States history in Religious Scandals (2009). Johnson and Wilentz also mention nonfiction writers who published books about the cult during the scandal itself. These include William Leete Stone’s Matthias and His Impostures: Or, The Progress of Fanaticism. Illustrated in the Extraordinary Case of Robert Matthews, and Some of His Forerunners and Disciples (1835). Stone’s book presents leading cult members Benjamin and Ann Folger’s version of events, which conceals their sexual relationships with several different cult numbers. It also wrongly shifts blame for the cult’s crimes onto their Black servant, Isabella Van Wagenen. Gilbert Vale’s Fanaticism: Its Source and Influence, Illustrated by the simple case of Isabella, in the Case of Matthias (1835) tells the cult’s story from Isabella Van Wagenen’s perspective, which ultimately clears her name. Isabella Van Wagenen is better known by a name she later adopts: Sojourner Truth. Truth’s infamous 1851 speech “Ain’t I A Woman?” offers one of the earliest historical formulations of intersectionalism: the idea that race, gender, and class combine—or intersect—to create complex forms of oppression in the United States. Intersectionalism features widely in contemporary culture and race studies today.